by Kater Moggin

In April 2006, Kater Moggin posted to alt.religion.gnostic a short essay examining the relationship between Nietzsche's critique of beatitude and the Gnostic rejection of this world.

Drawing on Nietzsche's "An Attempt at Self-Criticism" (prefixed to later editions of The Birth of Tragedy ) and Henri Berault's essay "Beatitude in Nietzsche" (collected in The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison), Moggin argues that Nietzsche correctly identified a life-denying impulse at the heart of Christianity — the yearning for transcendence, peace, and the "Sabbath of Sabbaths" — but that this impulse finds its fullest expression not in Christianity but in Gnosticism, where anti-cosmism is a central defining feature.

The essay is characteristically terse: Moggin does not claim Nietzsche endorsed Gnosticism, only that the theme he attacked in Christianity is most completely realized by the tradition he never named.

"I am bitterly opposed," Nietzsche writes, "to all teachings that look to an end, a peace, a 'Sabbath of Sabbaths.' Such modes of thought indicate fermenting, suffering, often even morbid breeds..." Why this animosity toward beatitude?

The question comes from "Beatitude in Nietzsche" by Henri Berault, collected in The New Nietzsche. What he's quoting I'm not sure, but the answer is clear enough in related passages. For example:

From the very first, Christianity spelled life loathing itself, and that loathing was simply disguised, tricked out, with notions of an "other" and "better" life. A hatred of the "world," a curse on the affective urges, a fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendence rigged up to slander mortal existence, a yearning for extinction, cessation of all effort until the great "sabbath of sabbaths" — this whole cluster of distortions, together with the intransigent Christian assertion that nothing counts except moral values, had always struck me as being the most dangerous, most sinister form the will to destruction can take; at all events, as a sign of profound sickness, moroseness, exhaustion, biological etiolation. And since according to ethics (specifically Christian, absolute ethics) life will always be in the wrong, it followed quite naturally that one must smother it under a load of contempt and constant negation; must view it as an object not only unworthy of our desire but absolutely worthless in itself.

— The Birth of Tragedy, "An Attempt at Self-Criticism" §5.

That makes things more than plain. Nietzsche is objecting to the criticism of life in the desire for transcendence — the world-rejecting attitude he finds in Christianity (and also in Buddhism, though he doesn't mention it here), which attacks material existence while longing for death, destruction and the final sabbath day. He's giving Christianity more credit than it deserves, but the theme that he's identified is part of the canon, and its fullest expression appears in gnosticism, where anti-cosmism is of course a central, defining feature.

Berault's reply doesn't add much to Nietzsche, but I'll go ahead and quote it anyway:

Perhaps because Nietzsche perceives the abyss that separates true happiness from beatitude. Happiness (but not the happiness of the 'last man,' that bastard form of beatitude) arises out of chance, hazard, accident, events, fortune, the fortuitous. Beatitude is not the height of, but the opposite of, this free and gratuitous happiness. The concern for beatitude expresses the will to conjure away that part of contingency that is the very essence of happiness. The man of beatitude no longer wishes to be exposed to the thousand blows of fortune, to the stupor and the rending that happiness as well as unhappiness provoke, both of them always unwonted and rather monstrous. He wishes to have his feet on the ground once and for all. It is not enough for him to be happy; he wishes to be blissful; he wishes to rest in the certainty of the unum necessarium. He wishes to die, to sleep, and this eternal rest and sleep he calls eternal life and eternal bliss! Thus beatitude saves us — it works our salvation, we save ourselves, we flee from ourselves, we are no longer here below. A phenomenon of withdrawal, flight, and resentment, beatitude always wants the unconditioned, the absolute, the eternal; it impugns the tender, innocent, puerile cruelty of chance; it casts an evil eye on all the favors and disfavors of existence. It says no to life.

Berault is adopting Nietzsche's life-affirming perspective — trying to "think with Nietzsche" what Nietzsche was trying to think — but that aside, he's got it right: to yearn for transcendence, what he's calling beatitude, is a death-wish, a no, thunderous or otherwise, to life's evil and even its always-uncertain pleasures. From the gnostic perspective this world is a mistake in need of erasing, exactly what Nietzsche labels a slander on mortal existence at the same time he realizes it belongs to the antithesis of truth and life.

Colophon

Written by Kater Moggin and posted to alt.religion.gnostic, April 2006. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Kater Moggin was a longstanding scholarly presence on alt.religion.gnostic, known for rigorous engagement with primary sources and a combative intellectual style. This essay draws on Friedrich Nietzsche's "An Attempt at Self-Criticism" (prefixed to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann — public domain) and Henri Berault's "Beatitude in Nietzsche," collected in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (MIT Press, 1985). Moggin's argument — that Nietzsche's attack on Christian beatitude identifies a life-denying impulse most fully realized in Gnosticism — is not a defense of Nietzsche but a clarification of the Gnostic position: the anti-cosmic rejection of this world is not pessimism but principle.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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