17

“Not to Destroy, but to Fulfill”

Eli Friedland

It is tempting, with Nietzsche, to be drawn—dazzled, puzzled, or simply perplexed—toward his visions of future human possibilities and to lose sight of what is close at hand; that is, to the conditions of the present which must be worked with if future possibilities are to be achieved. Nietzsche himself, especially with his Zarathustra, understood this temptation only too well. Indeed, in Ecce Homo, he writes of “forcing” his eye to focus on the “nearest things, the present time,” in Beyond Good and Evil,¹ which is why that book is the necessary counterpart to the visionary Zarathustra.

This is not to say that in Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents the achievement of a future spiritual transfiguration as ex nihilo, or from some tabula rasa. We might think here of Zarathustra’s repeated metaphors of the human being as a continuity, as “a bridge,” for example (Z Prologue 4; III.12.2), and as a “rope, fastened between beast and Overhuman—a rope over an abyss./A dangerous across, a dangerous-on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still” (Prologue 4).² What happens when one leaps over the human on the rope (the rope that he also is) is illustrated to Zarathustra by the jester, on his first day in the Motley Cow (Prologue 6). And while Zarathustra’s longing for the “Overhuman” may indeed, at this early point, have serious affinities with the impatient destruction of that jester—who sends the “human” falling to his death when he leaps over him on the tightrope—it is crucially important to the drama of Zarathustra that he only achieves his own highest hope by coming to deeply understand and experience the purely destructive foolishness of attempting to achieve the future by leaping over the present. Thus the wiser, almost-convalescent Zarathustra of the third book will still insist that “the human is something that must be overcome,” but he immediately appends this consideration:

There are many different paths and ways of overcoming – look you to them! But only a jester thinks: “The human can also be overjumped.” (Z III. 12. 4)

What is implied in this transformation of Zarathustra’s own understanding is that therapy, and not some “great leap forward,” for example, is fundamental to his sense of overcoming the present human. Just because the human “is a bridge” and “a rope,” the overcoming of the human, all-too human is a process that can only be achieved by its continued attachment to the possibilities and proclivities of the present human condition. And this means that the new health toward which Nietzsche the physician and therapist is pointing can only be understood in its necessary relation to the entire bridge over the abyss, including especially its foundation in the starting side. Our perceptions, whether of new or of old “tablets,” are value-laden and always-evaluating accesses to the world—and are our only accesses to the world—one cannot abstract from the drives and necessities of one’s being in the act of “perceiving.” Paths of therapeutic transfiguration therefore depend fundamentally on the material that is at hand to be transfigured, regardless if the transfigurative genius himself would be able to work with almost any material he had at his disposal (cf. Dawn 8 with 540; and 38). As St Bernard tells the pilgrim Dante, a good tailor must “fit the dress he makes to cloth he has” (Dante, Paradiso 32.140–1).³

In what follows, I hope to gesture at some of the important continuities with the past that Nietzsche uses in his attempt to open on to his “philosophy of the future.” In particular, I want to highlight those continuities with respect to the concepts and practices of Christianity, as they have unfolded over two millennia, in order to suggest that Nietzsche’s “anti-Christianity” is very far from a naïve attempt to abandon the deep psychophysiological drives that have informed—and that continue to inform—the religious consciousness that requires the Christian moral and metaphysical dispensation. Indeed, Nietzsche does with respect to Christianity what Jesus said with respect to Judaism: “I come not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it” (Matt. 5:17). And it is through that fulfillment that his therapeutic transfiguration of those drives hopes to open the future to new possibilities.

What this means is that Nietzsche intended the interpretation of his published writings to have therapeutic consequences in and of itself (a lesson from Plato). To borrow the words of another scholar, from another context, Nietzsche’s books, like Plato’s, are not “book[s] of whose content one can merely take cognizance without undergoing a change.”⁴ Attending to Nietzsche’s deliberate appeal to Christian consciousness opens new interpretive possibilities for his deliberately difficult (BGE 27, WS 71. D Preface 5) “written and painted thoughts” (BGE 296), possibilities whose consideration both require and at the same time assist in enacting a transformation in his careful reader (cf. WS 87). This is of course not to suggest that there is anything automatically therapeutic about reading Nietzsche: as with any therapy, one must work very hard and take it very seriously.

Obviously, I cannot provide here a full exploration of this therapeutic effort. Instead, I will limit myself to drawing out some oft-overlooked affinities between Nietzsche’s most important symbols, and Christianity’s, with the hope of laying some groundwork for a new and fruitful approach to Nietzsche’s therapy. Implied in this approach is a profound affinity between Nietzsche and his greatest philosophical rival (and greatest friend), Plato, with respect to their understandings of the mimetic nature of the human animal. Within this understanding, one would not expect an “ideal” described to be achieved, but rather, through its engagement with existing “dispositions and capacities for representation/imitation (mimêsesi)” (Plato, Laws 655d3), to excite and partially direct new self-transfigurations whose results are necessarily open-ended, multiple, and not entirely predictable. One would not, for example, expect the figure of the Übermensch or Zarathustra to “produce” replicas of Zarathustra, just as one would not expect the Christian figure of Jesus to produce Jesus’s, nor the Homeric Achilles to produce Achilles’s.

For this reason, we should note that this is not something that can be genuinely approached from a strictly analytic point of view. Even in terms of terminology, Nietzsche’s use of words and grammar is always essentially transformative (open-endedly transforming the terminology he uses), so to reduce what he supposedly said to a static description—however precise—will always miss the most important aspects of his efforts. The dual nature of the Socratic question that opens the Phaedrus must be continually attended to in Nietzsche’s therapeutics (and indeed, this is precisely why his work is therapeutic): “Where to, and where from?” (227a1: poi dê kai pothen?). There are a number of terms in Nietzsche’s work that are extremely difficult to fully grasp without undergoing a profoundly transformative experience—transformative of both oneself and the meaning of the term. This sentence can, and should, be taken in both of its senses: on the one hand, if one does come to grasp these terms, that in itself will lead to such an experience; on the other hand, one needs to experience such a self-transformation in order to fully grasp what Nietzsche is doing with these terms. This suggests a paradox, but fortunately, being human, what we can only describe in paradoxical terms is very often something we can live—indeed often cannot help but live—in a seamless (which does not mean an easy) way.

What does it mean to fulfill in order to go beyond—to go beyond by fulfilling? In the first place, we must understand that no one is “free” to have or not have a belief. A belief is a sign, a symptom of what “the great reason of the body (Leib),” to use Zarathustra’s term (Z 1.4), is doing—it is not an independent conceptual structure for which an “individual” is “responsible.” A belief may in some sense organize and direct behavioral conditions for those whom the belief has (sic), but it neither organizes nor directs (except into limited conscious expression) the fundamental psychophysiological requirements and capacities that lie beneath and give rise to that belief in the first place (what Aristotle called the hypokeimenon). A belief, to say the very least, is merely the tip of an iceberg. And while that tip may be in plain sight, it is not for that reason in control.

This is why a merely rational refutation of a belief, for example (as heard all too frequently from modern zealous atheists), simply cannot suffice to transfigure how we experience life and why. And this is also why any genuine process of cultural transfiguration is a project of centuries (HH 1.450), involving and requiring a slow shift in the deep structure of language, thought, desiring, expectations, and goals⁵—a shift that must at one and the same time fulfill the psychophysiological requirements of nihilistic consciousness (one could also call this Paulist consciousness), and accomplish by so doing what we might call a persuasive redirection of its psychic momentum. “Great politics,” as Nietzsche conceives it, is cultural therapy, not the immediate problem-solving that “politics” has largely been reduced to today (HH 1.438, 449).

The philosophers who take this task in hand—and for Nietzsche, taking this “difficult, unwanted, unrefusable task” in hand just is philosophy (BGE 212)⁶—will “employ the preparatory work of all philosophical laborers, all subduers of the past. With creative hands they reach towards the future, and everything that is or has existed becomes their means, their tool, their hammer” (BGE 211, my emphases; and cf. BGE 61). And clearly, “everything that is or has existed” now includes, in a major way, Christianity.

The first point that we should note, then, is that the three “major” transfigurative moves in Nietzsche’s writings are all signified with profoundly Christian terms (which most Christians, especially those who do not read German, may not immediately recognize). These are: the Übermensch (Overhuman—often mistranslated as “superman”), ewige Wiederkunft/kehr (eternal recurrence/return), and Wille zur Macht (“will to power”). The words Nietzsche uses to name these moves are all standard German translations of Greek and Latin words, the discourse and debate about which have defined what it is to be Christian. In the ecclesiastical literature, the Greek hyperanthrôpos—directly translated into German as Übermensch—very often refers to Jesus himself (especially in the Orthodox tradition); the expected “second coming” of Christ is, in German, Wiederkunft/kehr Christi—though the “translated” Greek word is parousia (presence); and “will”—Wille—is a crucial Christian conception that grounds “original sin,” beginning with (but not ending with) Augustine, who uses the Latin terms voluntas and arbitrium.

In strictly Christian terms, then, these are words often used to discuss Christ,⁷ his return as savior and redeemer, and the Roman Catholic doctrine of original sin (which fundamentally depends upon the notion of “will”). It is extremely difficult to believe that Nietzsche, especially with his theological and philological education, could have been unaware of this, and we must therefore consider why he used these terms to name what were, for him, transfigurative movements beyond Christianity.

Of course, linguistic affinities are not negligible in their consequences, but without deeper structural affinities, they cannot alone suffice. Nevertheless, before turning to the “deeper” level, we must take note of a particular strategy at the level (itself already deep) of language: Nietzsche is claiming a space for the redefinition of the words he uses by creating irresolvable debate about “doctrines” in his work that employ those words, doctrines that are not there. The point is not to defend the doctrines, but to let a debate about them redefine the words (cf. BGE 4 with 18; Horace, Ars poetica 69–72). This is a lesson he learned from Plato, whose supposed doctrines of the “Forms/Ideas,” immortality of the “soul,” etc., simply are not present as doctrines in the Platonic dialogues. Similarly, there is in fact no consistent doctrine of eternal recurrence, of will to power, or of an Übermensch to be found in Nietzsche’s published work. But there are powerful impetuses to suggest that there are, and to provoke both advocacy and refutation, subtle interpretation and less thoughtful doctrinal adherence. The debate that is thereby stimulated, and not some decisive interpretation attained therein, is everything in this regard (cf. BGE 18, and its implications for BGE 19). In the activity of that debate, the terms that initially define and confine it can come to be redefined—revalued—themselves. For historical examples, one may think of the long debate opened by Augustine’s notion of “will” (arbitrium or voluntas), and how it eventually eclipsed the previous meanings of the terms he used; as well as the debate opened by Plato’s reimagining of the “soul” (psuchê), and how it eventually transformed the Homeric sense of the same word. For contemporaries of Augustine and of Plato, their new conceptualizations presented the difficulties of understanding. But for we moderns, it is the more ancient conceptualizations that are difficult—if not almost impossible—to grasp.

This is, of course, the point of such a strategy, a strategy that deliberately invites contemporary confusion in order to therapeutically shape a future human consciousness in its crucible. Perhaps better: in order to provoke and direct (in a limited way) a self-shaping of future consciousness. Not an “opposition” of one concept to another, both having the same name, but the intensification and spiritualization of the highest possibilities of the present concept in the future understanding.⁸ And this strategy at the level of words and concepts is likewise deployed by Nietzsche in his broader “polemics,” including those directed against Christianity in general.

It has been noted, by Foucault among others, that a polemic is defined by what it is a polemic against. And this is most certainly true. But we harbor a hope—and Nietzsche knows this—that what is implied in this realization is that one might somehow, some day, achieve a point at which one escapes the “against” completely. For lack of a better word, let us call this aspiration “freedom” (please note the quotation marks). This is not, however, what Nietzsche means. For Nietzsche, the polemic remains permanently, though its status in our consciousness can change. Whatever we are able to overcome through a polemic, in Nietzsche’s sense of both words, becomes part of the bedrock of our consciousness, part of the “deep-down stupidity (Dummheit)” that structures—that alone allows a structure for—the flourishing of new life and life-possibilities (cf. Graham Parkes’ chapter in this volume). Every such battle is permanently preserved and will not cease to inform who we are. Thus, for example, Homer’s moral and religious dispensation remains a part of western Europeans, despite (and because of) Plato’s victory over that dispensation. Likewise, Nietzsche’s aspirations for victory over Plato’s dispensation in no way include a fruitless annihilation thereof. This a fortiori applies as well to that most notorious of Nietzsche’s “Platonic enemies,” Christianity. Nietzsche has no hope or desire that Christianity might or should be “overcome” in Christianity’s sense of the word (i.e., an ultimate purging from the universe, physical and metaphysical, of the polemicized principle—the final triumph of “good” over “evil,” or “evil” over “good”), as such a desire would preserve in deed what it opposes in word—just as the Manichaean dualism that came to so characterize Western Christianity crept into it through Augustine’s very efforts to refute and refuse it. By the very act of opposing Manichaeism itself as an evil doctrine (as, e.g., in Confessions 8.10.22) as compared to a “true” one, Augustine cemented the very dualism that he was attempting to deny—in Christian terms, one could say that the flesh of his argument is willing, but the spirit weak. In more Nietzschean terms, Augustine said No to Manichaeism, but did Yes.

What is the consciousness with which, and upon which, the philosopher must work? It is the ramifications of this question that almost break Zarathustra, for it requires accepting and affirming the very meagerness of human reality—the “All-too-small” and “All-too-human” reality of even the greatest human beings (Z 3.13). He must love this all-too-human smallness, must love what he despises, must love his enemy.⁹ Only as such—only, that is, by fulfilling this Christian principle too—can he overcome his own nihilistic, Paulinian “loathing for all existence” (ibid), a loathing that makes his greatness too “all-too-small.” To go beyond Christianity, Zarathustra must become the first Christian, and this is his tragic moment par excellence, the moment of realizing and celebrating himself as a fate—as a Christian fate. Without doing so, his own seeming opposition to modern Christian human-being would be the equivalent of Augustine’s anti-Manichaeism: he would say No, but do Yes, and his great loathing would be the greatest self-loathing and earth-loathing imaginable.¹⁰ “O my soul,” Zarathustra, Odysseus-like, says to himself, “I taught you the despising that does not make things wormeaten, the great, the loving despising that loves most where it despises most” (Z 3.14).

The metaphysical residuum that had remained, until this point, in Zarathustra’s loathing for the smallness of human beings was the implicit assumption that in this smallness, humans had failed in some way—which implies an ideal of the human an sich, of consciousness an sich, by which such a failure might be assessed in the first place. In other words, it implies that there is another world, a “world behind” (Z 1.3) this one whose total economy of life has a different, better structure, and by which this world can and must be judged wanting. And as Lampert rightly points out, until Zarathustra’s truly redemptive “Yes-saying” to even the smallest humans, in the third book, he in fact harbors and embodies a secret need (secret from himself) for “sweet revenge on the small and vengeful”; and his own accusation against life’s accusers is itself “an accusation . . . against life insofar as it seems to need what is low.”¹¹

So long as we consider Christianity as the conflictual multiplicity it is, and has been over the millennia, rather than as the supposedly conclusive judgments about what “true” Christianity is that has emerged from that conflict, in the forms of various churches’ doctrines, then we can see that Nietzsche’s philosophy mirrors Christianity in an uncanny way. The very debate concerning the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s Übermensch—that is, whether the term refers only to one “Overhuman” who leads the other humans, or whether it implies a possibility of several or even every human being bringing him or herself up beyond their present “self”—tracks almost exactly the ambiguities exploited by Christian theologians over the centuries, who used the image of Jesus as the Übermensch to tempt believers toward an overcoming of themselves, and to thereby realize the Übermensch (i.e., what is “over” and “beyond” their specific “humanness”) that they also could be. And as with the Christians, so with Nietzsche: there is no mutual exclusivity to these different possibilities; rather, they are symbiotic.

Consider as well, in this regard, the concept (perhaps better, the conception), of “eternal recurrence.” It is critically important to remember that in the book in which Nietzsche devoted most attention to this concept, Zarathustra rejects the Spirit of Heaviness’ suggestion that time is a circle (Z 3.2.2), and the implication is strong that when his animals interpret this thought of “eternal recurrence” to him in a similar manner, Zarathustra sees them as foolishly misunderstanding it and, like Socrates in the Timaeus, simply does not respond to the “cosmology” that has been related to him (Z 3.13). When Nietzsche later, in Ecce Homo, “defines” eternal recurrence as the “unbedingten und unendlich wiederholten Kreislauf aller Dinge” (“Books,” BT 3)—the “unconditional and infinite repeated circulation of all things”—he appends an important comment that must send us back to carefully consider what is meant: the Stoics, he says, had only traces (Spuren—the Latin etymology of which is noteworthy) of this teaching. But the Stoic teaching is precisely of infinite repetitions of the same (see, e.g., the fragment from Zeno in Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 1.109 [Leipzig 1903–24, von Arnim, ed.]). If only “traces” of Zarathustra’s teaching are to be found in Stoic teaching, Nietzsche does not consider them identical, as infinitely repeating cycles of the same.

It is of course true that the original, meditative, questioning aphorism in which the thought first occurs (GS 341) mentions “unzählige Male”—“innumerable times”—of repetition and appears to have much more affinity with (and is perhaps identical with) Stoic exercise. But this would not be the only time that Nietzsche preserves the “traces” and “tracks” of the path of becoming of his thought, and we should note that when he discusses this aphorism as the “fundamental thought”—“Grundgedenken”—of Zarathustra already there in the Gay Science (EH “Books” Z 1), he is quite specifically discussing it as embryonic; that is, as a not yet fully developed part of the not yet fully developed (infant) Zarathustra. The gestational process took him 18 months (after August 1881), he tells us, and therefore GS 341 was written and published antepartum, as it were, while still in the process of maturing. Nietzsche goes out of his way to stress the metaphor of pregnancy in this section, which indicates we should treat it very seriously. One example of this is the word he first uses to describe what the thought of eternal recurrence was in relation to the book Zarathustra. He calls it the Grundconception—the “fundamental conception”—of the work. But “Conception” in Nietzsche’s German evokes the Latin conceptio (and English “conception”), which has an immediate ambiguity that “Konzeption” does not in modern German—it suggests both the mental activity we associate with “conceiving” of a notion or idea, and the act of conceiving a child, and this is why Nietzsche chose to use it. So we should not necessarily chain ourselves to resolving, in the sense of finding compatible definitions, GS 341 entirely with Nietzsche’s later work.

It is fruitful, at this point, to consider this from a Christian perspective, and offer an interpretation from that perspective. Is one of the thoughts that Nietzsche is trying to provoke a single recirculation of all things that lasts unconditionally and eternally? Ewige Wiederkunft not as an eternally repeating process of recurrence, but as a return forever—just as the anticipated Wiederkunft Christi (“return of Christ”) forecasts the return forever of Jesus Christ? The Greek word translated in Luther’s Bible as Wiederkehr or Wiederkunft (and it seems to me that this is precisely why Nietzsche will use both terms to describe the “eternal return”¹²) is parousia,¹³ which means not “return,” but “presence” (e.g., 1 Thes 3:13). A presence in which the angel of the Apocalyse promises that “chronos ouketi estai”—“time shall be no more” (Apoc. 10:6). Is the “eternal presence of the same” suggested, and suggested precisely to Christians, by Nietzsche’s ultimate affirmation of life?

Nietzsche’s interpretation of Jesus as the “son of man” in The Antichrist/ian (aph. 34) is revealing. This concept, he writes, is of “an ‘eternal’ actuality, a psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time.”¹⁴ In fact, this direct experience Jesus had of himself as eternal—as literally having no concept of time (Zeitbegriff)—is crucial to Nietzsche’s picture of him (A 33, 34, 41). There is something essential here. The very belief in a transcendental God—who always was, is, and will be—contains within it an intimation that time as human beings experience it is somehow false, a “moving image of eternity,” as Plato’s Timaeus puts it (Timaeus 37d; cf. Job 10:5, Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8). In The Antichrist/ian, the Übermensch, the “sense of the earth” (Z 1.4, p.12), just is Jesus, but Jesus understood as a hyperanthrôpos, an Overhuman, and not the personified son of the one true God. This is Jesus the rabbi, the teacher, whose example¹⁵ offers the possibility of a new and fruitful tragic being-in-the-world, in the duplicitous antagonism and cooperation with Dionysus that was once, in the tragic age of the Greeks, engaged by Apollo (it is important to remember that, for Nietzsche, it was the Apollonian aspect that perished at the hands of Socratism, not the Dionysian). And it is the life, not the death, of this Jesus that matters for Nietzsche (see A 33–35 especially). This is what Nietzsche gestures at in the last line of Ecce Homo (and perhaps the difficulty of understanding this is why he so obsessively keeps asking if anyone has understood him throughout that work, including in this last line): “– Hat man mich verstanden? – Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten . . .” – “– Has anyone understood me? – Dionysus versus the crucified one . . .” This final phrase is what in the first sentence of Ecce Homo Nietzsche has referred to as “die schwerste Forderung”—“the most difficult challenge”—that he will soon confront humanity with. And perhaps the greatest part of that challenge (and I am making this sentence intentionally ambiguous) is not to destroy the religion that has so enervated European humans, but to fulfill it. The Christian/Dionysian tragedy that Zarathustra is, takes this as its task, and by so doing inaugurates the possibility of a new—very different—tragic age.¹⁶

***

It is worth noting that even if one interprets Nietzsche’s “anti-Christianity” as a complete polemic against a truly hated enemy, one cannot (or anyway should not) ignore Nietzsche’s own awareness of the possible irony involved therein, an irony he highlights in the last two sections of The Antichrist/ian. In the penultimate §61, Nietzsche excoriates Luther for restoring the Christian church by attacking it. Only after this excoriation does Nietzsche offer, in the last section (§62), his own tremendous condemnation and attack on Christianity and the Christian church (cf. also EH “Books” Wagner §2)—a juxtaposition so striking that it simply begs the reader to bring the criticism of Luther to bear on Nietzsche’s own effort.¹⁷

The famous statement by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo in which he says, “I am the Antichrist”? Well, he doesn’t actually say this, and the qualifications he introduces are noteworthy. What he writes there is: “Ich bin, auf griechisch, und nicht nur auf griechisch, der Antichrist” (“Books,” 2; KSA 6, 302, my emphasis)—“I am, in Greek, and not only in Greek, the Antichrist/ian.” Now the word “anti,” in Greek, does not mean what it does in German (or English, for that matter). There is no sense of being an opposite, for example, in the Greek, nor does the Greek imply any lethal enmity—indeed, all it really means, in Greek, is to be standing directly before another, facing him or her. And this comes in a section in which Nietzsche disavows being able to think or feel German!

It is, of course, not easy to read Nietzsche as a Christian. This is largely because, particularly in his most powerful and direct attacks on Christianity, like The Antichrist/ian, his comments are felt so keenly precisely because they cannot be dismissed—they are at the least trenchant, and what is more, seem to spring forth from a profound compassion (among other things, of course). It is not easy to read that, in the opinion of this obviously extremely intelligent and insightful former-theologian, during the entire time of Christianity, “there have been no Christians” (A 39). It is more difficult still if one wonders whether this might in fact be true. For Christians provoked to such a thought, Nietzsche’s therapy may in fact be as rewarding as it is difficult.

Notes

1 EH “Books” BGE §2.

2 All translations from Thus Spoke Zarathustra are from Graham Parkes’ superb translation (Oxford, 2005), though I have on rare occasions modified these to draw out the nuances that I want to highlight. All translations from Nietzsche’s other works are listed at the end of my chapters, though I have frequently modified them.

3 Alighieri, Dante. 1970. Paradiso. ed. G. C. Sansoni. Firenze: G. Civelli, 842. My translation.

4 Strauss, Leo., What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 144.

5 We could also think of this in terms of what Rancière calls the “redistribution of the sensible” (The Politics of Aesthetics, pp. 13–17).

6 Cf. the description of the task of Hyllos—to burn his father Heracles alive—given him by Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae (lines 1262–3): hôs epicharton/teleous’ aekousion ergon—“a joyfully accomplished, unwanted task.”

7 The concept of Jesus qua extraordinary or overhuman being, and particularly as a model of striving for other human beings, is found in many earlier works of Christian philosophy and theology, including those of the second century “heretic” Montanus (who is said by Epiphanius to have called Jesus simply “hyperanthrôpos”—see Panarion 48: 10, 3; note that the only English translation of this misconstrues this entirely), but also William of Ockham and Nicolas of Cusa. The principle behind such a model can be summed up by the Scholastic dictum (and readers of Zarathustra may well hear echoes of this in the idea of man as “a bridge,” and “an overcoming”) “homo non proprie [or: naturaliter] humanus sed superhumanus est”—“man is not, strictly speaking, human, but overhuman” (attributed to Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae in virtutibus, since at least Saint Alfonso Maria de Liguori in the eighteenth century—see the latter’s Homo apostolicus 5.1.101; however, I do not find this phrase in Thomas’ work). The Latin superhumanus, like the Greek hyperanthrôpos, is directly translated by the German Übermensch.

The necessity of faith for Christians is also, in a curious analogy to the power of the Sirens’ song, described as an “overhuman power” (dunamis hyperanthrôpon) by Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata (II.ii.9.7.1).

8 Cf. the different evaluations of the “uses and abuses” of “blood” in Z 1. “On Reading and Writing” and 2. “On Priests.”

9 In Ecce Homo (“Books” Z 8), Nietzsche will write that “man” cannot be “an object of love” for Zarathustra, which should give us pause here. And when earlier in the same work (EH “Wise” 8) he had given the words that Zarathustra uses to describe his “redemption from disgust,” what he quotes is not “The Convalescent” from book 3 of Zarathustra, but “On the Rabble,” from book 2. But the latter specifically describes the redemption that Zarathustra only thinks he has achieved, but which is in fact a way of being that he actually needs to redeem—as illustrated by Z 3.13 and 14 (see also BGE 258, in which the “healthy aristocracy” is said to act in much the same way as Zarathustra’s “redemptive” vision in “On the Rabble.” That aphorism too seems to be a wholesale advocacy of such an aristocracy, but then Nietzsche goes out of his way to draw an analogy between it and the “Java”—actually Amazonian—vine, the sipo matador. As its name implies, this vine uses a host tree to attain its height, but in the process it kills that tree, and in so doing kills itself as well). It is significant that the latter two chapters (and those following) are never mentioned by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo—he will write only of chapters up to the immediately preceding one, “On Old and New Tablets” (save one very brief mention of the fourth book as a whole – EH “Wise” 4). Nietzsche leaves it to his reader to consider why this seemingly glaring contradiction is there, and my suggestion is that the answer lies in the explicitly stated purpose of Ecce Homo, which is for Nietzsche to say who he is (EH “Foreword” 1), and by telling himself his life (“Foreword” Conclusion) with “extreme honesty” (“Wise” 8). And as he makes clear in the first sentence of the “Books” section, “I am one thing, my writings are another.” Nietzsche is, with “extreme honesty,” acknowledging that he is not Zarathustra, nor capable of what Zarathustra is (a lesson from Plato and his Socrates?). The character of Zarathustra, or rather, the type Zarathustra (EH “Books” 1, 6), is imaginable by him, yearned for by him, but also beyond him, and therefore when he honestly appraises himself in relation to his creation, he speaks only of what he—Nietzsche—is capable of when he speaks of Zarathustra. And he is capable of writing Zarathustra, and to a certain extent writing himself into Zarathustra, but he is not capable of being Zarathustra. The last four chapters of book 3 of Zarathustra are not mentioned in Ecce Homo because these are the chapters in which Nietzsche writes beyond and over himself. There is a lesson here about philosophers: they too write beyond themselves, live beyond themselves, “live posthumously” (EH “Books” 1, A Foreword).

10 Lampert too draws attention to this fundamental struggle of Zarathustra, though without noting (I do not necessarily say without noticing) its Christian implications. See Lampert, Laurence, Nietzsche’s Teaching (Yale: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 216–18 and 94–5.

11 Lampert, p. 217.

12 For a particularly deliberate example of Nietzsche taking up both terms, though not interchangeably, see TI “Ancients” 4 and 5. The first aphorism (with Wiederkehr) takes up (Christian) sexuality, the second (with Wiederkunft) takes up (Christian) longing for eternal life per se.

13 Parousia is translated as adventus by St. Jerome in the Vulgate Bible, which does indeed mean something more like “coming” or “arrival.” But Nietzsche was a philologist par excellence and would certainly have noticed the difference.

14 “Eine ‘ewige’ Thatsächlichkeit, ein von dem Zeitbegriff erlöstes psychologisches Symbol.” (KSA 6, 206).

15 By this I do not mean the example as illustrated in BGE 269, where Nietzsche on the surface seems to suggest that Jesus needed so badly to be loved by everyone that he invented hell as a place to send those who did not do so. Nietzsche is not writing about Jesus himself there, but about the “holy disguise and fable” of Jesus—which is to say he is talking about Paul.

16 The first introduction of Zarathustra, at GS 342, is titled “Incipit tragoedia,” usually translated as “the tragedy begins.” While this translation is not wrong, and is certainly also intended to be applied to the specific tragedy of Zarathustra, it does not attend to the ambiguity that Nietzsche clearly intended (Nietzsche never writes in Latin only to look smart!). Incipit tragoedia also means more generally, “tragedy begins”—that is, tragedy in general as a new form of art and way of life—the “Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Nihilism.”

17 This technique of undermining the force of his own argument by juxtaposition is one that Nietzsche uses with some frequency. Cf., for one striking example, BGE 18 with 19.

Editions used

All translations of Nietzsche’s work have been used inasmuch as they are in accordance with and frequently modified according to: Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA). Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari, eds. Berlin: de Gruyter (1980).