The Girard Reader (51 page)

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on Dionysus, begging him to bring back real vengeance as a cure for what seemed to him the

worst of all possible fates,
ressentiment
.

Such frivolity could flourish only in our privileged centuries, in privileged parts of the world

where real vengeance had retreated so much that its terror had become unintelligible. But

sincere prayers are never in vain, and the prayers of those who desired the return of

vengeance have finally been heard.

Real vengeance is back among us in the shape of nuclear and other absolute weapons,

reducing our planet to the size of a global primitive village, terrified one again by the

possibility of unlimited blood feud. Real vengeance is so awesome that even the most

vengeful men do not dare to unleash it, knowing perfectly well that all the dreadful things

they can do unto their enemies, their enemies can also do unto them.

Compared to this,
ressentiment
and other nineteenth-century annoyances pale to

insignificance, or rather their only significance is the increasing rage everywhere that turns

ressentiment
back into irrepressible vengeance and can unleash the unspeakable.

At more and more levels of reality, the urgency of the Gospel message can no longer be

disregarded with impunity. Those thinkers who, like Nietzsche, unthinkingly appealed to real

vengeance in their itch to get rid of
ressentiment
resemble these foolish characters in fairy

tales who make the wrong wish and come to grief when it comes true.

This can be interpreted as a warning of sorts. But this warning can and is disregarded with

impunity by almost everybody. Most people go on spouting nineteenth-century ideas as if the

return of real vengeance in our world were not an accomplished fact. The truth is that, for the

time being at least, real vengeance has a power of dissuasion such that, concretely, nothing

has changed. The very enormity of the threat protects us from the threatened violence.

Ressentiment
is intense enough to generate more and more intellectual nihilism but not

intense enough so far to annihilate real being.

Real vengeance has not yet concretely demonstrated its power upon our lives and it never

will, in a sense, because if it did, there would be no more lives to be affected by anything.

There would be no one left to acknowledge the return of absolute vengeance as the real event

of our time.

As a result one can go on thinking frivolously and pretending today that Nietzsche makes

sense as a teacher of ethics, or of history, or as a philosopher, or as a guide for some kind of

"lifestyle," or whatever. This cannot fail to sound more futile and unreal with each passing year. The price to be paid for this is the price any historical era must pay for avoiding its real

issues, a certain barrenness of the spirit and a growing sterility in all its "cultural activities."

Our military men love to give mythological names to their nuclear

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missiles, Pluto, Poseidon, Ariadne, and the like. Too bad they never resorted to Dionysus

himself, but it really does not matter. Those who understand do not need such literalness and

it would not make any impression on those who do not understand. The contemporary use of

mythology is more profound that all the mythological games of our philosophers since the

Renaissance.

Even though Nietzsche had ceased writing long before his espousal of mythological violence

began to reveal its frivolous side, there was something in him that fiercely resisted his own

wager. When studying "Dionysus
versus
the Crucified," we should place the emphasis on that

"versus." We can hear in it an echo of the fierce battle Nietzsche fought and finally lost in his effort to insure the revenge of Dionysus over the Crucified. We can also hear these echoes in

the inhuman aspects of Nietzsche's writing at the time, in the obligation he imposed upon himself to justify even the worst forms of oppression and persecution.

There is a universal wager nowadays against the biblical principle regarded as intrinsically

perverse rather than as perverted by the enormous human ingenuity in the service of this

perversion. This wager cannot be sustained without some form of the sacred, and it has to be

that violent sacred which Nietzsche calls Dionysus. Even though Heidegger also detected the

presence of violence in it, he too glorified the primitive
sacred
. He looked forward to future epiphanies of it and did not anticipate any particular problems with this violence even though

he was writing about this after the end of World War II.

In his later years, Nietzsche kept reviving, glorifying, and modernizing more and more

sinister aspects of the primitive sacred. I am convinced that this process became more

intolerable as it became more radical and led to his final breakdown.

The greatness of Nietzsche is that he committed himself totally to that process and he paid for

his commitment literally with his life. For things to come to such a pass, the forces on both

sides had to be almost evenly balanced. As the prophets would say: "It is a dreadful fate to

fall into the hands of the living God."

Paradoxically, Nietzsche is the one thinker in the modern world whose work did achieve

something that the Christian thinkers have always failed to achieve. They have never dared.

He put his finger on that "sword" that Jesus said he brought, the sword destructive of human culture, that sword no human being can fail to dread and resent even though -- or is it

because? -- it belongs to what Pascal calls
Vordre de la charité
.

This force destroys the old sacred through the revelation of its violent nature, but so far, it has

only managed to wound it, turning it into a fierce monster that now threatens to devour us all.

Mimetic doubles are everywhere in that cosmic battle and it is tempting to see nothing else,

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nothing but empty mimetic rivalry in the opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified.

This is what Heidegger did. Heidegger, here, was still the voice of a modern demystification

that exposes so many false differences that in the end it misses the one and only difference

that is real.

Heidegger fought on the same side as Nietzsche, no doubt, the side of the old sacred, but on

positions less exposed, less forward, less dangerous and revealing than Nietzsche's. He has

succeeded, at least for a while, in neutralizing the "imprudence" of Nietzsche in the domain of religion. With time, it will become easier and easier to realize that, before exploding into

the hands of its maker, this machine was producing the opposite of what it was built for, the

glorification of what is was supposed to vilify, the vilification of what it was supposed to

celebrate.

For quite a few years, I have emphasized the role of collective violence in the genesis of the

primitive sacred and the role of the Bible in the increasing intelligibility of that genesis. My

purpose in the present essay is to show that Nietzsche is deeply but paradoxically involved in

that process.

The present effort will probably meet with skepticism. Many readers will suspect that I am projecting upon Nietzsche a preoccupation too idiosyncratic to yield significant results. This

attempt has to result not in a mutilation of what Nietzsche "really thought" (which does not seem to matter anymore and cannot be reached in any case), but in a revelation of the real

fecundity of Nietzsche's work, his possible contribution to the critical formulae currently

fashionable.

The general reaction to the theme of
the collective murder of God
resembles the

bewilderment and amused condescension that greeted the Nietzschean madman when he

addressed his contemporaries in the market place. This anonymous lunatic

lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market and cried incessantly, "I seek God,

I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he

provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child?

said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated?

Thus they yelled and laughed.

This is the beginning of the most famous text in
The Gay Science
, aphorism 125. Even today,

especially today perhaps, whoever touches upon this untouchable subject,
the collective

murder of God
, finds himself in a position curiously reminiscent of the one described here.

After more than a century, nothing has really changed, especially in those aca-

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demic circles that did not appreciate Nietzsche at the time any more than he appreciated

them.

My readers are too careful with texts, too erudite, attentive, deliberate, thorough, and above

all too shrewd, too good as readers of texts to be scandalized, or ever surprised when they see

me appropriate this text in the informal fashion that I just did. They certainly would not

dispute my right to do this. They have kept in mind the extraordinary similarity of content if

not of form between my somewhat tiresome insistence on the religious significance of the

collective murder and the parallel insistence of this enigmatic text.

Here is the first proclamation of the madman:

"Whither is God," he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him -you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea . . . ?

Since the late eighteenth century, from Jean Paul to Victor Hugo and beyond,

pronouncements regarding the death of God have multiplied with each passing year, and

belated prophets are now forming what is probably the largest crowd ever gathered in our

intellectual history. What everybody has been announcing, of course, is that the biblical god

is dying of old age. It is a more or less natural death in other words.

Most people believe that Nietzsche's text refers exclusively to modern atheism. This is part of

the story, no doubt, but only a part, and an enigmatic part already because it rejects very

pointedly the very notion everybody is trying to find there, the notion of God as something

childish and meaningless really that men gradually learned to do without in the modern age,

as they became more "mature" and learned about electricity, and now computers.

Instead of that gradual fading away of God, with no particular violence or drama, Nietzsche sees the disappearance of God as a horrible murder in which every man is involved: "
We

have killed him
-you and I. All of us are his murderers."

"If God never existed, if there is no such thing as God, how could he be killed?" That is the question only the uninformed reader dares to ask and, as usual with great texts, it is a much

smarter one than all the "informed" philosophical questions.

Gods do not have to exist really in order to be murdered. As a matter of fact, unless they are

first murdered they will never exist. Unlike ordinary beings who can exist only if they are not

murdered, gods begin to exist as gods, at least in the eyes of men, only after they have been

murdered.

In the entire text, the hackneyed expression "God is dead" appears in one passage only, and it is followed by an insistent return upon the theme of the collective murder of God, as if

Nietzsche suddenly realized

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the difference between the hackneyed conception of God's "death" as a spectacle passively

watched and the active deed he had in mind, the collective crime that seems to come from

nowhere.

And he seems to have felt that the collective crime was the more powerful idea but harder to

communicate, an idea indeed that would be resisted and eluded with the utmost energy. More

emphasis was needed, therefore, and Nietzsche provided it, including even a gory description

of the collective murder of God:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all

murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has

yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is

there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we

have to invent?

The first two sentences are all we have in that text that resembles the old "God is dead"

theme. But this is enough of an excuse for all the commentators to seize upon it and substitute

once more the harmless cliché for what Nietzsche is really saying. The references to the

blood, and to the knife, and to the wiping of the blood, forcefully take us back to the first

announcement of the madman. God did not die a natural death; he was collectively killed.

And the crime is so great that new festivals of atonement, new sacred games will have to be

invented. New rituals will undoubtedly appear. The consequences of God's murder are

religious, therefore, purely religious. The very deed that seems to put an end to the religious,

process is really the origin of that process, the sum total of it, really, the religious process par

excellence. These new festivals and sacred games will certainly reenact the collective murder

of God. They will be sacrificial rites. The death of God is also his birth.

If God is always the product of his own collective murder, does not this text really say that