This is the third excerpt from my upcoming book titled The Initiation of Nietzsche. Anybody stumbling upon this without having read the first two should consider reading those first, since the argument made here builds upon the earlier posts. Still, this post should make some sense as a standalone topic looking at the issue of how cultures propagate themselves and change over time, with specific reference to 19th century Western society. With that said, here is the excerpt.
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To the list of difficulties in understanding the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship that we have already mentioned, there is one more to add, and this is the fact that the image that has been handed down by history is of both men as supreme individuals. This is certainly warranted in the case of Nietzsche, who became a philosopher-hermit whose writings are radically subjective in nature, a feature that he did not shy away from but rather placed at the centre of his thought. But Nietzsche had held this position ever since he was a young man. He was the supreme believer in genius and claimed that the purpose of society should be to facilitate the development of great individuals. Wagner was exactly the kind of individual man of greatness that Nietzsche was talking about. Wagner’s individualism comes from the bombastic nature of his personality, his writings, and his operas. He was not in the slightest bit shy of criticising those he perceived as his enemies, and he did so without providing any argumentation, logic, or empirical evidence for his claims but simply by asserting them through the force of his own character.
The individualistic tenor of Nietzsche’s life led one of his main commentators, Stefan Zweig, to proclaim in the opening line of his book on the philosopher, “The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a monodrama: no other figure is present on the brief-lived stage of his experience”. The theme of our book already implies a refutation of this claim since we are arguing that there was at least one other main figure who shared the stage with Nietzsche, namely, Wagner. But, more generally, this idea of a monodrama is highly problematic. It is worth quoting the extended text of John Donne’s famous sermon in response:-
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
For all Nietzsche’s individualism, questions of culture and especially German culture were always one of the main themes of his philosophy. Even Zarathustra must come down from the mountain top to share his wisdom with the common folk. Nietzsche always retained a small readership throughout his quasi-exile in the mountains, and he always hoped that more people would read him, eventually extending that hope to the time after his death (some are born posthumously). Zweig’s error is the one we have already noted: he began at the end. Nietzsche became an island unto himself, and we could very well say that this was his tragedy since it drove him mad. But it was not always so, and one of the goals of this book is to show how and to what degree Wagner changed Nietzsche’s life so that we no longer view his story as a monodrama. More broadly, however, another advantage of the archetypal approach we are using in this book is that it abstracts away from the individuality of these two supreme individualists and provides a more general perspective on them. One of the ways we will do that is by placing them in the cultural milieu of their era. Although both men were innovators, their ideas did not come out of nowhere. Like all of us, they were very much influenced by the society in which they were born. By understanding the wider cultural zeitgeist, we not only understand how it influenced the two men, but we also better grasp what were the truly new ideas that Wagner and Nietzsche introduced.
In terms of the archetypes, it is the Orphan-Elder relationship which is primarily responsible for the propagation of a culture. When we speak of a culture as a whole, we are almost always referring to a set of fundamental ideas that form the core worldview that gives the culture its unique properties. In the broadest meaning of the word, it is the religious institutions of society which carry these fundamental meanings. In the modern West, our understanding of this is clouded by the fact that we have inherited at least two very different traditions. On the one hand, there is the “philosophical” tradition from ancient Greece, and on the other hand, there is the “religious” tradition handed down through Christianity. By thinking of these as distinct histories, we lose sight of the incredible commonalities between them. Socrates was put to death largely because he was seen as a threat to the established worldview of his society. But so was Jesus. Both men were considered too radical by their own societies, who felt the new ideas as existential challenge and reacted accordingly. The “victory” of the new worldview of these radical Elders came later (some really are born posthumously).
Socrates and Jesus were Elders who were initiating their own set of Orphans into a worldview that their own societies deemed incompatible with the status quo. However, the methods of initiation into a worldview appear to be the same whether they are carried out by radicals or in the normal propagation of a culture. By understanding those methods, we deepen and broaden our understanding of the relationship between Elders and Orphans.
From an anthropological point of view, there are two primary mechanisms of initiation into a worldview. There are the rites of passage, and there are stories, myths, and legends. In most cases, the rites and stories are closely correlated, if not used simultaneously. The 4th-century scholar Sallustius referred to stories used in rites of passage as mixed myth. We have a prime example of this in the extensive rites of the Catholic Church. A Catholic mass consists of the Liturgy of the Word (stories) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (rite of passage). Both of these practices are tightly coupled since they revolve around the story of Jesus. Therefore, the stories and the rites reinforce each other. To take one other example from a completely unrelated culture, in Australian Aboriginal society, the young man (archetypal Orphan) receiving initiation from the Elders of the tribe is put through a complex array of rites. At the same time, he is told the stories of the culture heroes of his tribe. Those stories relate directly to the rites the young man is going through.
The use of story and myth alongside ritual has the purpose of contextualising the practices that the initiate is going through by showing how the culture hero portrayed in the story went through the same experience at an earlier time. The initiate is not just becoming a member of the institutions of society in their own time; those institutions are themselves derived from the authority of the founders of the culture, thereby creating a chain that links the generations. Of course, most cultures throughout history have not had such a sophisticated historical consciousness as the modern West, and so the mythological is almost always seen as being timeless or infinite in nature rather than historical. This is why the core stories and myths of any culture need to be understood religiously.
Thus, for any given culture, to understand how initiation works, we need to look for the institutions that manage the core rites of passage and stories of that culture. It should not surprise us to find that 19th-century Germany, and the West more broadly, was a time of major upheaval in this respect. Christianity had been the core religion and therefore the core initiatory system in northern Europe for the best part of a millennium. By the 19th century, however, the influence of Christianity had very much begun to wane, especially among the educated elites of European society. This loss of faith was directly related to the rise of historical consciousness that occurred at around the same time, not to mention the fact that the global nature of European civilisation had allowed a deeper appreciation of non-Christian cultures such as Japan, China, and India. Alongside the increasing dominance of scientific materialism, the mythological ground on which Christianity had stood was slowly giving way.
In addition, there was another set of problems that had been opened up by the Reformation. One of the ways to understand those problems is in the appearance of a debate over the difference between being a “Christian” and being a “disciple of Jesus”. This issue ties back to our earlier question of how initiation into a culture works. Ritual and myth are about the imitation of the heroes of the past. Imitation and mimicry are usually very literal in nature. It is clear from the gospel story that Jesus expected his disciples to emulate him directly. He wasn’t just teaching them in an academic or abstract fashion; he was having them walk the same path that he did, and he expected them to follow his example after his death. It is for this reason that the word disciple means something more than student. A student learns a theory or an abstract principle. A disciple commits to a lifestyle based on imitation of the master.
Because of the increasingly abstract nature of modern education, we don’t automatically associate the process of learning with imitation and mimicry, yet these are still widely practised. Plumbers, carpenters, and other trades learn their craft through imitation during their apprenticeship. The same is true of musicians and other artists. Our modern focus on the written word as a pedagogical device is a practice which was born out of the scholarly tradition of university education in the Middle Ages. While it made sense for scholars, for whom the written word was their speciality, it made far less sense for other domains of life. A prime example of this difference can be found in the early life of Wagner, who received a theoretical musical education as a young man but who eschewed that in favour of learning and transcribing works by ear, including and especially those of Beethoven. By playing along to Beethoven on the piano, Wagner was directly imitating one of his culture heroes. That is how he learned his craft.
Coming back to Jesus and his disciples, it is clear that the education Jesus was giving was not just about understanding his teachings in a theoretical or intellectual sense; it was a complete change of life for those who were willing to join him. The disciples were expected to leave their jobs and even, in some cases, their families. Such sacrifices are a core component of initiation, especially in the religious sphere. We saw earlier that Nietzsche had needed to make a similar, although less dramatic, sacrifice in order to attend Schulpforta. That is why we can say that Nietzsche’s scholarship there was a proper initiation since it was very much a lifestyle change, one that the young teenager took quite a long time to adjust to.
But there is an important difference between the initiation offered by Jesus and the one Nietzsche received. Schulpforta was a distinguished school which was recognised and celebrated by the wider society of Nietzsche’s time. By contrast, the initiation that Jesus offered his disciples placed them in direct opposition to the Jewish religious authorities and then later the Roman imperial state. Jesus required his disciples to follow his example of challenging these authorities even though it put their lives on the line, just as he put his own life on the line. After the death of Jesus, the disciples faithfully carried out the task and, especially in the case of Peter and Paul, met the same fate as their master before them. The difference here is between initiation into a recognised and accepted institution of society versus initiation into an institution that is in opposition to powerful segments of society.
In the case of Jesus, rebellion against the institutions of society was part of the initiation he was offering. This rebellious attitude continued on for centuries after the death of the prophet. The Roman state set out to persecute the Christians on a number of occasions, thereby affording those who wanted to imitate the master the opportunity to die for the cause. The Romans had no compunction about killing both external and internal enemies as a method of pursuing the goals of the state, and this worked to crush opposition in most cases. But the example of Jesus had the highly unusual effect of creating a group who not only did not fear death but exalted it as a way to imitate the prophet. Thus, it was in the 2nd century AD that the concept of the Christian martyr was generalised as a response to Roman persecution and became part of the tradition.
What happened next is something that has perplexed thinkers down through the ages and which set up the paradox that would later lead to the issue of what was the difference between a “Christian” and a “disciple”. During the latter phase of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion was incorporated into the Roman state. That institutional structure subsequently gave rise to the Catholic Church, which survived the Dark Ages and went on to unify Europe into what was essentially a Christian caliphate around 1000 AD. Whatever else can be said about that, it rendered the original concept of being a disciple problematic at best. Jesus had expected his disciples to follow his example and live as he did. That entailed rebelling against the corrupt authorities of his time. But what could it mean for a medieval peasant of Europe to imitate Jesus in this respect? At the very least, the part of the imitation involving a rebellion against the authorities had to be airbrushed out of the story since it was those exact authorities i.e. the Catholic Church, which were promulgating the religion in the first place. Ironically, in the meantime, the Church had reverted to the old Roman tradition of putting to death anybody who threatened their authority, as can be seen from the numerous killings of heretics and the Inquisition.
This strange state of affairs continued on for about five hundred years until a rebellious (there’s that word again) group of scholar-monks began to realise that there was a problem. It is no coincidence that these scholars had direct access to the original Greek texts of the Bible and therefore to the foundational myth of the religion. They were able to see which parts of the story had been airbrushed out by the Catholic Church. More generally, the Protestants correctly saw that the rites that had been built up by the Catholic Church were problematic, especially given that the gospel story makes clear that Jesus considered the rituals of his time to be outdated, if not entirely corrupt. That message could only have resonated strongly among those who watched the increasing decadence of the Catholic. Thus, the corruption of the Catholic Church placed it in an identical position to the religious authorities in Jesus’ time, and what could be more fitting than to emulate the master in rebelling against it? In this way, we can very much say that the Reformation was based on imitation.
The reason to go into some detail about this history is because these developments form the context not just to Nietzsche’s own life but to the broader cultural trends of his age. Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor, and Luther was still viewed as a heroic figure in 19th-century Germany. In Luther, we have the strange combination of a specifically German culture hero who was advocating on behalf of the ultimate culture hero that had been the foundation of modern Western civilisation, Jesus. Of course, the story of Luther is very similar to that of Jesus. Like Jesus, Luther held the strong conviction that the religious authorities of his time were corrupt. Also like Jesus, he had the ability to communicate his position with clarity and with passion, winning him a great deal of support among his contemporaries. That support made him a danger to the authorities and he required great courage to stand up to them. All of this places Luther very much in the context of a disciple imitating the master’s example as mediated through a myth that had been handed down over millennia. That is the incredible power of stories as initiatory devices.
But there are a number of important differences between Luther and Jesus. Just like the other Protestants, Luther was a university man. The Reformation was driven by men whose rejection of the Catholic Church was justified by the fact that they believed they had access to the direct source of truth in the Bible. There is a subtle irony here in that the Catholic Church had founded the universities and educated the very scholars who would later turn against it. The Protestant reformers had come to see that the official translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was riddled with errors. Moreover, those scholars also accused the church of misleading the congregation by omitting large sections of the Bible. All of this is relevant to the young Nietzsche since his high school and university education placed him on the same track as scholarly heroes like Luther, for whom the question of the truth of the interpretation of texts was quite literally a matter of life and death. There really was a heroism tied to the archetype of the scholar in this cultural milieu, and Nietzsche was being inducted into that mythology.
With the Reformation, the Catholic Church lost control of both primary methods of initiation mentioned earlier: rites and stories. It’s no coincidence that a big part of the fight that had been going on for centuries was to ensure that both the Bible and the rites of the church were not translated into vernacular languages. All this changed with the victory of the Protestants. One of Luther’s greatest achievements was his translation of the Bible into German. Nietzsche was born into a culture that arose out of these developments. We can now see why that culture had, from the very first, been preoccupied, even obsessed, with the written word. The reason why literacy rates in Protestant communities rose sharply in the aftermath of the Reformation was because being able to read the Bible for yourself became an article of faith. It was the heroic scholar, Luther, who had ushered in this change.
All of this was true for the general culture that the Reformation brought into being, but we can’t fail to see that it was even more true of Nietzsche as an individual. Not only was he the son of a Lutheran pastor and a devout mother, but he was also sent to a school whose military-style discipline was dedicated to exactly the kind of scholarship that Luther and the other Protestants were masters of. The interpretation and translation of the holy books was the life’s work of such men, and Nietzsche was receiving a first-class education in the same methods. But, alongside the Christian tradition, there was the other tradition that had heavily informed European culture: the Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance had most conspicuously revived interest in this kind of classical scholarship, and it had also seen a surge of interest in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, Nietzsche’s original enrolment at the University of Bonn saw him studying both theology and classical philology, essentially the two foremost influences on modern Western culture.
In short, Nietzsche received a first-class initiation into the kind of scholarly life that had existed in Europe since medieval times. The university was a genuinely new kind of institution that medieval Europe created for itself through the influence of the Catholic Church. As a result, university scholars were always Christians, often devoutly so. But there are two things about this tradition that are highly unusual when viewed from a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective. The first was the diverse array of culture heroes and stories that had been handed down from antiquity. Through the Christian tradition, there was the figure of Jesus as well as all the other major figures of the Bible. Then there were the Roman and Greek traditions with culture heroes such as Socrates, Plato, Alexander and so on. This meant that modern Western culture from medieval times onwards had at least two different sets of culture heroes to draw on in addition to the indigenous mythology of the various regions of Europe.
The second thing that is highly unusual about this is the abstractness of it all, and this brings us back to the issue of imitation. The stories of Jesus or Socrates took place in societies which no longer existed. If initiation is supposed to entail imitation, how could one imitate a man like Socrates if one didn’t live in a Greek city-state? And how could one imitate Jesus in rebelling against the religious authorities when it was those religious authorities who claimed to speak on behalf of Jesus? The way to resolve this was to take a more abstract approach to the lessons handed down from antiquity, but that de-emphasised imitation in favour of abstraction. That is why the issue of the difference between a “Christian” and a “disciple” arose. The Christian knows the doctrines of the faith but does not necessarily practice what he preaches. Without the requirement for imitation, Christianity eventually devolved into hypocrisy. This was especially problematic among the Protestants since it was Protestantism that reinvigorated the idea that imitation was required of the faithful, and yet how could one translate the example of Jesus into the modern world? The growing problem of hypocrisy meant that the abstractions of the faith had become even more stretched and hollowed out by the 19th century. This was a big part of the reason why Christianity lost relevance among the educated classes. In many respects, Nietzsche represented a paradigm example of a member of that class since he renounced his belief in Christianity at exactly the time he began his university studies.
At the same time as this loss of faith in Christianity was happening, scholars had begun to approach the religion from a secular point of view. In the years before his renunciation, Nietzsche had been reading Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Ernest Renan, and others who interpreted the Bible not as the sacred word of God or as holy revelation but as the projection of human psychology. Jesus was no longer the son of God but just a man who thought he was the son of God. The miracles he performed were no longer real but either figments of imagination or standard literary tropes that had been inserted into the story. Whether we agree or disagree with any of that, the point is that these new interpretations also functioned as initiatory devices. When we say that Nietzsche “read them”, it’s clear that he did more than that. He believed them, and he believed in the broader movement of which they were a part. Nietzsche’s renunciation of faith was not just nihilistic rebellion for its own sake; it was a decision to renounce theology in favour of a different way of life, philology. It was a decision to follow a different group of Elders (Feuerbach, Strauss, Renan) on a different initiatory pathway.
Thus, the Orphan phase of Nietzsche’s life does not show us an individual only but a young man following in the footsteps of the heroes of his culture. His enrolment at Schulpforta and his subsequent university studies place him in the category of the scholar-monk that had been a staple archetype in Europe since medieval times. The scholar-monks had inherited a synthesised tradition with heroic figures such as Luther and Calvin concerned with the Christian lineage, while other great scholars such as Montaigne or Goethe drew inspiration more from Greece and Rome. One way to view Western history since medieval times was as a back-and-forth battle between these two traditions, the Renaissance tilting the balance in favour of Athens and the Reformation in favour of Jerusalem. If that’s true, then the 19th century saw the waning of Jerusalem and the return of Athens. Nietzsche made the choice to become part of that movement. In a letter to his sister, he put it this way, “Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire…” The young scholar was choosing what he saw to be the more exciting path forward for his life.