Modernism After the Death of God

Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification

Stephen Kern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351603171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

1
Friedrich Nietzsche: Greatness, Meaning, and Authenticity

Christian Education

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, Germany, near the birthplace of Martin Luther and even closer to the hometown of Johann Sebastian Bach. Five generations of maternal ancestors were Lutheran ministers, as was his father, and his paternal grandfather was a distinguished Protestant scholar. His most intimate love interest Lou Salomé recalled how “Nietzsche repeatedly emphasized that the Christianity which imbued the pastor-home of his parents suited his inner being—smooth and soft, like a healthy skin—and compliance with all its commandments was as easy to follow as his own inclinations.”¹ His father died when Nietzsche was five, and in 1850 he moved to nearby Naumburg because his uncle was a preacher in the cathedral. His sister Elisabeth recalled that Naumburg was “a thoroughly Christian, conservative city, loyal to the King and a pillar of the Throne and the Church.”² He and his sister were raised by their pious mother, two aunts, and a grandmother. At ten he enrolled at the Cathedral Grammar School where the day was punctuated by resounding church bells. In 1858 he won a scholarship to the prestigious Pforta School, originally a monastery that included a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel and a thirteenth-century Gothic church, which imposed rigorous study and observance with morning chapel and daily prayers. There he recited scriptural passages and songs with great enthusiasm that brought tears to the eyes of listeners. His schoolmates called him “the little pastor.”

From an early age Nietzsche intended to become a minister like his father. At thirteen he wrote, “In everything God has safely led me as a father leads his weak child.… I have firmly resolved within me to dedicate myself forever to His service.… He will preserve us all… and shall one day unite us all in eternal joy and bliss.”³ Pforta Christianity was strictly imposed, and Nietzsche welcomed the discipline of his teachers and soaked up their religiosity. In preparation to be a minister he studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French. His schoolmate Paul Deussen also hoped to enter the ministry and in 1861 recalled “the holy, world-enchanting atmosphere which took possession of us during the weeks before and after our confirmation. We were quite prepared to depart this life, to be with Christ, and all our thinking, feeling, and striving was irradiated by an other-worldly cheerfulness.”⁴

Around age eighteen, Nietzsche’s faith began to erode. In 1862 he clashed with his mother in refusing to do his Easter duty, as his study of history and science was undermining his faith. Deus-sen recalled that their faith was challenged by “the superb historical-critical method which we employed in Pforta to torment the ancients and… biblical matters.”⁵ Evidence of Nietzsche’s use of that method is a lecture of that year titled “Fate and History,” which jabs at the heart of Christianity: “If we could examine Christian doctrine and Church history with a free, unconstrained eye, we would be compelled to arrive at many conclusions which contradict generally accepted ideas.” The ideas Nietzsche proposed to contradict centered on the existence of God. If we emancipate ourselves from “the yoke of habit and prejudice” and use the historical-critical method, he argued, we can reach an “unpartisan judgment about religion” that will be viewed as “sinful.” He concluded with a bold prediction that must have sent shivers up the spines of the Pforta pious: “We stand at the threshold of a great revolution when the mass of mankind first grasps that the whole fabric of Christianity rests on [mere] assumptions: the existence of God, immortality, and the authority of the Bible.”⁶ He had not entirely rejected Christianity but had eroded its foundation by viewing it as based on questionable assumptions rather than divine revelation.

The model for the historical-critical method was David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835), a critical examination of the historical Jesus that Nietzsche read at the University of Bonn in 1864. In addition to Strauss, two bigger cultural icons also played a role in Nietzsche’s apostasy—Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. In 1865 Nietzsche moved to the University of Leipzig to study philology and became an avowed atheist, stimulated by Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1819). Although Schopenhauer never referred to himself as an atheist or argued against the existence of God, he undermined the feasibility of believing in God by maintaining that behind appearances was not a Kantian thing-in-itself or an omniscient and morally perfect god but an irrational and amoral force, a blind and insatiable will to life.⁷ Subsequently, Nietzsche described Schopenhauer as “the first admitted and inexorable atheist among us Germans” and added that “the ungodliness of existence was for [Schopenhauer] something given, palpable, indisputable.… Unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of the way he poses his problem” (GS 307). Schopenhauer held that people are driven by an insatiable will to pleasure. If unsatisfied, that will is frustrated; if satisfied, it is bored and generates new pleasures. Thus life has no ultimate satisfaction or divine purpose but is rather an absurd cycle of lust and ennui. His pessimism led to the blunt statement that it would be better not to live. One shred of hope is to immerse oneself in art created by genius, preferably literary tragedy and music.

Another influential personality who mixed genius, tragedy, and music as well as a kind of apostasy was Wagner. They met in 1868 when he was teaching at the University of Basel. In The Ring of the Nibelung (written 1848–1874, first performed, 1869–1876) Wagner killed off the Norse gods who have replaced the Christian God in a Götterdämmerung when their castle goes up in flames. Wagner’s message is that the powerful gods are ultimately conquered after Brünnhilde, out of love for Siegfried who was betrayed and killed, returns the stolen ring to the Rhine maidens. Wagner announces not the death of the Christian God, but the death of the Norse gods. Still, Wagner was no atheist. He worked on the opera Parsifal, a sympathetic retelling of the story of the Holy Grail, for twenty-five years before its first performance at Bayreuth in July 1882. For Nietzsche, Parsifal showed how Wagner, “decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sank down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross.”⁸ Wagner’s abiding theism energized in reaction Nietzsche’s biting atheism.

Nietzsche’s emancipation from Lutheranism inspired by Strauss and Schopenhauer did not involve a personal crisis. As Rudolph Binion concluded, he “relinquished his childhood faith… all at once and effortlessly.”⁹ He reported feeling “not at all sad and gloomy rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn” (GS 199). The study of history, philosophy, and ancient languages together with Wagner’s inspiring operas drew him toward intellectually and artistically rewarding undertakings that enabled him to deal with the big issues of life in a differently fulfilling way. Why then did his anti-Christian views, which emerged without trauma, reach white hot intensity, making him the anti-Christ of the modernist era?

The most plausible answer is suggested by Nietzsche’s charged characterizations of the denigration of the body and sexuality evident in Christianity’s threat to realizing the fullest possibilities of mind and body. Among these threats one stands out—“Despisers of the Body”—the title of a section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), which refers to those priestly types from whom “an unconscious envy speaks out of the squint-eyed glance of [their] contempt” (Z 35). There Nietzsche indicts Christianity’s cultivation of sexual guilt symbolized by Christ’s bloody redemption on the cross for otherwise unredeemable sins, particularly original sin, but Nietzsche’s forceful analysis still does not explain the intensity of his anger. It was fueled by his unhappy love life, specifically his failed relationships with women along with betrayal, loneliness, and humiliation aggravated by a bout of gonorrhea and possibly syphilis. A brief survey of his romantic disappointments and failures reveals the most compelling personal explanation for his impassioned denunciations of Christianity.

Sexuality and Love

The little pastor had no childhood sweethearts. After the age of five he was raised in a fatherless home surrounded by five pious, anti-sexual women. In 1876, at age thirty-two, he proposed to Mathilde Trampedach after just three meetings and was promptly rejected.¹⁰ He had an intense relationship with his sister, who remained a jealous protector and persecutor throughout his life, a persistent reminder that the wages of sin are death. She boasted that “throughout his life he never once fell into the clutches of a great passion or a vulgar love.”¹¹ Although highly unreliable, she no doubt said the same and worse to others, contributing to his sense of betrayal and suspicion that people were publicly ridiculing his sex life. The peak of such suspicion resulted from a letter of 1877 that Wagner sent to Nietzsche’s doctor, speculating that Nietzsche’s eye problems were caused by masturbation and that his “altered mode of thought” was due to “unnatural debauchery with indications of pederasty.”¹² The doctor wrote back to Wagner that Nietzsche denied that he masturbated or had had any “abnormal satisfactions” or been syphilitic but admitted to having had gonorrhea, explaining further that “on medical advice, he had recently engaged in intercourse in Italy,” presumably at a Naples brothel.¹³ At the second Bayreuth Festival in 1879, where Wagner’s music was being celebrated, the contents of this embarrassing exchange surfaced in gossip about how Nietzsche was going blind from masturbation, was going to prostitutes in Italy, and had had a venereal disease. Wagner had leaked a doctor’s confidence in order to publicly malign his onetime close friend, and Nietzsche found out about it, as is evident in a letter to the editor Heinrich Köselitz in April 1883, where he wrote, “Wagner is full of evil ideas; but what do you say to the fact that he exchanged letters (and even with my physician) in order to express his conviction that my changed way of thinking is the result of unnatural excesses with an indication of pederasty.”¹⁴ In a recent study of Nietzsche, Robert C. Holub concludes that “Nietzsche was justifiably offended that Wagner was interfering in very personal matters related to his health and sexuality” and speculates further that that interference may have been “the cause or one of the causes of the break between the two men.”¹⁵ While Nietzsche’s earlier rejection of Wagner was stimulated by aesthetic and ideological differences over his embracing of Christianity with Parsifal, it was no doubt intensified by this betrayal of sexual intimacies so much that in 1883, following Wagner’s death, Nietzsche referred to the leak as a “deadly insult” and later as “an abysmal treachery of revenge.”¹⁶

Scholars have offered several explanations for Nietzsche’s subsequent mental breakdown from manic-depressive illness to syphilis.¹⁷ If it was syphilis, he contracted it during sexual relations with a prostitute. If it was not syphilis, he may well have suspected that it was. Beyond brothel experiences, he had no sexual relations with women. He was friendly with several feminists in spite of his stridently anti-feminist comments after 1882. He related well to women with strong minds but did not know what to do with their bodies. His two most important relationships with intellectually formidable women were asexual and ultimately disappointing. One was with Cosima Wagner, seven years older than Nietzsche, whom he met in 1870 shortly after he began teaching at Basel. Over the next three years he made over twenty visits to her and Richard’s lively home at Tribschen and came to regard her as a model wife. His relationship with her lasted for the rest of his sane life. He managed greater emotional intimacy only as he lapsed into insanity and began to refer to himself as the Greek god Dionysus and to her as his true love Ariadne.¹⁸ On 27 March 1889, in the asylum at Jena he said, “My wife Cosima Wagner has brought me here.”¹⁹ Nietzsche acquired a “wife” only by losing his mind.

His most intense relationship was with the twenty-one-year-old Russian émigré Lou Salomé. Before he met her, on the basis of reports from his friend Paul Rée, he wrote: “I am greedy for souls of that species.… I could consent at most to a two-year marriage, and then only in view of what I mean to do these next ten years.”²⁰ A few days after their first meeting in Rome on 23 April 1882, he asked Rée, who was already in love with her, to propose marriage for him. She rejected this proposal and another also made through Rée a few weeks later. On 6 May the pair climbed the Monte Sacro in Rome and exchanged verbal intimacies, although Nietzsche’s physical loving must have been tepid because in her diary Lou could not recall if he had kissed her.²¹ That he could contemplate marriage to someone he had not met and then propose marriage to her twice through someone else shows how emotionally immature he was in love matters. Their resulting tempestuous relationship continued over the next six months, complicated by Rée’s rivalry and the intervention of Nietzsche’s sister who hated Lou and worked to enlist everyone against her, especially his mother. Sibling rivalry, runaway sexual gossip, and Christian moral guilt in addition to his sexual inexperience undermined the relationship that gave Nietzsche the peak love experience of his life but also a suicidal depression that he attempted to treat with huge doses of opium. By November he ended the relationship with a letter that concluded with a succinct statement of the philosophy of self-fulfillment and self-unification that he would elaborate three months later in Part I of Zarathustra: “Dearest Lou, be what you must be!”²²

Nietzsche’s writings reveal outrage that Christian anti-sexual values instilled in his youth caused sexual failures as an adult, as, for example, in numerous tirades against “despisers of the body” such as St. Paul and St. Augustine who imposed sexual values on the Christian faithful. Behind terms that repeatedly link Christian views of sex with sin, guilt, danger, sickness, poison, and death, I hear Nietzsche’s outcries against his own limited experiences and sexual deficiencies that blocked expressions of love. His Beyond Good and Evil (1886) indicts the desexualizing prescriptions of Pauline Christianity as a source of mental illness: “Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared so far, we find it connected with three dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.” His life story reveals that he was the solitary one who ate poorly and refrained from masturbating, and his inability to disengage from Christianity intensified his religious conflicts, if not mental illness. This transparent self-diagnosis had far-reaching consequences for his entire mental life, as a subsequent epigram suggests: “The degree and type of a person’s sexuality reaches up into the furthermost peaks of their spirit” (BGE 45, 60).

The section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra titled “The Tomb Song” laments the loss of Lou’s love and turns against his “enemies” led by his sister who condemned sexual desire: “you murdered the visions and dearest wonders of my youth.… [Y]ou made those who loved me [Lou] scream that I was hurting them most.” He then targets his sister’s Christianity with bitter contempt: “your ‘piety’ immediately placed its fatter gifts alongside, and in the fumes of your fat what was holiest to me suffocated.” Referring to his own sexual deficiency, he charges: “now my highest parable [of love] remained unspoken in my limbs” (Z 111–12). His sexual deficiency stemmed from a religion that viewed sex as a sin, and he learned to make that self-debasing value judgment as a child before he had learned to think for himself. The force of his sco...