From a customer review on Amazon: “This monograph constitutes a response to the criticisms of Christianity outlined in Nietzsche’s Geneology of orals, in which Nietzsche argues that Christianity is a “slave revolt” of the weak—an attempt by the impotent to bring down the vitality of the capable nobility. Scheler’s response is multi-faceted but centers on Nietzsche’s failure to understand the nature of Christian love. Christianity is not a destructive enterprise trying to bring everyone down to the same low level of its impotent faithful, who must put their trust in the next world because they can get nowhere in this one. Rather, it attempts constructively to bring everyone up to a new level of human flourishing. Christianity’s preoccupation with the poor, weak, and marginalized stems from a recognition, through divine love, of the miracle of God’s creation and infinite possibilities present even in them. The following quotation well represents Scheler’s position (and Nietzsche’s perspectival error): “Those people [modern nihilists] saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas [St.] Francis sees the holiness of life even in a bug.” (p. 70). This monograph is certainly not the last word on Nietzsche’s famous anti-Christian polemic, and it contains many avenues of argumentation that are not described here; but it is fair to say that it articulates a capable response to the core of his arguments. And like the Texas Cottonwood tree, when the core of the trunk rots, the result is obvious during the next storm.”

It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical enquiry.