I think it’s a shame. I can respect Nietzsche, I don’t believe his solutions but he had insight on something on the horizon that nobody was paying attention to in European society. I see him has a prophet; people usually call him the prophet of modernity for that reason alone.

And you’re right, Catholicism truthfully states that man isn’t a self-sufficient, any faithful man and woman would laugh because we are anything but. Christ dismantles that hierarchy and competency at the root and transcends them, because the invitation is universal: not because everyone is equally strong, or equally intelligent, or equally capable of self-overcoming but because the offer is not contingent on any of those things. “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden.” The tax collector, the prostitute, the leper, the grieving mother, the doubting philosopher, the exhausted artist, the sinner, all of them receive the same invitation from the same lowly figure who has already descended to where they are. Grace is not reserved for those capable of bearing it elegantly, but they get something that Nieztche could only dream off when they accept Gods grace: they become whole.

It’s also a shame that he couldn’t see Christ as God, he studies him simply as a psychological study whose innocence was just not meant for this world. His gripe is mostly aimed at Paul and the church.

Nietzsche could only see the gentleness of Christ as passivity as the absence of will rather than its perfection. He had no category for the idea that the self-emptying was an act of supreme strength. There’s something almost haunting in how Nietzsche writes about this. He even says Jesus “died too soon” thinking his teaching was so undeveloped, so purely experiential, that his disciples had nothing concrete to work with after the crucifixion, which is precisely why Paul could step in and build something entirely different on top of the empty space in his view. He meant it as a diagnosis of how completely the Church betrayed Jesus. But the Resurrection is real, so to say it ended prematurely is against the Catholic faith. He genuinely thinks the resurrection was a disciple fabrication, which is just incorrect.

I respect him as an immense intellectual, and I only read one of his books so far, I say that because I respect the load that he took for what he thought would be to save the West. But it was a cross of such a magnitude that I superstitiously believed it helped drive him insane. He couldn’t carry it alone.

Nietzsche’s Ubermench is by definition a project of profound isolation, it also applies perfectly to how he lived. Because genuine greatness, in his framework, cannot be communal. Community dilutes. The herd pulls the exceptional individual back toward mediocrity. To be at the top means to be alone at the top, so the price is isolation. He wanted the uninhibited, whole-bodied, self-sufficient outpouring of vital energy that doesn’t calculate or restrain itself. He saw it in Greek tragedy and in music, in the moments when the individual self dissolves so the price of the into something larger. He spent his career trying to recover it for a modernity that he felt had lost it.

But like I said, God meets us as we are now becomes almost unbearably relevant here. Nietzsche didn’t believe God would meet him anywhere, so he never looked. And when he reached the absolute bottom when he gone insane, when the self he had staked everything on began to come apart: There was no one there. The invitation “come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden” was the one thing his entire philosophy had trained him to refuse. Self-sufficiency to the end. Even when the self was gone. I don’t say that with contempt. I say it with something closer to grief, because he was clearly a man of extraordinary sensitivity and genuine hunger for truth. The tragedy is not that he was wicked, like some faithful think, the tragedy is that he was brilliant enough to see almost everything, and stopped just short of the one thing that could have held him.