In that great fatality called Christianity,
Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,”
which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves
and to set foot on the bridge leading to the ‘Cross’…
And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,”
in the construction, system, and practice of the church.

My recuperation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism
has always been Thucydides…
and, perhaps, The Principle of Machiavelli,
most closely related to me by the unconditional will not to delude myself,
but not to see reason in reality – not in “reason,” still less in “morality.”

Plato was a coward before reality,
consequently he flees into the ideal;
Thucydides has control of himself,
consequently he also maintains control of things.

Excerpt, Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche

---

These lines penned by the son of a Lutheran minister, Götzen-Dämmerung, were written in about a week, from August 28 to September 3rd in 1888.  He wanted an introduction to his philosophy, something in a nutshell, something radical.  The title in German, is a pun on the title of Richard Wagner’s opera, Götterdämmerung, or ‘Twilight of the Gods.’  Twilight of the Idols is a ravening criticism of German culture, as decadent, nihilistic.

It is late in the day for us in America.  Everyone knows, feels the reality in his/her bones.  As if on the Titanic, one feels the tilt of the deck…  The end will not be what we anticipated, what we fortunate, what we purchasers of a ticket had in mind.  We expected to make the passage in high style, in an environment of light, of levity and comfort.  Now the party is ending, the lights grow dim.

I read these words in this mornings issue of the New York Times:

Nearly a week after the storm made landfall in Louisiana, roughly 70 percent of energy customers in New Orleans remain without power. Cleanup crews are working to contain what experts called a substantial oil spill Ida left in the Gulf of Mexico. In New York City, 13 people died, many of whom drowned in basement apartments. The storm killed at least 25 people in New Jersey — more than in any other state.

As disasters become more severe, the cost of rebuilding has skyrocketed. Extreme weather has caused more than $450 billion in damage nationwide since 2005; the number of disasters causing more than $1 billion in damage reached a record 22 last year. The price tags mean the U.S. faces another climate dilemma: how to decide which places to try to save.

Nietzsche unleashes a salvo at the spiritual, existential foundations of Western society and culture, declaring that Christianity is a train wreck, that “great fatality.”  By Nietzsche’s lights Christianity as cultivated and dispensed under the auspices of the church is nothing but a Platonic ideal, in the wrapper of religious teaching.  Christianity is something bright and shiny, mesmerizing like a Youtube commercial for children — that misleads, that misdirects from the hard work of character formation, of embracing the jagged reality of our true selves.

Nietzsche, the preacher’s son contrasts the abstract allure of the ideal “good” inherited from Plato, with the rugged realism of Thucydides, the Athenian historian/commander of trireme warships in the Peloponnesian war.  Thucydides  knew war and conflict first hand, what we humans ought never to forget “how bad it can get,” the blood stained sea, when we allow our hubris, our ambition to get out of hand.

Do not we need a cure, not to delude ourselves with the nonsense that we Americans are exceptional, the “chosen?”  To turn — with our eyes-wide-open to recognize we are not moral, nor have we been reasonable, that we have left a trail of bodies in our wake. There are uncounted bodies of lynched Black citizens, American Indians dispossessed from their land and exiled, and lately in Texas, women stripped of the right of medical decision over their bodies.

On this Sunday morning, churches welcome adherents to another “show,” always another show.  Do we not misunderstand ourselves?