The following is an excerpt from N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World (Thomas Nelson 2009), pp. 124-125. In a few short paragraphs, Wilson captures what being and living as the Anti-Christ really means.
Nietzsche published The Anti-Christ in 1888. Along with many other things, he had this to say about pity: ‘Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.’Our stupid world professes virtually universally that mankind came into being as a species through naturalistic, evolutionary processes. Yet, it also finds Nietzsche's demand for ethical consistency with the alleged forces and processes of evolution deeply offensive, even horrific. It betrays thereby one of the deepest hypocrisies of our age.
One year later Nietzsche entered into madness. True or false, the story is that he was overcome by the sight of a horse being whipped. Unhinged by pity. He wouldn’t die until 1900. For a decade he was kept alive and maintained through his insanity, strokes, and incapacitating illness. At the age of fifty-five, partially paralyzed, unable to speak or walk, he discovered what life waited for him beyond the grave.
Nietzsche lashed out at his Maker with his tongue, the only notable muscle he had—his greatest gift. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
There was little that Nietzsche loathed more than the heritage of his Lutheran father.
I have never been irritated by Nietzsche, never annoyed. At his most blasphemous, at his most riotously hateful and pompous, I have only ever been able to laugh. But even then, there is something bittersweet about the laughter. I know his story. I know how his bluff was called, how he was broken.
Again from The Anti-Christ: ‘The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.’ Spake the paralytic. The man fed with a spoon by those who loved him.
‘What is more harmful than any vice—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity….’
And yet, because I see the world through my eyes and not his, I have sympathy for Nietzsche himself. Bodies and minds are not all that can be botched in a man. Souls can be hollow, twisted, thrashing, more bitter than pi**.
Nietzsche is the consistent prophet of Darwinism--in all its horror and ignominy. The failure of modern evolutionists to claim him as one of their own is but one more reason why evolution and its advocates are not to be taken seriously. They want their cake of an imaginary cosmogony, but they certainly do not want to eat it.
1 comment:
Very cogent observation. I also find it odd that Nietzsche's perspective is denied by so many evolutionists, as if they just can't handle the truth.
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