Grottanelli, Nietzsche and Myth

Nietzsche and MythAuthor(s): Cristiano GrottanelliSource: History of Religions, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Aug., 1997), pp. 3-20Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176561 .

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Cristiano Grottanelli NIETZSCHE AND MYTH

I. NIETZSCHE'S ATTITUDES TO MYTH

Though the critical bibliography on Nietzsche is huge, only a very small part of it addresses the subject of Nietzsche and myth. Nor does the quality of these writings compare favorably with their quantity. The most often repeated statement is that Nietzsche treated myth (Mythus, as he spelled the term) in his book Die Geburt der Tragodie and that in his later writings he cautiously avoided the term. To some, Karl Jaspers, for instance, this truism, which is, in fact, not true, has meant-very simply-that there is no justification for mixing Nietzsche's name with an object that the philosopher stopped dealing with after his first book, published in 1872. Others have taken the matter more seriously, but no sat- isfactory solution has been suggested.

Yet the problem of Nietzsche's changing attitudes to myth is real and important. Such change was a consequence of the transformation of Nietz- sche's thought, and this evolution was divided by Nietzsche himself in a famous passage of the Nachlass into three main periods, described as a period of veneration (for the Greeks, for Wagner, for Schopenhauer), lasting until 1876; a second period during which, as Nietzsche put it, the venerating heart was broken (from 1876 to 1882); and finally a third period, during which, Nietzsche wrote, above him there was kein Gott,

This article is a revised version of the Brauer Lecture that I gave in the Chicago Di- vinity School in May 1996. I am very grateful to my Chicago friends, Wendy Doniger, Bruce Lincoln, Frank Reynolds, Clark Garret, Martin Riesebrodt, and John Collins, and to the students, who listened and discussed the lecture. I learned a lot from them all.

? 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/98/3701-0001$02.00



Nietzsche and Myth

kein Mensch, and the main ideas of his paradoxical philosophy took shape (from 1882 to Nietzsche's mental collapse in January 1889).1 A discussion of Nietzsche's attitudes to myth should be based on such a peri- odization, and in my treatment of the problem I shall concentrate on three main texts or groups of texts each of which represents one of the periods I have indicated: first, Die Geburt der Tragodie; second, the most meaningful document of his break with Schopenhauer and Wagner, the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878); and finally, his books of the year 1888 that marked the end of his production as well as of his existence as a rational thinker.

II. 1872: MYTH, ARYAN AND SEMITIC

As has often been noted, Die Geburt der Tragodie is a complex text, and not always totally consistent.2 In regard to myth, two seeming incongru- ities may be noted. First of all, in Section XXI Nietzsche stated most clearly that one element of ancient Greek tragedy-music-is Diony- siac and should be interpreted as the drunken, orgiastic unity with the whole that forgoes individuation, while the other element-myth-identified with the tragic plot created by the poet, pertains to the opposite, Apollonian principle. But in Sections IX and X myth is presented not as the tragic plot but as the horrid Dionysiac depth reshaped by the

Apollonian, creative intervention of the tragic poet. The myths of Oedi-

pus and of Prometheus are chosen as examples of such abysmal horror, expressing wisdom and civilization-respectively-as crimes commit- ted against nature and implying great suffering but also justifying human crime and human suffering.

Prometheus is the Dionysiac emblem of this view of myth as the un-

veiling of a terrible truth, and that figure's importance for the author of Die Geburt der Tragodie is clearly demonstrated by the vignette on the title page of the book's first edition, which depicted the Titan just freed from the chains that tied him to the rock in the Caucasus. The eagle that tormented him by devouring his liver is also shown. It is precisely in connection with Prometheus that the second seeming incongruity in Nietzsche's treatment of myth in his first book appears, because at the end of Section IX the idea of myth as the profound notion "that human-

ity's highest goal must be bought with crime and suffering" is suddenly

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1988), 11:159-60 (henceforward KSA).

2 See, first of all, Nietzsche's own self-criticism in the preface to the second edition of Die Geburt der Tragodie (1886), discussed below (KSA, 1:11-22). See, more recently, the

preface by Francis Golffing to his translation of The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York and London: Doubleday, 1956), pp. vii-x.

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History of Religions

presented, not as the essence of myth in general, as in the rest of the book, but as the specific nature of Aryan myth as opposed to Semitic myth. "The legend of Prometheus," Nietzsche writes, "is indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that the two myths are related as brother and sister."

Why "brother and sister"? The answer is given a few lines later, where Nietzsche states:

The notion that humanity's highest good must be bought with crime and suffering, expressed by the Prometheus myth, is an austere notion which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall-a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue; this notion provides us with the ethical sub- stratum of pessimistic tragedy, which comes to be seen as a justification of human ills, that is to say of human guilt as well as the suffering purchased by that guilt. The tragedy at the heart of things, which the thoughtful Aryan is not dis- posed to quibble away, the contrariety at the center of the universe, is seen by him as an interpretation of several worlds, as for instance a divine and a human, each individually in the right but each, as it encroaches upon the other, having to suffer for its individuality. The individual, in the course of his heroic striving towards universality, deindividuation, comes up against that primordial contra- diction and lears both to sin and to suffer. The Aryan nations assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female gender; and it is quite consistent with these notions that the original act of hubris should be attributed to man, original sin to a woman.3

Hubert Cancik's recent book Nietzsches Antike has thrown further light on this well-known passage and on Nietzsche's positions in regard to the Aryan myth, to racism, and to anti-Semitism.4 Cancik is right in stating that Nietzsche's binary opposition between the male, active Aryans and the female, passive Semites can be found in zeitgenossischern rassischer Literatur, as shown by Leon Poliakov in his Aryan Myth volume.5 In the present context, it seems to me more important to focus on the two myths contrasted by Nietzsche as the expression of a thoughtful Aryan dispo- sition that involves the justification of the tragedy at the heart of things,

3 KSA, 1:68-71. For quotations from Die Geburt der Tragodie, I have availed myself of Golffing's translation. All other translations from the works of Nietzsche are mine.

4 Hubert Cancik, Nietzches Antike: Vorlesung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), pp. 62-63. 5 L6on Poliakov, Le mythe aryen (Brussels: Complexe, 1987), pp. 85-122, 245-371.

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Nietzsche and Myth

on the one hand, and of the idea of an original sin born of feminine frailty on the other. From the point of view of Nietzsche's understanding of myth, this means not only that myths are racially determined but also that the kind of myth that expresses the tragic, exalted notion of active sin may be opposed to another kind of myth-a myth that is not tragic, a myth that insists on human weakness as the cause of original sin.

III. MYTH, ANCIENT AND MODERN

In the rest of Die Geburt der Tragodie this opposition between an Aryan and a Semitic myth is apparently forgotten, as I have already stated, and myth per se is presented as the expression of true notions and as the emblem of a healthy humankind. But the book is, above all, an account of the destruction of myth at the end of the Classical Age of Greek culture. I will spare you a detailed study of Nietzsche's reconstruction of the decline and fall of Greek tragedy as entailing the death of myth. Suffice it to say that in such a reconstruction Greek tragedy and myth were killed by the "definite secularization" brought about by the triumph of critical thought. According to the author of Die Geburt der Tragodie, two ratio- nalists were responsible for the death of tragedy and myth: an external enemy, Socrates, and an enemy from within, the poet Euripides, who, in Nietzsche's view, was influenced by Socratic rationalism. The process they put into motion led to the decadence of Greek culture, to the shal- low frivolity of Alexandrian intellectualism, and finally to the critical and historical outlook of modern time. In Section XXIII, the proof of the decadence of European culture is provided by modern humanity's understanding of Greek tragedy. If one asks a modern spectator "with what emotion he responds to the miracle on the stage," Nietzsche argues,

Depending on which answer he makes, such a spectator will be able to tell whether he has any understanding at all of myth, which, being a concentrated image of the world, an emblem of appearance, cannot dispense with the miracle. The chances are that almost every one of us, upon close examination, will have to admit that he is able to approach the once-living reality of myth only by means of intellectual constructs. Yet every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural, healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and of Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. Nor does the common- wealth know any more potent unwritten law than that mythic foundation which guarantees its union with religion and its basis in mythic conceptions.6

This enthusiastic description of myth is immediately followed by a symmetrical description of modern humanity:

6 KSA, 1:145.

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Over against this, let us consider abstract man stripped of myth, abstract edu- cation, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government; the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchanneled by any native myth; a culture without any fixed and consecrated place of origin, condemned to exhaust all possibili- ties and feed miserably and parasitically on every culture under the sun. Here we have our present age, the result of a Socratism bent on the extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb.7

Just as the enthusiastic description of myth which is followed by the terrible description of "man today, stripped myth," this second description is followed by a hopeful note, that is, by the announcement of the future rebirth of myth afforded by the German spirit:

If the German spirit were, like that of "civilized" France, indissolubly bound up with its culture, we might well despair of it. That oneness of her people with her culture which for so long constituted France's great virtue and was the cause of her supremacy might make us shudder as we look at her today and indeed congratulate ourselves that our own dubious culture has so far nothing in common with the noble core of our national character. All our hopes center on the fact that underneath the hectic movements of our civilization there dwells a marvelous ancient power, which arouses itself mightily only at certain grand moments and then sinks back to dream again of the future. Out of this subsoil grew the German Reformation, in whose choral music the future strains of Ger- man music sounded for the first time. Luther's chorales, so inward, courageous, spiritual, and tender, are like the first Dionysiac cry from the thicket at the approach of spring. They are answered antiphonally by the sacred and exuber- ant procession of Dionysiac enthusiasts to whom we are indebted for German music, to whom we shall one day be indebted for the rebirth of German myth.8

As for the importance of this rebirth of myth, it is stated most clearly at the end of Section XX of Die Geburt der Tragiidie that such a rebirth

(represented as the return of Dionysus) is a redemption. I quote: "In- deed, my friends, believe with me in this Dionysiac life and in the rebirth of tragedy! Socratic man has run his course; crown your head with

ivy, seize the thyrsus, and do not be surprised if tiger and panther lie down and caress your feet! Dare to lead the life of tragic man, and you will be redeemed. It has fallen to your lot to lead the dionysiac procession out of India to Greece. Gird yourselves for a severe conflict, but have faith in the thaumaturgy of your god!"9

7 Ibid., 1:145-46. 8 Ibid., 1:146-47. 9 Ibid., 1:132.

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Nietzsche and Myth

IV. MYTH IN Die Geburt der Tragodie: SOURCES, AGENDA, REACTIONS

In order to discuss Nietzsche's ideas on myth in his first book, we should of course ask ourselves where they came from, what agenda they served, and how they were received. As for Nietzsche's sources, his indebtedness to German Romantic thought, and most specifically to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, is widely recognized, and Barbara von Reibnitz's recent Kommentar to the first twelve sections of Die Geburt der Tragodie provides much useful information.10 What is less generally recognized, but much more meaningful, is the fact that all the central ideas expressed in this book, except the Apollo/Dionysus dualism, are to be found in Richard Wagner's writings published between 1849 and 1867, namely in Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850), Oper und Drama (1851), and Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik (1867). I shall spare you a detailed analysis of the correspondences and only mention several of the essential ideas presented: Greek drama is essentially religious and mythical and is the most complete form of universal art; the growth of science and the decline of myth are the causes of the disruption and decadence of culture; European art must be re-created in modern times, and such a rebirth shall be complete only when "the point of departure and birth" represented by Greek Antiquity will have been reached again; and, finally, such a rebirth can be entrusted only to Ger- many because, as shown by the failure of the Italian Opera, the Latin people are the heirs of the Roman Empire, "whose levelling civilization was a bringer of death." One should connect all this to Wagner's view of Christianity as a religion of death, in contrast to the life-affirming quality of ancient Greek culture, but this view, that coexisted with a sincere veneration of Jesus as a moral reformer and religious redeemer, is not echoed in Die Geburt der Tragddie. What is most striking in Wagner's writings, however, and especially in Deutsche Kunst and Deutsche Politik, is the social and political meaning of such aesthetic theories: "Modem life, Wagner wrote, [shall be] reorganized by the rebirth of art," and especially by a new theater whose life-giving function shall be equal to that of ancient Greek drama. In this respect, Nietzsche was faithful to his inspirer.

What we know of the personal relationships between young Nietzsche and Wagner's entourage in Lucerne suggests that the Basel professor drew his inspiration from a process of deep, enthusiastic osmosis and not

10 Barbara von Reibnitz, Ein Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsche "Die Geburt der Tra- godie aus dem Geiste der Musik" (Kapitel 1-12) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992). On the connection between Nietzsche and the Romantic view of myth, see Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen iiber die Neue Mythologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), Gott in Exil: Vorlesungen iiber die Neue Mythologie, Teil XI. Mit Beitragen von Rolf Kauffeldt und Gerhard Plumpe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).

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just from reading the essays quoted. These essays are never mentioned in Nietzsche's first book, while references to Wagner's musical theater, and especially to Tristan und Isolde, are extremely frequent. In spite of this, it is clear that the inspiring force behind Die Geburt der Tragodie lay not simply in Wagner's music and theatrical performances but in the musician's aesthetic, social, and political views. It is thus not too bold to state that, as Cancik has recently written, the main agenda behind Nietz- sche's first book is the creation of a Programmschrift der Wagnerschen Kulturreformbewegung.1 1

This was by no means a hidden agenda, as the book was dedicated to Wagner (meinem erhabenen Vorkimpfer) and by the subsequent discussion, usefully documented by Karlfried Griinder, Der Streit ur Nietzsches "Geburt der Tragidie."12 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf's attack on Nietzsche's book that appeared already in 1872 bore the title Zukunftphi- lologie, a clear echo of Wagner's Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, and presented his opponent both as an incompetent philologist and as a Wagner fan, while defending the critical and historical approach condemned by Nietzsche as decadent. In the same year, two men rallied in Neitzsche's defense: first Wagner himself, in an Open Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche, then Erwin Rohde, the Greek philologist who shared Nietzsche's enthu- siasm for Wagner, in the essay Afterphilologie, constructed as an Open Letter to Richard Wagner. Though Nietzsche's ideas on myth had been summarized and extolled by Rohde in his review of the Geburt der Tragodie that appeared before the publication of Wilamowitz's attack, in the debate that followed Wilamowitz's essay the issue of myth was not central. In his Open Letter, Wagner expressed his distrust of philology, and this embarrassing attitude forced Rohde to concentrate on a detailed defense of Nietzsche's philological competence. While he prepared his Afterphilologie text, he wrote a letter to Nietzsche urging him to keep his chair in Basel, which Wilamowitz had polemically asked him to re- sign in order to dedicate himself totally to the Wagnerian art of the future.

1 Cancik, p. 52. This must of course be envisaged in connection with the strong political difference between Nietzsche and Wagner. On Nietzsche's politics, see Bruce Detwilder, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); R. Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society (Manchester: Manches- ter University Press, 1983), on Nietzscheanism in German politics after Nietzsche's collapse; Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), on the political heritage of Nietzschean- ism. On the political transformation of Nietzsche's message from his mental collapse to the Nazi era, see H. F Peters, Zarathustra's Sister (New York: Markus Wiener, 1977). On Wag- ner's politics, see Leon Stein, The Radical Thinking of Richard Wagner (New York: Philo- sophical Library, 1950); and Paul Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

12 Karlfried Griinder, Der Streit um Nietzsches " Geburt der Tragodie "

(Hildesheim, 1969).

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Nietzsche and Myth

V. MYTH AND RELIGION IN Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I

(1878)

In the year 1879, Friedrich Nietzsche left his chair in Basel and started his new life as a lonely wanderer. But this happened seven years after the publication of Die Geburt der Tragodie, and not as a consequence of the refusal of his Wagnerian manifesto by his colleagues in the field of classical philology, but as he was painfully breaking away from what was by then Wagner's establishment in Bayreuth, under the protection of

King Ludwig of Bavaria.13 By then, his attitude not only to Wagner and to Schopenhauer, but also to myth, had radically changed, as is shown most clearly in section 110 of Nietzsche's book Menschliches, Allzumen- schliches I, published in 1878, six years after Die Geburt der Tragodie and one year before he gave up the Basel chair:

Truth in Religion. In the Enlightenment period, the importance of religion was not sufficiently recognized, this is beyond doubt: but it is just as true that, in the

subsequent reaction to Enlightenment, justice was exceeded just as much in the

opposite direction, because religions were treated with love, or rather with rap- ture, e.g. by viewing them as a very profound, indeed as the profoundest, understanding of the world, and by holding that science had only to disrobe them of their dogmatic dress in order to possess truth in a mythical form. Religions possess-in the opinion of all those who opposed Enlightenment-in an alle-

gorical sense, prepared for the intelligence of the masses, a most ancient wisdom that may be defined as wisdom itself, so that all true science of modern times moves towards that wisdom rather than away from it. ... All this conception of religion and science is totally wrong, and no one would accept it today, were it not for the fact that Schopenhauer's eloquence has taken it under its

protection.... But Schopenhauer... was completely mistaken on the value of

religion for science. He was too docile a disciple of the science theorists of his own time, who revered Romanticism and had betrayed the spirit of Enlighten- ment; had he been born in our time, he would never have been able to speak of the sensus allegoricus of religion; he would have honored truth, as he was wont to do, by stating that no religion has ever contained a truth, directly or indi-

rectly, in a dogmatic or in an allegorical form. Every religion is born from fear and from need, and has insinuated itself into existence through the mistakes of reason.14

The rhetoric of this passage is interesting. I wish to draw your atten- tion to three points. First of all, to Nietzsche's attitude to Schopenhauer, who, while being described as totally mistaken, is at the same time presented as a hero of truthfulness, but also as the victim of his Romantic

13 Some peculiar but meaningful aspects of the relationship between Wagner and "his" Bavarian king are well presented in Martin van Amerongen's witty book, Wagner: A Case History (New York: George Braziller, 1994), pp. 77-83 and passim.

14 KSA (n. 1 above), 2:109-10.

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context-and so contradicted, extolled, and excused in one breath. Sec- ond, to Nietzsche's description of the ideas of religion and myth upheld by the enemies of Enlightenment: the idea of myth as allegory for the masses is typical of the anti-Enlightenment views of Masonic Schwdr- merei, not of the Romantic views of myth, that were based on a belief in the deep symbolic understanding of the people.15 Finally, his statement at the end of my quotation, deriving religion from fear, from need, and from error: nothing could be more faithful to the views held by the rationalism of eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

If we compare this passage to Nietzsche's positions in Die Geburt der Tragodie, we are struck by the total reversal both in the general outlook (decidedly Romantic in the first book, violently anti-Romantic here) and in the specific treatment of myth and religion. The general contents and stance of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I are perfectly in tone with the passage I have just quoted, and the book was dedicated to Voltaire on the hundredth anniversary of his death. About a month after the book was published, an anonymous French reader sent Nietzsche a bust of Voltaire, with the message: "Voltaire's soul presents its compliments to Friedrich Nietzsche."16

The reaction to this publication among Nietzsche's friends, most of whom were members of the Wagner entourage, was immediate and violent. Wagner was outraged and disgusted by the book that Nietzsche had sent to him, and in the article "Publikum und Popularitit," published in the new Wagnerian periodical, Bayreuther Blatter (August-September 1878), he attacked it without ever naming its author, using arguments, such as the uselessness of scholars, the redeeming function of the artistic genius, the profound wisdom of das Volk, that he had used in defending Die Geburt der Tragodie six years earlier.17

It is meaningful that Nietzsche's betrayal of the Wagner Kreis in Bayreuth was interpreted by many of its members as the consequence of the philosopher's friendship with the psychologist and moralist Paul Ree, a freethinker, a materialist, and a Jew. In a letter to her friend Marie von Schleinitz, Cosima Wagner wrote: "Many things have contributed to the birth of this sad book! Even Israel has played a role, in the person of a dr. Ree, a slimy, cold fellow, who is apparently very taken by Nietzsche and submitted to him, but in reality dominates him: on a smaller scale,

15 On the Romantic conception of myth, one should see Manfred Frank's books (n. 10 above) and the excellent essay by Giampiero Moretti, Heidelberg romantica: Romanticismo tedesco e nichilismo europeo (Bologna: Cosmopolis, 1995). On Masonic Schwdrmerei, Giu- seppe Giarrizzo, Massoneria e Illuminismo nell'Europa del Settecento (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), is extremely important. 16 KSA, 15:85.

17 Ibid., 15:92.

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Nietzsche and Myth

the relationship between Germany and Judaism."18 In his article Publi- kum und Popularitdt, Wagner wrote: "Historical criticism is immersed in Judaism, and the fact that on the morning of every Easter Sunday bells ring out for a crucified Jew is said to be astonishing, just as every Jew is astonished by this fact." This is an echo of Menschliches, Allzumenschli- ches I, Aphorism 113.19 Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche's one-time intimate friend and defender of Die Geburt der Tragodie, did not take up an anti-Semitic stance, but in his letter to Nietzsche of June 16, 1878, he expressed his surprise for the fact that Nietzsche had "so totally divested himself of his own soul to take up the soul of another." Instead of Nietzsche, he explained, the author of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches had become Ree.20

Some light is thrown on Nietzsche's transformation during the 1870s by a striking self-examination published ten years after Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I, at the end of his further, dramatic evolution and on the verge of his final psychical catastrophe in Turin that took place in January 1889. In that book, Ecce Homo (1888), a chapter is devoted to the meaning of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches in the spiritual and intellectual history of its author. Most strikingly-but not surprisingly- the book published in 1878 is presented there, not only as a fundamental step toward Nietzsche's later positions through his liberation both from his profession as a philologist and from his veneration for Schopenhauer and Wagner, but also as a reaction to Wagner's self-betrayal in the Bay- reuth era. This last aspect of Nietzsche's new positions in 1878 is effectively synthesized in Ecce Homo as the crossing of two books traveling by mail in opposite directions. "When at last Menschliches, Allzumen- schliches was published," Nietzsche wrote in 1888, "I sent two copies of it to Bayreuth. By a wonderfully meaningful coincidence, at the same time I received a fine copy of Wagner's Parsifal, with the author's hand- written dedication 'to his dear friend Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wag- ner, Church Councillor [Kirchenrath]'. This crossing of the two books seemed to me to have an ominous sound. Did it not sound as if two swords had been crossed? ... At any rate, this is what we both felt, for we both were silent. At this time, the first Bayreuther Blatter also appeared: and thus I understood what time was rife for. Incredible! Wagner had become pious."21

18 Ibid., 15:83-84. Nietzsche's correspondence for this important period is collected in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, herausgegeben von Gior- gio Colli und Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1986), vol. 2, sec. 6.

19 KSA, 2:116-17. Nietzsche wrote: "When we hear the old bells ringing on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves: 'How is it possible? This is for a Jew who was crucified two thousand years ago, and who said he was God's son.'"

20 Ibid., 15:86. 21 Ibid., 6:327.

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In reality, no such crossing of books ever took place, because Nietz- sche received the Parsifal text on January 3, 1878 (his written comment was: "More Liszt than Wagner. Spirit of the Counter-Reformation"), while Wagner received Menschliches, Allzumenschliches on May 25 of the same year.22 To this one should add that already in 1869 Wagner had read a preliminary version of the Parsifal aloud to Nietzsche and that in October 1877 Nietzsche still expressed his admiration for the Parsifal project in a letter to Wagner.23 In general, one should beware of trusting Nietzsche's reflection on the meaning and on the consequences of his 1878 book ten eventful years after its publication-and five years after Wagner's death. The chapter in Ecce Homo that discusses Menschliches, Allzumenschliches should be read in the light of Nietzsche's later writings, and connected especially with his two texts on Wagner published in 1888: Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner.

VI. NIETZSCHE AND WAGNER ON SIN AND SALVATION

These texts belong, of course, to what I have described as Nietzsche's third period, during which his most important ideas were given the shape we all know. In this late production, myth was not discussed as such by Nietzsche, but the implications of his early treatment of myth were de- veloped, and more specifically, his confrontation with Wagner's mythmaking never ceased. Both these aspects of Nietzsche's reflection in his third period are clearly exemplified by what I would define as a de- velopment of Nietzsche's discussion of the myths of Prometheus and Eve, during the years 1886-88. Here I shall deal first with the process whereby the discussion of these two myths in Nietzsche's first book was transformed into a basic conception of his mature philosophy. Then I shall show how this conception involved a further attack against Wagner's use of myth in connection with the announcement of future redemption.

In the Essay in Self-Criticism (Versuch eines Selbstkritik) that opens the second edition of Die Geburt der Tragodie (1886),24 Nietzsche criticized what he called "the wary and hostile silence [he had] observed [in

22 Anacleto Verrecchia, La catastrofe di Nietzsche a Torino (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 83-84. For Wagner's reaction to Nietzsche's book (and for the date of the book's arrival), see Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebiicher, vol. 2, 1878-1883 (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1977), various entries in the course of Cosima's diaries throughout the period in question; see summary by Verrecchia, p. 84. For Nietzsche's reception of, and reaction to, the Parsifal text in 1878, see KSA, 15:79-80.

23 See van Amerongen (n. 13 above), pp. 54-55. An interesting discussion of the personal relationship between Nietzsche and the Wagner couple is offered by Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimniss (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), chap. 6. But K6hler's tentative reconstruction of Nietzsche's personality and production in the light of his alleged homosexual inclinations is childish.

24 KSA (n. 1 above), 1:18-19.

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Nietzsche and Myth

the book] on the subject of Christianity" and tried to make up for it with two pages of anti-Christian statements. The silence on Christianity in Die Geburt der Tragodie is indeed remarkable because the central position in Nietzsche's later discussion of Christianity, briefly expressed in the Ver- such eines Selbstkritik, was present in the early writing of Richard Wag- ner, who was his main authority as he wrote his first book, and consisted of the opposition between Christianity and nature, or between Christian- ity and life.25 But Nietzsche was quite right, in his preface to the new edition, when he stated that he "had always sensed the furious, vindictive hatred of life implicit in (the Christian) system of ideas and values" and that this system was the origin of modern morality, a "will to deny life, a secret instinct of destruction, . . . a reductive agent-the beginning of the end-the Supreme Danger."26 These themes are indeed present in Die Geburt der Tragodie, even though Christianity is never mentioned.

Nietzsche's denial of Christian values was present, if implicit, in his comparison between the Aryan Prometheus myth and the Semitic myth of Eve's original sin discussed above. This will be clear if we keep in mind that the Semitic myth is also a Christian myth and if we remind ourselves that the central Promethean philosophy is envisaged by the author of Die Geburt der Tragodie as the justification of human hubris and of the consequent human suffering, as the very foundation of an existence that deserves to be called human. On the other hand, in the Semitic myth Nietzsche thought he recognized a vile quibbling away of the tragedy at the heart of human things by identifying sin with human frailty.

It is not excessive to say that such themes, presented as essentially mythical in Die Geburt der Tragodie, were to be central elements in Nietzsche's mature thought that took shape in his third period. Their most forceful outcome was the often repeated contrast between the tragic or Dionysiac philosophy based on the acceptance of human crime and suffering, and the Christian idea of sin and redemption.

25 On Wagner and Christianity, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1983), p. 139: "In fact, Wagner's attitude to Christianity, even in 1849 when he wrote Die Kunst und de Revolution, was a good deal more complicated than the young Nietzsche realised. In October 1845 he had produced Tannhauser; six years later he pro- tested against those who found in it 'a specifically Christian tendency towards impotent pietism'. But without putting it quite that way, one may wonder whether it is possible to avoid seeing Tannhduser, and still more Lohengrin, if not as Christian works, at least as works containing certain Christian elements. Many people have maintained that the Chris- tian tendency that finally emerged, beyond all possibility of doubt, in Parsifal, produced in 1882, the year of Wagner's death, was due to Cosima's influence.... Yet as early as 1862 Wagner had written to Hans von Billow that of course his last work would be Par- sifal." On the same subject, see also van Amerongen, pp. 84-90.

26 KSA, 1:18-19.

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The title of Aphorism 124 in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I (1878) is Absence of Sin in Humankind, and the idea that there is no such thing as human sin is repeated in Antichrist (1888), Section 38: "The priest knows, as everybody knows, that there is no more 'God,' no 'sin,' no 'redeemer."'27 As for the contrast between the tragic and the Christian outlook, the two seem strangely similar in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I (1878), where it is stated that both religion and art (and especially tragic art) are mere narcotics, while science alone fights effectively against human suffering.28 But in later writings Nietzsche's ephemeral rationalism of the late 1870s gave way to a more radical questioning of all values, and the contrast between the Christian and the tragic outlook regained the importance implied by the contrast between Prometheus and Eve. In Ecce Homo (1888) we find a shortened version of what was discussed in the Nachlass of the same year: "Dionysus against the Crucified" (Diony- sos gegen den "Gekreuzigten"). In the Nachlass we read of two types (die zwei Typen), Dionysus (the god Zagreus, hewn asunder by the Titans and later called back to life) and the crucified Jesus, presented as follows:

Here is the distinction. There is no difference as to martyrdom; but the same suffering has a different meaning. [In the case of Dionysus] life itself, its eternal fecundity and return implies torment, destruction, desire for annihilation ... in the other case [in the Christian case], the suffering, the idea that the Crucified is innocent, is an objection against this very life, and the formula of its condemnation. Thus the problem is the meaning of suffering: either a Chris- tian meaning or a tragic meaning [ob ein christlicher Sinn, ob ein tragischer Sin].... In the former case the way is towards a blissful existence [zu einem seligen Sein], in the latter, existence itself is blissful enough to justify an im- mensity of suffering.29

This then is Dionysus in Nietzsche's late writings: der tragische Mensch: strong, full, divine enough to embrace suffering as an aspect of life, while der christliche Mensch is so weak that it refuses both suffering and life. The correspondence of this Dionysus and of this Christian to the Prometheus figure and the Eve figure, respectively, is extremely clear, in spite of all the philosophical innovations in Nietzsche's thought during the intervening sixteen years. But this new Dionysus of 1888, as Nietzsche wrote in the same year in Antichrist (see above), knows that there is no God, no sin, no redeemer. There is also no crime, and existence must not be justified; it must be affirmed.

27 KSA, 6:210. 28 Ibid., 2:107. 29 Ibid., 13:265-67.

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The expression "Dionysus against the Crucified" that I have discussed so far is found also in Ecce Homo (1888), where a chapter is dedicated to Nietzsche's new book Der Fall Wagner.30 The small volume discussed in this chapter was a violent attack against Nietzsche's onetime idol, and the salvation afforded, according to Wagner, by his musical and social reform is the central issue. Many pages are dedicated to this theme: Wagner presented himself as a redeemer (Erloser), Nietzsche wrote, but in reality he was a decadent artist, an adventurer, a liar, and, worst of all, a sickness, a neurosis (in French: Wagner est une nevrose). In his letter to his musician friend Peter Gast, dated August 11, 1888, Nietzsche de- clared: "The Leitmotiv of my bad joke on Wagner as redeemer obviously refers to the writing on the wreath presented to Wagner's funeral [1883] by the Wagnerian association in Munich 'Redemption to the Redeemer' [Erlosung dem Erlbser]." In his response to this letter, Gast reminded Nietzsche that the expression was a quotation from the last lines of Parsifal, the Wagnerian drama of Christian salvation he had so harshly criticized when he received it in 1878.31 But the statement in Der Fall Wagner that cautions the reader against the belief in redemption and the founding of religions surely refers to Wagner's essay Religion und Kunst, which was first published in a Bayreuter Bldtter issue of 1881 and is often studied today as a theorical parallel of the musical and theatrical creation found in Parsifal.32 In that text, Wagner wrote: "The reader may well ask the author of this essay: 'Do you plan to found a religion?"'

The rhetorical question is well justified by the contents of Religion und Kunst. That essay is based on the central ideas of sin and redemption. Humankind's sinfulness is stressed against those "free spirits" who deny it, as Wagner puts it-and there is consensus among special- ists that this is a precise reference to Nietzsche. A few pages after this passage, Wagner declares: "I know my Redeemer lives!" But the essay may not just be explained by the fact that Wagner "had become pious," as Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo seven years later. Though its Christian overtones are beyond doubt, its specific view of sin and redemption is idiosyncratic: original sin is identified with the eating of meat, that took place for the first time in the mountains of Himalaya at the beginning of human history, and a redemption is announced, that shall be afforded by the joined efforts of socialist organizations, vegetarian associations, and

30 Ibid., 6:374. 31 Verrecchia, p. 75. Main sources: KSA, 13:243-44, 14:402-3. 32 On the connection between art and theory in Religion und Kunst and in Parsifal, one

should see Enrico De Angelis, Saggio Introduttivo in Richard Wagner, Religione e arte (Genoa: Il melangolo, 1987), pp. 9-43. On the connections between Wagner's art and his ideology, see n. 11 above, and most notably Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti- Semitic Imagination (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

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Wagnerian art. Wagner's reformulation of the myth of original sin is important. Though the racial identity of the first sinners is not specified in Religion und Kunst, Wagner's account of the origin of evil derives from a particularly eccentric variation on what Leon Poliakov has called "the Aryan Myth." In Friedrich Schlegel's essay on the language and wisdom of India (Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier), that was published in 1808, the alleged Indian colonization of the Ancient World was explained as the consequence of an original crime that transformed those sweet vegetarians into carnivorous migrants. Wagner took over this reconstruction and transformed it into an account of sin and redemption.33

In Der Fall Wagner, Nietzsche attacked Wagner's vegetarianism as a further proof of his opponent's decadent and sickly refusal of life,34 but in the present context it is more important to note that, in defending human sinfulness and the need for redemption against Nietzsche and other free thinkers, Wagner shaped what can only be described as a new Myth of the Fall. In its ethical implications, this new myth resembled the bib- lical myth of Eve's sin rejected as decadent in Die Geburt der Tragodie, but, just as the Prometheus myth discussed in that book, it was totally devoid of Semitic connotations, and thus in line with the idealization of Brahaminic vegetarianism and with the anti-Semitism of Religion und Kunst. In that essay, Jesus was saluted as a redeemer because his death put an end to sacrificial bloodshed and announced the substitution of Eucharistical bread and wine to animal flesh, but Wagner took care to deny Christ's Jewishness by stating that the Savior was a non-Semitic Galilean. This move was particularly important, because it reconciled Wagner's peculiar brand of German Christianity to his anti-Semitic ob- session. Nietzsche's attacks against anti-Semites in his production of 1888 (and specifically against the anti-Semites of the Wagner group in Bayreuth, mentioned in Ecce Homo) should be referred precisely to the problematic coexistence of Christianity and Anti-Semitism that Wagner dealt with by de-Semitizing Jesus. "Jews," Nietzsche wrote in Antichrist (1888), Sec- tion 24, "have so utterly misled humanity that today still Christians may have anti-Semitic feelings, without understanding themselves as the ultimate consequence of Judaism."35

I think this last confrontation between Nietzsche and Wagner throws light not only on the deep meaning of the contrast between the musician

33 Poliakov (n. 5 above), pp. 216-19. 34 It is interesting to note that vegetarianism was originally practiced and exalted by

Nietzsche. See van Amerongen (n. 13 above), p. 49; and Wagner's letter to Nietzsche dated April 6, 1874 (now in Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, eds., Selected Letters by Richard Wagner (New York: Norton, 1987), p. 832 (Wagner to Nietzsche: "Eat meat!"). 35 KSA, 6:192.

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and the philosopher but also, and more important, on the continuity of Nietzsche's thought beyond his refusal of its original mythical dimension. But the abundance of mythical references in the rhetoric of both con- tenders seems still more meaningful. In the case of Wagner's reshaping of the Myth of the Fall, I think we need not be surprised. But Nietzsche's use of mythical figures such as Dionysus and the Crucified is indeed paradoxical.

VII. THE LATE NIETZSCHE: NIHILIST OR MYTHMAKER?

The paradoxical quality of Nietzsche's use of mythical names and images during his third period lies in the fact that the German philosopher used such names and symbols to indicate his stance that denied the possibility of reaching a philosophical or religious truth, attacked and reversed accepted values, and affirmed Life, the Will to Power, and the Eternal Return as guidelines implying the refusal of all ethical, religious, and philosophical categories.36 This is the opposite of the Romantic idea of a profound religious truth embodied in nature, intuited by the Volk and expressed in symbol and myth.

Critical reactions to this paradox have taken different directions, but it is both easy and correct to classify them into two groups. The first group includes interpreters who have stressed the mythical expressions of Nietz- sche and their alleged religious implications, while playing down the nihilistic and the perspectivistic aspects. Among these critics, some have gone so far as to identify Nietzsche as a mythical thinker. This is especially clear in the writings of the George-Kreis during the first decades of the present century: Stefan George himself in his eulogy for Nietz- sche published in 1900 presented his suffering hero as a redeemer and as a poet who created gods (but only to overthrow them),37 and George's follower Ernst Bertram even shaped the biography of the mythmaking Nietzsche as a myth in his book of 1918 whose meaningful title was precisely Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie.38 In his famous Rektoratrede of 1933, Martin Heidegger still presented an image of the same kind when he described Nietzsche as "the passionate seeker of God and the

36 On the recent debate about the meaning of these guidelines, see Maurizio Ferraris, Storia della volonta di potenza, published as a concluding commentary to a new Italian edition of the (by now discredited) Wille zur Macht (Maurizio Ferraris and Pietro Kobaus, eds., La volonta di potenza [Milan: Bompiani, 1992]), pp. 562-688. Gilles Deleuze, Nietz- sche and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), was an important turning point.

37 Stefan George's eulogy is translated in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psy- chologist, Antichrist (1950; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 10. It is discussed by Aschheim (n. 11 above), pp. 74-75.

38 Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: Bond, 1918).

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last German philosopher."39 With very different overtones, the theme of Nietzsche the mythmaker is still prominent in recent critical literature. In his reconsideration of Nietzsche's attitude to myth that was published in 1979, Peter Piitz40 (Der Mythos bei Nietzsche) stated that the German philosopher stopped discussing myth as such after Die Ursprung der Tra- godie, only to "fashion a myth (the myth of Life)." More recently still, Alan Megill has stated that Nietzsche created "the mythos of the future, the myth destined to save us from the nihilism that he believes has cast its shadow on Western culture."41

The second, and opposite, position was well represented by Karl Jaspers in his important book Nietzsche: Einfiihrung in das Verstandnis seiner Philosophie,42 who states that Nietzsche never undertook a profound ex- ploration of myth and that he never recalled, renovated, or reappropriated any myth, with the seeming exception of Dionysus. Dionysus was a central symbol for Nietzsche, but a problematic symbol, whose meanings (a global vision of the world, the Will to Power, ebriety, the opposite of Christ) were consciously tied to Nietzsche to a given historical mo- ment, that is, to the philosopher's own time, when the nihilistic reali- zation of God's death required a countermovement, represented by the future thought of the coming Ubermensch. Moreover, Jaspers continued, Nietzsche's Dionysus was a philosopher, not a god to whom a cult could be tributed. The view of Nietzsche as a destroyer of myth has been de- fended most forcefully by Jorg Salaquarda in his essay Mythos bei Nietz- sche (1979).43 Salaquarda argues that

1. Nietzsche understands myth in a wide sense, in a sense implying that any statement on the meaning and significance of human existence must be mythical- ideological, because there is no such thing as the truth about man. 2. So Nietz- sche fights against any myth that presents itself as expressing a truth; such myths, he states, are the expression of decadence and ressentiment. 3. Nietzsche does not produce new myths-and specifically, if one refers to his late production, no

39 Republished as M. Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutsche Universitdt-Das Rektorat, 1933/34 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983). Further meditations on Nietzsche are found especially in Heidegger's courses on the philosopher in 1936/37 and 1940 (respectively, on "The Will to Power" and on "Nietzsche and European Nihilism") and already in his Was ist Metaphysik? (1929). Heidegger's writings on Nietzsche are now collected in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfulligen: Gtinter Neske, 1961).

40 Peter Piitz, Der Mythos bei Nietzsche, in Mythologie in der Literatur der 19. Jahr- hunderts, ed. H. Koopman (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 251-56, esp. p. 252.

41 Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berke- ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 85.

42 Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einfiirung in das Verstiindnis seines Philosophierens (Ber- lin: de Gruyter, 1936).

43 Jorg Salaquarda, Mythos bei Nietzsche, in Philosophie und Mythos, ed. H. Poser (Berlin and New York, 1972). pp. 174-91, following quote on p. 177.

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myths presented as different form the myths he had criticized as being untrue. His doctrines may be expressed symbolically precisely because they are con- ceived of as interpretations, not as truths.

Salaquarda's reading of Nietzsche in the light of the Frankfurt School's Kritik der Ideologie is as hard to accept as Piitz's interpretation of Nietz- sche's evolution as a movement from the discussion of myth to the creation of a new Myth of Life. In the present context, however, I think a choice between the two perspectives is both impossible and unnecessary. It is more important to understand Nietzsche's paradoxical stance: his treatment of mythical images and themes during his first period when myth was for him a crucial issue, his rejection of myth as the allegoric expression of truth during his second period, and the ongoing elabora- tion of such images and themes to shape the perspectivistic philosophy of his late writings.44

Such images never abandoned him: of the letters he wrote to a wide assortment of addressees during the first days of January 1889, after his mental collapse in Turin that marked the end of his rational thought, eight bear the signature "Dionysus," while eight others are signed as "the Crucified."45 This conflation of opposites that marked the final im- plosion of Nietzsche's identity is not just the strange logic of his mad- ness but also the ultimate outcome of his mature thought. Whether or not Nietzsche should be seen as a mythmaker, surely his last words, on both sides of the Zusammenbruch of January 1889, imply the denial, inver- sion, and transfiguration of the central myth of European culture: Chris- tian redemption.46 And to the very end, Nietzsche presented that myth both by opposing it and by assimilating it to the Greek mythology of Prometheus and Dionysus.

44 Much light is shed on this problem by Manfred Frank's Gott in Exil (n. 10 above) and by Giampiero Moretti (n. 15 above), pp. 164-88. To Giampiero Moretti I am also indebted for many discussions, suggestions, and violent disagreements.

45 These are the last letters in the last (eighth) volume of Friedrich Nietzsche, Brief- wechsel (n. 18 above). Some information is provided also by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, "Die Krankheit Friedrich Nietzsches," Zukunft, vol. 8 (1900) (but on Elisabeth Ffrster-Nietzsche, see Peters [n. 11 above]).

46 Take, e.g., the Crucified: not only is the title Ecce Homo (1888) an obvious move toward Nietzsche's identification with Christ, but in the third part of Also sprach Zarathu- stra (KSA [n. 1 above], 4:266), "the good" (the followers of the Christian lie; cf. Ecce Homo, KSA, 6:368-69) are said to "crucify him who writes new values on new law-tables" (clearly, Nietzsche as Zarathustra). And this view of Nietzsche as the Crucified implies a paradoxical salvation: in Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. 2 (KSA, 4:177-82, Of Redemption), while the redemption of the will by "nonwilling" is denied, it is stated that "the will may unlearn the spirit of revenge and all teeth-gnashing," thus becoming "its own redeemer and bringer of joy."

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Grottanelli, Nietzsche and Myth

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