The third in a sporadic series.  Previously, the intro and the second.

Pulled from The Twilight of the Idols:

The Christian and the Anarchist.—When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the decaying strata of society, raises his voice in splendid indignation for “right,” “justice,” “equal rights,” he is only groaning under the burden of his ignorance, which cannot understand why he actually suffers,—what his poverty consists of—the poverty of life. An instinct of causality is active in him: someone must be responsible for his being so ill at ease. His “splendid indignation” alone relieves him somewhat, it is a pleasure for all poor devils to grumble—it gives them a little intoxicating sensation of power. The very act of complaining, the mere fact that one bewails one’s lot, may lend such a charm to life that on that account alone, one is ready to endure it. There is a small dose of revenge in every lamentation. One casts one’s afflictions, and, under certain circumstances, even one’s baseness, in the teeth of those who are different, as if their condition were an injustice, an iniquitous privilege. “Since I am a blackguard you ought to be one too.” It is upon such reasoning that revolutions are based.—To bewail one’s lot is always despicable: it is always the outcome of weakness. Whether one ascribes one’s afflictions to others or to one’s self, it is all the same. The socialist does the former, the Christian, for instance, does the latter. That which is common to both attitudes, or rather that which is equally ignoble in them both, is the fact that somebody must be to blame if one suffers—in short that the sufferer drugs himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish. The objects towards which this lust of vengeance, like a lust of pleasure, are directed, are purely accidental causes. In all directions the sufferer finds reasons for cooling his petty passion for revenge. If he is a Christian, I repeat, he finds these reasons in himself. The Christian and the Anarchist—both are decadents. But even when the Christian condemns, slanders, and sullies the world, he is actuated by precisely the same instinct as that which leads the socialistic workman to curse, calumniate and cast dirt at society. The last “Judgment” itself is still the sweetest solace to revenge—revolution, as the socialistic workman expects it, only thought of as a little more remote…. The notion of a “Beyond,” as well—why a Beyond, if it be not a means of splashing mud over a “Here,” over this world? …

First, when he says Anarchist, we can freely substitute any one of those of committed to political revolution, or that is, the intellectual spawn of Rousseau, and of course the devotees of Marx (and all of his derivatives); most of all that glorious caste of morons we know as Social Justice Warriors.  Suffering is just another way to say oppression, and someone else is always to blame for oppressing me (or whatever person, or even better, class of people I am not actually a part of, but that I champion).  The Oppressor is to these people what the Great Satan is to an Islamic fundamentalist (or, just good old Satan for a Baptist).

Consider the contrast with Job, where he knows (with no small amount of pride) that he is righteous before the Lord, and the great offense taken is by Job’s friends who all seek to counsel him on his error – that he cannot be blameless and suffer as he does.  Here this is the projection of the revolutionary, the inverse of the Christian, demanding Job admit his unrighteousness to therefore justify God and His affliction of Job.  Job blames no one for his suffering, not even the God who raised the prospect by engaging in a little heavenly wagering and granting Satan the latitude to inflict on Job whatever he would short of death.  Job doesn’t even blame the devil!  I have to guess that Nietzsche couldn’t bring himself to find something of value in the Bible, even in something as subversive as the Book of Job.  And Job was ultimately vindicated by God, which of course wouldn’t be the lesson Nietzsche would want us to learn – which was not simply to endure but to accept, even embrace the suffering, in order to pass through and beyond it.

Now why does he find fault in the Christian?  Because the Christian, unlike Job, blames himself for his afflictions – after all, what else is sin?  And any decent Christian knows he is riddled with sin, through and through, and that there is no way to escape that.  Sure your sins can be forgiven, but you never transcend the sinfulness (at least not in this life).

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:

You want, if possible—and there is not a more foolish “if possible”—TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we?—it really seems that WE would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it—is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an END; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible—and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering—know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man CREATURE and CREATOR are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day—do ye understand this contrast? And that YOUR sympathy for the “creature in man” applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined—to that which must necessarily SUFFER, and IS MEANT to suffer?

Suffering is an essential filter of humanity, if of course it is understood properly; that is not an easy thing.  This is a value not at all consonant with the dominant value structures of Christianity or the revolutionary movement substitutes for Christianity.  Don’t be fooled that Nietzsche was adopting a stoic attitude here – he sees the necessity of suffering and the need to embrace it, as opposed to being indifferent to it.  The stoic wouldn’t say “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.

Nietzsche knew about suffering; it marked his life, so he wasn’t idly speculating about the suffering of others and what purpose it might serve.  This is as down to the marrow and personal as it is possible to be.  He speaks about the power of convalescence personally in the preface to The Joyful Wisdom [my preference to the alternate title translation of The Gay Science].  The power of the restoration of health, the unexpectedness, the rush of new strength to fill him with fresh perspective – that arises out of overcoming that suffering from injury or illness.

In contrast, he spoke to sickness – most typically in a moral or psychological sense but some of the time as physical – with disdain.  Whereas his youthful suffering he viewed as formative (as in the above quote), he would write more disparagingly toward the chronic or the invalid.  It isn’t difficult to read him as preferring death to his long decline as an invalid.  This he would characterize not as suffering for benefit or growth, but as decay or degeneracy.  In neither case though does he seek to elicit sympathy for the sufferer.  In the former it is inappropriate and in the latter ineffectual.  The weakness in this point is that his biology/physiology wasn’t very well grounded, or perhaps better to say it hasn’t aged well as the field of medical science has improved.  However, when he writes of sickness in the moral/psychological dimension we lose no relevance to the present.