The Girard Reader (49 page)

humanity as though it were the worst of plagues. Nietzsche understood the religion* of the

crucified Christ as the historical culmination of the Jewish "slave morality" that is rooted in
ressentiment
.
Ressentiment
is the sublimated desire for revenge against the masters of history on the part of those who view themselves as their victims. Or, as Girard says in the following

essay, it "is the interiorization of weakened vengeance," whose "ultimate target is always
ressentiment
itself, its own mirror image, under a slightly different mask that makes it

unrecognizable."

Nietzsche held that Christian morality became not only the most powerful but also the most

baneful combination of conviction and lifestyle to emerge in history. He envisioned the

appearance of the superior human being,
der Übermensch
, whose god is Dionysus and whose

will to power transcends
ressentiment
. In the following piece, published originally

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as "Dionysus versus the Crucified" in
Modern Language Notes 99
( 1984): 816-35, Girard analyzes the real differences between the Christ of the Gospels and Nietzsche's Dionysus,

differences which Nietzsche himself under stood only too well. He knew that Jesus brought a

sword which was "the order of charity" or love, as Pascal put it. But in the antithesis of

Dionysus versus the Crucified, he willed and tried to affirm an order he understood as "life

itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence," which "creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilate. . . ." (
Will to Power
, no. 1052).

Girard has written a number of other essays on Nietzsche. On Nietzsche's work as a strategy

of madness stemming in great part from his rivalry with Wagner, see "Strategies of Madness

-- Nietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevski" in
"To Double Business Bound,"
61-83. On Nietzsche's proclamation of the murder of God through his madman, see "The Founding

Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche," in
Violence and Truth
, ed. P. Dumouchel ( Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 227-46.

For a while, after the war, a great debate raged about Nietzsche's own responsibility in the

Nazi exploitation of his writing for anti-Semitic purposes. There was mostly silence,

however, regarding his anti-Christian stance; it is too explicit and consistent to be denied.

To those who felt that Nietzsche's work should not fall into neglect, the point was irrelevant

anyway. Why should Nietzsche be exonerated from an attitude that a majority of intellectuals

regarded as sound? No apology needed to be made.

No apology was made. Nietzsche was in the clear. But the antiChristian polemics of

Nietzsche have received scant attention since World War II. Why? If they were asked -- they

never are -- contemporary Nietzscheans would probably answer that their thinker's passionate

attitude toward religion has lost its relevance.

Nietzsche remains "important" because of some avatars of his that came to light in recent

years, mostly through the ingenuity of French critics. Nietzsche the genealogist, Nietzsche

the advocate of "free play," Nietzsche the exponent of counter-culture. . . .

Different as they are from one another, at least in some respects, these avatars are all alike in

their indifference to the great struggle that obsessed the last lucid years of Nietzsche. Is there

some obscure reason why this should be? Is there something inopportune or embarrassing

about the theme; is it strategically advisable not to insist upon it?

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Whatever the case may be, Nietzsche's religious problematic was already marginalized when

the French critics began their work. The real job was performed by Martin Heidegger. Even

those who reject the interpretation of Nietzsche as the last great metaphysician of the West

are dependent on Heidegger for their evacuation of "Dionysus versus the Crucified." Just as

existentialism in the French style was an offshoot of German philosophy and above all

Heidegger, the new "French Nietzsche" is another lively mouse, or rather a whole litter,

brought forth by the Heideggerian mountain.

Nietzsche's forced conversion to inverted platonism is rooted in one essential Heideggerian

tenet, which is the mutual incompatibility of religion and thought in the highest sense, the

postphilosophical and Heideggerian sense.

Everything in Nietzsche that comes under the heading "Dionysus versus the Crucified" must

be alien to "thought" and is therefore harshly condemned as a pure and simple "return to monotheism," the very reverse in other words of what Nietzsche himself imagined he was

doing. This condemnation is also an allusion to the fact that someone fighting Christianity

with the passionate intensity of Nietzsche must still have been under its influence. Even though brief flashes of hatred appear here and there in his writings, Heidegger on the whole

gives an impression of radical indifference to religion, an attitude that has become a model

for quite a few people. The subject is of little or no interest. Period.

Heidegger interpreted monotheism as a monopolistic claim on the divine that constituted, in

his eyes, the height of
ressentiment
. I will be the last to disagree with Heidegger regarding the importance of
ressentiment
in Nietzsche's work. I do not believe, however, that Heidegger or

anyone else can disentangle the strands that belong to
ressentiment
and therefore to religious nonthought from the strands that do not and belong therefore to the philosophical thought that

deserves to be considered and interpreted.

To Heidegger, "Dionysus versus the Crucified" was merely the Nietzschean reversal of a

previous Christian formula: "The Crucified versus Dionysus," and therefore the same empty

struggle for power between two rival religions. As institutional Christianity weakens, the

philosophical hostility to it turns to silence but it does not decrease.

To Heidegger, the essential history of our world is postphilosophical and religion is

irrelevant. The Nietzsche of "Dionysus versus the Crucified" is more alien to the real issues of our times than the "withdrawal of being" and its comet tail of postphilosophical discourse.

Is this view going to prevail?

Even from the standpoint of Nietzschean studies in the narrowest sense, this negative attitude

is a mutilation. It deprives us of what is

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really exciting and novel in the Nietzschean corpus. Now that we are no longer limited to the

excerpts carefully selected and organized by Nietzsche's sister, and we can read all of the

formerly unpublished writing, we cannot doubt that the closer we get to the end the more

obsessive the Christian theme becomes with Nietzsche. The number and importance of the

fragments dealing with the subject increase. . . . We are reminded of a volcano pouring

greater and greater torrents of murky lava with, here and there, the sparkle of a jewel still

untouched by human hands . . .; for these some of us at least would gladly burn one finger or

two.

Here, the most daring material becomes inseparable from the grotesque. Genius and insanity

lend each other a hand until the last instant, giving the lie to the orthodox thesis that

disconnects the two. If we receive the evidence of their mutual contamination, we commit the

one unforgivable sin, punishable by immediate exclusion from the club of the respectable

Nietzscheans.

These later fragments are the height of
ressentiment
in the sense that the final breakdown also is. Nietzsche's superiority over his century and ours may well be that he alone pushed the

ressentiment
that he shares with quite a few lesser mortals to such a height that it yielded its most virulent and significant fruit. None of Nietzsche's achievements as a thinker can be

divorced from
ressentiment
, whether the subject is Wagner, the divine, or Nietzsche himself

in
Ecce Homo
.

Unlike Heidegger, unlike most of his contemporaries and ours, Nietzsche strongly believed in the unique specificity of the biblical and Christian perspective. His reasons cannot be

dismissed as summarily as they would if he were a Christian. The ethnocentric fallacy will

not do.

The uniqueness of the Bible and the New Testament is affirmed by Nietzsche in a context

directly opposed to Christian apologetics. Nietzsche tried to put his critique of Christianity on

a basis less shaky than the one that was already standardized in his time, the great positivistic

equivalence of all religious traditions. He knew too much about pagan mythology not to be

revolted by the shallow assimilation of the Judeo-Christian with the pagan.

He maintained that the Christian spirit tries to stifle "life" by repressing the most dynamic individuals of a culture. This is the famous "morality of the slaves" versus "the morality of the masters," the one thing everybody knows about the Nietzschean distinction between

paganism and Judeo-Christianity.

A culture has to pay a price in order to breed a class of higher men. It has to assume even the

worst forms of violence. Time and time again, Nietzsche tells us that Dionysus

accommodates all human passions, including the lust to annihilate, the most ferocious

appetite for destruction. Dionysus says yes to the sacrifice of many human lives, in-

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cluding, not so paradoxically, those of the highest type that is being bred in the process.

Already in
The Birth of Tragedy
, Nietzsche mentioned the violence that accompanies and

often precedes Dionysus everywhere. All epiphanies of the god leave ruins in their wake.

"Mania," after all, mean homicidal fury. Unlike many of his followers, Nietzsche did not turn the Dionysian into something idyllic and inconsequential. He was too honest to dissimulate

the disturbing sides, the ugly sides of the Dionysian.

With the years, his references to that frenzied and seemingly haphazard violence that marks

all the episodes of the Dionysian saga became even more frequent and insistent than in the

past, but Nietzsche often repeated them almost verbatim, and they became stereotyped.

Nietzsche never went into an analysis in depth of
The Bacchae
, for instance, but he always

dutifully mentioned the Dionysian violence. The reason for this is not that Nietzsche

particularly relished that violence; the opposite is true, but this violence plays an essential

role and it should not be suppressed.

Nietzsche clearly saw that pagan mythology, like pagan ritual, centers on the killing of

victims or on their expulsion, which can seem perfectly wanton. He realized that this type of

killing, which is reflected in many rituals as well as represented in myths, is often executed

by a large number of murderers; it is a collective deed in which an entire human group is

involved. Only exceptionally, but then most strikingly, as we will see later, did Nietzsche

focus his attention directly on the collective aspect of the god's murder, but his entire

problematic depends on this and his most interesting fragments clearly demonstrate that need.

This is the case, especially, of a well-known text that figures in
The Will to Power
under the number 1052.

Nietzsche himself gave that important text a title: "The Two Types: Dionysus and the Crucified." The second paragraph formulates most clearly the attitude of Nietzsche:

Dionysus versus the "Crucified": there you have the antithesis. It is
not
a difference in regard to their martyrdom -- it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness

and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case,

suffering -- the "Crucified as the innocent one" -counts as an objection to this life, as a

formula for its condemnation. -- One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of

suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed

to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as
holy enough
to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the

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harshest suffering. . . . Dionysus cut to pieces is a
promise
of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.

Nietzsche obviously felt that the collective murder of Dionysus, in the episode of the Titans,

is analogous enough to the Passion of Jesus to be regarded as equivalent. There is a

difference between the two but "it is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom." The

italics are Nietzsche's.

The insight regarding the similarity of the two collective deaths is not uncommon among

thinkers and anthropologists of the period. It is the insight of Freud
Totem and Taboo
as well.

It has disappeared from modern anthropology, lost and buried beneath the fast accumulating

rubble of scholarly fashion. The structuralist analyst, for instance, is still concerned with the

episode of the Titans in the Dionysus saga but his interest has shifted from the murder of the

god and the cannibalistic feast to the culinary preparation that took place in between, an

interesting question no doubt but one that diverts us from the tragic apprehension of

Nietzsche.

When the anthropologists first observed the great abundance of gods collectively murdered in

religious cults everywhere, they felt they had discovered something important and so did