In Jesus or Nietzsche Belliotti offers a detailed comparison between the teaching of Jesus and the philosophy of Nietzsche. Nietzsche's ambivalent attitude towards Jesus and Christianity has been a popular topic for Nietzsche scholars and theologians. Traditionally, the majority of studies in this area have typically concentrated on investigating Nietzsche's critique of Jesus and Christianity, often attempting to illustrate what they perceive to be Nietzsche's misunderstanding of them (a fairly recent example is Stephen N. Williams's The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity, 2006). But there have also been several texts that have explored Nietzsche's positive attitude towards Jesus, such as his view of Christ as a life-affirmer (e.g. Peter Berkowitz's Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, 1995). And there have also been a few notable texts that even argued for a deep affinity in outlook between Nietzsche and Christianity (e.g. Karl Jaspers's Nietzsche and Christianity, 1963) or an affinity in attitude between Nietzsche and Jesus (e.g. F. A. Lea's The Tragic Philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche, 1993). Among these texts, Belliotti's book occupies a somewhat unusual position. For Belliotti is most concerned with the practical values of Jesus’ teaching and Nietzsche's philosophy, specifically – as the subtitle of the book indicates – what sorts of answers these two thinkers offer to the enduring, paramount question, ‘How should I live my life?’.
In the first part of the book (chapters 1–3), in which he outlines and critically assesses some of the major themes of Jesus' moral message and those of Nietzsche's philosophy, Belliotti claims that although Jesus and Nietzsche were ‘uninterested in deriving moral conclusions mechanically and formalistically from general normative principles’, each of them in his thinking echoes three recurrent themes (pp. 10–11). On the one hand, the recurrent themes of Jesus' moral message are: extending unconditional love to everyone, even to strangers and enemies; cultivating an almost default mindset of forgiveness and mercy towards others' transgressions; and providing aid to those in need regardless of their backgrounds. On the other hand, the recurrent themes of Nietzsche's normative messages are: the need for potential ‘higher types’ – a few selected individuals of potential exceptional greatness – to distance themselves from dominant, conventional understandings; the connection between different psychological types of human beings and the convictions they accept; and the importance of the process of self-realization, i.e. actualizing and maximizing one's higher human potentials, in a radically contingent world. Belliotti carefully examines each of these themes, confronts some of their problems and paradoxes in detail, and highlights the most demanding features of the respective normative ideals of Jesus and Nietzsche.
One of Belliotti's key arguments in the book is that ‘the contrast between Nietzsche's embrace of amor fati and Jesus' alleged distance from this world’ – which has been so often emphasized by many commentators – is actually ‘misconceived’, and that ‘[t]he more genuine difference is between engagement in the world that inclines toward individualism and that which is directed toward community’ (p. 206). That is, Belliotti identifies in Jesus and Nietzsche ‘the antinomies of the individual–community continuum’ (p. 205). By this he means an existential tension at the heart of human experience, namely that ‘our yearning for intimate connection with others and the recognition that others are necessary for our identity and freedom coalesces uneasily with the fear and anxiety we experience as others approach’. Experiencing too much individuality could cause us to face ‘alienation, estrangement, and psychological isolation’, whereas experiencing insufficient individuality would invite ‘emotional suffocation, loss of self-esteem, and unhealthy immersion in the collectivity’. And since this ‘disharmony may never be fully reconciled once and forever’, ‘we find ourselves making uneasy compromises and adjustments during our life's journey as we oscillate along the continuum whose endpoints are “radical individuality” and “thorough immersion in community,” respectively’. And Belliotti's view is that ‘Jesus champions the community side of the continuum, while Nietzsche prizes the individual side’ (pp. 10–11).
The most interesting aspect of Belliotti's book is the manner in which he attempts to synthesize what he perceives to be Jesus' perfectionism and Nietzsche's perfectionism (chapters 4 and 5). Although the title of his book is Jesus or Nietzsche, Belliotti does not urge us to choose either Jesus or Nietzsche in unadulterated versions of their teachings. For, according to him, on the one hand, a major problem with Nietzsche's ‘aristocratic’ individualism – the idea that the justification of the human species lies in its highest exemplars, namely ‘higher types’ – is that while it offers ‘the exhilaration of the values of uniqueness, autonomy, freedom from abject conformity to dominant ideas, and self-realization’ (at least to those who are potential higher types), it arouses ‘our fear of alienation, estrangement, loneliness, and isolation’. Furthermore, it hardly contributes towards the individual empowerment of the majority who are – in Nietzsche's view – consigned to serving the interests and facilitating the perfection of those few potential higher types. On the other hand, the main difficulty attending Jesus' communitarianism is that while it inspires us with its ‘images of robust communal action, human solidarity, and universal love’, it also ‘unintentionally incites our apprehension of being suffocated by the oppressive collectivity, of being used only as a resource to fulfil the need of others, and of being mired in pathetic self-abnegation’. Put differently, Belliotti's claim is that ‘Jesus emphasized excessively our communal impulse, while Nietzsche overestimated our individualistic instinct’ (pp. 206–207).
As such, Belliotti's overall argument is that we must reconcile Jesus' communitarianism and Nietzsche's individualism by stripping the extremities from each of them, to produce the synthesis that would underscore their respective strengths and soften their respective problems. So we must reject all the aristocratic elements from Nietzsche's individualism to make a process of self-realization available to everyone. According to this revised version of Nietzschean individualism, our higher human potentials can be cultivated not only by ‘high cultural creativity’ or ‘extraordinary artistic production’ but also by ‘relatively ordinary human action performed with brio and a sense of mission’, and our measure of success is gauged not by ‘the superiority of our productivity in relation to others’ but by ‘the extent to which our efforts, sacrifices, risks, and suffering facilitate the actualization and maximization of our particular set of higher human potentials and those of other people’. This is an individualism that embraces the intimacy which only communal attachments can provide, by recognizing that ‘human beings are social creatures and require engagement with an appropriate social environment to realize their higher human potentials’. Conversely, Belliotti suggests that by recognizing that the most radical aspects of Jesus' teaching – such as utter impartiality and unconditional love – can be implemented only by heroes, martyrs, and, saints, we can relieve our fears of self-abnegation and suffocation within the grand collectivity. But we can still strive to achieve self-perfection by cultivating a more forgiving and merciful approach to others' transgressions; by taking the claims of the needy more seriously; by restraining our natural inclinations towards harsh retribution; and by encouraging the development of the higher potentials of others, especially those of strangers and enemies. In this manner, Belliotti sketches a perfectionism that ‘exudes both individual and communal dimensions’ and regards our personal journey towards self-perfection as something ‘mutual’ in nature (pp. 206–208).
Belliotti is clearly a subtle interpreter of Jesus and Nietzsche. In particular, he understands the fraught business of reading Nietzsche's texts, and correctly grasps certain distinctive characteristics of Nietzsche's writings, such as their ‘personal’ nature – the fact that they cannot be entirely severed from Nietzsche's own life experiences and dispositions – and their unique ‘style’. Indeed, Belliotti is surely right to identify similarities between Jesus and Nietzsche not just in their tasks, such as their conscious aspirations to refashion or revalue the dominant norms of their time in service of what they took to be a higher vision, but also in their style, especially in the way they both expressed their teachings in ‘unforgettable contexts’ (p. 1). Unlike academic philosophers, who typically seek to prove their moral conclusions by means of sophisticated arguments, Jesus frequently conveys his moral lessons by using imaginative parables that stir people's emotions, while Nietzsche often chooses to express his views through a variety of literary styles (such as metaphors, aphorisms, calculated exaggerations, ironies, and parodies) in order to appeal not just to readers' reason but also to their emotions and imagination.
Belliotti's views are generally well argued and well presented, and most of his interpretations of Jesus and Nietzsche seem plausible. His discussions of Nietzsche's philosophy are extensive but easy to follow, which makes his book accessible even to non-specialists without any previous reading of Nietzsche's work, as Belliotti indeed intends it to be.
But this has certain disadvantages, and it seems to me that a chief weakness is Belliotti's tendency to be diverted from the primary concerns of the book by a sense of obligation to take a position on various matters within Nietzsche scholarship – no doubt, partly for the sake of non-specialists – and consequently his account of the interplay between Jesus and Nietzsche remains somewhat limited. He devotes a large part of the book to discussions of the particular metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions of those two thinkers, and their normative conclusions, which are most crucial to the book, sometimes take a while to emerge. Certainly, as he quite rightly claims, those discussions are not irrelevant to the primary concerns of the book (p. 209). And he makes it clear that what he attempts to sketch is ‘only a trajectory toward a synthesis of the respective strengths in their teachings’ (p. 12). Still, it may have been more productive to condense those discussions to make room for an expanded version of such synthesis as is presented in chapter 5.
Belliotti sometimes presents his interpretations of Nietzsche rather too uncritically, without examining other possible interpretations in any detail. For instance, throughout the book Belliotti construes Nietzsche's ‘will to power’ as an aggregate of instinctual drives. This is not an implausible interpretation, but the ‘will to power’ is a notoriously ambiguous notion, and given the fact that other commentators have interpreted this notion quite differently – for example, as a metaphysical will, as a myth, or as a thought experiment – Belliotti could have supported his interpretation with more textual evidence and expository argument.
To cite another instance, Belliotti regards Nietzsche as an elitist individualist, who cares little about anything other than the flourishing of a few exceptional individuals whose existence and creations form the value of humanity, as indicated by Nietzsche's famous claim in Untimely Mediations that ‘the goal of humanity’ lies ‘only in its highest exemplars’. Hence Belliotti claims that ‘Nietzsche's individualism seems restricted only to higher human types’ (p. 206), and that ‘Nietzsche's perfectionism instructs the vast majority of us [who are not higher types] to devote ourselves only to nurturing the excellences of the greatest exemplars in our society and empowers the greatest exemplars to embrace our sacrifices and use our services with a good conscience’ (p. 189). This is undoubtedly the dominant reading of Nietzsche, but it has been questioned by some commentators. For example, in his article ‘Nietzsche's perfectionism: a reading of Schopenhauer as Educator’ (2010), James Conant has argued that Nietzschean exemplars are ‘part of an ad hominem strategy for exhibiting to a reader – that she is (and feels herself to be) beholden to demands she otherwise evades (or seeks to deny)’. On this reading, what an exemplar discloses to us is our own ‘higher self’, such that each of us experiences a distinctive sort of ethical shame about our own present self, specifically our own failure to compete with the genius. This suggests that the role of a Nietzschean exemplar is to inspire us to discover and actualize our own higher human potentials that have been concealed from us: that is, to provide ‘a concrete representation of how one should live and to what one should aspire’. Such a perfectionist reading might cast doubt on the plausibility of Belliotti's exegesis.
Further, it is surprising that Belliotti does not discuss Nietzsche's various comments about the effects of food, drink, place, and climate on the body, such as his suggestions on what one should eat and drink. Nietzsche always recognizes and repeatedly emphasizes the importance of attending properly to what he calls ‘these small things – nutrition, place, climate, recreation’, of being able to take pleasure and find solace in these ‘little things’ as ‘the basic concerns of life itself’, which could significantly grace and enrich our life (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Clever’, 10): one of his criticisms of Christianity is that it makes light of or even despises these ‘small things’. Given Belliotti's aim to reconstruct Jesus’ and Nietzsche's advice on how to live, ‘their definitions, recipes, and accounts of what constitutes the good human life’ (p. xiv), Nietzsche's concern for physiological well-being – an aspect of his thinking that particularly prompts us to see him as a kind of life-reformer – might well have been explored with profit.
Nonetheless, Belliotti's book can certainly be recommended to both Nietzsche scholars and theologians, as well as to a wider range of readers who simply seek to improve their lives. Belliotti writes well and with conviction, and it is refreshing to see a commentator who, where appropriate, confronts and criticizes not just Nietzsche but also Jesus forthrightly. And Belliotti's book also reminds us of something important: that Nietzsche's philosophy, like Jesus’ moral teaching, is directed at transforming our practical lives.
