Max Scheler's Ressentiment (Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen), published in 1913, is one of the most important philosophical defenses of Christian ethics written in the twentieth century - and its significance lies precisely in the fact that it engages Nietzsche's assault on Christianity on Nietzsche's own phenomenological ground. Nietzsche had argued in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) that Christian love-ethics were the psychological product of ressentiment: the reactive hatred of the weak for the strong, disguised as virtue. Scheler's response is phenomenologically rigorous: he accepts Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment as a genuine psychological phenomenon, agrees that it has often infected religious ethics, but argues that authentic Christian love (agape) is the precise opposite of ressentiment - not a reaction against superior value, but an overflow of genuine value-perception and love. The debate between Scheler and Nietzsche remains one of the most philosophically searching exchanges about the moral psychology of Christianity.
The Thinker and His Work
Max Scheler (1874-1928) was one of the founders of philosophical phenomenology alongside Husserl, whose method he adapted to questions of value, emotion, and ethics. He converted to Catholicism in 1906 and for about a decade was the Catholic Church's most distinguished philosophical representative in the German academy, developing a phenomenology of religious experience and value that drew on the New Testament and on the Catholic mystical tradition. His masterwork Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913-16) argued for an objective hierarchy of values apprehended through emotional intuition (Wertfuhlen) rather than rational calculation - a framework within which the Christian values of love and humility occupied the summit.
Scheler later drifted from Catholic orthodoxy, developing a more pantheistic philosophy in his last years, but the Ressentiment essay remains his most distinctive philosophical contribution and his most sustained engagement with the biblical ethical tradition.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Matthew 5:44 - 'But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' - is the paradigmatic text for Scheler's phenomenology of agape. Nietzsche read this commandment as the ultimate expression of slave morality: the weak person who cannot retaliate against enemies redefines powerlessness as virtue. Scheler's response is that genuine love of enemies is not rationalized hatred but the overflow of a love that recognizes value in persons independent of their treatment of oneself. The person who can genuinely love enemies is not weak but exhibits a form of moral strength that transcends the reactive economy of retaliation entirely.
John 13:35 - 'By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another' - represents the community character of Christian agape: it is not a private emotional disposition but a form of social existence that creates a distinctive community visible to outsiders. This communal love is, for Scheler, the primary evidence that Christian ethics is not ressentiment but genuine moral achievement.
Romans 5:5 - 'God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us' - provides the theological ground of agape's non-reactive character. Christian love is not generated by the human will from below (which would make it subject to all the distortions of psychological self-defense) but poured into the human person from above by divine grace. Its source is outside the economy of human evaluation and resentment.
Core Argument
Scheler begins by accepting Nietzsche's analysis of ressentiment as phenomenologically accurate: ressentiment is a genuine psychological state in which the person who cannot achieve what they desire (because they lack the power or capacity) represses the awareness of this inability and transforms the desired value into a disvalue. The person who cannot achieve noble achievement revalues the noble as 'arrogant'; the person who cannot achieve beautiful things revalues beauty as 'vanity.' Ressentiment is the psychology of downward revaluation motivated by impotence.
Scheler then argues that Christian love ethics are not generated by this mechanism. The Christian who loves the poor and humble is not doing so because they cannot appreciate strength and beauty - they are doing so because they have a different hierarchy of values, one grounded in the perception of the eternal worth of each person as such, independent of their worldly qualities. The mother who loves her sick child is not revaluing sickness as health; she is perceiving the child's value as a person that transcends the child's condition. Similarly, Christian love of the poor is not the devaluation of wealth but the perception of the human person's value that wealth can obscure.
Intellectual Context
Scheler was working within the framework of Husserl's phenomenology, which aimed to describe the structures of consciousness as they present themselves prior to theoretical interpretation. Scheler's contribution was to extend phenomenological method to the realm of values and emotions - to argue that love, hatred, shame, and resentment are not merely psychological states but forms of intentional awareness that disclose genuinely objective values (or their absence). This meant that the question of whether Christian love is genuine or disguised resentment was not merely a psychological question but a phenomenological one: what does genuine love intend, and does Christian agape have that intentional structure?
Reception and Critique
Edith Stein, Scheler's student and later a Carmelite martyr, developed his phenomenology of empathy and intersubjectivity in ways that extended his engagement with the Christian ethical tradition. The philosopher Max Horkheimer, writing from the Frankfurt School perspective, found Scheler's Catholic phenomenology a significant alternative to the dominant neo-Kantian tradition, though ultimately insufficient as a basis for social critique.
From within Catholic philosophy, Scheler's analysis was received as a major philosophical vindication of Christian ethics against Nietzsche's cultural dominance. From the analytic tradition, Philippa Foot's later virtue ethics and Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy both developed accounts of moral perception and value-awareness that, while not explicitly Schelerian, share his conviction that moral knowledge is a form of genuine perception rather than mere preference.
Legacy
Scheler's Ressentiment established the terms for philosophical engagement with Nietzsche's challenge to Christian ethics that remain influential. His argument that authentic Christian love is not a rationalization of weakness but a genuine form of moral perception and overflow of value has been developed by Thomas Merton, by the Christian personalists (Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel), and by contemporary virtue ethicists who argue that agape is a genuine human excellence rather than a psychological defense mechanism.
Key Passages
'Christian love is not a symptom of weakness and cowardice; it is a surplus of vital energy, a triumphant feeling of life and strength, which prompts giving oneself and sharing oneself.' (Ressentiment, trans. Holdheim)
Contemporary Relevance
Scheler's analysis of ressentiment has acquired new relevance in the context of contemporary identity politics and the psychology of social movements. The question of whether movements for justice are animated by genuine care for the suffering or by reactive resentment against those who are not suffering - the question Nietzsche raised and Scheler attempted to answer - is a live and contested issue in contemporary political psychology and moral philosophy. René Girard's mimetic theory, which draws on Nietzsche and on the New Testament's scapegoating dynamic, is a further development of the phenomenological analysis of ressentiment and its relationship to Christian ethics that Scheler pioneered.