Nietzsche, Christianity, and Sexuality

While his immediate target , in the central phase of his career, is Schopenhauer, towards the end, Christianity becomes the primary object of Nietzsche's attacks. For example, the first official part of his projected 'Revaluation of All Values' project, The Anti-Christ, presents a relatively, for Nietzsche, focused and systematic exposition of the theme expressed in its title. However, a few comments near the end of the contemporaneous Twilight of the Idols indicates how Christianity may have been the ultimate target all along. As Nietzsche there reflects on Birth of Tragedy, he, for perhaps the first time, acknowledges how the Dionysian theme, originally advanced to explain Greek tragedy, is a fundamentally sexual one, and, as such, the germ of his subsequent main doctrines, e. g. Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence. Implicit in his affirmation of Sexuality is its stark contrast with Christianity--with not so much the events in Genesis, which, contrary to the popular interpretation, makes no explicit reference to sexual relations between Adam and Eve, but with Augustine, the Plato-inspired father of Christian theology, who influentially construes the reproductive act as an ontological curse on the human race. All the main elements of Nietzsche's eventual explicit anti-Christianity, e. g. sexual pleasure as the physical feeling of eternally recurring creative power, derive from his initial implicit subversion of that predominating nay-saying theological doctrine. Which is probably why he refers in hindsight to Birth of Tragedy as his "first revaluation of all values".