1 Corinthians 1: 26-30
Rollins Chapel, 4/15/12
Frederick Nietzsche is often considered
one of the most able critics of Christianity ever to have put pen to paper. I
personally do not find his arguments compelling. But for all his faults,
Nietzsche understood much about Christianity that many contemporary people—
both Christian and non-Christian—fail to understand. Nietzsche disliked
Christianity so strongly in part because he believed that Christianity had
initiated what he called "a slave revolt," in which the weak and
powerless of this world rose up against their naturally strong, intellectually
superior, aristocratic masters. This slave revolt, he thought, was to be
regretted.
Much of Nietzsche's actual historical speculations
are wrong, but he captured the spirit of the Christian message better than
many. He understood that Christianity was radically opposed to the logic and
wisdom of the world. Not that Christianity holds the world to be evil. Christ
said, "I have not come to condemn the world, but to save it." The
world is, at root, good.
But Christ's words presuppose that the
world needs to be saved. In the fallen state of our world, deformed by sin, our
natural tendency is to seek above all our own selfish ends, and to rationalize
this selfishness. We seek power to serve our ends, we seek knowledge to
manipulate things to our advantage. Christ came to save us from this double bondage
of our mind and our will. In doing so, he preached a message, and lived a life,
that is radically subversive of our natural tendencies. We naturally praise
worldly wisdom and worldly power, but Christ inverted this.
Blessed, he told us, are the poor, the
weak, the sorrowful. These are not the words of the world; instead they stand
in profound contradiction to the values of the world. The passage from
Corinthians that I choose expresses this sentiment: God choose the weak, the
foolish, the unimportant, the lowly to spread His message of Love. As St.
Martin put it: "salvation was preached to the world not by orators, but by
fishermen." That God choose fishermen—a low, despised class in Christ's
place and time—to spread his message was profoundly radical and subversive of
our notions of wisdom.
"Where," St. Paul asks
elsewhere in First Corinthians, "is the wise person? Where is the teacher
of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the
wisdom of the world?" Christ did not do what we, in our worldly wisdom,
would expect. We would expect Him to come in His glory, but he came in
meekness. He was born in a stable, and preferred the company of the ignorant
masses to the company of the philosophers and he wise scribes of the law. In so
doing, He, so to speak, identified Himself with the weak, with the powerless,
with the ignorant.
Nietzsche, as I said, essentially
understood this. In his work The
Antichrist, he wrote “What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power,
the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from
weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance
is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war;
not virtue, but efficiency. The weak and the botched shall perish: first
principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful
than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the
weak—Christianity....”
But he was wrong about one thing. God did
not come to pit the weak against the strong and the ignorant against the wise.
He came to show that worldly weakness is
strength and worldly
foolishness is wisdom. He redefined these concepts for
us. It is in the fullness of our finitude, in the limitations that we run up
against in daily lives, in our weakness, our sinfulness, our foolishness, it is
in these that we meet God. Our finitude becomes the nexus for our meeting with
God: it is in embracing our finitude that we attain to the humility that is at
the heart of God's wisdom.
What this means is that finitude takes
on, for the Christian, a positive value. We are able to see weakness and
foolishness not merely as something shameful to be avoided or something
distasteful to be enslaved by Nietzsche's ubermench,
but as a condition charged
with meaning and transcendence.
David Bentley Hart, the contemporary
Orthodox theologian and one of my favorite writers, got to the heart of
Christian wisdom in his book Atheist
Delusions. It’s a long
quote, but it's much better to listen to him than to me, anyway.
"The essential victory of
Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness
of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences. If we find
ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women destroyed
or ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect
that theirs was-- in purely pragmatic terms--a more 'natural' disposition
towards reality...In the light of Christianity's absolute law of charity, we
came to see that formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or
otherwise disabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a
perpetual perplexity, which can too often cause pain but perhaps only vaguely
and fleetingly charm or delight; the derelict or wretched or broken man or
woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly
impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles,
refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from,
or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely
practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something
of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored,
is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human
souls.”
When God came and showed us that
foolishness is wisdom and weakness is strength he upset everything. The
question is whether we, as a post-Christian society, can continue to look at a
disabled child or criminal with love, whether we can continue to allow a place
for weakness. I tend to think we can’t. We already see the equivalent of
exposure—the cruel ancient practice of leaving unwanted babies in the
wilderness to die, endorsed by the wise of the world, including
Aristotle—returning in our society. Two Australian Academic philosophers
recently published a peer-review article in a journal of medical ethics arguing
that infanticide is morally permissible.
We have a stark choice before us between
Christianity and a Nietzschean nightmare: which will we choose? I have no
answer to this question, but I hope and pray that we may again allow Christ to
dwell in us and teach us about foolishness and weakness. I pray that we in the
academy realize that our legitimate attempts to pursue scholarship must bow
down before a wisdom that the world knows not.
I think of Blessed Pier Gorgio Frassati.
He was an Italian lay Catholic in the 20th century, who died in his
twenties. By the wisdom of the world, he would have been judged harshly: he was
not a very good student and constantly struggled in his studies. And yet he was
rich in the wisdom of God. He came from a wealthy family, but when he would
ride the train, he would always go third class and give the leftover train fare
to the poor. His friends once asked him why he did this. He answered,
"Because there is no fourth class."
That is the wisdom of God. It is wisdom
that I do not know, but that I pray I will one day learn.
1 Corinthians 1: 26-30
Consider your own call, brothers
and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were
powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the
world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the
strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not,
to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the
presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for
us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
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