The world of Nietzsche's
dream, with its circularity and downward pull,
feels less like a human world than like a dark
and inhuman one, a curved space surrounding a
black hole in being. Many of Nietzsche's later
writings seem to struggle against its gravitational
pull. Often he appears to be literally writing
against death, as in The Antichrist.
From a Nietzschian perspective, Christianity
is a religion of death, which, by placing life's
goal in the afterlife, brings about an impoverishment
of life itself. An analogy might be seen here
to Ludwig's death- Nietzsche's personal life,
as his autobiography makes clear, became dramatically
impoverished after his father's journey into the
Beyond. Nietzsche argues that the duality between
good and evil should be questioned, transcended,
and replaced with a healthier and more instrumentally
sound value system. He lays out this project as
follows:
…whither must we direct our hopes? Towards
new philosophers, …towards spirits strong
and original enough to make a start on antithetical
evaluations and to revalue and reverse 'eternal
values,' towards heralds and forerunners, towards
men of the future… It is the image of such
leaders which hovers before our eyes- may I say
that aloud, you free spirits? …a revaluation
of values under whose novel pressure and hammer
a conscience would be steeled, a heart transformed
to brass, so that it might endure the weight of
such a responsibility… these are our proper
cares and concerns, do you know that, you free
spirits? (BGE, 126-7)
Despite Nietzsche's invective against Christian
morality, his "revaluation of all values"
is implicitly portrayed here as a moral ideal,
which "free spirits" must struggle to
achieve. The free spirits seem like members of
an elite moral order, poised to seize control
of the world from a decadent religious leadership.
Nietzsche's vision, therefore, does not eliminate
the morality of good and evil, but rather reinstates
it on a new level. The good and evil dichotomy
itself becomes evil, in contrast to the revaluation
of all values, the good, and thus, Nietzsche's
attempt to transcend the good/evil binary turns
back upon itself and destroys itself, landing
him right back in the moral situation he is trying
to escape from.
Neitzche says that man is an end: but what type
of man must be bred, must be willed, as being
the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the
most secure guarantee of the future. This more
valuable type has appeared often enough in the
past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception,
never as deliberately willed. Very often it has
been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has
been almost the terror of terrors ;--and out of
that terror the contrary type has been willed,
cultivated and attained: the domestic animal,
the herd animal, the sick brute-man.
He who makes the truth comes to the light. The
`truth' of which Augustine spoke was not merely
a quality of a verbal formula, but veracity itself,
a quality of a living human person.
Augustine `made the truth' - in this sense, became
himself truthful - when he found a pattern of
words to say the true thing well. But both the
`truth' that Augustine made and the `light' to
which it led was for him scriptural guaranteed
epithets of Christ, the pre-existent second person
of the trinity.
Augustine believes that human beings are opaque
to themselves no less than to others. We are not
who we think we are. One of the things Augustine
had to confess was that he was and had been himself
sharply different from who he thought he was.
He tells us repeatedly that his own view of his
own past is only valid if another authority, his
God, intervenes to guarantee the truth of what
he says. His God is timelessly eternal, without
time's distention and hence anxiety, but also
without the keen anticipations and rich satisfactions,
of humankind; his God is perfection of language
incarnate, without the ambages, and thus without
the cunning texture and irony, of human discourse;
his God is pure spirit, without the limitations,
and thus without the opportunities, of fleshliness.
That God is in every way utterly inhuman; and
yet (here we approach the greatest mystery of
this book) humankind is created in the image and
likeness of that God - a resemblance that Augustine
prizes highly, and in which he finds the way to
knowledge both of self and of God. That God is
in every way utterly inhuman; and yet (here we
approach the greatest mystery of this book) humankind
is created in the image and likeness of that God
- a resemblance that Augustine prizes highly,
and in which he finds the way to knowledge both
of self and of God. The defects of both Protestant
and Catholic modern views of Augustine and of
this text encourages us to look for alternatives.
That which has proved most useful in the present
work is easily stated. For Augustine, and for
late antique men and women generally, religion
is cult - or, to use the word we use when we approve
of a particular cult, religion is liturgy. Anti-clerical
Parisians and Protestants may agree that priest-craft
is dangerous stuff, but Augustine would not concur
with them.
Augustine has been fitted out with a new intellectual
position. We see him now not merely as a provincial
bishop, theologizing down the party line, but
as a man constantly in dialogue with the wider
world of the non-Christian thought of his time,
accepting its excellences, quarreling selectively
with its errors, sharing a common ground of debate
and discussion.
All of us who read Augustine fail him in many
ways. Our characteristic reading is hopelessly
incoherent. Denying him our full cooperation,
(1) we choose to ignore some of what he says that
we deny but find non-threatening; (2) we grow
heatedly indignant at some of what he says that
we deny and find threatening; (3) we ignore rafts
of things he says that we find naive, or uninteresting,
or conventional (thereby displaying that in our
taste which is itself naïve, uninteresting,
and conventional); (4) we patronize what we find
interesting but flawed and primitive (e.g., on
time and memory); (5) we admire superficially
the odd purple patch; (6) we assimilate whatever
pleases us to the minimalist religion of our own
time, finding in him ironies he never intended;
(7) we extract and highlight whatever he says
that we find useful for a predetermined thesis
(which may be historical, psychological, philosophical,
or doctrinal, e.g., just war, immaculate conception,
abortion) - while not noticing that we ignore
many other ideas that differ only in failing to
command our enthusiasm. So when, for example,
Augustine relies on the proposition that all truth
is a function of Truth, and that Truth is identical
with the second person of the trinity, and that
Jesus the carpenter's son is identical with that
same person - we offer at most a notional assent,
but are compelled to interpret the idea to ourselves,
rather than grasp it directly. Just when we are
best at explaining Augustine, we are then perhaps
furthest from his thought.
Some of the ideas they propose have merit, but
none has been presented in a way to compel, or
even very strongly to encourage, assent. One prevailing
weakness of many of these efforts has been the
assumption that; there lies somewhere unnoticed
about the Confessions a neglected key to unlock
all mysteries. But for a text as multi layered
and subtle as the Confessions, any attempt to
find one, or even a few, keys is pointless. Augustine
says himself that he meant to stir our souls,
not test our ingenuity as lock-picks. We may also
mistrust readers who insist, or who insist on
denying, that the work is perfect and beyond reproach.
That form of idolatry, like the complementary
iconoclasm with which it long disputed, has had
its day.
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