Militant Atheism and Nietzsche

Intellectual Gadflies

David Bentley Hart has an engaging piece on modern militant atheists (whom he dubs "fashionable enemies") describing them as "gadflies".

He laments the good old days when the enemies of the Christian faith in the West had intellectual muscle.  He is impatient with the mental laziness and sloppiness on display with folk like Hitchens and Harris and the like. 

My own impatience with (their) remarks, I should confess, would probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that, among Christianity's most fervent detractors, there has been a considerable decline in standards in recent years. . . . (A)t the end of Europe's Christian centuries, the church could still boast antagonists of real stature.  In the eighteenth century, David Hume was unrivaled in his power to sow doubt where certainty once had flourished.  And while the diatribes of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes were, on the whole, insubstantial, there were at least marked by a certain fierce elegance and occasional moral acuity.  Edward Gibbon, for all the temporal parochialism and frequent inaccuracy of his account of Christianity's rise, was nevertheless a scholar and writer of positively titanic gifts . . . (D. B. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p.5f.)

In the nineteenth century we come to the greatest and the fiercest critic of Christianity--one with an intellectual rigour and emotional force that still leaves one breathless today.  Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity and Christians had about it an intellectual rigour and consistency and compelling force that is completely absent from effete gadflies such as Richard Dawkins.
 

The greatest of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche, may have had a somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, and who had enough of a sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the fading of Christian faith would bring about.  Moreover he had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity's history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis.

Unmistakably, he has Dawkins and Hitchens in his sights at this point.   Their life's great crusade has erected a straw-man parody of the Christian faith and of Christian culture, then mounted it with a self-righteous indignity, pouring out invective, disdain, and scorn on a slur of their own making.  An intellectual tour-de-force, indeed.  Not so Nietzsche, who had the knowledge and integrity to grasp the nettle that confronted him.

He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with the Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.

He knew that the disappearance of the cultural values of Christianity would gradually but inevitably lead to a new set of values, the nature of which was yet to be decided.  By comparison to these men, today's gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful, less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is. 

One cannot maintain Christian ethics and Christian morality without Christian truth, without the Living God and His Saviour, Jesus Christ.  This rather obvious thought seems never have occurred to our modern militant atheists.  It most certainly was obvious to someone as rigorous as Nietzsche.