The Hollowing of Goodness: Nietzsche and the Need for Moral Vitality

A Theological Reflection

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.” —Matthew 23:27 (NKJV)

In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, titled “‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’” Friedrich Nietzsche does more than critique morality, he performs an outright autopsy on it. He argues that instead of being the sentiment of eternal truth, moral values are the byproduct of cultural utility and historical power. Goodness, he says, was not born from divine command but from pattern recognition. Humanity took from what was once useful, then repeated it, and then mistook that inherited pattern as truth. He traces this trajectory with four elements: utility, forgetting, habit, and finally, error.

1. Utility: Actions are praised for being socially useful.

2. Forgetting: The origin of their praise is lost.

3. Habit: These actions become rituals, practiced unthinkingly.

4. Error: We now believe these actions are good in themselves.

At first glance, Nietzsche’s view feels abrasive, perhaps even heretical. But after sitting with it longer, it began to sound hauntingly familiar. His “error” is not so far from what Christ condemned: “whitewashed tombs”, lives that shine with piety on the surface but conceal spiritual decay underneath. Both Nietzsche and Christ expose humanity’s hollowed-out sense of virtue.

Nietzsche’s moral conundrum unfolds further in his contrast between master morality and slave morality. Master morality, he argues, originates from the noble and powerful, who define “good” in terms of strength, vitality, and excellence. Slave morality, by contrast, emerges from the weak who cannot embody those ideals and instead cling to meekness, humility, and suffering. In this reactive system, what was once “power” becomes “evil,” and what was once “weakness” becomes “virtue.” Nietzsche calls this ressentiment, a form of moral revenge.

At first, I wrestled with this idea because it seemed to reduce love, humility, and compassion to psychological compensation rather than genuine expressions of inner transformation. It felt as though what I understood to be virtues were being reduced to disguised forms of weakness, as if the Christian life were merely a reaction to powerlessness rather than a revelation of grace. But Nietzsche’s target isn’t love, it’s pretense. He isn’t raging against Christ crucified; he’s raging against a system that has turned Christ’s message into a dead ethic, an institution propped up by habit rather than transformation. His fight isn’t with humility, it’s with hypocrisy.

What Nietzsche names error, Christ names hypocrisy. The philosopher grieves the loss of moral vitality and the Messiah mourns the death of righteousness in the heart.

And this, I think, is where Orthodoxy offers something vital. The tradition doesn’t ask for performance; it calls for participation. Morality is not adherence to a code but a reflection of the heart's transfiguration. In Orthodox theology, goodness is not utility or law, it is communion. To be good is to be united with God, not simply compliant with a social script. The saints aren’t moral heroes in Nietzsche’s sense; they are icons of inner fire. They do not simply do good, they become good, by grace.

Nietzsche feared that without inner vitality, morality would become a mask. Christianity agrees, except it calls the remedy not the will to power, but the will to kenosis. By emptying ourselves of pride, self-will, and the illusion of control, we make room for communion, for transfiguration, for goodness, for God Himself to dwell within us.

So perhaps Nietzsche and Christ both cry out against the same emptiness.

Nietzsche’s brilliance lies in what he saw, and his tragedy in what he couldn’t. He uncovered the hollowness of morality divorced from life, denounced virtue performed without inward transformation, and demanded that goodness be real rather than inherited. In doing so, he echoed something he could never fully accept: the very heart of Christ’s own critique.

Where Christ spoke of whitewashed tombs, Nietzsche called it error. Where Christ called for the transformation of the heart, Nietzsche called for the revaluation of all values. The language was different; the longing was the same.

But Nietzsche could not recognize that his rebellion was, at its core, a yearning for truth, one that Christianity, when practiced authentically and in accordance with Christ’s teachings, already proclaimed. The tragedy is not, only, that he opposed Christ but that he missed Him, even as he followed the same path of protest against hollow religion.

Perhaps his despair was not a rejection of the Gospel but a sign that he had been betrayed by its impersonation…