Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
humanity as though it were the worst of plagues. Nietzsche understood the religion* of the
crucified Christ as the historical culmination of the Jewish "slave morality" that is rooted in
ressentiment
.
Ressentiment
is the sublimated desire for revenge against the masters of history on the part of those who view themselves as their victims. Or, as Girard says in the following
essay, it "is the interiorization of weakened vengeance," whose "ultimate target is always
ressentiment
itself, its own mirror image, under a slightly different mask that makes it
unrecognizable."
Nietzsche held that Christian morality became not only the most powerful but also the most
baneful combination of conviction and lifestyle to emerge in history. He envisioned the
appearance of the superior human being,
der Übermensch
, whose god is Dionysus and whose
will to power transcends
ressentiment
. In the following piece, published originally
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as "Dionysus versus the Crucified" in
Modern Language Notes 99
( 1984): 816-35, Girard analyzes the real differences between the Christ of the Gospels and Nietzsche's Dionysus,
differences which Nietzsche himself under stood only too well. He knew that Jesus brought a
sword which was "the order of charity" or love, as Pascal put it. But in the antithesis of
Dionysus versus the Crucified, he willed and tried to affirm an order he understood as "life
itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence," which "creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilate. . . ." (
Will to Power
, no. 1052).
Girard has written a number of other essays on Nietzsche. On Nietzsche's work as a strategy
of madness stemming in great part from his rivalry with Wagner, see "Strategies of Madness
-- Nietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevski" in
"To Double Business Bound,"
61-83. On Nietzsche's proclamation of the murder of God through his madman, see "The Founding
Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche," in
Violence and Truth
, ed. P. Dumouchel ( Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 227-46.
For a while, after the war, a great debate raged about Nietzsche's own responsibility in the
Nazi exploitation of his writing for anti-Semitic purposes. There was mostly silence,
however, regarding his anti-Christian stance; it is too explicit and consistent to be denied.
To those who felt that Nietzsche's work should not fall into neglect, the point was irrelevant
anyway. Why should Nietzsche be exonerated from an attitude that a majority of intellectuals
regarded as sound? No apology needed to be made.
No apology was made. Nietzsche was in the clear. But the antiChristian polemics of
Nietzsche have received scant attention since World War II. Why? If they were asked -- they
never are -- contemporary Nietzscheans would probably answer that their thinker's passionate
attitude toward religion has lost its relevance.
Nietzsche remains "important" because of some avatars of his that came to light in recent
years, mostly through the ingenuity of French critics. Nietzsche the genealogist, Nietzsche
the advocate of "free play," Nietzsche the exponent of counter-culture. . . .
Different as they are from one another, at least in some respects, these avatars are all alike in
their indifference to the great struggle that obsessed the last lucid years of Nietzsche. Is there
some obscure reason why this should be? Is there something inopportune or embarrassing
about the theme; is it strategically advisable not to insist upon it?
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Whatever the case may be, Nietzsche's religious problematic was already marginalized when
the French critics began their work. The real job was performed by Martin Heidegger. Even
those who reject the interpretation of Nietzsche as the last great metaphysician of the West
are dependent on Heidegger for their evacuation of "Dionysus versus the Crucified." Just as
existentialism in the French style was an offshoot of German philosophy and above all
Heidegger, the new "French Nietzsche" is another lively mouse, or rather a whole litter,
brought forth by the Heideggerian mountain.
Nietzsche's forced conversion to inverted platonism is rooted in one essential Heideggerian
tenet, which is the mutual incompatibility of religion and thought in the highest sense, the
postphilosophical and Heideggerian sense.
Everything in Nietzsche that comes under the heading "Dionysus versus the Crucified" must
be alien to "thought" and is therefore harshly condemned as a pure and simple "return to monotheism," the very reverse in other words of what Nietzsche himself imagined he was
doing. This condemnation is also an allusion to the fact that someone fighting Christianity
with the passionate intensity of Nietzsche must still have been under its influence. Even though brief flashes of hatred appear here and there in his writings, Heidegger on the whole
gives an impression of radical indifference to religion, an attitude that has become a model
for quite a few people. The subject is of little or no interest. Period.
Heidegger interpreted monotheism as a monopolistic claim on the divine that constituted, in
his eyes, the height of
ressentiment
. I will be the last to disagree with Heidegger regarding the importance of
ressentiment
in Nietzsche's work. I do not believe, however, that Heidegger or
anyone else can disentangle the strands that belong to
ressentiment
and therefore to religious nonthought from the strands that do not and belong therefore to the philosophical thought that
deserves to be considered and interpreted.
To Heidegger, "Dionysus versus the Crucified" was merely the Nietzschean reversal of a
previous Christian formula: "The Crucified versus Dionysus," and therefore the same empty
struggle for power between two rival religions. As institutional Christianity weakens, the
philosophical hostility to it turns to silence but it does not decrease.
To Heidegger, the essential history of our world is postphilosophical and religion is
irrelevant. The Nietzsche of "Dionysus versus the Crucified" is more alien to the real issues of our times than the "withdrawal of being" and its comet tail of postphilosophical discourse.
Is this view going to prevail?
Even from the standpoint of Nietzschean studies in the narrowest sense, this negative attitude
is a mutilation. It deprives us of what is
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really exciting and novel in the Nietzschean corpus. Now that we are no longer limited to the
excerpts carefully selected and organized by Nietzsche's sister, and we can read all of the
formerly unpublished writing, we cannot doubt that the closer we get to the end the more
obsessive the Christian theme becomes with Nietzsche. The number and importance of the
fragments dealing with the subject increase. . . . We are reminded of a volcano pouring
greater and greater torrents of murky lava with, here and there, the sparkle of a jewel still
untouched by human hands . . .; for these some of us at least would gladly burn one finger or
two.
Here, the most daring material becomes inseparable from the grotesque. Genius and insanity
lend each other a hand until the last instant, giving the lie to the orthodox thesis that
disconnects the two. If we receive the evidence of their mutual contamination, we commit the
one unforgivable sin, punishable by immediate exclusion from the club of the respectable
Nietzscheans.
These later fragments are the height of
ressentiment
in the sense that the final breakdown also is. Nietzsche's superiority over his century and ours may well be that he alone pushed the
ressentiment
that he shares with quite a few lesser mortals to such a height that it yielded its most virulent and significant fruit. None of Nietzsche's achievements as a thinker can be
divorced from
ressentiment
, whether the subject is Wagner, the divine, or Nietzsche himself
in
Ecce Homo
.
Unlike Heidegger, unlike most of his contemporaries and ours, Nietzsche strongly believed in the unique specificity of the biblical and Christian perspective. His reasons cannot be
dismissed as summarily as they would if he were a Christian. The ethnocentric fallacy will
not do.
The uniqueness of the Bible and the New Testament is affirmed by Nietzsche in a context
directly opposed to Christian apologetics. Nietzsche tried to put his critique of Christianity on
a basis less shaky than the one that was already standardized in his time, the great positivistic
equivalence of all religious traditions. He knew too much about pagan mythology not to be
revolted by the shallow assimilation of the Judeo-Christian with the pagan.
He maintained that the Christian spirit tries to stifle "life" by repressing the most dynamic individuals of a culture. This is the famous "morality of the slaves" versus "the morality of the masters," the one thing everybody knows about the Nietzschean distinction between
paganism and Judeo-Christianity.
A culture has to pay a price in order to breed a class of higher men. It has to assume even the
worst forms of violence. Time and time again, Nietzsche tells us that Dionysus
accommodates all human passions, including the lust to annihilate, the most ferocious
appetite for destruction. Dionysus says yes to the sacrifice of many human lives, in-
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cluding, not so paradoxically, those of the highest type that is being bred in the process.
Already in
The Birth of Tragedy
, Nietzsche mentioned the violence that accompanies and
often precedes Dionysus everywhere. All epiphanies of the god leave ruins in their wake.
"Mania," after all, mean homicidal fury. Unlike many of his followers, Nietzsche did not turn the Dionysian into something idyllic and inconsequential. He was too honest to dissimulate
the disturbing sides, the ugly sides of the Dionysian.
With the years, his references to that frenzied and seemingly haphazard violence that marks
all the episodes of the Dionysian saga became even more frequent and insistent than in the
past, but Nietzsche often repeated them almost verbatim, and they became stereotyped.
Nietzsche never went into an analysis in depth of
The Bacchae
, for instance, but he always
dutifully mentioned the Dionysian violence. The reason for this is not that Nietzsche
particularly relished that violence; the opposite is true, but this violence plays an essential
role and it should not be suppressed.
Nietzsche clearly saw that pagan mythology, like pagan ritual, centers on the killing of
victims or on their expulsion, which can seem perfectly wanton. He realized that this type of
killing, which is reflected in many rituals as well as represented in myths, is often executed
by a large number of murderers; it is a collective deed in which an entire human group is
involved. Only exceptionally, but then most strikingly, as we will see later, did Nietzsche
focus his attention directly on the collective aspect of the god's murder, but his entire
problematic depends on this and his most interesting fragments clearly demonstrate that need.
This is the case, especially, of a well-known text that figures in
The Will to Power
under the number 1052.
Nietzsche himself gave that important text a title: "The Two Types: Dionysus and the Crucified." The second paragraph formulates most clearly the attitude of Nietzsche:
Dionysus versus the "Crucified": there you have the antithesis. It is
not
a difference in regard to their martyrdom -- it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness
and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case,
suffering -- the "Crucified as the innocent one" -counts as an objection to this life, as a
formula for its condemnation. -- One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of
suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed
to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as
holy enough
to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the
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harshest suffering. . . . Dionysus cut to pieces is a
promise
of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
Nietzsche obviously felt that the collective murder of Dionysus, in the episode of the Titans,
is analogous enough to the Passion of Jesus to be regarded as equivalent. There is a
difference between the two but "it is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom." The
italics are Nietzsche's.
The insight regarding the similarity of the two collective deaths is not uncommon among
thinkers and anthropologists of the period. It is the insight of Freud
Totem and Taboo
as well.
It has disappeared from modern anthropology, lost and buried beneath the fast accumulating
rubble of scholarly fashion. The structuralist analyst, for instance, is still concerned with the
episode of the Titans in the Dionysus saga but his interest has shifted from the murder of the
god and the cannibalistic feast to the culinary preparation that took place in between, an
interesting question no doubt but one that diverts us from the tragic apprehension of
Nietzsche.
When the anthropologists first observed the great abundance of gods collectively murdered in
religious cults everywhere, they felt they had discovered something important and so did