Christianity is radically egalitarian. God not only opens the doors to the poor and despised, He uses them to accomplish his will on the earth. In this passage, the noble priestly caste comes up against God’s lowborn servants and marvels at their power. This aspect of the faith ought to be attractive to modern egalitarian liberals; whether it is or not, the modern liberal’s rejection of the basis for egalitarianism (God and humanity as the imago Dei) is ironic. In that sense though, so is the historical conservative’s failure to truly recognize the equality inherent in his worldview.

It’s strange reading this passage after reading the first part of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche’s diagnostic attributes egalitarian, Judeo-Christian values to powerless peoples’ ressentiment of their betters. He directs our attention to the stream of language and argues that the dichotomy “good-bad” has its roots in physical and social differences between the strong, healthy, joyous aristocrats and the weak, sickly, and unhappy peasants of old. Given his assumptions, his case is compelling enough.

Especially relevant to our passage is Nietzsche’s charges against (and I’m only saying what he says, and there are apparently all kinds of reasons he wasn’t an anti-Semite)—against the Jews. If “good” was originally a concept derived from nobility, and “bad” was derived from the nobility’s conceptions of their social inferiors, then, Nietzsche suggests, the revaluation of Jewish ressentiment consisted in the inferiors’ calling the noble, powerful, and beautiful “evil” and misappropriating for themselves the characteristic—“good.” Here’s a pretty concise expression of his idea (Nietzsche speaks for the “Jewish” spirit of ressentiment here):

“…The wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!” (p. 34 The Genealogy of Morals, New York, Vintage Books, 1967, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

If you find yourself more familiar with the New Testament than the Old, or if you’re the type who sees the Old through the lens of the New, you may have, upon reading that quote, immediately thought of the Beatitudes. Nietzsche anticipates you.

In the next aphorism (section 8 in the first essay), he says that Jesus was the inevitable consummation of this Jewish ressentiment. He’s not stingy about giving credit where it’s due either:

Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? (p. 35)

I actually laughed out loud as I reread that. But, of course, a horselaugh is no argument, and it would be better to treat Nietzsche’s claim in kind.

It lends credence to the Christian metanarrative, spanning the Old and New Testaments, that Nietzsche calls Christ’s coming and the consummation of his life (his death) a “farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge,” a revenge for which Christ’s executioners get the credit. Nietzsche seems to see the improbability of this, but nevertheless posits it. The facts of Christ’s life and its results are so uncanny, so wild, that they require such an outlandish explanation (if you refuse to consider the other probability—that Jesus was divine).

What if Nietzsche were wrong about this whole thing, though? What if these “slave morals” were really just God’s morals, revealed to Moses and the Prophets and expressed perfectly through Christ and the Apostles? And what if Jesus were really the Lord of the Resurrection? How might He have reacted when he witnessed Nietzsche writing that blustering sentence? Would he have laughed like I did? Would he have cried?

I think that if Nietzsche’s conclusions (which you can assume as you read him) about metaphysics, God, man, and language are correct—then he’s right enough about social hierarchies and values. Egalitarianism is entirely unnatural. From sharks, snakes, and insects, to wolf packs, ape troops (with the possible exception of bonobos), and human societies, Nature favors the strong over the weak. Unless God did reveal himself, why the hell would the strong, competent, beautiful, and happy care much about the unhappiness of the others? Why shouldn’t they enjoy the privileges with which Nature graced them? I say if there is no God and no revelation, then the strong should enjoy their privilege and not waste a second’s peace on compassion for the wretched. For thus the universe has willed it, and if human freedom can conceive of defying nature in the name of egalitarianism—there’s no real reason it should. More than that—all of nature will work against these egalitarian efforts.

I suppose some materialists would say that evolution somehow necessitates greater and greater egalitarianism and that the development towards equality or socialism is right and inevitable. Perhaps it is—but only on the basis of a sad and paltry pragmatism. The truth is—there are vast differences between human beings, and if equality isn’t metaphysical, it isn’t. Only practical considerations about the strength of mobs and the expediency of throwing them a token bone every now and then, fending off the inevitable tide of their growing solidarity against the powerful, are the powerful’s only real reasons for being (or acting) egalitarian.

On the other hand, I know a guy who acknowledges the rigid fascism in nature and who arbitrarily defies it and insists on equality because he wants to—he simply hates cruelty, and as he says, “I’ve never met a man I didn’t like—and I always like him until he [expletives] me over.” He knows and even insists that his quixotic affinity for the brotherhood of man is foundationless. I take this affection of his as a clue—perhaps his assumptions are wrong.

Christianity is self-aware about its revaluation of values. It knows the natural man values only strength, wisdom, wealth, and beauty. The raising of the valleys and the lowering of the mountains is not a work of Nature—it’s a work of Grace. In the first chapter of I Corinthians, Paul calls his audience to realize this:

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.” (Verses 26-31)

The fact that Christianity turned the Greco-Roman world upside down, and indelibly shaped Western history, recommends that we consider whether or not Christ was who he said he was, and wether or not the apostle’s succeeded in truly boasting in the Lord as Paul preached.

This episode in Acts is just one such instance of God’s power exercised through the likes of Nietzsche’s peasants—in this case, a Jewish fisherman. Full of the Holy Spirit, Peter addressed the rulers and elders of the people, “all who were of high-priestly descent,” who had arrested him and John for preaching the resurrection and for healing a sick man; he says, “Let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by this name this man stands here before you in good health.” Luke writes, “Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John, and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were marveling, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).