For someone who ostensibly disavows religion and perhaps theism in general, he devotes a significant amount of time to alluding to specific sects, and religious locales. In this section alone, there are three particular allusions that stand out from the others. First, there is the distinction that he draws in faith between the north and south. Second, there are criticisms that he provides against both modern philosophy and modern philosophers. Finally, there is the special admiration that he gives to the ancient religions and to the practice of Buddhism.
In part three, Nietzsche draws a distinction between the two types of spirits. Nietzsche describes the faith required by the early Christians as a “skeptical, southern, free-spirited world, a world that has century-long struggles between schools of the philosophy behind and inside it”. Nietzsche then clarifies that “this faith is not the simple, rude, peon’s faith with which a Luther or a Cromwell or some other northern barbarian of the spirit clung to its God”. It seems like the first faith that Nietzsche is more logical or cynical in nature and is less about a belief in things unseen. On the other hand, the other faith like Luther’s seems to be devoid of any logical merit or value. There are a couple of strange things about the divides that he draws between these two types of faith.  The first is that Nietzsche does not explicitly mention any practitioner of this first kind of faith, and merely alludes to the fact that this faith shares similarities with that of Pascal’s. On the other hand, Nietzsche explicitly critiques men of faith like Luther and Cromwell in his analysis of the northern faith. Secondly, Nietzsche seems to explore the merits of each faith based off of their location, but what do the modifiers north and south seem to indicate? Is it a divide across borders with the southern faith referring to that of countries like Italy or Greece and the northern faith referring to England or Germany?  Or is it an intentional inversion of audience expectations about the values of the north and the south. The former question seems to better align with the figures that he mentions since Luther was German and Cromwell was English. Additionally, Pascal was French, something that could be considered southern when compared to Germany and England. However, Nietzsche reinforces this distinction when he reaffirms his belief about the peasant type. When describing Protestantism, he states that “The passion for God; there is the peasant type, naïve and presumptuous—like Luther. The whole of Protestantism is devoid of any southern delicatezza. His use of the Italian word for delicacy, another country that would be considered southern, seems to reaffirm that this distinction is at least partially geographical. However, it is still wholly possible that the names and locations mentioned were an intentional reversal of audience expectations on Nietzsche’s part. This reversal of expectations plays into the critiques of modern philosophy that he makes in this part.
Nietzsche’s tirades in part 3 of Beyond Good and Evil seem more like an attack on the leading figures of modern philosophy than any sort of exploration of a religious character. Nietzsche begins section 54 by asking “what is really going on with the whole of modern philosophy? Since Descartes… all the philosophers have been out to assassinate the old concept of the soul under the guise of critiquing the concepts of subject and predicate. In other words, they have been out to assassinate the fundamental presupposition of the Christian doctrine”. He also specifies that “As a sort of epistemological skepticism, modern philosophy is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian (although, to state the point for more subtle ears, by no means anti-religious)”. However, this part is titled the ‘religious character’, so perhaps there is something about the religious character that leads to the modern’s being so heavily criticized in this section. After all, Nietzsche later says in this chapter that “ childish, boundlessly foolish naivete—lies in the scholar’s belief in his own superiority, in the good conscience he has of his tolerance, in the clueless, simple certainty with which he instinctively treats the religious man an inferior lesser type… he who is himself a presumptuous little dwarf and rabble-man, a brisk and busy brain- and handiworker of ‘ideas’, of modern ideas”. It seems that Nietzsche has highlighted hypocrisy on the part of the modern philosophers since this passage seems to assert that modern philosophers possess all the dogma and silliness of any other religious character.  This view is consistent with the two modern characters that Nietzsche mentions in the section. Descartes, whose skepticism has almost become a caricature of itself, and Kant whose dogmatic approach to questions of the mind has acted as a watershed moment in the history of philosophy. The allusion to Kant here seems especially important since Nietzsche consistently criticizes Kant all throughout his works. He has attacked “Kantian precepts calling him, among other things, a "moral fanatic,' "Scarecrow," "philosopher for civil servants,' "moralist, "cunning Christian,' and "deformed conceptual cripple". This perspective allows us to reconcile Nietzsche’s criticism of the moderns with these sections themes about religious character, which leads us to the next incongruity in the text. Why does there seem to be some undertone of admiration towards certain religious sects?
