Master and Slave (notes)

 Nietzsche makes much of this. Oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited, victimizer and victim. He's annoyed that the oppressed, exploited, victimized person wins. He's annoyed at how powerlessness gains power over the powerful. Deleuze explains and develops Nietzsche's point in excruciating detail: active and reactive. On and on. The slave has to stop winning.

The slave wins by revaluing his oppressed condition, with the help of the beatitudes. Now the thing you did to me is a blessing but you are evil for having done it. You remain evil. I remain blessed. You are weakened by my blessing. You relinquish your power to me. All the world is weak, passive, effeminate. (Is Nietzsche's misogyny any surprise?) 

Christianity is the enemy, the exploited weakness of the boy human. Christianity is where this effeminate victim morality snuck in. 

Whenever of course one wishes to critique or praise or condemn Christianity one needs first to create it. Impossibly morphic, squeezing out between the fingers like clay, reforming from the dropped clump. Is it the institution that defines it? Some particular church? A set of doctrines? A set of practices? The Bible? It's never any of those. Which is easily provable. None of those. 

So what is it? What is its fundamental theological claim? It's not amenable to language in that way. 

But it has something to do with love--whatever that is. And is somehow the expression of that often overlooked third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the impulse behind that object of reading promoted by Christ and also called "spirit," that is to be accepted over the word, who is also Christ. Word to Spirit. 

Nietzsche grounds his vision of Christianity on a certain reading of the beatitudes. And that's what must be re-evaluated. He has no god. What do his re-evaluated values stand on? What is the ground of his masculine appeal? His Master morality.