Thérèse or Nietzsche: It’s All or Nuthin’
by Dwight Longenecker
In the musicalOklahoma! Ado Annie and Will Parker sing, “With Me It’s All or Nuthin’ is it All or Nuthin’ With You?” I like to imagine the duet being sung by Thérèse of Lisieux and Friedrich Nietzsche. I can just see the sweet little French girl and the skinny German with his big moustache, the first crying out in girlish enthusiasm, “I will have all!” and the second in sickly sadness crying, “I will have nothing.”
The Doctor of the Church and the Philosopher of the Anti-Church were contemporaries. Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900. Thérèse was born in 1873 and died three years before Nietzsche in 1897. In one of those quirks of history, the two of them stayed in the same hotel in Paris while Thérèse and her father were on pilgrimage to Rome.
Nietzsche was the son of a small-town Lutheran pastor and teacher. He went to conventional middle-class Christian boarding schools. He was the product of German, small-town Protestantism, and it was this background that he rejected. What kind of a God, therefore, did Nietzsche consider to have died? It was the god he learned about within small-town bourgeois Protestantism–a God who expected dull conformity of belief and behavior–a God who didn’t like smart boys asking too many questions. If this was the God that the boy Nietzsche was introduced to in his childhood, then not only was that God dead. He was never alive.
Thérèse, on the other hand, is the product of small-town, bourgeois French Catholicism. Her life and her philosophy are almost the exact opposite of Nietzsche. She never rejected the religion she was given as a child, and yet she questioned the same expectations of dull conformity and challenged them not by rejecting her religion, but by living it out in a radical way that turned the dull piety of the French bourgeois Catholics upside-down.
If Friedrich Nietzsche were to meet Thérèse Martin how would the conversation go? He might explain the death of God and the inexorable rise of nihilism. Therese would say “the good God” was not dead, but only man’s false ideas of God had died. When he explained how morality was discovered by each person, Thérèse would reply that each person did indeed have to discover morality–but in a radically personal way. When Nietzsche explained how the great ones had to give up fitting into dull society, had to give up attachment to all material things, Thérèse would point out that this is precisely what she aimed to do by becoming a Carmelite.
When Nietzsche explained that this process of negation and discovery of true values was the process by which the “superman” came to be, Thérèse would point out that the “superman” is what Catholics call a “saint.” When she cries, “Sanctity! It must be won at the point of a sword!” or “You cannot be half a saint. You must be a whole saint or no saint at all!” she gives the world her own version of the “superman”–one who has overcome the dull conventional beliefs and behaviors and risen to another dimension of humanity altogether.
This is one of God’s great jokes: that the world throws out a Nietzsche–a proud, self-dramatizing, Byronic philosopher–the atheist of the grand flourish and the tragic gesture, and God answers with a little girl who likes to sit on Papa’s lap and see her initials in the stars. See how it all ends: Nietzsche descends into madness and dies penniless in his domineering sister’s house. His legacy was one of nihilism and despair, and his greatest ignominy is that his thought inspired the Nazis to plunge Europe into war and murder millions.
Thérèse also dies surrounded by sisters. She shares with Friedrich an obscure and tragic death–suffering from tuberculosis and dying after a long, drawn-out agony. But within months of her death the little girl’s book is re-printed by the tens of thousands. She is hailed as the “greatest modern saint” by Pope Pius XI. Putting her in the intellectual big-league with Nietzsch, a hundred years after her death this little girl is named as a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II. Her star continues to rise, and wherever her relics are taken on pilgrimage, incredible crowds to venerate the memory of this little girl who counters the übermensch spirit of our age.
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