Civil Religion

To develop a case that Heidegger marks a continuation of some of the concerns and themes expressed in Nietzschean civil religion, let me restate what I associate with the problem of civil religion in relation to Nietzsche. One rendering of the civil-religion idea is nicely encapsulated in Nietzsche's statement in The Antichrist that “[a] people that still believes in itself retains its own god.” This corresponds to what Rousseau at the end of the Social Contract labels “the national religions,” which he seems to invoke in order to elaborate his own conception of a civil religion but which (as we saw in Part I) he ultimately repudiates. Nietzsche's central purpose, of course, is to show why Christianity cannot possibly be a “national religion” in this sense, and here again his analysis comes into close proximity with Rousseau's. For Nietzsche, the great enormity perpetrated by Christianity is not that it itself fails to offer a national religion of this kind, but that it sets in motion a tendency in Western civilization that renders it impossible for there to be national religions at all. Thus it precipitates a tremendous spiritual crisis in the historical destiny of the West. This is expressed very powerfully in a crucial aphorism in The Will to Power: “Religions are destroyed by belief in morality. The Christian moral God is not tenable: hence ‘atheism’ – as if there could be no other kinds of god.” Far from celebrating the end of Western theism, Nietzsche blames Christianity for having driven us into the dead end of atheism! According to Nietzsche, it is the greatest argument against Christianity that it has undermined our capacity as a civilization to “retain our own gods.”

There are two signal texts in the oeuvre of Martin Heidegger that indicate to us that Heidegger moves in the orbit of the same concerns. One is his famous utterance in the posthumous Der Spiegel interview that “only a god can save us.” The second is the motto that prefaces Heidegger's two-volume commentary on Nietzsche, and that Heidegger draws from Nietzsche's The Antichrist: “Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god!” These two key texts indicate very clearly that Heidegger fully shares Nietzsche's conviction that the awakening of the West from its present spiritual coma will be marked by its finding the confidence, the sense of its own destiny – Nietzsche would say, the will – to summon up new (post-Christian) gods.