Nietzsche’s New Faith: The Self-Overcoming of Enlightenment

In this article, I argue that Nietzsche ultimately arrived at the view that it was essential to use religious myth to wean people off prior myths, so as to render more likely a shift toward a new aristocracy. Nietzsche’s new myths are in his view closer approximations of scientific and philosophic truth than the old myths, and by their nature direct people beyond themselves toward the full truth. Nietzsche created a self-imploding religion, a religion one might christen ‘variable-faith polytheistic pantheism.’ This overarching religion was designed in such a way that it (1) would serve as a new playing field for future religions, (2) could accommodate and would even encourage variable levels of belief within a society at any given time, (3) would in Nietzsche’s view more closely approximate the truth than any existing or previous religion, and (4) could point the way toward its own dissolution and toward an acceptance of what Nietzsche saw as the fully irreligious truth, should a person, a culture, or an era be strong enough to handle that acceptance. In this sense Nietzsche is not the contradiction but rather the logical culmination of the Enlightenment: he uses art, and religion as art, as a useful transition toward what he sees as a more philosophic culture.