Nietzsche’s Lost Portrait of Christ
Jesus, Nietzsche, Recovery - all three saying Yes to everything
Getting sober, for me, required two leaps of faith.
The second leap was the choice of an unknown, baffling, possibly-terrifying future without alcohol. The first leap, deeper than the second, was a primordial decision that it was good to be living at all.
My life as an active alcoholic was painful and chaotic and isolated in a way that only people who have lived through it can understand. I avoided anyone and everyone and spent my days scraping just enough money together to drink. It would have felt very reasonable to look at how I had ended up and then decide that this life just wasn’t worth living, that I was too far gone, that there was nothing beyond this suffering to look forward to. But on August 13, 2016 I chose to live and get sober anyway, saying Yes to life in spite of any moral or experiential calculus that might have justified some feeling that life was in itself bad.
I’ve since found this “saying Yes to everything” feeling in Nietzsche. This surprised me. When readers meet Nietzsche they usually meet Nietzsche the bomb‑thrower, the man who calls Christianity a “slave morality” and proclaims God dead and seeks to demolish all illusions of conventional morality. Yet in The Antichrist §§27‑32 he pauses the demolition of Christianity long enough to present a startling cameo: Jesus Christ as supreme Yes‑sayer.
“The Gospel”, Nietzsche writes, “died on the cross”. The living Jesus practiced a profound and unconditional embrace of life. Jesus affirmed absolutely everything as forgiven and loved - everything from prostitution to tax collection to intimate betrayal to institutional injustice. Crucially for Nietzsche, this Yes is pre-moral - it does not argue or threaten, it simply radiates. Judgement and punishment are foreign currencies to this wandering Nazarene who pays for nothing because he owes nothing. The confrontation of Jesus, such as it is, is simply “what part of God’s Love Is Infinite do you not understand?”
What survived Christ’s life is the religion that Nietzsche attacks, a religion of debt and death and doctrine and dogma. Nietzsche’s charge is not just that Christianity failed to live up to its founder - it is that the Apostle Paul and centuries of church bureaucracy replaced a contagious Yes with a calculus of guilt. Through Paul and the Church, the message of “you couldn’t become unworthy of Love if you tried” was replaced by “follow the rules, wretched sinners! Obey our authority, or burn in hell for eternity!” The result of this transformation is what Nietzsche later calls a “metaphysics of the hangman” - a worldview built around weighing souls, instead of setting them free to dance.
For us in recovery, the portrait of Jesus that Nietzsche paints is electrifying. It offers a spiritual archetype that is neither the resentful score-keeper nor the distant judge but the walking permission slip to exist, to change, to desire and to play.
Step 2 of AA (“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”) is often read as intellectual, cognitive assent: I can understand that there might be help for me. What I get from Nietzsche is what I saw in my very decision to get sober - that this commitment must live not just in my head, but in my heart. Belief, if it remains abstract, can become a bargain. “I believe that life is worth living because x, y, and z, and if I lose any of those things then I’ll resentfully retract my affirmation”. Or, worse: “I have been good and followed the rules for ten whole days, where the hell is my reward?”
Yes‑saying is riskier than any conditional, intellectual consideration. It commits in advance, and without reservation.
I like summing it up with this reframing of Step 2: “Came to practice unconditional affirmation that life, exactly-as‑is, is worth living - and found in doing so that such an affirmation became the foundation of my sanity”.
That affirmation is how, at least for today, I keep YES from turning into IOU.