Nietzsche did not have much good to say about Christianity. One of his main complaints about it was that Christianity promotes “slave morality,” a vindictive strategy of the weak and poor to triumph over the strong and rich. In his book On the Genealogy of Morals, he attacks altruism, selflessness, and neighborly love as expressions of this slave morality. He writes, “It is only bad conscience, only the will for self-abuse, that provides the necessary conditions for the existence of altruism as a value.”¹ In Ressentiment, Max Scheler claims that, although Nietzsche was right about altruism, he was wrong about Christianity as its source. Altruism is not the same as Christian love. The former is a child of ressentiment of the weak toward the strong, whereas the latter is born of the strength of the noble towards the needy. Scheler shows the difference between true love and altruism and Nietzsche’s failure to recognize the true source of altruism by comparing two types of love. On the one hand, there is the love of the lower for the higher, which is the view of love of ancient Greek philosophers: “Thus, in all human love relations, such as marriage or friendship, a distinction must be made between a ‘lover’ and a ‘beloved,’ and the latter is always nobler and more perfect. He is the model for the lover’s being, willing, and acting.”² It was how Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” moved everything else but stayed unmoved at the same time. It was love towards perfection that attracted everything imperfect. Scheler states that Christian love is the opposite: “Now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility.” According to Scheler, Nietzsche had the ancient Greek understanding of love in mind when criticizing the Christian understanding. Or, perhaps, Nietzsche was writing about the kind of love that he observed in the Christians of his time. Anyway, he did not write about the love of God revealed in Christ.

Martin Luther stated the difference between the two in his Heidelberg Theses. In Thesis 28, he wrote, “God’s love does not discover, but creates, that which it esteems. Man’s love is produced by what it esteems.”³ We love because we are attracted; God loves because he wants to attract. Man’s love is reactive; God’s love is creative. God does not love the poor and the ugly because of their poverty or ugliness but because he wants to make them blessed and beautiful. It is powerful and purposeful love.

Nevertheless, Scheler agreed with Nietzsche that altruism is a hollow, fake kind of love. He used the term “humanitarianism” to write about altruism. It looks like Christian love, and many Christians praise this kind of love, but it is not the kind of love we see in Christ. It turns towards other people, especially the weak, the poor, the ugly, not to help them overcome their weaknesses and shortcomings, but to escape its own shortcomings:

[It] is inspired by self-hatred, by hatred of one’s own weakness and misery…Afraid of seeing itself and its inferiority, it is driven to give itself to the other—not because of his worth, but merely for the sake of his “otherness.” Modern philosophical jargon has found a revealing term for this phenomenon, one of the many modern substitutes for love: “altruism.”⁴

Basically, altruism is a flight from self. It is the fake love of people who feel empty, miserable, and inferior. To escape this mental hollowness, they involve themselves in other people’s lives. When they help people (though often they just pity others and take it as an act of humanitarian love) they end up distracted from their own empty lives. It is never really about the needs of others but about themselves. In Scheler’s words, “Turning toward others is but the secondary consequence of this urge to flee from oneself.” Thus, an altruist needs poor and ugly people to be able to feel pity for them. Humanitarian love does not seek the end of others’ suffering because “love” would become pointless without suffering. The source of altruism is ressentiment. Those infected with ressentiment envy and hate the strong and beautiful as reflections of what they could be but are not. And altruists are infected with ressentiment, but instead of attacking the world’s “heroes” they proclaim love for the weak and poor, thus trying to elevate the weak and so implicitly (and eventually explicitly) pass judgment on the strong and wealthy. Altruists, instead of going after the strong and beautiful, whom they envy and hate at the same time, go after the weak and poor.

An excellent case study here is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As Paul Johnson in The Intellectuals reminded us, Rousseau proclaimed himself as a friend of all mankind. However, in his private life, he was very quarrelsome and obnoxious. He loved an abstract man but not an actual man. His love for all mankind only masked his dislike of real people. He even forced his mistress to send their five children to an orphanage, claiming that they would find better care there. It was an obvious lie, as two-thirds of all children in an orphanage died during their first year there. Thus, sending his own children to the orphanage was a death sentence for most of them.

Rousseau, the altruist, obviously lacked the creative kind of love, love that demands self-sacrifice. He escaped his personal obligations. In Scheler’s terms, his self-hate led him to the invention of some kind of abstract duty of the state to take care of his children. This was a flight from true love. All the above did not prevent him from writing a book on education titled Emile, or On Education, in which he had much to say about pity, compassion, and love of neighbor. Here are a few of Rousseau’s thoughts on this:⁵

To consider childhood in itself, is there in the world a weaker being, a more miserable one, one more at the mercy of everything surrounding him, who has a greater need of pity, care, and protection, than a child?

Thus, is born pity, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature.

The pity one has for another’s misfortune is measured not by the quantity of that misfortune but by the sentiment which one attributes to those who suffer it.

According to Paul Johnson, Rousseau’s altruism and political theory were an escape from his own shortcomings and guilt:⁶

It is right to dwell on his desertion of his children not only because it is the most striking single example of his inhumanity but because it is organically part of the process which produced his theory of politics and the role of the state. Rousseau regarded himself as an abandoned child. To a great extent, he never really grew up but remained a dependent child all his life, turning to Madame de Warens as a mother, to Thérèse as a nanny. There are many passages in his Confessions and still more in his letters which stress the child element.

Johnson continues, claiming that Rousseau’s Social Contract was an expression of his guilt and failures and a projection of the ultimate responsibility for all citizens onto the State, which acts as a Universal Parent. Thus, altruism led to state control but also served as a convenient excuse for the lack of real, active love for concrete neighbors of flesh and blood.

Rousseau’s life demonstrates the hollow love of altruism: The love of the weak and ugly is a mask worn by people who, in reality, hate their own emptiness or want to falsely prove their moral superiority. Rousseau was an altruist, not because he was a Christian, but because he abandoned Christianity. He loved humanity but refused to care for his own children.

We cannot love humanity. We can only love our neighbors.

Bogumil Jarmulak received his PhD from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.

NOTES

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Michael A. Scarpitti (Penguin Classics, 2013), 74. ↩︎
2. Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Cosper and William W. Holdheim (Marquette University Press, 1994), 64. ↩︎
3. Martin Luther, The Essential Luther, ed. and trans. Tryntje Helfferich (Hackett, 2018), 46. ↩︎
4. Scheler, Ressentiment, 73. ↩︎
5. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), 88. ↩︎
6. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (HarperCollins, 2009), 31. ↩︎