Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way. The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ … And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind. Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.” In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's *amor fati* falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures. ### Episode Highlights 1. "The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth. It gains nothing from imparting its gifts." 2. "Love that is neither motivated by need nor based on worthiness—that is the kind of love Nietzsche thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth." 3. "Nietzsche aspires to transfiguration of all things through value-bestowing life, but he cannot overcome nausea over humans." 4. "God’s love for creatures is unconditional. It is agapic love for the states in which they find themselves." 5. "Love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it can live only between places. If it took an abode, it would die." **Show Notes** - Miroslav Volf’s engagement with Nietzsche’s work - Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as life-denying and his vision of the will to power - Schopenhauer’s hedonism vs. Nietzsche’s anti-hedonism: “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power.” - The will to power as Nietzsche’s supreme value and “hyper-good” - “The will to power is not a philosophy of life—it’s a philosophy of vitality.” - Nietzsche’s agonism: the noble contest for superiority among equally powerful opponents - “Every GOAT is a GOAT only for a time.” - Amor fati: Nietzsche’s love of fate and affirmation of all existence - Nietzsche’s ideal of desire without satisfaction: “desiring to desire” - Dangers of epithumic (need-based, consuming) love - “Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorter than a two-year-old’s toy... If it took an abode, it would die.” - Nietzsche’s nausea at the weakness and smallness of humanity: “Nausea, nausea... alas, man recurs eternally.” - Zarathustra’s conditional love: based on worthiness, wisdom, and power - “Joy in tearing down has fully supplanted love’s delight in what is.” - Nietzsche’s failure to love the unworthy: “His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings.” - Volf’s theological critique of striving, superiority, and contempt - “Nietzsche affirms vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.” - The biblical God’s love: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good.” - “Even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars.” - Jesus’s unconditional love versus Nietzsche’s agonistic, conditional love - Kierkegaard and Luther on the distinction between person and work - Hannah Arendt’s political anthropology and enduring love in the face of unworthiness - Volf’s proposal for a theology of loving the present world in its broken form - “We can actually long also for what we have.” - “Love that cannot take an abode will die.” - A vision of divine, presuppositionless love that neither requires need nor merit
Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way.
The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ …
And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind.
Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.”
In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's amor fati falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures.
Episode Highlights
Show Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Miroslav Volf: The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final good. Thus very important work in nature's philosophy for nies. Striving is good. Happiness does not dress in feeling that one's power is growing. The consequence however, that embracing, striving for superiority have or niches relationship to the world are momentous.
In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, puts it crossed everywhere with infinity. And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving. But this means there's no determinant goals like swift footed Oculus in the parable of Zob, Ilia infinity impedes them. He cannot overtake the tortoise, the will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time, and that goal can never be reached.
You are always equally behind striving for superiority, so as to enhance power does not just elevate some the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increase the weak, become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased successful. Striving for superiority.
Inferior rises.
Evan Rosa: Friedrich Nietzsche loved the world by loving our fate in it. This love embraces one's vitality in the world. One's power, one's struggle in beyond good and evil. He wrote, life itself is essentially appropriation injury, overpowering of what is foreign and weaker oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own forms, and at least at its mildest exploitation even equals Nietzsche says, will quote, "have to incarnate, will to power.
This will to power. He says, "will grow spread out, pull things in. Try to gain the upper hand, not due to any morality or immorality, but because it lives and because life. It simply is will to power. So Nietzsche's vision of the ultimate good is a striving to enhance one's power, to exert one's agency and will, and to embrace the world of contending forces.
But what does that kind of love imply about our relation to the rest of the world, the rest of our peers and the human species? In this episode, Miroslav Wolf's third Gifford lecture explores Nietzsche's will to power, agonistic or struggling love, and his affirmation of suffering. Miroslav critiques, nies devaluation of humanity, and proposes Jesus's unconditional love as a more enduring and encompassing response to the world's brokenness offering.
A love that transcends individual power worthiness from striving and personal need. This is the third in our recent series and was given as part of the lectures Miroslav Volf delivered at University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures. His series entitled Amor Mundi, considered God's love for the world and What it should mean for our love, our love of God, our love of creation, and our love of one another. Special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these lectures in our podcast and for the sport of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped to make the lectures possible. Hope you enjoy listening. Here's the third of Miroslav Volf's Gifford lectures.
Amor Fati: Nietzsche's Universal Affirmation and limited love.
Miroslav Volf: Ladies and gentlemen, friends, some of you who know my work will know that I'm a great fan of nietzche. Those of you who know me personally, know that I have read Nies work for years, uh, every evening for devotions. I'm serious. Yeah. Um, I taught a class, uh, at the school, evangelical school when I was teaching at Fuller, uh, on Nietzsche.
And, uh, I made it a rule that no negative comments about Nietzsche may be said in this, in this class. Well, yes, the time has come Dear f Fred, to move beyond gratefully receiving your profound critique of Christianity and say how deeply I think you are wrong about what you propose instead. And if Nietzsche can hear me, he'll also recognize that even in my critique, uh, I have learned from him.
So last lecture ended with Auer. So let me start very briefly with Auer and immediately go, uh, to Nietzsche, his pupil. The world has failed Schopenhauer expectations. It has proven itself incapable of giving any of his desires, appetites, immediate, full, and abiding satisfaction, like an irrationally demanding lover.
He has been robust and yet asking whether something might be, uh, yet instead of asking whether something might be wrong with his expectations, au decides to blame the world and wish, wish its non-existence. For him, a specific kind of desire is a given suffering, its unfulfillment is suffering and any suffering pushes the value of existence.
Below zero.
DHA was his teacher. Nietzche, soon lost patience with him except that he made Chop Beau's question about the value of existence. His own Nietzsche's entire philosophy is an alternative to Schopenhauer, though not just that, of course, Schopenhauer is a hedonist. His chief dis value is suffering and his chief value abiding satisfaction.
Nietzche is an anti hedonist. His chief dis value is weakness and his chief value enhancement of one's own power, sharpen powers. Podium Mundi hatred of the world. To, to that Nie responded with a more mundi love of faith. We ought to love the entirety of what is past, present, at future, the massive weight of suffering in the world.
Notwithstanding, unlike Schopenhauer and Nietzche, we often mix and match, and we do so. Even with our chief values, guiding values, even those of us who embrace hedonistic ideal of satisfaction, can find ourselves resonating with Nietzsche's vision of great striving and growing power, it is hard for us not to inwardly nod our heads in approval.
When we read Albert, asserting the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to feel man's heart. We can understand why Nietzche would celebrate power. We may more worry, however, about his signature idea, his love of what is, what was, and what is to come. Nietzsche made much of it and of what he believed were the inadequacies of Jesus love for the world.
Insiding with the ill constituted and the suffering the God revealed in Jesus Christ suppresses vitality. The Christian concept of God represents. He believed the low mark in the development, in the descending development of the god's Type God degenerated into a contradiction of life in God, nothingness, deified will to nothingness, sanctified.
In this lecture, I will argue that both Nietzsche's, chief value, enhancement of power, and his signature idea, areti systematically undermine any love that is worthy of that name. I do. So to do so, I will examine his notion of will to power two statements about loving concrete human beings. And then his idea of amor fatty at the beginning of the only volume of his planned revaluation of all values.
He actually, uh, that he actually wrote, Nietzsche asks and answers in tic style two fundamental questions for the life of every human being. What is good? And what is happiness in answering them? He names what he considers to be the most ba, his most basic value, the criterion for value of everything. But Charles Taylor calls a hyper good.
So what is this kind of good for? Nietzche? Everything that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in humans. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing. That resistance, eh? The resistance is being overcome. For Nietzche, striving to enhance one's power is not a specif, specifically human trait.
The basic human instinct is the same as the basic instinct of all living things. Each aims at enhancement of its own power, making such, striving his highest values for Nietzsche, the central aspect of loving life as it is given that nietzche, often though not always, associates overcoming resistance with having opponents.
The form of resistance that serves self enhancement is often the counterforce of competitors In the genealogy of morality, he writes that the will to power is a will to overwhelm, will to topple. Will to become master thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs similarly in the will to power. He writes that the feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the fact that the will is never satisfied unless it has opponents and resistance.
In many instances, then the will to power aims concretely at superiority at being more powerful than other others in philosophy and arts, no less than in sports politics, and of course, warfare Nature also highlights striving for superiority in contrasting his will to power to darvin's struggle for survival.
He writes, the great and small struggle everyone revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion around power in accordance with a will to power, which is simply will to life. Human beings do not just want power. Neither do they just want their power to grow. Human beings want growing power that is greater than the power of their competitors.
This belongs, I believe, to the logic of power In social context. I have power only when I have more power than my competitors or relative, comprehensive, and my power is the greatest when I set the standards by which all others must be measured. Importantly, the condition of superiority is always only temporary struggle continues eternally rights.
Nietzsche echoing Tus dictum that war is the mother of all things. Striving for permanent increase has no terminal goal. Every goat, greatest of all time, every goat is a goat, only for a time for the will to power to be the mode of love of life. Ongoing. Striving for superiority too would have to be the mode of love for life.
But is that plausible? In his early essay, Homer on Competition, Nietzsche recommends the form of human relations organized around the practice of agon. Struggled with others, conducted not as destructive combat, but as power enhancing contest. Three features of agon distinguish it from war. First, Agon is not action of a struggle to the death, but action of competition.
Second agon is a context of opponents with rough parity of power. Monopolies are non agonal. Third, since agon is a contest for mastery of relative equals, the contestants insight each other to action and growth just as they keep each other within certain limits. But the line between life enhancing agon and life destroying violence turns out to be difficult to maintain in the later work.
Beyond good and evil nature. Nature repeats some of the conditions of genuine agon, noting that it can take place only within small groups of equally powerful nobles who share basic values, he immediately qualifies the condition. If we were to make equality and prohibition against violence, basic principle, society as a whole, we would promote.
He writes The will to denial of life, the principle of disintegration and decline. Here's how he explains this position, life itself. Essentially, am I okay? Oh, okay. Life itself is essentially appropriation injury, overpowering, or what is foreign and weaker oppression. Harshness in position of one's own form incorporation, and at least at its mildest exploitation.
Even those bodies within which individuals treat each other as equal must do to other bodies. Everything that the individual within it refrain, refrain from doing to each other. If the social body will have to incarnate the will to power, will to grow, will to spread, pull things in, to try to gain upper hand, and why?
Not due to some morality or immorality, but it because it lives and because life simply is. Will to power now in Homer and competition the value of the, the image, I'm sorry, in, in Homer and competition, the image of raging tiger with one ton cruelty in its terrible eyes, stood for the violence niches sought to overcome with the help of agon after having introduced his signature idea of the will to power, the constraints on violence that Agon Agon was meant to introduce had lost some of their force.
These constraints, constraints he explains can, in certain crude sense, become good manners between individuals if conditions allow, and the conditions do not apply at all to relationships between groups.
The idea that competitive and goalless striving to re increase one's power is the final good, does very important work in HS philosophy. It allows him to place the meaning giving goal of life into life itself, and denied a position outside of life where Platonism and Christianity, religion more generally had placed it.
This is where Auer two had placed the meaning giving goal as he considered striving that never came to full and lasting satisfaction, both an argument against existence and means, as you might recall, if you've been here yesterday, no day before yesterday, and means of achieving nothingness. In contrast, Topen Hower Nietzsche for nietzche.
Striving is good. Happiness does not trust in feeling the rest, in feeling that one's power is growing. The consequence however, that embracing, striving for superiority have her nies relationship to the world are momentous. First in the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzche puts it, puts it crossed everywhere with infinity and therefore condemned to ceaseless striving.
But this means there's no determinate goals like swift footed Oculus in the parable of Zob, Ilia Infinity impeaches them. He, uh, him, he cannot overtake the tortoise. The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time, and that goal can never be reached. You are always equally behind.
Second, striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increase the weak, become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased, successful striving for superiority inferior rises.
These two tracks with a feature of modernity. It's logic of increase niches power. Agon more power is analogous to money, capital, more money without placing agon in a third agon. In a thirdly moral and legal frame, as the wise seek to do with economic competition, its effect will be the general interiorization of people.
Finally, the interiorization that the will to power generates would be less troubling. Were it not that for that. Nietzsche does not recognize any intrinsic values. As a consequence competitor and everything else that offers resistance are likely to become mere means for the enhancement of power perhaps.
At the highest level of competition, one can point. At some point, nature writes about competition between three or few more geniuses. Competitors can, under those circumstances, perhaps avoid treating each other as mere means when it comes to those he believed to be in inferior or slave type of humans.
He practice, uh uh, he praises the idea that they, they're means to make possible superior types of human
with a bill to power as his chief goal. Nature might not have so much rescued life from Christian and platonic nail nihilism as devalued. Not just most competitors, but also most of their accomp accomplishments. As I will argue in the last lecture, everyone is a disposable means to feeding the growth of individual's.
Vitality niche's. Philosophy is not philosophy of life, but the philosophy of vitality, which enhances the power of some, but degrades most agonism implies ascribing positive value to suffering sharpen our hedonist objects to the claim of Jewish and Christian traditions, that life without suffering is possible.
Nietzche an anti hedonist objects to the biblical claim that life without suffering is desirable. Commenting on Genesis two and three in the will to Power. He writes, God created man, happy, idle, innocent, immortal. Our actual life is a false, decayed, sinful existence and existence of punishment, suffering, struggle, work, death are considered as objections to the and question marks against life as something that ought not to last for which one requires cure and and has such cure.
From the time of Adam until now, man has been in an abnormal state. God himself has sacrificed his son for the guilt of Adam. In order to put an end to this abnormal state, the natural character of life is a curse. Christ give backs. The state of normalcy to him who believes in him, makes him happy, idle and innocent.
The whole struggling, battling actual existence full of splendor and darkness. Only a bad false existence. The task is to be redeemed from it. Mitch's concern with Genesis two to three is that it distorts most basic character of human beings. The whole, uh, to hold innocence, idleness, immortality, and happiness.
To be supremely desirable is to make human destruction desirable. The criticism is powerful. I think if we fail to distinguish sufficiently between two forms of the world. This present form of the world and the form of the world to come. Those of you who are here at the first lecture will remember that I try to introduce this distinction between world as such and different forms of the world.
So now of this world and the world to come are those different forms of the world, um, as a thing from the world. As such, for the present form of the world, vulnerability, suffering, and death are essential. I believe in the world to come. They will be absent. Building on David's Kelsey's work, I want to suggest that we should not place the two forms of the world on the same scale of value, one imperfect and the other.
Perfect. Though the nature of the goodness of the two forms of, of the world, meaning this world and the world to come, though the nature of the goodness of the two forms of the world overlaps, each is also good in its own way. Immortality and abiding happiness are goods of the world to come.
Vulnerability, suffering and death are goods of the present world, though they, though they are goods that make possible some of the worst evils, it is a false choice either to reject all suffering Aspen Howard does, or to embrace it all, however severe as Nietzche does. I realize that what I've just said is pretty controversial, so I will expect few questions, uh, about it.
Agonists notes, niche plausibly take upon themselves suffering in overcoming resistance. They also inflicted upon their opponent in the joyful science. Nietzsche brings together these two sides of our relation to suffering. He contrasts heroic individuals with weaklings, who in the prospect of fame, uh, the pain hear a command to take.
In sa the sales. There are human beings who hear exact opposite command when the great pain is approaching who are never prouder. More war life can happier than when facing down the storm that blows in. Indeed pain itself gives them their greatest moments. These are heroic human beings, but then in the middle of the sentence, he shifts from enduring suffering to inflicting suffering.
These heroic human beings, nature continues are the great pain bringers of humanity. Those few of rare types who deserve precisely the same apology as Spain in general and truly, it should not be denied them. They are species preserving and species promoting forces of the first order. For Nietzsche. One such hero was Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military expedition Expedition slept about 6 million dead and many more wounded to most of them.
He brought only well and served, which served no positive purpose. Nietzche had no better comfort for such sufferers than to tell them that their deaths and pain help heroic individuals to do their species promoting work. Once again, Nietzche affirm's vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.
A shift from, um, will to power to a more mundi slow shift transition. After 10 years of solitude, Nietzche has his ausra coming down from the mountain to begin his mission to humanity on the way he meets an old saint and tells him I love humans. The saint responds by explaining why he has chosen to live in the desert.
I love God, man. I love not man is for me, two imperfect a thing. Love of man would kill me. Ausra seems like takes step back and responds. I bring man a gift. A love of it seems just is bringing his gift, certainly a noble act and the Saints flight from imperfect humans into love for God. But what kind of love is there?
Austra gift giving there Ausra had retreat to the mountain to, in part, to flee from contemptible humanity. Why then is he coming down? Behold, I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands outstretched to receive it. Humans are repulsive, but they might be redeemable.
What he loves in human beings is not who they actually are, but the fact that they are made to be a transition bridge to the Uber me. Sarata brings his wisdom, but is this heartened to find no hands to receive it? The multitude will have none of it. They laugh at him, but when he gathers disciples, they too prove disappointing.
They're mere followers incapable of being fellow agonists of making the will to power the principle of their own lives, finding no one worthy of his love. He returns to the mountaintop full of contempt. There are two stress, two-way journey. Enacts his oscillation between what he haltingly and rather inappropriately calls love and deep contempt.
Instability of Resus love is rooted in its nature. First, he comes to relieve himself of the weight of pain, of his wisdom. As a lover, he's the giver in the need of recipients. And that note, as a person who has experienced great joys, joy and is bursting to share it, but as someone requiring relief, love here is epit.
Toia only. Now it is not seeking to fill a void, but to alleviate pain. Second, an essential condition of his love is that its recipients are worthy of it, that they themselves be transformed by his wisdom. When recipients are unworthy, contempt is appropriate. Now his love is, hes. Which facing unworthiness turns into contempt as the pain of the need to give remains unrelieved.
It increases RA contempt for those who are not wise enough to benefit from his superior wisdom and to honor it. Both his neediness and the recipient's unworthiness limit the scope of his love. There's yet another limit to XO lab. Let's assume for a moment that he found fellow agonists ready to embrace his vision of the good do agonists governed by the desire for enhancement of their power, love each other.
We've encountered that question before. Possibly that's three geniuses, but if so, then only as long as they prove good agonists and thus worthy of love. Love is in danger again, of morphing into contempt. Since the will to power is essentially insatiable, the wordiness of the fellow agonists is always a moving target.
While Agon brings about enhancement of power and therefore also worthiness, it simultaneously devalues inferior rises. Whatever has been overcome, as I've noted earlier. But counted as worthy prior to enhancement becomes unworthy after it. The objects of the suru two stress kind of love can be only a very small minorities.
Most humans will always nauseate nauseating his love, cannot have humanity and earth as its object. For that, NIE would need a different kind of love, the one neither motivated by need, nor based on worthiness. He would need precisely the kind of love that he thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth.
In the joyful science nature offers a similar account of love that I've just offered by analyzing, uh, the two stress relation to multitude in his disciples. He does so in the process of explaining his very question number, take on the difference between female and male loves, as I will show shortly, he will connect, sir, a tores love with what he calls male love.
What woman means by love is clear enough for to nature at least complete devotion, not merely surrender with soul and body without any consideration, any reserve, rather, with shame and horror at the thought of a devotion governed by clauses and conditions. Man, when he loves a woman once, precisely this from her.
Woman wants to give herself and be taken. Her love is the very opposite of the will to power. Male. Love is the averse of female love man wants to take, and so to be made even richer in himself through the increase of strength, happiness, faith that the woman gives him in giving herself. Male love is the mode of the will to power.
Explaining why loyalty does not belong to this. The essence of this love, nature, rights, male love after all is wanting to have and then, but wanting to have comes to an end with having, in other words, his love is, in my terms, earlier terms, epit, themic. The passage is significant, not just because it illustrate how comfortable Nietzsche is reducing a person to mere means to an individual's will to power, and calling that reduction love.
It also specifies how Nietzsche understand the dynamic of desire and possession. It assumes a need-based account of desire and the denial of intrinsic value of any object, as we've seen sharpener does once the need is satisfied in having the desire ceases and the desire turns to a new object for sharpen power.
This shows the impossibility of satisfaction, the presence of desire being for him, a form of suffering, an indicator of, of dissatisfaction, but not so for Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejects the ideal of satisfaction that would fully extinguish desire. Instead, he embraces a notion of desiring to desire in emo deemed the highest form of all beings.
In part because he has the soul, which having being dives into becoming the soul that has, but wills itself into wanting and longing, not at all wanting and longing for what it has, but refusing, contentment, wanting and longing for new things. The idea that satisfaction is not in having, but ongoing desiring is resonant with the idea that happiness consists in indefinite growth in power.
In the second lecture, I noted how per se, pervasive in the culture of modernity, um, epi Themic love is and how it devalues my term was garbages the world. Nietzche affirms an analogous relation to the world. In fact, he elevates it to a principle of life joy in the destruction of the most noble and at the site of its progressive ruin In reality, joy in what is coming and lies in the future, which triumphs over existing things.
However, good joy in tearing down, clearing away is fully, has fully supplanted, loves, delight in the good that is. Niche's, accounts of desire leads him to endorse openly the kind of devaluation of the world. Most of us in late modernity practice without noticing it. As I argued earlier, that bethia, especially when affirmed as desire to desire, undermines the reality of love and does so right at the point where love in some sense, properly gets going.
When lovers have come into possession of their object, of their love, instead of forming attachment and caring for them, they discard and destroy them in preference for new ones. Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorted than the two year old's toy. Unlike Christian, some Christian theologians, I do not think, I do not think that abiding love requires desiring the end of desire, perhaps in some.
Possession of the object of love in our temporal eternity To the contrary, as I see the end of time would be the end of anything we imagine as human love. Another controversial statement, but uh, there it is. I take Nisha to be right. The desiring this kind of release from time implies radical alienation from the world is rejection, but what makes love for the world also impossible are two related claims that are central for nature, that the will to power is insatiable, and that love ceases with having the two together imply endless striving for an unending stream of new conquest, new achievements, new things.
As a result, love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it cannot live because it can live only between places. If it took an abode, it would die. As I have noted at the end of previous lecture, a better way of thinking about the relation between desire and possession is available. We can actually long also for what we have, and unless we do, we will never genuinely love the world or anything that is in it.
But what about niches? Grade yes to life. His love of faith. At the beginning of Book Four of the Joyful Science, a book that ends with ausra over rich, with wisdom descending from the mountain to bring it to the world. Nietzche expresses a Goodyear wish. I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of all things as beautiful.
And then I will be one of those who makes things beautiful are more fat. Let that be my love. From now on, I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers, let looking away be my sole negation and all in all, and on the whole, I want at some point for once to be only a yes, say as he was writing the joyful science.
Occasionally he would actually find himself in such a state. In a letter to his friend, Overbeck, he writes, I am in the mood of fatalistic surrender to God. I call it amor fatty. So much so that I would rush into a lion's jaws. As we saw in the passage quoted, he aspired to amor fat in not as an occasional mood, but as an enduring state.
Now, like most new New Year's wishes, niches was never fulfilled. He never came. Became only a yes sayer. Not so much it seems because he was incapable of it though for that reason as well. But because he came to believe that the aspiration formulated in so general a way was itself in an important sense, mistaken, no saying is essential to the will, to power and to his whole project.
As he noted at the beginning of that same book, my way of Thinking demands a warlike soul, a desire to harm, lust for No Saying later, he described the tension between yes and no evident in this, in these quotes as a psychological problem with RA type, how someone who says no to everything, to an inordinate degree.
Can nevertheless be the opposite of no saying spirit, nevertheless, carry his yes, saying blessing into all abysses. To see how nietzche nos and yeses relate. We need to distinguish between our relation to the world as a whole and our relations to people, things and events within it. Many robust nos, along with joyful yeses are appropriate for things within the whole.
The unconditional yes, without any no should be said to the whole A yes saying, which encompasses literally everything, all glories and horrors alike, and everything in between the world as it is without subtraction exception, and selection or selection. This is niche's. Affirmation of life applied more narrowly to one's own life.
It means to say yes to it as a whole and desire it exactly as it was, as it is, and it as, as it is to become all of its smaller nos and yeses included. Now this kind of unconditional affirmation of life is the content of what RA calls his abysmal thought. He's referring to the idea of eternal recurrence of all things.
At the end of that very same book of, uh, the Joyful Science book four, which started with a New Year's Wish, Nietzsche announces for the first time eternal recurrence. Here's how it goes. This life as you live it now and have live it, you will have to live once more and countless times more, and there will be nothing new in it.
Rather, every pain and every joy, every thought and every sigh will return innumerable times. How would you respond? If that for true, he says, if a demon would fluster that into your ears. Here he invites his readers to experience the weight of the recurring life and world, not so much as the highest burden, but as the highest joy to crave.
Nothing more than just such a world. This would be living in a mood of universal, unconditional, and strictly all encompassing Allah.
But why should a person whose life principles will to power aspire to such a love with God's dead nature thinks that the world is like an infinite and often chaotic ocean. One can strive for increase of one's power without loving the terrifying world by resigning oneself to it and, and living in it bega, begrudgingly, but on the, on the whole.
One might then even think that it's better to live in such a world or not. But that would be to take a stance too close. Topen Towers, the one Nietzsche made his life work to combat for Nietzsche only. Those are truly great, who love, who crave just the world in which they live with its torment, destruction, and annihilation.
They're able to affirm not just their own striving for superiority, but the whole world in which life itself is competition, overpowering oppression, exploitation. But can they really love even the striving that materializes them, the eternal return, not only of their overcoming, but of their being overcome?
What kind of love could this be? It is not errors. Love motivated by intrinsic value of its object for nothing has intrinsic value for nature. It is not epithelial love directed to object that satisfies a thirst. It's hard to see how fate, which includes many things of market disvalue, can be object of either of these two loves.
Rehan pile proposes that Nietzsche has in mind. Love which confers value rather than responding to it either as valuable in itself or as a good means for slacking some thirst. Nietzche writes, I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of things as the beautiful. Then I will be the one who makes things beautiful.
To see things as beautiful and to make all things beautiful is on Han Pile, reading a transfiguration of their value brought about by our love for them
as constant and great sufferer. We always have to remember in richer rights about suffering, that he was suffering just about entirety of his, of his life as a consulate and great sufferer. Nietzche, uh, with Armour of Fati. Nietzsche invented here a modest. Will Ous happiness, a happiness like that of an eye before which the sea of existence, even the raging sea of existence has become calm and now cannot see enough of the surface and of the multitude tendered, trembling skin of the sea.
The question, why do you, why do we love what we love drops off, and how do we come to love replaces it? And so love comes to us in Han Pile's reading as an act of grace, and it does so primarily through great suffering. No justification or reasons are involved at all. We feel the pain that attaches to such experiences, but find ourselves able to love them nevertheless, without holding them as objections to life.
If indeed this is what Nietzche after, it would take a great deal of unmotivated trust to achieve such love. And even if we were to love the world with this kind of love, would not, would it not rest on perceptual and existential illusion, seeing something as beautiful, which makes things beautiful we see as beautiful.
What we at the same time know to be hideous. Nietzsche has no way to resolve this attitudinal, existential tension. As I will note shortly, Martin Luther and Hannah ar actually do when discussing his abysmal thought. Nietzsche has their truthers say more than once. Nausea. Nausea, nausea wo unto me. He imagines a snake crawling into Zara's mouth to illustrate the feeling.
But what triggers Zara Truss's powerful loathing. It cannot be the destructiveness and cruelty in the nature and history or awareness of the ghastly absurdity of existence. These are just unalterable features of the world. Amor Fai should have taken care of them. Here's the cause of his nausea. Alas man.
Recur eternally. Small man recurs, eternally naked. I, once I, I had once seen both the greatest man and the smallest man. All too small to each other, even the greatest. All too human, all too small. The greatest. That was my disgust with man and the internal recurrence even of the smallest. That was my disgust with all existence.
Alas. Nausea. Nausea, the smallest of smallness of humans. Their weakness, they're all too human. And nausea. Nausea as a reference to nakedness of the greatest and the smallest human indicates. There are two is disgusted, not just with the rebel. But with the human more broadly comprehensively, and the main ways there ausra overcomes nausea is through isolation in the highest height, a solution not entirely different from that of the old world hating Saint whom there ausra meets on his back down the mountain, the one who had retreated into desert because the love of man would kill him.
But isolation, isolation does not help because it confirms there are tores inability to affirm life fully. When he's in the proximity of the weak, it only lays bare his failure to say eternal. Yes to all things. At the end of his active life, Nietzsche Nietzsche notes that disgust that humans is his greatest danger, and in fact embraces isolation.
As the push, as the path to redemption from disgust. His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings. So what are we make of Nies? In striving for superiority in his affirmation of life and in his love of faith, Nietzsche is largely a despised of life in its concreteness, albeit one with no other worldly hopes.
The will to power is an attempt to rescue life from Christian nihilism and from Schopenhauer, disappointed hedonism, but it generates too much contempt to count as love at all. When it comes to the scope of worldly love and its quality too. Jesus, I believe, has a distinct advantage over Zara. Tora Misha's.
Favorite metaphor for Z Zara Tora is the sun. From the sun, I learned this. When it goes down over rich, it pours gold into the sea out of its inexhaustible riches so that even the poorest fishermen still roses with golden oars. Amazing. This, this is, this is some of the best of Nies prose, and if you read, uh, uh, the Joyful Science, you, you, you'll get, you'll get pages of it.
It's, it's in incredible. I think that's why I love the Guide. The image is beautiful and illustrates well the supper, super abundance zare fields, and yet it fits Ill with two features of Z toras love. I had identified the need from which it springs, and the demand for worthy recipients on which it depends, combination of epit, theia, and S.
Even those austra imagines the sun could not be happy without those for whom it shines. The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth. It gains nothing for imparting its gifts, certainly not relief. And unlike there are two stress gifts, the gifts of the sun, the sun bestows, manifestly do not require worthy recipients.
The poor fishermen does not need to make himself worthy for the sun to turn the oars in his C hands into gold. The son's love is all encompassing and unconditional. Now, Jesus too uses the image of the Son to illustrate his core teaching about love. God makes his son to rise on the evil and the good alike.
Jesus love is beyond the distinction between good and evil, beyond the difference between wordiness and not wordiness. No one nauseas Jesus, the masses of the poor and sick, many of whom follow him from from wrong reason. Do not. Those who have no ears to hear his message, no hands to receive his gifts do not either the disciples do not even those who deny and betray him.
Nietzche inspires to transfiguration of all things through value, bestowing love, but he cannot overcome nausea over humans. He cannot eliminate demand worthiness from his love for humans. The scape of the scope of his love remains, therefore, severely limited. Jesus loves with universal. Unconditional love, not motivated by his own need and utterly undaunted by the unworthiness of its objects.
Martin Luther built his entire theology on the foundation of the primacy of, of God's unconditional love. Such love is what Mac creation be. What gives it existence. Its preciousness. Such love is also what tends to creatures violated integrity and seeks to make them beautiful transf. Both how they are seen niches interest and the way they are implicit in unconditional love is the distinction between what Luther called person and work.
In a familiar way of speaking, we, you and I are more than the worst thing we have done. And as Ki Guard will say, we're also more than the best we have achieved. I mentioned his comment on Solomon, and here again, Solomon is more glorious as a human being than he is as a king. Possibly better than using categories of person and work would be to distinguish between human beings as such, their sheer existence, which makes it possible to stay, I'm sorry, uh, sheer existence and their qualities as Hana Aen does.
So for Luther Kier guard and a. This distinction is in iron's worth the fruit of the incalculable grace of love, which makes it possible to stay with those we love through the history of their transformations, whether positive or negative, to love them and care for them in whatever state they find themselves.
Theologically, the distinction is rooted in God's presupposition less and unconditional love for creatures. Love that in is inly alive, irrespective of the value or disvalue of creatures, capacities and achievements. God's love for creatures themselves is unconditional. It is a gothic love for the states in which they find themselves.
Their capacities and achievement is conditioned by their qualities. God's relation to the states in which humans are is erotic. As I explained in lecture two, Aris and Agape are not mutually exclusive. They're complimentary, but agape is primary and overarching. Aero is subordinate and regional. For Luther and Kier guard, the distinction between sheer existence and existence with certain qualities is anthropological.
R and two applies this distinction to humans. As members of a shared world, I propose to expand it, extended it to the lives, to the lived world as a whole. It requires us toti distinguish between the world as such and the particular form of the world or state in which it finds itself. As I explained earlier, the distinct the distinction can help us imagine how could it be possible to love the world, which in so many ways does not deserve to be loved to love, despite widespread gratuitous suffering and cruelty.
In it. We might then even come to love the world in certain sense because of such stubborn suffering and cruelty, as I will argue in my next lecture. Thank you very much
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Miroslav Volf.
Production Assistance by Taylor Craig, and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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