Twenty years ago when I was first reading Nietzsche, fully on fire and burning to pure ash, I became convinced that Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian of some weird variety. The belief lacked evidentiary foundation. Not only could it not be proved, but proving it seemed somehow wrong.
The belief was rooted in hermeneutic experience: having sacrificed my old truth at the altar of interrogation, a new kind of truth could emerge. That truth made the clearest and most vital sense of the Gospels. Please notice — it was not only a new truth, a new “belief system”, a new set of opinions on what was and wasn’t true, good or existent. It was a new kind of truth and entirely different way to approach truth. This new kind of truth was not a set of facts to look at and to accept or reject. Rather, this was a truth to be looked through, which revealed a new world of givens — and that new given world was infinitely preferable to the old one.
Nietzsche’s comments on Christianity, on Christians, Jews, Jesus, Saul/Paul and his use of polyvalently charged appellations — like “the founder of Christianity” — make his attitude toward the Judeo-Christian tradition highly… multistable. Depending on the tone of our reading and the care we take in considering everything Nietzsche might have meant in each of his statements, we could take his utterances as a whole to be radically atheistic or passionately (but covertly) evangelical. Or something else entirely.
When we look through a dark glass what we see is a matter of focus.
We can focus into the dark glass and see what images the glass reflects, which includes the image of our own selves as objects, and all the objects that lie behind and around ourselves. Our human-all-too-human eyes are magnetically drawn toward our self-image. “There’s me!”
Or we can focus through the glass to see what images the glass transmits — the objects on the other side of the glass.
If we never reflect on focus and just take the image we see at face value, we naturally assume we have seen what there is to see in the glass. We look into it and never look through it, or we look through it and never look into it, and, consequently never understand the full reality of the dark glass, which is, whether we look into it or through it, always involved — unseen — in the act of seeing.