Power in Weakness

The radical idea that changed the Western world and enraged the Nazis

The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald with its central portrayal of Christ’s crucifixion, photographed by Wikipedia user Gzen92 at the Musée Unterlinden.

Note: This article is preceded by two others - “The Annihilation of the Nazis” and “Nietzsche, Nazis, and Nihilism.” It is recommended that, for maximum clarity, you read those before proceeding to this one.

On April 5, 1887, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton was sitting in the French resort town of Cannes. He was a member of an international family with a hereditary estate in England but Roman Catholic beliefs that prevented them from participating in certain aspects of British society. Barred from the University of Cambridge, Acton instead attended the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he gained a profound interest not only in historical research, but also in the principles of political liberty.

Acton went on to visit many of Europe’s leading cultural centers and carried on a correspondence with prominent intellectuals of the day. It was in this capacity that he sat down on April 5, 1887 to write a letter to Mandell Creighton, archbishop of Canterbury. Creighton objected to the tendency of modern historians to engage in revisionist readings of great figures from previous centuries. We must not judge historical figures by exacting moral standards, Creighton argued. We can still revere great men who accomplished great things, even if they committed abuses on the way to doing so.

Acton objected to this notion in no uncertain terms. “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases,” Acton wrote. He then penned what was to become one of the most famous quotes in modern Western literature: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”¹

This pessimistic understanding of power could not be more utterly opposed to that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had deemed the will to power the highest of human pursuits. During World War II, Nazi Germany was influenced by Nietzsche’s glorification of power, while the Western Allies generally displayed an aversion to tyranny in line with Acton’s warning. But why did Nietzsche come to laud power while Acton instinctively distrusted it?

Because Acton was a Christian.

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Think back to the pre-Christian societies so revered by the Nazis. The Roman Empire in which Christianity was born had no scruples when it came to the pursuit of power. Perhaps 1/3 of all people living in the empire were slaves. Households were ruled over by the all-powerful paterfamilias. Sexual relationships were conceived in terms of one dominant partner and one passive partner, which is to say one that conquers and one that is conquered. Such checks as were placed upon the emperor’s power were there more to protect the interests of the Senatorial class than because Romans thought power an inherently corrupting thing. Infants who seemed disabled were left exposed to die.

The Roman Empire was run on slavery, and to keep such a large population of slaves in line, harsh measures were sometimes required. Therefore, the Romans reserved their cruelest form of execution for slaves who rebelled against authority: a death so painful, so humiliating that no one would dare stand up to power. As the historian Tom Holland describes in his book Dominion,

“No death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion. To be hung naked, ‘long in agony, swelling with ugly weals on shoulders and chest’, helpless to beat away the clamorous birds: such a fate, Roman intellectuals agreed, was the worst imaginable. This in turn was what rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves.”²

For a free-born Roman, to become a slave or, worse yet, to suffer the horrific death of a slave was the worst fate imaginable. They dreamed of going in the opposite direction: rising so high in esteem that they would become divine. The Romans counted many former mortals among their pantheon of deities. Deification was the polar opposite of enslavement.

“Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.”³

It is therefore no surprise that, when an obscure sect of religious radicals began declaring their devotion for a man who had, in the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius,”⁴ many in the Roman world were disgusted. To be beaten, condemned, stripped naked, and impaled for all to see was the very opposite of power. Who could find anything good in the wretched death of a slave?

Romans lived to conquer. They pursued power to the ends of the earth. All their relationships were defined by it. But the Christians were declaring that earthly power was deceptive and empty - a temptation to evil. Their teacher had declared that his kingdom was not of the world. (John 18:36) He offered his devoted followers not earthly success but a cross: they, like him, would suffer in this life. The Roman system of values could not have been more subverted.

“For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) He declared that the human body would be “sown in weakness” and “raised in power.” (1 Corinthians 15:43) During a period of suffering, Christ had told the apostle, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness,” causing Paul to conclude, “Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Christianity was therefore not opposed to power per se, but to the unjust assumption of power, or perhaps to a power that is false. For the power of God was the source of a Christian’s strength.

The Sermon of the Beatitudes by James Tissot, c. 1890

Thus, Christ could make the radical statement, “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5) No pagan culture had ever had much time for gentleness. Like Nietzsche, they tended to see pity as a fatal flaw. But Christianity turned the world’s values upside down, declaring that one must be made weak to be truly strong and must die to truly live.

“Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” the Apostle Paul asked. (Romans 6:16) But slavery to Christ was true freedom. The pursuit of earthly power led to death, but submitting to the power of Christ led to eternal life.

It is thus unsurprising that when the Western Roman Empire fell, many blamed it on the Christians, who in their rejection of traditional Roman values had (it was thought) brought about the weakening of the empire itself.

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That most in the West now see the Christian system of values as more appealing than that of the ancient Romans was by no means guaranteed from any human perspective. But Christianity did become dominant in Europe, and while many centuries brought an endless parade of political leaders who sought to exercise power (often absolutely), there was always a sense that those leaders had to answer to God for their deeds: that they were expected to uphold justice, provide for the disadvantaged, and generally have good moral character. One could always find preachers declaring the dangers of power and glories of the cross.

Even when orthodox Christian belief declined in the West beginning roughly in the 18th century, the assumption that human beings all had inherent dignity and worth was maintained, as was the general distrust of those hungry for power. Before Friedrich Nietzsche arrived in the 19th century, few had been willing to question the deep-held moral assumptions of Western society, even as they rejected the concept of supernatural miracles. But Nietzsche declared that the emperor had no clothes: that an abandonment of Christianity must also mean an abandonment of Christian morality and a return to the pursuit of power. As Holland writes,

“Condemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course, No one, though - not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx - had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for civilisation.”⁵

Christianity’s chief sin, for Nietzsche, was its demonization of power. Lord Acton’s assumption that power corrupts was utterly at odds with Nietzsche’s thinking. It was not the pursuit of power but its abandonment that led one into nihilism - a nothingness of the soul.

“It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”⁶

In the American Declaration of Independence, one of the chief documents of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson had declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”⁷ Jefferson was a Deist. He believed in the existence of God, but only just. He famously removed any passages from his Bible that contained supernatural miracles. Yet, Jefferson still saw the values that underpinned his society not as miraculous revelations, but self-evident truths accessible to anyone with a reasoning mind. History was to prove him wrong.

“That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never self-evident truths. The Nazis, certainly, knew as much - which is why, in today’s demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they - because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses - rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.”⁸

When the Nazis launched their Blitzkrieg in 1939, aiming to neutralize French and British opposition and acquire Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, they were taking some of Nietzsche’s ideas to their logical end. In his speech immediately following his country’s declaration of war upon Germany, King George VI of the United Kingdom portrayed the war as a struggle between two competing value systems.

“We have been forced into a conflict and we are called with our allies to meet a challenge of a principle which if it were to prevail would be fateful to any civilized order in the world. It is a principle which permits the state of the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges, which sanction the use of force against the security and independence of other states. Such a principle, stripped of all disguise the primitive doctrine of might and right, and if this principle were established throughout the world, the freedom of our own Empire and of the whole British Commonwealth of nations would be in danger.”⁹

Might and right, or perhaps it would be better to say, might makes right. The selfish pursuit of power. These were the Nazi values that the United Kingdom intended to oppose. Certainly, the British had selfishly pursued power on many previous occasions around the world, but there were always voices within the UK objecting to these abuses, whereas Nazi Germany had declared the annihilation of enemies not merely a necessary evil, but an inherently good thing. The Nazis were able to do this because they had moved beyond the old values and embraced Nietzsche’s vision of a post-Christian society.

And yet, many Nazi leaders and supporters claimed to be Christians. The party found significant support among Protestants and even some Catholics. The better part of German Christianity capitulated to Nazi demands and endorsed their values. How could this be if the two systems of values were so utterly opposed?

That is the question I will take up in my next article.

1. Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward. Letter to Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html

2. Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 2.

3. Holland, 6.

4. Tacitus. Annals, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (London: Hadas, 1942), 15.44.

5. Holland, 464.

6. Holland, 464.

7. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

8. Holland, 540.

9. Radio address by King George VI. 3 September 1939. Original transcript can be viewed here: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Kings-Speech/