Nietzsche read and admired Dostoyevsky, describing him as "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn".
That fact shocked me when I learned it, and immediately raised a question in my mind: How could Nietzsche, upon reading Dostoyevsky, not immediately repent, burn all his writings, and curl up into a weeping ball?
As I’ve written about elsewhere, Crime and Punishment was the book that made me a Christian precisely because it represents the Nietzschean worldview, only to reveal it as nothing.
The novel’s protagonist, an intelligent-yet-improvised former law student named Rodion Raskolnikov, takes it upon himself to murder a good-for-nothing elderly pawnbroker and use her fortune (which she has amassed by ripping off the community) in order to free himself and his neighbors from poverty.
He figures himself unconstrained by the laws of morality, which he believes to be rightly followed by the masses in order to ensure social harmony, but readily breakable by great men like himself, for the greater good; after all, if Napoleon were constrained by conventional morality, he would not have been able to change the world, now would he? Raskolnikov’s endorsement of “great man” morality resembles Nietzsche’s.
However, when Raskolnikov commits the murder, his conscience immediately reduces him into a wreck, and he experiences extreme mental anguish and moral confusion. The lesson of Crime and Punishment is that trying to be an Ubermensch will turn you into a couchbound, paranoid, suicidal mess, crushed under the weight of rules larger than any man; whose only real respite is to be found in complete self-surrender before God, a lesson which we witness Raskolnikov internalize, leaving us as shaken as the protagonist himself.
Presumably, Nietzsche would tell Raskolnikov to throw off the tyranny of his conscience; to discharge his strength fully, satiating all of his desires so that he can live a life of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and mastery, unburdened by the slavish impulse to morality.
Crime and Punishment, by demonstrating the power of God’s mercy, shows Nietzsche’s recommendation to be ridiculous. Better yet, he does not do so by route of “debunking”; by pushing up his glasses, saying “erm, on the contrary”, and laying down the kinds of scholastic dogmatics that Nietzsche brushes off as unnatural and absurd; Dostoyevsky opts to show rather than tell. The psychological portraits he paints are basically inarguable.
Dostoyevsky shows that Nietzschean action is totally incompatible with our humanity. So how could Nietzsche, who was clearly a genius, cope with – let alone admire – Dostoyevsky, whose work turns his own into ribbons?
The answer is that Nietzsche probably didn’t read Crime and Punishment, or the Brothers Karamazov, or any work that deals with true redemption. However, we do know that he read Notes from Underground, a book whose psychologically distressed protagonist tries and fails to alleviate his anguish through rationalization, but gets nowhere. In this case, without the true Christian solution in sight, and with a paranoid overthinking in place to use as a scapegoat for moral sense, Neiztsche’s suggestion to embrace the darkness looks enticing. This gap of understanding explains why Nietzsche praised Dostoyevsky; it also explains why Nietzsche is a midwit.
By “midwit”, I do not mean that Nietzsche has a middling intellect – like I said, he is a genius. What I mean is that he, in missing the Christian way of life, fails to explain so much of happy human psychology.
You see this midwittery in the limited scope of Nietzsche’s psychological categories. He splits people (and things) into the spiritual categories of “warrior” (he who throws off the constraints of morality); “priest” (he, through a sclerotic desire to explain away higher life, attempts to smother out the will to power); and the “slave” (the weak simpleton who justifies his inferiority by exalting meekness and virtue).
Your average salt-of-the-earth Based anon (a true midwit in the kindest sense of the word), whose right wing sensibilities draw him towards images hierarchies, finds these categories convenient, and so adopts them. However, this transvaluation of values fails to explain so much.
Pictured above is Pope Saint John Paul II greeting a little boy with Downs Syndrome. Tell me: which Nietzschean category does he fall under? Is JP II a “warrior”, high and mighty, flinging a scrap of magnanimity to an inferior? Is he a “priest”, attempting to perversely aggrandize mere life to the detriment of true goodness, which is strength? Is he a “slave”, whose kindness is a front for weakness?
Obviously, he is none of those things; each of those scenarios exist in real life, and the Pope, in that photograph, occupies none of them. JP II occupies a category which transcends the transvaluation; a category whose occupation gives Raskolnikov new life, and lays in wait for the Underground Man (and all men for that matter): John Paul II is a Saint. The picture above shows a man of God humbling himself before a superior in innocence. Nietzsche cannot explain that, and so is a midwit.
You see obvious coping like this all the time from the Based Right. “No actually Abraham was really a tough warrior too!! He single handedly beat three kings! Moses killed Pharaoh's guard!! Christ will crush his enemies!!” As if those descriptions don’t miss the entire point, erasing clear examples of human flourishing because they don’t fit into the Nietzschean mold. As if Abraham didn’t beat the three kings for Lot (Genesis 14); as if Moses didn’t intercede humbly to spare God’s people (Exodus 32); as if Christ didn’t wash his disciples feet and bear a crown of thorns. “Warrior”, “Priest” and “Slave” merely scratch the surface of the full reality encapsulated by the “Apostle”, the “Martyr”, the “Confessor”, the “Doctor” and the “Healer”.
When confronted with the Saintly witness, the Nietzschean solution just comes out looking like straw. Even to say that Dostoevsky is a "psychologist" who "taught me something" is so lame. Dostoyevsky’s work, and the Christian solution it represents in such piercing detail, is the Way.
Luca Adamo is the Editor-in-Chief of Catholic Politics. You can follow him on X @lucacadamo
“By midwit, I do not mean that Nietzsche was a midwit, I actually mean something completely different and unrelated”
I stopped reading after this
My priest conveyed a story about this: in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has a dream where he a child and he sees a horse being beaten senselessly in the street. He’d moved to pity by the cruelty of it, shattering his illusion of a superman beyond pity.
On the day he went mad, Nietzsche saw a horse being beaten by its driver, and he ran out and put his arms around it’s neck sobbing. Within days he was in a mental hospital