7

The Decadence of Christianity

Faith, Hope, and Love: The Last Pope

The priestly bearing of the last pope and the ascetic idealism which that connotes mark a thematic shift in Zarathustra’s picaresque drama of the soul. With the last pope, Zarathustra’s aesthetics of redemption moves on from an exploration of cultural paradigms (dealt with in the preceding chapter) to an excavation of the latter’s genealogical roots in, as it were, the ascetics of redemption (to be dealt with in this chapter). These “pious” higher men, whose faith in the ascetic ideal is merely a ‘believer’s need to believe’, are all guilty of pious fraud;²¹⁵ for enveloping this ‘need for faith’ is the fog of ‘a certain pessimistic gloom, something that smells of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, and fear of new disappointments’ (GS.V.347).²¹⁶ Bound upon his conscientious wheel of fire and ice, illusion and disillusion – a vicious circle of death and resurrection – Zarathustra is stopped in his tracks by his (former) ‘rock of salvation’ (Ps. 89:26; 95:1): the Übermensch. It is with deep integrity and even deeper irony that Zarathustra, an ‘out of work’ (Z.IV.6) prophet, reflects upon his (former) apostolic ministry – undertaken in ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’ – and its implicit ascetic articles of ‘faith, hope and love’ (I Cor. 13:13) or what Nietzsche calls ‘the three Christian shrewdnesses’ (A.23).

Faith

Having proclaimed the death of God, the madman withdrew from the market square and ‘carried [his] ashes to the mountains’ (Z.Prol.2), the ashes, that is, of ‘great longing, great disgust, great weariness’ – in short, the “remains” of God (Z.IV.11). But just as in Christian mythology the ashes of man betoken the ‘sure and certain hope of his resurrection’,²¹⁷ so too do the madman’s ashes carry intimations of immortality. Indeed, after ten years in ‘azure solitude’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 6), the madman has rekindled his ashes and in the fire of his “wisdom” (Z.Prol.1) forged anew both himself and the remnant of God within him. Faith in the sun of his “wisdom”, and in the ‘gold’²¹⁸ which it will pour out into the sea of humanity (Z.III.12.3), has alchemically transformed the madman into a prophet: ‘His breath exhales gold and golden rain: thus his heart wants it. What are ashes and smoke […] to him now!’ (Z.II.18, emphasis added). It is the madman turned prophet – his eyes ablaze (fueled by longing and ‘leaden-eyed despairs’),²¹⁹ his mouth tight-lipped (thinly concealing its disgust), and his easy, dancer-like gait (belying its weary Dance of Death)²²⁰ – who in section 2 of ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’ is observed carrying his ‘fire into the valleys’. His hand having ‘welded the furthest to the nearest, and fire to spirit and joy to sorrow’ (Z.III.16.4), having welded an incandescent midday to ‘an ash-grey dawn’ (Z.III.6) and the Übermensch to the remains of God, the resurrected and re-cast madman returns to the market square to proclaim in ‘tongues of fire: It is coming, it is near, the great noontide!’ (Z.III.5.3). His new-found faith in the great noontide – ‘when man stands in the middle of his course between beast and Übermensch and celebrates his journey to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the journey to a new morning’ (Z.I.22.3) – is quintessentially faith in the ascetic ideal, for ‘this is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a dreadful void, – he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning […] and the ascetic ideal gave him a meaning!’ (GM.III.28).

Hope

In common with that of the first pope (I Pet. 1:3–12), Zarathustra’s first address to the people opens with the (“stressed”) hope of salvation: ‘Behold, I teach you the Übermensch’ (Z.Prol.3). Their putative saviours are different, of course, but it is a difference in degree not in kind. For although Peter’s redeemer is the moral Christian God, and Zarathustra’s redemptive Übermensch an immoral anti-Christian god, the same nihilistic²²¹ trinity constitutes both deities: suffering – ‘This [salvation] is a cause of great joy for you, even though you may for a short time have to bear being plagued by all sorts of trials’ (I Pet. 1:6) – cf. ‘Who alone has good reason to lie his way out of reality? One who suffers from it’ (A.15); self-contempt – ‘Do not behave in the way that you liked to before you learnt the truth’ (I Pet. 1:14) – cf. ‘Behold, I teach you the Übermensch: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can drown (untergehen). What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness arouses your disgust and also your reason and your virtue’ (Z.Prol.3); and faith in the ideal – ‘you are sure of the end to which your faith looks forward, that is, the salvation of your souls’ (I Pet. 1:9) – cf. ‘The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth’ (Z.Prol.3).

In prophesying the coming of the Übermensch (Z.Prol.4), Zarathustra takes his place among those ‘prophetic men [who] are greatly afflicted men’ (GS.316). For although Peter’s God inspires ‘superterrestrial hopes’ and Zarathustra’s Übermensch is ‘the meaning of the earth’, both superhuman figures represent the salvation from life’s miseries ‘that the prophets were looking and searching so hard for’ (I Pet. 1:10). And so far as both these gods and the minds of their makers inhabit a fictive future world (whether temporal or atemporal) – an ideal future against which the very real present is judged and condemned – Christian and anti-Christian prophet alike are ‘decadents [who] need the lie [of the ideal] – it is one of the conditions of their preservation’ (EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 2). In sacrificing an insupportable present to an equally insupportable future, in their ‘counterfeiting of transcendence and the beyond’ (CW. Postscript), both Peter and Zarathustra reveal their common roots in ressentiment. As Zarathustra teaches, it is suffering, impotence and weariness that ‘create[s] all gods and afterworlds’

(Z.I.3). For all his atheism, scepticism, immoralism and impiety, the latest pope (Zarathustra of the Prologue) no less than the earliest pope is one of ‘those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power that one calls founders of religions’ (EH.Pref.4); founded on impotence, suffering (Z.I.3) and the ‘fear of pain’, the religion of the former no less than that of the latter is ‘a religion of love’ (A.30).²²²

Love

‘I love man’ (Z.Prol.2): these are the first words spoken by Zarathustra after ten years of solitude. The significance of this declaration lies not only in its being the reason Zarathustra gives for his return to man, nor yet in its being the reason for Zarathustra’s former flight from man, but above all in its being a confession of (nihilistic) faith – faith in the ascetic ideal. Zarathustra’s faith in the higher, übermenschliche self and his ‘highest’ hope that this ‘hero in [man’s] soul’ (Z.I.8) will one day be realized, spring from a spiritual love of man. This love for the ideal in man,²²³ for the ‘creator, educator, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity, and seventh-day’ (BGE.225), is the kind of love which comes easily to the solitary who has retired far from the madding crowd, and arouses what one might term a creative pity for what in man ‘must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent and purified’ (ibid.). This type of pity longs to ‘descend to earth like a god and “with fiery arms raise up to heaven” all that is weak, human and lost’ (UM.IV.7). But, for the social animal in constant contact with the ‘creature in man’, with that which is ‘matter, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense, chaos’ (ibid.), such an ideal type of love gives rise to a degenerative pity for the all-too-human in man. This type of pity can be so overwhelming that it precipitates a self-preservative flight into solitude, which is a paradoxical act of self-denial: ‘The desert […] an avoidence of oneself (GM.III.8), the self, that is, as perceived through the (all-too-human) other.

Midway between solitude and society, ‘mountain’ and ‘valley’ (Z.Prol.2), Zarathustra oscillates between these strong and weak forms of pity. The saint, whom Zarathustra meets in the forest²²⁴ (situated between mountain and valley), represents that weak, degenerative pity which had previously driven the madman into solitude: ‘Why’, said the saint, ‘did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved man all too much? Now I love God: man I do not love. Man is too imperfect a thing for me. Love of man would kill me’ (Z.Prol.2). This ‘saint’s pity’ for man is, according to Nietzsche, ‘pity for the dirt of the human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights at which he feels pity itself as pollution, as dirt’ (BGE.271). The prophet Zarathustra, who masks the madman in the same way as the madman’s faith in the ascetic ideal ‘masks the feeling of a profound weakness, of weariness, of old age, of declining powers’ (GS.V.377), represents that strong, creative pity which wants to ‘bring man a gift’ (Z.Prol.2), a gift that will (miraculously) transform dirt into gold and the human into the suprahuman. This ‘benevolent’ pity of the stronger for the weaker is, according to Nietzsche, ‘a pleasant stirring of the acquisitive drive at the sight of weakness’ (GS.118). But, whether strong or weak, creative or degenerative, so far as each is the product of an ideal (otherworldly) love of man and thus symptomatic of faith in the ascetic ideal, both types of pity constitute ‘practical nihilism’ (A.7).

Faith in the ascetic ideal is that which binds the first pope to the last pope and the last pope to the latest pope. Under the penetrating gaze of the old Zarathustra of Book IV, the credulous Zarathustra of the Prologue appears as one of those ‘ambitious artists who like to pose as ascetics and priests but who are at bottom only tragic buffoons’ (GM.III.26). And if, in the priestly figure of the last pope, Zarathustra sees only ‘disguised affliction’ (Z.IV.6), it is precisely in the ‘refracted light’ (GS.311) of this casuistic counterfeiting that the ironic Zarathustra sees in the prophetic Zarathustra not a great man, but ‘only the actor of his own ideal’ (BGE.97): the ascetic ideal. Just as the sceptical last pope, as ‘a good servant’ of his Lord, ‘knows everything, and a number of things, also, that his master hides from himself’ (Z.IV.6), so too does an ironic Zarathustra – at once master and servant of his ascetic idealism – know exactly what his animals artfully seek to hide from him.²²⁵ He knows that adulterous relations between sly reason and promiscuous imagination, between ‘sickness and will to power’, stand at the door of his faith in the Übermensch just as ‘adultery stands at the door of [the last pope’s] faith in [his god]’ (ibid.).

When faith is lost, however, illusion slides into disillusion. In the same way as the last pope – unfree, unhappy, and redundant – sinks back into a meaningless void after the death of his god, the disenchanted latest pope languishes in cavernous despair after the godliness of his “godless” Übermensch is painfully, if ironically, discerned. How pertinent, therefore, is the last pope’s query as to whether he or the latest pope has the greater claim to godlessness. On the grounds that ‘[h]e who loved and possessed him most […] has now also lost him the most’, the last pope argues that he is ‘the more godless of us two’ (Z.IV.6). But was not the latest pope so possessed of and by his love for the ideal in man that he felt compelled to descend to earth not simply as a prophet of idealism but rather as a god – an übermenschliche ‘God of life, and poesy, and light’?²²⁶ Like the setting sun, Zarathustra ‘must descend into the depths […] and bring light to the underworld’ (Z.Prol.1), but no sooner has he arrived in the underworld than the divine sun of his “wisdom” is eclipsed by pity and the prophet Zarathustra unmasked to reveal, as ‘the actor of his own ideal’, the benighted madman. Like the young ‘god from the orient [who] was hard and revengeful’ (Z.IV.6), Zarathustra entered the underworld ‘full of wrath; / His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels, / And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire’.²²⁷ But then, like the ‘old and soft and mellow and pitying’ god from the orient, who ‘saw how man hung on the cross and could not endure it, [and whose] love for man became his hell and at last his death’ (Z.IV.6), the prophet Zarathustra ‘choked’ on his ‘saint’s pity’ for the “fallen” ropedancer, that is, for man who hangs by the rope ‘stretched between beast and Übermensch’ (Z.Prol.4).

This (elective) affinity between the latest pope and the late Christian god is made even more specific in ‘The Last Pope’ (Z.IV.6). Both were ‘hidden god[s], full of secrecy’. Both judged man by an ideal ‘of transcendence and the beyond’ – for in spite of Zarathustra’s earnest, if unrealistic, desire not ‘to be the accuser of man’ (ibid.), his tirades are those of ‘[t]he small man, especially the poet – how zealously he accuses life in words’ (Z.III.13, emphasis added). Both ‘snorter[s] of wrath’ were ‘indistinct’ – ‘They do not understand me’, bemoaned the latest pope (Z.Prol.5). But most significantly, both ‘had too many failures’. Indeed, in the light of these common weaknesses, which the old Zarathustra arguably perceives, one begins to grasp not only the decadence underlying the latest pope’s emulation of the Christian god, but, more significantly, the ironic subtext of the tragic buffoon’s declamation: ‘Rather no god [than the Christian god], rather make destiny on one’s own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself!’ (Z.IV.6).

And if the last pope seeks comfort for his loss in ‘a festival of pious memories and divine services’ (Z.IV.6), is not Zarathustra’s loss and consequent need for metaphysical comfort that much greater? Not only does Zarathustra stage his own nostalgic revue of his (former) piety and ascetic idealism, but, when his festival of impious pious memories has failed to exorcise his ‘great longing, great disgust [and] great weariness’, he then begs his needy higher men – who have come to him for comfort – to humour him with talk of ‘my gardens, of my Isles of the Blest, of my beautiful new race’ (Z.IV.11). To disparage the need for ‘metaphysical comfort’ – in Part I, an older, and supposedly wiser, Zarathustra had chided the young Zarathustra for having once ‘cast his delusion beyond man, like all otherworldlings’ (Z.I.3) – and then plead with his fellow decadents to satisfy precisely this vilified need for the ‘holy lie’ of otherworldly idealism, is blatant hypocrisy. This wilful act of self-deception discloses a loss so profound that self-denial²²⁸ (the “cardinal sin” in Zarathustra’s morality of life), with its implicit denial of the ‘will to suffer’ (GS.338) and the Dionysian ‘will to life’ (TI ‘What I owe to the ancients’ 5),²²⁹ is the terrible price of immorality that Zarathustra is prepared to pay for relief (however brief) from suffering.

In this refracted light of ‘faults and blunders, [… of] my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion, my tears, my vanity, my owlish seclusions, my contradictions’ (GS.311), the latest pope no doubt sees himself as possessing a far greater claim to “godlessness” than the last pope. By playing fast and loose with the “shades” of piety and impiety – which, like the heavy clouds of a ‘certain pessimistic gloom’, hover ironically around the adjective ‘godless’ – Zarathustra commits a pious fraud when, notwithstanding his ‘love [of] everything that is clear-eyed and honest of speech’ (Z.IV.6), he refers to himself as ‘the godless Zarathustra’ (ibid.). Thus, if the latest pope is ‘too weak’ to lift the melancholy from the last pope’s shoulders (Z.IV.6), it is simply because the melancholy and impotence of the former (‘His is the melancholy of incapacity’ CW. Postscript.2) is far greater than that of the latter. For the last pope is expected not only to resign himself to the death of his god, but (in “loving” memory, perhaps, of his late Christianity) to play the good Samaritan and resurrect with a litany of lies the god of him who is most godless: ‘Speak to me of my gardens’, begs Zarathustra, ‘of my Isles of the Blest, of my beautiful new race’ (Z.IV.11).

Bad Conscience, Shame, and Pity: The Ugliest Man

Upon entering the valley known to the shepherds as ‘Serpent’s Death’, Zarathustra is ‘plunged into dark recollections’ (Z.IV.7). He recalls, no doubt, how during his former sojourn there he had discerned in the ‘deathly-grey twilight’ the pitiful face of ‘the most solitary man’ (Z.III.2.1); and we, the readers, recall how in the parable of the shepherd and his serpent the most solitary man had dramatized his longed-for victory over suffocating sorrow (Z.III.2.2). As legend teaches, sorrow is the bitter fruit of an hubristic lust for knowledge. ‘The tree of knowledge [robs] us of the fruit of life’:²³⁰ just as Eve’s desire to ‘be as Gods, / Knowing both Good and Evil as they know’, fails to ‘leade, / To happier life’;²³¹ just as Ulysses’ ‘grey spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought’ – a noble desire ‘Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods’ – finds itself smouldering in Dante’s Inferno (canto xxvi) rather than effulgent in ‘the Happy Isles’;²³² just as Manfred’s aspirations ‘beyond the dwellers of the earth’ teach him only what the Fates already know: ‘That knowledge is not happiness’;²³³ just as Faust, ‘the modern man of culture, […] storms unsatisfied through all the faculties’ until finally ‘he yearns for a shore in the wide and barren sea of knowledge’ (BT.18); so Zarathustra, ‘who lives so that he may know and who wants to know so that one day the Übermensch may live [… thereby] wills his own destruction’ (Z.Prol.4)²³⁴ – for ‘he will yet freeze to death on the ice of knowledge!’ (Z.III.6).

‘“Why have knowledge at all?”’ (BGE.230). This is the riddle which lies behind the riddle posed by ‘the vision of the most solitary man’ (Z.III.2.1) and by the ghastly vision of the ‘ugliest man’ (Z.IV.7). As the dramatic encounters of the last five sections amply demonstrate, an audacious spirit of inquiry leads inexorably to a rancorous spirit of gravity. There we saw how the age of reason degenerates into the age of romantic pessimism (Z.IV.2); noble disgust for man into ignoble pity for man (Z.IV.3); a conscientious spirit into a penitential spirit (Z.IV.4); intellectual conscience into bad conscience (Z.IV.5); and faith into disillusion (Z.IV.6). Leaden-limbed and leaden-tongued, the ressentiment-riddled spirit of gravity stalks the pages of Zarathustra. He is the hunter who, ‘hung with ugly truths, the spoil of his hunt, […] return[s] gloomily from the forest of knowledge’ (Z.II.13, emphasis added). He is the ‘solemn […] penitent of the spirit [… whose] ugliness’ elicits from the Zarathustra of Part IV shame and pity rather than mocking laughter (ibid.). His voice is the ‘gurgling, rasping’ voice of bad conscience which has ‘stammered for too long’, and his feet are ‘the biggest and heaviest feet [… which] tread all roads to death and destruction’ (Z.IV.7). In short, the spirit of gravity is the ugliest man. And whereas, for Nietzsche, man is ‘the most chronically and profoundly sick of all sick animals’ (GM.III.13) and thus the ugliest of creatures (‘It is to be doubted whether a traveller would find anywhere in the world regions uglier than the human face’ HH.I.320), for Zarathustra, the ugliest man of all is to be found in the forest and desert regions of the world where penitents of the spirit scourge themselves with their bad knowledge and where erstwhile shepherds choke to death on the heavy, black ‘serpent of knowledge’ (Z.I.22.1).

Knowledge, like Christianity, is ‘a hangman’s metaphysics’ (TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ 7), demanding of its martyrs the ‘sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit’ (BGE.46). But whereas the Christian’s sacrifice is imposed from without, that of the seeker after truth is self-induced. Paradoxically, it is precisely the free, proud and bold spirit of the genuine ‘hero in quest of truth’ (Z.I.20), rather than the accommodating will to popular “truth” of the so-called ‘famous wise men’ (Z.II.8), that falls victim to the very freedom, pride and boldness that it seeks to validate. Unlike the celebrated “wise” men who, as economists of truth guided by the law of supply and demand, are revered by those whom they serve, the enlightened man, a gruesome sacrifice on the altar of truth, is ‘despised and rejected by men, / a man of sorrows, and acquainted with sickness, / and as one from whom men hide their faces’ (Isa. 53:3). Like Christ, prophetically ‘so disfigured […] that he seemed no longer human’ (Isa. 52:14), the ugliest man, ‘shaped like a man, but scarce like a man, a thing unspeakable’ (Z.IV.7), symbolizes the ugliness of truth. If knowledge of truth is suffering and if ‘everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine’ (A.51), then truth is a ‘hangman-god’ (Z.IV.5.1) and the paradoxical symbol of Christ on the cross another formulation of the riddle lurking behind the riddle of the ugliest man: ‘What is the meaning of all will to truth?’ (GM.III.27). ‘Despoild of Innocence, of Faith, of Bliss’,²³⁵ the crucified Christ, like the ugliest man, hangs on the cross of knowledge, and Zarathustra, who has ‘reaped disgust as [his] single truth’ (Z.IV.5.2), sees in the face of the ugliest man the unspeakable fate of one who had lived for knowledge and who once had faith in the blissful innocence and majestic beauty of the Übermensch. Faced with this ugliest of truths, Zarathustra’s pride blushes for shame, his hope for man collapses into pity for man, and his all-consuming disgust – at man, at knowledge, but most unbearably of all, at self-knowledge – produces ‘the gloominess and the related sorrow of bad conscience’ (GS.53).

Bad Conscience

‘What is revenge upon the witness?’ (Z.IV.7). This is the rhetorical riddle which the ugliest man puts to Zarathustra, and which the latter has no difficulty, other than reluctance, in solving. Bad conscience is the riddle which the ugliest man represents, the bad conscience of those ‘great thinkers’ (GS.53) whose honest will to truth, ‘foul’d in Knowledge’s dark Prison house’,²³⁶ has finally taken revenge upon itself. Truth is not beauty,²³⁷ ‘for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.’²³⁸ This violation of honesty out of love for the beautiful lie occurs when bad conscience takes revenge upon intellectual conscience. And when Zarathustra witnesses his own prostitution of honesty – ‘that youngest of virtues’ (Z.I.3) – his fate, in common with all higher men, is tragically sealed. With ‘unblinking eye and the glance of eternity’ (Z.I. 14), this omniscient god within Zarathustra witnesses with horror its own corruption, for is not the violation of innocent purity the ugliest and most unbearable sight of all? With eyes which ‘pierce like arrows thoughts and thoughts behind thoughts’ (Z.II.20), riddles and riddles behind riddles, Zarathustra’s intellectual conscience scrutinizes the masquerade of unadulterated pessimism: how rulers serve (Z.IV.3), and scientists lack conscience (Z.IV.4), and artists lie (Z.IV.5), and godless popes commit pious frauds (Z.IV.6). But at the sight of the unmasked ugliest man, of his own ‘corruption [and] ruination’ (BGE.269), Zarathustra is overcome with the pity which has been welling up within him since his first encounter with the two kings: self-pity.

Self-pity is the ultimate sin to which the ugliest man seduces Zarathustra: pity for the loss of his former freedom, pride and self-confidence. Felled by self-pity, Zarathustra ‘sank down all at once, like an oak-tree that has long withstood many woodcutters’ (Z.IV.7). In the Old Testament, the oak-tree symbolizes human pride,²³⁹ and it is to this symbolism that the narrator of Zarathustra arguably refers. Honesty is the arch-enemy of human pride, and it is this purest of virtues which distinguishes the enlightened man from the “wise” man and, in a darker, more sinister fashion, the ugliest man from the higher men whom Zarathustra has thus far encountered. Unlike the soothsayer whose bad tidings flash without trace across his face; and the king on the right whose disgust is, to some extent, kept in check by the king on the left; and the conscientious man of spirit whose shallow scientific rationalism saves him from the abysmal depths of pessimism; and the sorcerer whose vanity paints over the ugliness of disease; and the last pope whose blindness in one eye impairs the divining powers of intellectual conscience; the ugliest man is the abhorrent face of intellectual conscience – he is the spirit of gravity. As the personification of bad conscience come to consciousness, the ugliest man has the edge on all the other woodcutters who would seduce Zarathustra to self-pity. As the worm of bad conscience, which has eaten its way through the long-enduring oak, this particular woodcutter knows precisely where the wood is most rotten and thus where best to strike. Just as in Isaiah the felling of the oak-tree symbolizes the moment when ‘human pride lower[s] its eyes [and] the arrogance of men [is] humbled’ (Isa. 2:11), so the felling of the ‘wise, proud Zarathustra’ by the ‘malicious lightning eyes’ (Z.IV.5.1) of the ugliest woodcutter, marks the moment of truth when Zarathustra’s pity for man collapses into self-pity, and his pride blushes for shame.

Shame

Shame is symptomatic of ‘the morbid pampering and moralizing [… of] animal “man”’ (GM.II.7), and Nietzsche traces this emasculation of man back to Socrates and Plato. To these famous “wise” men Nietzsche attributes not the source but rather the principal agency of man’s decline. For their own part, these ‘declining types’ are merely ‘symptoms of [a] decay’ (TI ‘The Problem of Socrates’ 2) which in turn can be traced back to the fall of proud reason – reason which, like Lucifer, was ‘once fairer than the light.’²⁴⁰ Confounded by the inscrutability of ‘the dark desires’ (ibid. 10), and reasoning that if ‘the instincts want to play the tyrant; one must devise a counter-tyrant who is stronger’ (ibid. 9), proud reason turns tyrant and projects the shame of its rational impotence onto the irrational omnipotence of the instincts. Translated back into the history of man, Socrates’ hypocritical faith in reason can be seen to be a necessary one. Thrusting with the syllogism (ibid. 7) and fencing with the dialectic (ibid. 8), Socrates not only revelled in a new and sophisticated form of agon (ibid.) from which his instincts were by their very nature excluded, but found thereby ‘his means, his cure, his personal trick of self-preservation’ (ibid 9). Socratic rationalism provided reason, on the one hand, with the tools of its tyranny and, on the other – via its insidious ‘equation of reason = virtue = happiness’ (ibid.4) – with its “moral” justification. In ‘that bizarrest of equations’ (ibid), reason was simultaneously defiled and deified, sacrificed and sanctified. But this diadem on the head of the ugliest of sages (ibid 3) was designed to serve the same purpose as the crown worn by the ugliest man (Z.IV.11): to disguise the shame of self-knowledge. Revenge on the reflective witness is the meaning of all will to truth, for, like ‘all great things’, an audacious will to truth ‘bring[s] about [its] own destruction through an act of self-transcendence’ (GM.III.27). And just as bad conscience is a form of revenge directed at knowledge but in actuality wrought upon intellectual conscience, so Socratic ‘dialectics [is…] a form of revenge’ (TI ‘The Problem of Socrates’ 7) directed at the instincts but wrought against reason.

Shame is the misbegotten and parricidal child of pride, and just as the shame of bad conscience murders the noble pride of intellectual conscience, so the ‘petty shame’ (Z.III.14) of the mind’s proud but ‘petty reason’ murders the ‘great reason’ of the body (Z.I.4). This degeneration of Sophia into sophist, reason into rationalist, and honesty into casuistry, marks the turning point in the history of man. Henceforth, the pitiful face of the ugliest man – with its ‘weary pessimistic glance, [its] mistrust of the riddle of life, [and its] icy No of disgust with life’ – will increase ‘man’s shame before man’ (GM.II. 7). ‘Shame, shame, shame’, as Zarathustra teaches in his denunciation ‘of the compassionate’, is ‘the history of man! / And that is why he who is noble bids himself not to shame: he bids himself to be ashamed before all who suffer.’ (Z.II.3) And yet, as his encounter with the ugliest man seems to demonstrate, by withholding his helping hand and his pitying ‘look and word’ (Z.IV.7) from the ugliest man, Zarathustra simply increases his own shame and his own pity, that is to say, shame before himself and pity for himself. At what price moral integrity? To pity ‘the shame of the great sufferer’ (ibid.) at the moral cost of seriously wounding the latter’s already ‘sorely injured pride’ (Z.II.3) is practical nihilism; but to feel shame before the sufferer at the even greater moral cost of paralyzed pride (Z.IV.7) and crippling self-pity is impractical nihilism. Surely, the increase in shame and loss of pride in the pitied ugliest man would be negligible in comparison to that accruing to the shamed Zarathustra. But moral integrity finally wins out and Zarathustra, taking the advice of the late saint, resolves to ‘take something off [suffering humanity] and bear it with them’ (Z.Prol.2) rather than bestow upon mankind his gift of the Übermensch. But in offering himself as satisfactio vicaria, Zarathustra sacrifices his noble pride to ignoble shame, his shame before man to shame before himself, and his liberating pity – ‘However powerfully pity affects us, in a certain sense it nevertheless delivers us from the primal suffering of the world’ (BT.21) – to paralyzing self-pity.

Pity

Zarathustra’s ‘greatest danger’ (GS.271)²⁴¹ lies in self-pity. With the crucifixion of the higher man, and thus his own tragic fate, continually before his eyes (BGE.269), Zarathustra suffers from a severe case of over(empathic)-identification. This ‘species of sympathy’, which ‘is nothing other than an illness’, is akin to ‘a Christian hypochondria which assails those solitary, religiously inclined people who have the suffering and death of Christ incessantly before their eyes’ (HH.I.47). In both cases, pity is a powerful, if morally (in the non-Christian sense) deleterious, palliative: immoral because pity’s will to power is a will ‘to abolish suffering’ (BGE.225), and because suffering, at least in Zarathustra’s view, is something divine. Pity should be a crucifixion rather than an alleviation of pain, and pitying hands should sooner be nailed to the cross (Z.Prol.3) than be free to throw alms to those who suffer (Z.Prol.2). ‘Is not pity the cross on which he who loves man is nailed?’ (Z.Prol.3), asks Zarathustra, and is not his later pity for the ugliest man – a pity withheld – precisely such a crucifixion?

In Zarathustra’s first sermon to the people, he discourses on ‘the hour of the great contempt’ (Z.Prol.3) when a new morality of integrity will vanquish the old Christian ‘morality of pity’ (GM.Pref.6). And, as he is to discover in Book IV, this morality of integrity is indeed a hangman’s metaphysics. The hour of Zarathustra’s great contempt and moral integrity is the hour of his crucifixion: if ironic distance has held Zarathustra’s ‘hypochondria’ at bay and delivered him from the soothsayer’s pessimism, the king on the right’s disgust, the conscientious man of spirit’s lack of conscience, the sorcerer’s counterfeiting, and the pope’s metaphysical need, the repulsive sight of the ugliest man – representing the overpowering immediacy of bad conscience – precludes any contrivance of distance. The ugliest woodcutter not only fells the lofty Zarathustra but nails the latter’s pity for the ‘suffering, doubting, despairing, drowning, freezing’ (Z.IV.7) higher men to the cross of self-pity. And yet, as the ugliest man explains, Zarathustra’s crucifixion by the vengeful hand of his own bad conscience had to happen because his proud, omniscient and ironic intellectual conscience

… looked with eyes that saw everything – he saw the depths and abysses of man, all his hidden disgrace and ugliness.

His pity knew no shame: he crept into my foulest corners. This most curious, over-intrusive, over-compassionate one had to die.

He always saw me: on such a witness I would have revenge – or cease to live myself.

The god who saw everything, even man: this god had to die! Man could not endure that such a witness should live.

Thus spoke the self-pitying voice of bad conscience.

With the felling of the oak, the mighty ones are brought low. Just as in Zechariah ‘[t]he wailing of the shepherds is heard; their glorious pastures have been ruined’ (Zech. 11:3), so too in Zarathustra the distressed cry of the ruined higher man resounds through the valley which the shepherds call ‘Serpent’s Death’. Brought low by bad knowledge and bad conscience, by disillusion and despair, the fallen higher man, like fallen reason, seeks redemption from self-knowledge; for if suffering is divine, the desire for ‘absence of suffering’ (GM.III.17) is quintessentially human. ‘Redemption itself, total hypnotization and repose’, is far from being a ‘liberation from all illusion’, and even further from being “knowledge”, “truth” and “being” (ibid.). On the contrary, redemption is a need engendered by knowledge, truth and being, and is manufactured by the artisans of illusion. Not ‘through virtue and moral improvement’ is redemption attained (ibid.), but through ‘sly’ invention and ‘slippery’ circumvention: only the ‘fluttering’ eagle of imagination, the ‘crawling’ serpent of reason, and the occasional buffonic ‘leap’ of irony can deliver man from his suffering. Accordingly, Zarathustra advises the ugliest man to seek repose in the cavernous workshop of the mind ‘where ideals are manufactured’ (GM.I.14):

My cave is big and deep and has many corners, there the most hidden may find his hiding-place; and close by there are a hundred sly and slippery ways for crawling, fluttering and leaping creatures […]

And speak first and foremost with my animals! The proudest animal and the cleverest animal – they may well be the right counsellors for us both! (Z.IV.7)

Indeed! For an honestly reflective higher man afflicted with bad conscience, ‘secret shame’ (ibid.), and self-pity, what better physicians than shrewd reason and proud imagination? Between them, the eagle and serpent will transform bad conscience into good, secret shame into posturing pride, and self-pity into self-confidence.

Meditation, Benevolence, and Philanthropy: The Voluntary Beggar

And so the pilgrim’s regress continues. Re-viewing yet another ‘sun of humanity’ (D.575) sink into roseate remembrance as he rounds the final cape of dashed hope, Zarathustra must wonder whether it will not be said of him one day ‘that [he] too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India – but that it was [his] fate to be wrecked against infinity’ (ibid.). For above all, Zarathustra knows ‘from the adventures of his own most authentic experience how a discoverer and conqueror of the ideal feels’ (GS.V.382). As a discoverer of the ideal, he knows how it feels to believe, with the soothsayer, in strong wines of wisdom;²⁴² with the two kings, in a nobility of the future; with the conscientious man of spirit, in the absolute authority of scientific explanation; with the sorcerer, in the heroic search for truth; with the old pope, in otherworldly idealism; with the ugliest man, in the zealous pursuit of knowledge to the point of martyrdom; and now, with the voluntary beggar, in the redemptive properties of the contemplative life: it feels good. But when it comes to ‘conquering’ the ideal, to exposing the nihilism and ressentiment which lie at the root of this optimism, then, precisely because faith in the ascetic ideal has engendered such a profound feeling of (misplaced) optimism, the correspondent feelings of disillusion, self-deception, and profound pessimism affectively reduce to pyrrhic victories every one of Zarathustra’s so-called conquests of the ideal. It is this dual sense of victory and loss, of health and sickness, that characterizes what Nietzsche calls the ‘new health’ (ibid.) and colours Zarathustra’s blush of “health” with a decidedly hectic hue.

Rumination and self-parody are the means by which Zarathustra maintains a precarious balance between a will to illusion and a will to truth, between life-preserving nihilism and suicidal nihilism. Only the bathos of ironic distance saves him from sinking, along with each of his ideals (‘Not only one sun had set for me’ Z.III.2.1), into the abyss of nihilistic pessimism. But although this obsessive reopening and poking of old wounds – for the sake of proving the veracity of Nietzsche’s oft-cited military maxim: ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ (TI ‘Maxims and Arrows’ 8) – has much of the machismo about it, doing battle with fallen heroes is less a sign of courageous strength than of ‘sickness unto death’; most of all, however, it is symptomatic of ressentiment. And when cankerous ressentiment turns the ‘memory [into] a festering wound’ (EH ‘Why I am so wise’ 6), the psychological effects are not dissimilar to the physiological ones arising from a stomach ulcer. Thus, the patient: ‘digests less well’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 5) – his past deeds “repeat” on him; ‘does not like to move’ (ibid.) – apathy and despondency incapacitate him; and ‘is all too susceptible to feeling chills as well as mistrust’ (ibid.) – the frostbite of solitude and chilling self-doubt leading to the following self-diagnosis: ‘Anybody who, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the colours of affliction, green and grey with revulsion, satiety, sympathy, gloominess and loneliness, is certainly not a man of higher tastes; assuming, however, that he does not take upon himself all this weight and aversion (Unlust) voluntarily, that he forever avoids it and remains […] quietly and proudly hidden in his castle, then one thing is certain: he is not made, nor predestined, for knowledge’ (BGE.26).²⁴³

It was while he was suffering from these symptoms – (a) a pathological preoccupation with his past deeds; (b) an inability to free himself from the rut of recollection; and (c) a hypersensitivity to the chill of loneliness and self-doubt – that Nietzsche wrote Part IV of Zarathustra. As he himself confesses in his “autobiography”:²⁴⁴ ‘Except for those ten-day works [that is, Parts I to III of Zarathustra], the years during and above all after Zarathustra were [marked by] a crisis without equal’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 5). Part IV falls within and deals specifically with that period of crisis following upon the completion of Parts I to III, and it was in such a state of mind that Nietzsche ‘once sensed the proximity of a herd of cows, even before I saw it, because of the return of milder and philanthropic thoughts: they had warmth’ (ibid.). Thus, in the opening of ‘The Voluntary Beggar’ (Z.IV.8), the reader finds Zarathustra not only suffering the same symptoms as his maker, but experiencing the same compensatory²⁴⁵ sensations:

When Zarathustra had left the ugliest man, he was frozen and he felt his solitude: for much that was cold and lonely passed through his mind so that even his limbs had become cold. But as he climbed on and on, now up, now down […] all at once he became warmer and more cheerful again.

‘What has happened to me?’ he asked himself. ‘Something warm and living refreshes me that must be nearby.

‘Already I am less alone; unconscious (unbewußt) companions and brothers roam about me, their warm breath touches my soul.’²⁴⁶

But as he looked about him and sought the comforter of his loneliness: behold, there were cows standing together on a hillock; their proximity and smell had warmed his heart. But these cows seemed to listen eagerly to one that spoke, and took no heed of him who approached.

The man whom Zarathustra discovers preaching to the cows is, of course, the voluntary beggar; and if the cows represent ‘the return of milder and more philanthropic thoughts’, then the voluntary beggar arguably represents the philanthropic thinker of such thoughts. On one level, this thinker is clearly Zarathustra, but on another, the voluntary beggar who converses with animals – here referred to by Zarathustra as his ‘brothers’²⁴⁷ – is just as clearly a figurative allusion to St Francis of Assisi. But while the similarities between Zarathustra and St Francis are certainly striking, it is likely that Zarathustra’s comparative allusion is intended more as a suggestion and aspiration than a felt and acknowledged identity. For, upon closer inspection, and with one or two exceptions, these apparent similarities are found to conceal intrinsic dissimilarities of which Zarathustra would doubtless have been aware.

Meditation

Zarathustra and St Francis both stress the importance of meditation (symbolized in Zarathustra by ruminating cows) for the edification of the individual soul and, by exemplary and pedagogic extension, the collective soul. But whilst, for St Francis, meditation was in some measure a means to subsequent action, for the Zarathustra of Part IV, it is an impediment to action.²⁴⁸ In Zarathustra’s case, chewing the cud is symptomatic of indigestion, that is, of an inability to have done with the past.

After having completed Zarathustra, the protagonist of Part IV suffers from ‘the rancune of what is great: everything great, a work, a deed, once accomplished, immediately turns against the man who did it. By doing it he has become weak; he can no longer endure his deed, he can no longer face it’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 5). An unconditional will to truth forces into reluctant and volatile co-existence practice and theory, the real and the ideal, intellectual conscience and bad conscience. As ‘physician and patient in one’ (HH.II.Pref.5), Zarathustra must undergo the same examination as that to which he subjects others, for the same will to truth that in Parts I to III disclosed the nihilism that masquerades as idealism – the ressentiment of the otherworldly (I), the asceticism of knowledge (II), and the escapism of solitude (III) – compels the Zarathustra of Part IV to recognize in himself the same insidious nihilism. Thus, in Part I, the ‘conqueror of the ideal’ denounced ‘the despisers of the body’ (Z.I.4) who ‘hearkened to preachers of death’ (Z.I.3), and exhorted man to hearken instead ‘to the voice of the healthy body’ (ibid.). But is not Zarathustra’s masochistic scab-picking in Part IV indicative of self-loathing, is not his incessant harking-back to irrevocable past deeds merely contempt for the self that can ‘no longer do that which it most loves to do: to create beyond itself’ (Z.I.4)²⁴⁹ In Part II, he proclaimed that although ‘all deep knowledge flows cold’ (Z.II.8), it must yet learn ‘to smile’ (Z.II.13). But is not Zarathustra so chilled to the marrow, frozen to death on the ice of knowledge, that he can no longer run ‘with warm feet and warm thoughts […] to the sunny corner of [his] mount of olives’ (Z.III.6)? For unlike St Francis, who ‘deliberately did not see the mob for the men’,²⁵⁰ Zarathustra’s sunny thoughts are clouded over precisely with disgust for ‘mob pride’ and for ‘the slow rebellion of the mob’ which has produced ‘mob above [and] mob below’ (Z.IV.8).²⁵¹ Lastly, in Part III, notwithstanding his pæan to the still and silent mountain-air of solitude – which delivers him from the ‘noise and bad breath’, the ‘poisonous flies’, and the loneliest loneliness, of the market-place – Zarathustra maintained that his ‘greatest danger always lay in indulgence and sufferance’ (Z.III.9). But is not hypersensitivity his greatest danger: ‘the absurd sensitivity of the skin to small stings, a kind of helplessness before everything small […] caused by the enormous squandering of all defensive energies which is a presupposition of every creative deed, [of] every deed that issues from one’s most authentic, innermost, nethermost regions’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 5)?²⁵²

Meditation, which is a sign of health for the man of action, is for the man of inaction a sign of decadence. ‘Sitting on a stone before his cave and gazing silently out’ (Z.IV.1), Zarathustra appears to possess the serenity of Buddha, but behind his meditative gaze the penitential spirit rages. Embroiled in interminable hostilities with ‘It was’, a fragmented, ressentiment-riddled and enfeebled Zarathustra struggles to ‘will it thus! Thus shall I will it’ (Z.II.20). Thwarted, however, by the resentful ‘spirit of revenge’, Zarathustra’s ‘creative will’ (ibid.) suffocates on recollection (BGE.282) and thereby loses the ability ‘to create beyond itself’ (Z.I.4).

Benevolence

In a utopian vision, Nietzsche envisaged meditation as a customary daily activity that would transform every day into ‘a festival of attained and attainable dignity of human reason: a new and fuller blossoming and efflorescence of the teacher-ideal, in which the priest, the artist and the physician, the man of knowledge and the man of wisdom, are blended into one, so that their separate virtues also necessarily appear as one complete virtue in their teaching itself, in their delivery [and] their methods’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 180). It is a vision which Zarathustra holds in common with St Francis and which both ascetics endeavoured to put into practice: St Francis, who ‘looked to deeds rather than to discourses and doctrines’,²⁵³ by example, and Zarathustra, who ‘sp[oke] to his pupils differently than to himself (Z.II.20), by doctrines and discourses.

Zarathustra baptizes this consummate and ‘highest virtue’ the ‘bestowing virtue’ (Z.I.22), and its pre-eminent position in Zarathustra’s table of values is evidenced by the fact that Zarathustra opens and closes with its putative hero overburdened with the fruit of many years’ meditation and anxious to bestow the same upon the benighted multitudes below. In the Prologue, Zarathustra pictures himself as the ideal teacher ‘whose soul is lavish, who neither wants nor returns thanks; for he always gives and keeps nothing for himself (Z.Prol.4); who will ‘bestow and distribute until the wise amongst men rejoice again in their folly, and the poor in their riches’ (Z.Prol.1). But already in Part I, the visionary scope of Zarathustra’s ideal has been greatly diminished by the people’s mocking response to his sermon composed on the mount, and it is to a reduced flock that Zarathustra teaches ‘the friend and his overflowing heart […] in whom the world stands complete, a cup of goodness – the creative friend, who always has a complete world to bestow’ (Z.I.16) and whose bestowing virtue ‘compel[s] all things to come to you and into you, that they may flow back from your fountain as gifts of your love’ (Z.I.22.1). By Part II, however, Zarathustra’s fountain has all but dried up for want of thanks and requited love; deeply resenting ‘the joy of the receiver’, which he has never known (‘They take from me: but do I yet touch their souls? A gulf stands between giving and receiving’ Z.II.9), Zarathustra ‘would like to rob those to whom I give’ (ibid.) as recompense for the unkindness of man’s ingratitude. By Part III, he has abandoned man altogether; and yet, that which sustains him in his solitude is the desperate hope ‘That the lonely height may not always be lonely and content with itself; that the mountain may descend to the valley and the wind of the heights to the lowlands’ (Z.III.10.2). Finally, at the close of Part IV, notwithstanding Zarathustra’s (make-)belief that he is ‘ripe’ enough to return to man and to bestow upon him his “virtue”; notwithstanding ‘the sign’ and the glorious vision of a radiant Zarathustra emerging from his dark cave, ‘glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from behind dark mountains’ (Z.IV.20); the image that obstinately lingers on is the penultimate one – that of Zarathustra sitting upon ‘the great stone and meditat[ing]’ (ibid.) … and meditating … and meditating.

This desire for ‘hearty help, benefaction and benevolence [combined] with the drive to clean and clear thinking’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 196) is satisfied in the life of St Francis. For Zarathustra, however, it remains an unfulfilled desire, expressing instead the paradoxical impulse that drives him ‘now up, now down’ (Z.IV.8): to solitude and society, to thought and deed, to affirmation and disgust, to the warmth of philanthropic thoughts and the silent, gloomy ‘wretchedness of all givers’ (Z.II.9). In the figure of the voluntary beggar – ‘who was ashamed of his riches and of the rich, and fled to the poorest that he might give them his abundance and his heart. But they received him not’; who thereby learned ‘how it is harder to give well than to take well, and that to give well is an art, the ultimate, craftiest master-art of kindness’ (Z.IV.8) – Zarathustra perceives his own failure as a teacher. And this failure, marked by the scoffing crowds, recalls and reflects the difficult beginnings of St Francis’ ministry: ‘they covered him with insults, calling him a fool and a madman, and even throwing dirt and stones at him.’²⁵⁴ But whereas the ‘Little Poor Man’ scorned the ridicule of the people and continued to bestow and to distribute until the poor rejoiced in their riches, Zarathustra’s ‘hand and heart [… grew] callous through nothing but distributing’ (Z.II.9), for he craved love and gratitude more than he desired benefaction and benevolence. And whereas St Francis’ separate virtues were blended into one complete virtue and were reflected in the method and delivery of his teaching,²⁵⁵ Zarathustra’s cup of contempt and ressentiment ranneth over into his discourse while ‘radiant eyes and a benevolent smile [supplied] the kind of applause rendered to the whole great universal comedy of existence’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 24) – a black comedy in which Zarathustra’s ‘rose-wreath crown’ of laughter (Z.IV. 13.20) is set about with thorns. In short, while St Francis can arguably be seen as an almost perfect representative of the ‘teacher-ideal’, Zarathustra remains a teacher of the ideal.

Philanthropy

As mentioned earlier in this section, there are, however, two unequivocal points of affinity between Zarathustra and St Francis, and these concern the precise nature of their philanthropy and affirmative stance towards life. In respect of the former, there is a deep affinity between the specific type of philanthropy espoused by both missionaries. In his book, St Francis of Assisi, G K Chesterton distinguishes between the literal and received sense of philanthropist: ‘A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids.’²⁵⁶ The point that Chesterton is making here is that St Francis (like Zarathustra) was not a lover of mankind, of the all-too-human Everyman, but of that which is highest in man. It is precisely this love of the higher man – a love which lies at the root of Zarathustra’s ‘misanthropy’²⁵⁷ – which led Chesterton to make the following analogy (which is especially, if not more, applicable to Zarathustra): ‘But as St Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.’²⁵⁸

With regard to affirmation, just as St Francis ‘strove to live always in jubilation of heart’ and, above all, to avoid ‘the deadly sickness of despondency (“accidia”)’,²⁵⁹ so too did Zarathustra canonize laughter (Z.IV.13.18) and strive towards ‘painlessness [and] the removal of apathy’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 187). Theirs was no Dionysian affirmation, however, for at noontide, when the demon of accidia is said to tempt ‘wandering monks and solitaries’,²⁶⁰ neither was so well-disposed either to himself or his life ‘to crave nothing more fervently’ than the eternal recurrence of this greatest of weights (GS.341). But, to be fair, neither did they hurl themselves to the ground and gnash their teeth (ibid.). Rather, they sought refuge in Apollonian artifice: St Francis in prayer,²⁶¹ and Zarathustra in whatever his hermit’s pets happened to conjure up for him. And it is on the basis of this Apollonian affinity, as it were, that Zarathustra divines the voluntary beggar’s love of honey – the need, that is, to sweeten the meditative life with either prayer or parody and to ‘abstain from all heavy thoughts that inflate the heart’ Z.IV.8). Accordingly, Zarathustra invites him to meet with his animals, to speak with them ‘of the happiness of animals’, and to partake thereby of his ‘new […] golden honey […] cold as ice’ (ibid.), chilled so as to sweeten the ascetic’s bad conscience without cloying his good.

Penitent of the Spirit: The Shadow

Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Fool: Lear’s shadow.²⁶²

The romantic device of self (as opposed to ego)-projection – which, as the last seven sections have sought to demonstrate, Zarathustra deploys to greatest dramatic effect in his psychic encounters with the seven higher men – culminates in Zarathustra’s confrontation with his spectral shadow-self. An ancient symbol, revived and popularized by the nineteenth century Schauerroman²⁶³ a man’s shadow was believed to represent his soul;²⁶⁴ while the deathly portentous wraith of equally primitive belief was clearly a related superstition (a mythological correlation which might be deemed to find its etymological analogue in the common roots of ‘shadow’ and ‘shade’). In any event, the connection between his shadow and imminent death, between his melancholy soul and abject despair, is one that Zarathustra arguably made. Pursued by his ‘long-legged’ (Z.IV.9) shadow, Zarathustra takes to his heels in a manner reminiscent of Tristram Shandy’s comic flight from ‘that death-looking, long-striding scoundrel of a scare-sinner’.²⁶⁵ Unlike Tristram, however, Zarathustra does not fear for his material body but for his immaterial body (‘our body is but a social structure composed of many souls’ BGE.19). A hierarchy of oversouls and ‘undersouls’ (ibid.), of ruling passions and exploited passions, of masters and slaves, the body politic – governed by the will to power – has its factions and insurrections like any other; and what Zarathustra’s shadow symbolizes is the vicissitudes of his many souls, the state of his ‘entire inner world’ (GM.II.16). Thus, when Zarathustra hungered after the ultimate über-menschliche ideal, his shadow reflected the bright hope of his soul, but when, broken and disillusioned, Zarathustra longed only for redemption from suffering, his shadow accordingly reflected his soul’s grim despair. Suicidal despair is the spectre that now haunts Zarathustra, and in the sudden appearance of his shadow – ‘thin, dusky, hollow, and worn out’ (Z.IV.9) – Zarathustra sees the death of hope foreshadowed.

Zarathustra’s shadow-self is the re-cast shadow of the ‘penitent of the spirit’, of the embittered, enlightened man who ‘has sat all too long in the shadow, [and whose] cheeks […] have grown pale; he has almost starved to death on his expectations’ (Z.II.13, emphasis added). Zarathustra had sought truth but found only Baubô (GS.Pref.4). Truth is an obscenity that breeds truths so awful ‘that they lose all power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.’²⁶⁶ Destroyer of tranquil, blissful ignorance and enemy to reverential love and friendship, truth belies the (illusory) concept of ‘gay science’ (Z.II.11). And just as in Shakespeare’s King Lear Gloucester was doubtless a happier man when blind ignorant than when blinded by knowledge, so too in Zarathustra we hear the tragic hero lamenting the getting of wisdom: ‘As a blind man, I once walked on blessed paths; then you threw filth in the blind man’s path: and now the old footpath disgusts him’ (ibid.). And therein lies the tragedy: lost innocence is irretrievable. Once the sun of enlightenment has cast its long, dark shadow, Zarathustra can either emulate the Übermensch and frolic naked in ‘the burning sun of wisdom’ (Z.II.21), or cower in the ‘dark and comfortless’²⁶⁷ shade of his shadow-self where ‘doleful shades’²⁶⁸ haunt and taunt him whose deathly pallor marks him out as one of their own, and whose partiality to shades and shadows betrays a lifetime of underworld trafficking.

One recalls how Zarathustra had murdered all his ‘gods for the sake of morality’ (GS.153), but ‘the morality of piety’ (HH.I.96)²⁶⁹ runs deeper than the morality of truth: ‘What binds most tightly? Which ropes are all but inseverable? With men of a high and select kind they will be their duties: that reverence proper to youth, that awe and delicacy before all that is honoured and respected from of old, that gratitude for the soil out of which they have grown, for the hand which led them, for the holy place where they learned to worship – their supreme moments themselves will bind them the tightest, will lay upon them the most enduring obligation’ (HH.I.Pref.3). Bound by a stygian oath made in his youth – ‘All beings shall be divine to me […] All days shall be holy to me’ (Z.II.11) – Zarathustra feels compelled to follow the sacred river from its Arcadian but now godless heights, down into its stygian heart of darkness. It is precisely this ongoing dialogue with his fallen heroes – whose blood, let by Zarathustra’s own hand, stains the battlefield of his soul – which has violently upset the naturally precarious balance between Zarathustra’s conscious ego-self and his unconscious or half-conscious shadow-self. For, as Nietzsche cautions: ‘There are many things we must leave in the Hades of half-conscious feeling, and not desire to redeem them out of their shadow-existence, otherwise they will, as thoughts and words, become our dæmonic masters and cruelly demand of us our blood’ (HH.II ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 374). But, as we have seen, Zarathustra cannot leave well alone: ‘a strong, weight-bearing man whose reverence is inherent: he has laden upon himself too many extraneous heavy words and values’ (Z.III.11.2). Having lived with his shades for so long, Zarathustra is now but a slave to his ‘dæmonic masters’; the shadow has become master and the master a mere shadow of his shadow.²⁷⁰ Zarathustra now walks a liminal, twilit tightrope, and across his ashen face flit the ‘shades of the prison-house’.²⁷¹ ‘His countenance is still dark; his hand’s shadow plays upon it. The expression in his eyes is still overshadowed. / His deed itself is still the shadow upon him; the hand darkens the doer. He has still not overcome his deed’ (Z.II.13).

One of Zarathustra’s most cherished hopes had been to purge his manifold soul of ‘romantic pessimism’ – the pessimism, that is, of ‘the failed and defeated’ (HH.II.Pref 7) – by means of ‘anti-romantic self-treatment’ (HH.II.Pref.2). In ‘Of the Great Longing’ (Z.III.14)²⁷² – whose title testifies to the immense weight that Zarathustra attached not only to the success of his cure but, as suggested by the infinitive “mood” of the verb ‘to long’, to its subsequent failure – one finds both the prescriptive particulars of this ‘spiritual cure’ (HH.II.Pref.2) and a seemingly intransigent patient. The cure is clearly unsuccessful, but it is not until Part IV that one is able to observe the recurring symptoms and to draw one’s own conclusions as to the cause of the cure’s inefficacy.

To heal his soul of its nostalgia for the past Zarathustra prescribed the ancient virtue of carpe diem, but in Part IV we find Zarathustra’s soul ‘wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future’ (Z.IV.19.2). To say ‘today’ as well as ‘once’ and ‘formerly’ (Z.III.14) is evidently not quite the same as performing ‘today’.²⁷³

So that his soul might overcome its ‘petty shame and corner-virtue’ he persuaded it to ‘stand naked before the eyes of the sun’ (ibid.); but in Part IV we see Zarathustra’s melancholy spirit, having wooed truth and stood naked before her, running for the shadows, his petty shame and corner-virtue banishing him ‘from all truth’ (Z.IV.14.3). To stand naked before Baubô would shame even the most shameless of men.

That ‘strangler called “sin”’ was to be ‘strangulated’ by “spirit” (Z.III.14); but once again, it is Zarathustra’s melancholy spirit that in Part IV writhes under the torment inflicted by his intellectual conscience-turned-bad conscience (Z.IV.5). The antinomian spirit is always in danger of being strangulated, in turn, by the penitential spirit.

To liberate his soul from ‘the morality of mores and the social straitjacket’ (GM.II.2) he returned to it its original ‘freedom over created and uncreated things’ (Z.III.14);²⁷⁴ but instead of ‘this power over oneself and over fate […] penetrat[ing] to the most profound depths and becom[ing] instinct, the dominating instinct’ (GM.II.2), it filled his soul with so much self-doubt and bad conscience²⁷⁵ that, like a ‘pale criminal’ (Z.I.6) – who in Part IV we detect hiding behind ‘the beautiful mask of a saint’ (Z.IV. 14.2) – it finally repented its “immoral” deed: ‘I have killed the law, the law anguishes me as a corpse does a living man: if I am not more than the law, then I am the vilest of all men’ (D.14).

His soul’s ‘gnawing worm’ of contempt was to be replaced by ‘the great, the loving contempt which loves most where it despises most’ (Z.III.14); but in Part IV Zarathustra is bereft of love: ‘Nothing that I love still lives – how should I still love myself?’ (Z.IV.9). Without love, ‘contempt for man’ remains his soul’s ‘blackest melancholy’ (A.38) and all too often expresses itself as contempt for its ego-counterpart – ‘My ego is something that should be overcome, my ego is to me the great contempt of man’ (Z.I.6) – which in Part IV tries to escape from itself by means of mockery and self-mockery.²⁷⁶

Persuasion was prescribed as an artificial substitute for deficient example; but if his soul succeeds in dredging up from its ‘sorrowful, black sea’ (Z.III.1) fragmentary higher men with which to aba(i)te the loneliness of Zarathustran solitude, then – given the penumbral world of caves ‘and caves behind caves’ (Z.IV.2) that cluster around the shore of consciousness and into which these fragments emerge – his soul must be forgiven for being unpersuaded as to the purported ‘height’ and ‘sun’ light (Z.III.14) of Zarathustra’s alpine “beyond”.

To remedy his soul’s diffidence and care, he dispensed tonics in the form of ‘new names’ (Z.III.14); but to call one who reaps care, a ‘dispeller of care’, and one who is crushed by fate, ‘destiny’ (ibid.), is at best cruel irony, and at worst an extreme case of self-delusion. Mere word-play – ‘Only speaking colourfully, / Only screaming colourfully out of fool’s-masks, / Clambering around on mendacious word-bridges, / On colourful rainbows, / Between false heavens / And false earths’ (Z.IV.14.3) – is more placebo than antidote to sinister shadow-play.

Finally, he gave his soul ‘all wisdom to drink, all new wines and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom’ (Z.III.14); but wisdom is simply a matter of ‘taste’,²⁷⁷ and the wine of wisdom that the Zarathustra of Part IV finds most palatable is the one with ‘a perfume and scent of eternity, a rosy, russet, gold-wine scent of ancient happiness, / of drunken midnight’s death-joy’ (Z.IV.19.6).

Notwithstanding the ‘spiritual cure’, failure, defeat, and great longing continue to oppress Zarathustra’s soul; melancholia, the quintessential romantic disease, is at bottom incurable. And just as ‘neighbourly love’ tends to benefit the neighbour less than the giver who gives so as to steal into the other (Z.I.16), so too does Zarathustra’s ego-self stand to benefit more from its beneficence than its shadow-beneficiary; for in giving, the former likes to believe that it performs ‘I’ (see Z.I.4), but in truth it is the latter who²⁷⁸ performs ‘I’ precisely, if paradoxically, in its non-performance. Hence the soul’s rhetorical question: ‘Which of us must thank the other? / Must the giver not thank the taker for taking? Is giving not a necessity? Is taking not – compassion?’ (Z.III.14).

Ultimately, the inefficacy of Zarathustra’s spiritual cure is due less to the infirmity of the patient than to the physician’s choice of medication. By looking, idealistically, to ‘the salvation of the soul’, Zarathustra’s mind had neglected ‘the great and small needs’ of the body (HH.II ‘The Wanderer and his Shadow’ 6). He had filled his soul with metaphysical panaceas, but “sun” burns, “spirit” strangulates, “freedom” imprisons, and “wisdom” intoxicates. Zarathustra had hazarded his soul for übermenschliche divinity but, although a higher order gain, the Faustian analogy still holds insofar as in both cases the enemy of mankind – in Zarathustra, idealism is the Mephistopheles to whom the tragic hero forfeits his soul – triumphantly claims its prize. Misguided though his bounty clearly was, Zarathustra had given his soul everything (Z.III.14). Not wishing to appear ungrateful, his soul now smiles sweetly and compassionately back at its needy benefactor. It is a smile, however, that is ‘full of melancholy’, that ‘longs for tears’, and that ‘trembles’ with suppressed ‘sobs’ (ibid.).

Like Zarathustra’s hectic blush of health, his soul’s melancholy smile is symptomatic of the ‘new health’:²⁷⁹ just as victory is tainted by loss, and health infected with sickness, so too is hope ‘sicklied o’er’ with failure. ‘[W]hen the best part of youth and strength for action has already been used up through sitting still’ (BGE.274) or, what amounts to the same thing, through endless wandering; when the wonderer or wanderer has ‘lost faith in himself’ (ibid.) and consequently in all hope of self-creation; when ‘golden sadness’ (Z.IV.10) and ‘purple melancholy’ (Z.III.14) hang heavy on the vine; then the gaze of great longing turns away from its highest hope of ‘tender eternities’ and ‘dearest wonders’ (Z.II.11) and looks imploringly towards ‘the vintager who waits with diamond vine-knife’ (Z.III.14) to cut down the failed and defeated. And what the soul prefigures in Part III, the shadow, as its figurative analogue, shadows in Part IV. With unparalleled loyalty, willingness and innocent enthusiasm, Zarathustra’s panchoesque shadow had accompanied his quixotic master on his rigorous and perilous quest for truth. But truth is a lie,²⁸⁰ and Zarathustra’s shadow, who ‘sometimes […] meant to lie, and behold! only then […] hit upon the truth’ (Z.IV.9), is now but a shadow of his former shadow-self. Lost innocence weighs heavy upon him and, with ‘[a] weary and insolent heart; an unstable will; fluttering wings; [and] a broken backbone’, he now yearns only for extinction: ‘″To live as I like or not to live at all″’ (ibid.).

The supreme irony, however, is that the shadow’s ‘saintly’ desire – to live as he pleases or not at all – sins against the sacred law of the excluded middle. The “saintly” life is fundamentally life-denying: whether a holy fool, a prophetic saint, or a saint of knowledge, the ascetic ideal is their common creed. Only a naïve belief in ‘the innocence of the good and their noble lies’ (Z.IV.9) enables the holy fool to bless each day as holy. Only faith in the ideal sustains the prophetic saint, whose übermenschliche desire to live beyond man – in the rarefied air of authenticity where ‘life-preserving errors’ (GS.110) cannot breathe – is not only otherworldy, but ultimately underworldly:

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.²⁸¹

The higher realm is no sooner reached than surrendered, and from the Arcadian heights of breathless Übermenschen, Zarathustra ‘sink[s] down, pale, towards night’ and the Hades of disillusioned Untermenschen.

Thus even I sank

Out of my truth-illusions,

Out of my day-longings,

Weary of day, sick of the light,

Sank downwards, nightwards, shadow-wards:

By one truth

Burnt and thirsty: […]

That I am banished

From all truth,

Only a fool!

Only a poet! (Z.IV.14.3)

Finally, only a yearning for telos, for stability, rest and security, drives the nomadic saint of knowledge inexorably on towards his eternally elusive “home”.

Belief in the “good”, in the “beyond”, and in a metaphysical “home”, are all forms of nihilism, and the pious fraud that unites this holy trinity is the myth of “being″. But as Zarathustra’s shadow now knows, the perfectionism aspired to by his former master is but a fond illusion,²⁸² and the arduous journey to the “higher self merely a circuitous route to fragmentary and importunate lower selves: ‘how crude and sore / The journey homeward to habitual self!’²⁸³ He now knows that ‘being is an empty fiction’ (TI ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’ 2) and that to be ‘always journeying but without a goal [and] also without a home’ is to be like ‘the eternal Wandering Jew, except that I am neither eternal nor a Jew’ (Z.IV.9) – a qualification which, with its breezy juxtaposition of the pertinent with the impertinent, obscures its all-important critique of the myth of eternity. For if Heraclitus is right, and ‘everything is in flux’ (Z.III.12.8), then the only true “being” is the being of becoming (see EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 3). Accordingly, if there is neither God nor eternity, neither goal nor home, then the mythical Wandering Jew need no longer await in dread his equally mythical Judgment Day nor Zarathustra’s wandering shadow continue his endless search for eternal truths and a “homeland” (Z.II.14).

Truth cuts short eternity (Z.II.11) and asks incredulously: ‘What mad pursuit?’²⁸⁴ Once Zarathustra’s shadow has discovered that “home” is a delusion; that ‘seeking for my home […] was my affliction; and that hope which springs eternal is an ‘eternal vanity’ (Z.IV.9); he can either look to the vintager to cut short his futile and seemingly eternal wandering with the knife that cuts into life or, at ‘the noontide hour, when the sun st[ands] immediately above Zarathustra’s head’ (Z.IV.10), fade away into the temporal eternity of sleep and forgetfulness. But if the former is nihilism, is the latter not also nihilism?²⁸⁵ As ‘a doorkeeper on the threshold of the temple of human dignity’ (HH.I.92), forgetfulness is ‘an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression (Hemmungsvermögen)’ (GM.II.1); but, as an Ambrosian ‘drop of golden happiness’ (Z.IV.10), stolen by Zarathustra while his shadow-self slumbers in the noonday sun, it is a furtive foretaste of eternity. And Zarathustra’s subsequent supplication – ‘when, well of eternity! you serene and terrible noontide abyss! when will you drink my soul back into yourself?’ (ibid.) – is both a blessing and an indignity: a blessing to his soul which longs only for death, but a shameless indignity from one who not only exhorted man to ‘remain true to the earth’ (Z.Prol.3), but who then led his soul a merry dance of death down to the grave of lost hope and there bade it sing its own requiem until redeemed by the comforting lie of eternity (Z.III.14).

Only if Zarathustra blocks his ears to the Sirens’ song of his soul, ‘only if he turns away from himself, will he leap over his own shadow – and, truly! into his sun’ (Z.II.13). But Zarathustra’s sun of ‘truth-illusions’ (Z.IV.14.3) has long since set, and having sat all too long in his own shadow, an older and wiser, thinner and weaker Zarathustra is now unlikely to make such a leap of faith. On the contrary, having listened to his shadow lament the vanity of his wandering, he can but gloomily acknowledge his own spiritual double and ruefully confess: ‘You are my shadow!’ (Z.IV.9). His shadow is his home: the nomadic home of becoming, of becoming what one is (Z.IV.1). ‘You shall become the person you are’ (GS.270), proclaims Nietzsche – a proclamation not, as many believe, of idealistic individualism (defined by Coomeraswamy as ‘the doctrine of inner harmony’),²⁸⁶ but of the brutally honest self-realization that ‘in the final analysis one experiences only oneself’ (Z.III.1).

215. ‘The free spirit, the “pious man of knowledge” – finds pia fraus even more offensive to his taste (to his “piety”) than impia fraus’ (BGE.105).

216. Cf. Edmund Burke’s assessment of pious frauds as ‘much better calculated for the private advantage of the preacher than the edification of the hearers’ Observations on a Publication, ‘The present state of the nation’.

217. The Book of Common Prayer, 1559, Burial of the Dead, First Anthem.

218. Gold here symbolizes the glad tidings of the Übermensch: ‘…the heart of the earth is of gold’ (Z.II.18), and ‘the Übermensch is the meaning of the earth’ (Z.Prol.3).

219. Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, 1. 28.

220. Cf. ‘Wanderer, who are you? I see you walking on your way without mockery, without love, with unfathomable eyes; moist and sad like a sounding lead that has emerged into the light unsatisfied from every depth […] with a breast that does not sigh, with a lip that hides its disgust, with a hand that now only reaches out slowly: who are you? what have you done?’ (BGE.278).

221. We are, of course, dealing here with the optimistic and idealist nihilist.

222. ‘The fear of pain, even the infinitely small in pain, – cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love’.

223. It is interesting to note that Scheler, in his defence against Nietzsche’s attack on agape, maintains ‘that love in the Christian sense is always primarily directed at man’s ideal spiritual self’, p. 256.

224. See footnote 193.

225. See chapters 3 and 4.

226. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto iv, 1. 1442.

227. Keats, Hyperion, A Fragment, Book I, ll.213–15. Cf. the Zarathustran ‘fire dog, which really speaks from the heart of the earth’ (or so Zarathustra would have it), but which really is indistinguishable from that other fire dog: ‘the hypocrite dog [… which] likes to speak with smoke and bellowing – to make believe […] that it speaks out of the belly of things’ (Z.II.18).

228. ‘It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself’ (Z.I.3).

229. ‘… the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types.’

230. Hamann, letter to Thomas Wizenmann, 22 July 1786, in Smith, p. 260.

231. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, ll. 708–9 and 696–7 respectively.

232. Tennyson, Ulysses, ll. 30–32, 53 and 63 respectively.

233. Byron, Manfred, II.iv.58–61.

234. Deliberate misconstruction of untergehen here.

235. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, 1. 411 (deliberate misappropriation of Milton’s description of the fallen Eve).

236. Blake, Then She Bore Pale Desire.

237. Despite the “statement” made by a Grecian urn: ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”’, Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1. 49.

238. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.i.111–114.

239. Isa. 2:3; Zech. 11:2.

240. Blake, Then She Bore Pale Desire.

241. ‘Where lies your greatest danger? – In pity.’

242. Is this metaphor possibly related to the dictum: ‘in vino veritas’?

243. Cf. Plato’s criticism of those men possessed of ‘the highest forms of knowledge … remaining in the upper world, and refusing to return again to the prisoners in the cave below and share their labours and rewards, whether trivial or serious’ Republic 519 d.

244. I stress the Greek word ‘auto’ because Ecce Homo is a highly idiosyncratic work reflecting the many and diverse moods of the author, moods which range from the ironic, hyperbolic and “poetic” (in the derogatory Zarathustran sense – see Z.II.17) to the melancholic, sincere and confessional. Young’s severe criticism of what he describes as ‘in many ways a mendacious, deluded book’ (p. 2), is a salutary reminder to all those who would seek a degree of scholarly objectivity in Nietzsche’s purported philosophical autobiography: ‘Nietzsche’s retrospective self-descriptions, considered from the point of view of scholarly accuracy, are deeply unreliable […] The aim [of Ecce Homo] is not to provide an accurate mirroring of the textual facts but rather to create (by the discovery of hints, undertones, “real” intentions, almost utterances lurking between lines, and by obscuring, where necessary, what is said on the lines) a work of art, an aesthetically convincing account of the intellectual and spiritual life of the man behind the works […] As Nietzsche-commentator, then, Nietzsche is to be viewed with greater distrust than most’. See Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 29–30. Williams is similarly sceptical: ‘[Nietzsche’s] presentation of himself, of his deepest and most heart-felt emotions is contrived in a far more ambiguous and teasing way than is commonly understood’. See W D Williams, in Solomon (ed.), p. 102. See also Reinhardt, p. 219.

245. The psychological definition of ‘compensate’ is of particular relevance here: ‘offset deficiency or frustration by developing another characteristic’ (COD).

246. Both Kaufmann and Hollingdale substantially weaken the anagogic force of this sentence by rendering the adjective ‘unbewußt’ (unconscious) as ‘unknown’ (unbekannt). On my reading, however, Zarathustra is here concerned with warm, inchoate thoughts which have not yet entered consciousness.

247. ‘[St Francis] was wont to call all created things his brothers and sisters’. See Thomas of Celano in Otto Karrer (ed.), The Little Flowers, Legends, and Lauds: St Francis of Assisi and others, trans. N Wydenbruck (London: Sheed & Ward, 1984), p. 43.

248. ‘There is from the first something unhealthy in priestly aristocracies and in the habits ruling in them which turn them away from action and alternate between brooding and emotional explosions’ (GM.I.6).

249. See symptom (a).

250. G K Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), p. 110.

251. See symptoms (b) and (c).

252. See symptom (c).

253. Thomas of Celano, in Karrer (ed.), p. 48.

254. Giovanni di Ceprano in Karrer (ed.), p. 10.

255. ‘How fair, radiant and glorious was the sinlessness of his life, the simplicity of his words, the purity of his heart […] To this must be added his angelic appearance, the charm of his manner, his natural gentleness, the kindliness of his admonitions, the loyalty with which he treated anything told him in confidence, the wisdom of his counsel, the energy of his actions and his general lovableness […] // He was a man of great eloquence; the expression of his face was gay and kindly, equally free of torpor as of arrogance’. See Thomas of Celano, in Karrer (ed.), p. 43.

256. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi, p. 14.

257. ‘Misanthropy is the result of an all too covetous love of man and “cannibalism”; but who asked you to swallow men like oysters, my Prince Hamlet?’ (GS.167).

258. Chesterton, p. 14.

259. Thomas of Celano, in Karrer (ed.), p. 53.

260. ‘Acedia, or Spiritual Tedium [… is] that which the Greeks call acedia, and which we may describe as tedium or perturbation of the heart. It is akin to dejection and especially felt by wandering monks and solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert, disturbing the monk especially about midday, like a fever mounting at a regular time, and bringing its highest tide of inflammation at definite accustomed hours to the sick soul. And so some of the Fathers declare it to be the demon of noontide which is spoken of in the 90th Psalm.// When this besieges the unhappy mind, it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way off, as careless and unspiritually-minded persons. Also, towards any work that may be done within the confines of our own lair, we become listless and inert […] we sigh and complain that bereft of sympathetic fellowship we have no spiritual fruit; and bewail ourselves as empty of all spiritual profit, abiding vacant and useless in this place; and we that could guide others and be of value to multitudes have edified no man, enriched no man with our precept and example.’ See The Spear of Gold: Revelations of the Mystics, ed. H A Reinhold (London: Burns Oates, 1947), p. 119.

261. Thomas of Celano, in Karrer (ed.), p. 53.

262. Shakespeare, King Lear, I.iv.250–251.

263. A genre pioneered by Chamisso’s immensely popular Peter Schlemihl and perfected by E T A Hoffman’s works which, according to Tymms, represent ‘the peak in the Doppelgänger’s development as a psychological gambit’. See Tymms, p. 107.

264. Cooper, p. 151.

265. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Vol II (London: Hutchinson & Co), p. 163.

266. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ‘Introductory Aphorisms’, Aphorism 1.

267. Shakespeare, King Lear, II.vii.85 (Gloucester).

268. ‘Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell, hope never comes / That comes to all’, Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 65–67.

269. ‘… every convention continually grows more venerable the further removed its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, finally, convention becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions’ (HH.I.96). I would argue that ‘unegoistic’ here carries both “moral” (Christian) and “immoral” (non-Christian) connotations.

270. Cf. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Shadow in Fairy Tales, trans. H L Braekstad (London: William Heinemann, 1937), p. 411.

271. William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1. 67.

272. In an otherwise illuminating critique of Nietzsche’s thought, White (pp. 93–5) offers a surprisingly pedestrian reading of this section, based on a misleading comparison. He argues that in contradistinction to the soothsayer, for whom alone ‘God’s death continue[s] to be a cause for despair’, Zarathustra is able to affirm the value of life. On my reading, though, a Schopenhauerian pessimism (the soothsayaer) informed by the death of God, is even more questionable than Zarathustra’s alleged affirmative stance (an allegation which this book explicitly calls into question).

273. Unlike the “self”, ‘which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’ ’ (Z.I.4).

274. Cf. ‘… the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from the morality of mores, the autonomous and supramoral individual (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive) […] this master of a free will, this sovereign man – how should he not be aware […] of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature’ (GM.II.2).

275. ‘Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience’ (D.9).

276. Cf. ‘… we should have to make it clear that we are artists of contempt […] that we love nature the less humanly it behaves, and art if it is the artist’s escape from man, or the artist’s mockery of man, or the artist’s mockery of himself (GS.379).

277. ‘… the Greeks, who were very cunning in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic as well as cognitive, frankly ‘taste’ (Sophia)’ (HH.II. ‘Opinions and Maxims’ 170).

278. In a conversation between Nietzsche and Dionysus and recorded by the former in his notebooks, Dionysus insists that a genealogical critique must begin with the question “Who?” rather than “What?” (KSA.12.178). That is to say, one must not ask what a word or deed signifies in itself, but rather who the author of that word or deed is.

279. See preceding section.

280. ‘Ultimate scepticism. – What, then, are man’s truths ultimately? They are his irrefutable errors’ (GS.265).

281. Yeats, Byzantium, second stanza.

282. Cf. the following exchange in which Lucian articulates the findings of the shadow-self, and Peregrine the perfectionism preached by Zarathustra in the market square:

 Lucian: He that is born to be a man, neither should nor can be any thing nobler, greater, and better than a man.

 Peregrine: But, good Lucian, for the very reason that he may not become less than a man, he should always be striving to be more. It is undeniable that there is something dæmoniacal in our nature; we are suspended between heaven and earth; on the father’s side, so to speak, we are related to superior spiritual natures; on the side of our mother earth, we are related to the beasts of the field. If the spirit be not ever soaring upwards, the animal part will soon stagnate in the mire of the earth, and the man who does not strive to become a god, will find himself in the end transformed into a beast. (C M Wieland, The Private History of Peregrine Proteus the Philosopher, trans. William Tooke (2 vols), 1796). Cited in Miller, p. 92.

283. Keats, Endymion, ll. 275–6.

284. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1. 9.

285. A further allusion to GS.V.346.

286. Ananda K Coomeraswamy, ‘Cosmopolitan View of Nietzsche’ in The Dance of Shiva (London: Peter Owen, 1958), p. 142.