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.Yet he was by no means the first critic of Christian-ity to question the mental health of its founder.As the theologian Al-bert Schweitzer long ago demonstrated in his doctoral dissertation, Diepsychiatrische Beurtheilung Jesu (The Psychiatric Evaluation of Jesus), DavidFriedrich Strauss and the historical school of biblical criticism had alreadyexpressed the suspicion that the mind of Jesus might somehow havepathological traits.long before psychiatry occupied itself with the per-son of the Nazarene.9 In 1878 the French doctor Jules Soury describedChrist as aliené et hallucine , as hysterical and exalted, as nervous andmentally ill.10 By the early twentieth century case-studies of Christ s psy-chopathology were entirely commonplace, indeed almost fashionable, asan increasing number of medical writers sifted Scripture with a com-bination of exegetical casuistry and monomaniacal zeal for the telltalesigns that underpinned their retrospective diagnoses of dementia andparanoia.Emil Rasmussen s Jesus.Eine vergleichende psychopathologischeStudie (1905), Charles Binet-Sanglé s La folie de Jésus (1908), and WilliamHirsch s Religion and Civilisation: The Conclusions of a Psychiatrist (1912),to name but a few, are entirely typical of this glut of pathographies orclinical histories of the Messiah.But it is George de Loosten s Jesus Chris-tus vom Standpunkt des Psychiaters (Jesus Christ from the Standpoint of thePsychiatrist) which perhaps bears the most resemblance to Nietzsche saccount.De Loosten suggests that Christ was probably of mixed race[Mischling] , that he was accordingly tainted from birth by heredity anda congenital degenerate.An exaggerated self-consciousness combinedwith high intelligence and an only slightly developed sense of familyand sex [Familien- und Geschlechtssinn], de Loosten continues, eventu-ally evolved into a fixed delusional system, the peculiarities of which wereinfluenced by the intensive religious tendencies of his time and by hisone-sided preoccupation with the prophecies of the Old Testament.11It would seem, then, that Nietzsche s pathologisation of religious ex-perience has much in common with the strident anti-clericalism of theincreasingly powerful, usurpatory medical establishment.Like Maudsley,Galton and the other positivists, he apparently subscribes to precisely thatkind of medical materialism which William James would later reject as a9Albert Schweitzer, Die psychiatrische Beurtheilung Jesu (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913), p.2.10Soury, quoted in Johannes Ninck, Jesus als Charakter.Eine Untersuchung (Leipzig:Hinrichs sche Buchhandlung, 1906), p.230.11George de Loosten, Jesus Christus vom Standpunkt des Psychiaters (Bamberg:Handelsdruckerei, 1905), p.90. Christianity and degeneration 149means of explaining the varieties and significance of religious experience,and whichfinishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharginglesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.It sniffs out Saint Theresaas an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.George Fox sdiscontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treatsas a symptom of a disordered colon.Carlyle s organ-tones of misery it accountsfor by a gastro-duodenal catarrh.12Yet for all the similarities between Nietzsche s appraisal of the phenomenaof religious belief and that of the medical materialists he even assertsthat Thomas Carlyle s pessimism can be attributed to lunch revisited(TI IX, 1) there is at least one significant difference.Despite theirattempts to explain away experiences of revelation and inspiration as psy-chological aberrations and their enmity towards what they perceived asarchaic superstition, many, if not all, of these positivists embraced the ideaof a secularised Christianity, a moral core divested of its supernatural trap-pings.Nietzsche, in contrast, had nothing but scorn for those fat-headsamongst his contemporaries who remained naïvely convinced that thevalues and norms of Christian civilisation might still be retained despitethe divine source of their authority having been abolished.If God andthe believer s communion with Him is nothing but a phantasm, a delu-sion, then His commandments, too, are no less fictional
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