The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
DIONYSUS.
1033. The passions which _say yea._ I ride, happiness, health, the love of the sexes, hostility and war, reverence, beautiful attitudes, manners, strong will, the discipline of lofty spirituality, the will to power, and gratitude to the Earth and to Life: all that is rich, that would fain bestow, and that refreshes, gilds, immortalises, and deifies Life--the whole power of the virtues that _glorify_--all declaring things good, saying yea, and doing yea. 1034. We, many or few, who once more dare to live in a world _purged of morality_, we _pagans_ in faith, we are probably also the first who understand what a _pagan faith_ is: to be obliged to imagine higher creatures than man, but to imagine them _beyond_ good and evil; to be compelled to value all higher existence as _immoral_ existence. We believe in Olympus, and _not_ in the "man on the cross." 1035. The more modern man has exercised his idealising power in regard to a _God_ mostly by _moralising the latter_ ever more and more--what does that mean?--nothing good, a diminution in man's strength. As a matter of fact, the reverse would be possible: and indications of this are not wanting. God imagined as emancipation from morality, comprising the whole of the abundant assembly of Life's contrasts, and _saving_ and _justifying_ them in a divine agony. God as the beyond, the superior elevation, to the wretched _cul-de-sac_ morality of "Good and Evil."
1036. A humanitarian God cannot be _demonstrated_ from the world that is known to us: so much are ye driven and forced to conclude to-day. But what conclusion do ye draw from this? "He cannot be demonstrated to _us_": the scepticism of knowledge. You all _fear_ the conclusion: "From the world that is known to us quite a different God would be _demonstrable,_ such a one as would certainly not be humanitarian"--and, in a word, you cling fast to your God, and invent a world for Him which _is unknown to us._ 1037. Let us banish the highest good from our concept of God: it is unworthy of a God. Let us likewise banish the highest wisdom: it is the vanity of philosophers who have perpetrated the absurdity of a God who is a monster of wisdom: the idea was to make Him as like them as possible. No! God _as the highest power_--that is sufficient!--Everything follows from that, even--"the world"!
And how many new Gods are not still possible! I, myself, in whom the religious--that is to say, the god-_creating_ instinct occasionally becomes active at the most inappropriate moments: how very differently the divine has revealed itself every time to me! ... So many strange things have passed before me in those timeless moments, which fall into a man's life as if they came from the moon, and in which he absolutely no longer knows how old he is or how young he still may be! ... I would not doubt that there are several kinds of gods.... Some are not wanting which one could not possibly imagine without a certain halcyonic calm and levity.... Light feet perhaps belong to the concept "God". Is it necessary to explain that a _God_ knows how to hold Himself preferably outside all Philistine and rationalist circles? also (between ourselves) beyond good and evil? His outlook is a _free_ one--as Goethe would say.--And to invoke the authority of Zarathustra, which cannot be too highly appreciated in this regard: Zarathustra goes as far as to confess, "I would only believe in a God who knew how to _dance_ ..." Again I say: how many new Gods are not still possible! Certainly Zarathustra himself is merely an old atheist: he believes neither in old nor in new gods. Zarathustra says, _"he would"_--but Zarathustra will not.... Take care to understand him well.
The type God conceived according to the type of creative spirits, of "great men." 1039. And how many new _ideals_ are not, at bottom, still possible? Here is a little ideal that I seize upon every five weeks, while upon a wild and lonely walk, in the azure moment of a blasphemous joy. To spend one's life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality, half-artist, half-bird, half-metaphysician; without a yea or a nay for reality, save that from time to time one acknowledges it, after the manner of a good dancer, with the tips of one's toes; always tickled by some happy ray of sunlight; relieved and encouraged even by sorrow --for sorrow _preserves_ the happy man; fixing a little tail of jokes even to the most holy thing: this, as is clear, is the ideal of a heavy spirit, a ton in weight _of the spirit of gravity._ 1040. _From the military-school of the soul._ (Dedicated to the brave, the good-humoured, and the abstinent.) I should not like to undervalue the amiable virtues; but greatness of soul is not compatible with them. Even in the arts, grand style excludes all merely pleasing qualities. *** In times of painful tension and vulnerability, choose war. War hardens and develops muscle. *** Those who have been deeply wounded have the Olympian laughter; a man only has what he needs.
To this end we must not only consider those aspects of life which have been denied hitherto, as: _necessary,_ but as desirable, and not only desirable to those aspects which have been affirmed hitherto (as complements or first prerequisites, so to speak), but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more terrible, and more _veritable_ aspects of life, in which the latter's will expresses itself most clearly. To this end, we must also value that aspect of existence which alone has been affirmed until now; we must understand whence this valuation arises, and to how slight an extent it has to do with a Dionysian valuation of Life: I selected and understood that which in this respect says "yea" (on the one hand, the instinct of the sufferer; on the other, the gregarious instinct; and thirdly, the _instinct of the greater number_ against the exceptions). Thus I divined to what extent a stronger kind of man must necessarily imagine--the elevation and enhancement of man in another direction: _higher creatures,_ beyond good and evil, beyond those values which bear the stamp of their origin in the sphere of suffering, of the herd, and of the greater number--I searched for the data of this topsy-turvy formation of ideals in history (the concepts "pagan," "classical," "noble," have been discovered afresh and brought forward).
1042. We should demonstrate to what extent the religion of the Greeks was _higher_ than Judæo-Christianity. The latter triumphed because the Greek religion was degenerate (and decadent). 1043. It is not surprising that a couple of centuries have been necessary in order to link up again--a couple of centuries are very little indeed. 1044. There must be some people who sanctify functions, not only eating and drinking, and not only in memory of them, or in harmony with them; but this world must be for ever glorified anew, and in a novel fashion. 1045. The most intellectual men feel the ecstasy and charm of _sensual_ things in a way which other men --those with "fleshy hearts"--cannot possibly imagine, and ought not to be able to imagine: they are sensualists with the best possible faith, because they grant the senses a more fundamental value than that fine sieve, that thinning and mincing machine, or whatever it is called, which in the language of the people is termed _"spirit"_ The strength and power of the senses--this is the most essential thing in a sound man who is one of Nature's lucky strokes: the splendid beast must first be there--otherwise what is the value of all "humanisation"? 1046. (1) We want to hold fast to our senses, and to the belief in them--and accept their logical conclusions! The hostility to the senses in the philosophy that has been written up to the present, has been man's greatest feat of nonsense.
_Dionysus_. Sensuality and cruelty. The perishable nature of existence might be interpreted as the joy of procreative and destructive force, as _unremitting creation._ 1050. The word "_Dionysian_" expresses: a constraint to unity, a soaring above personality, the common-place, society, reality, and above the abyss of the _ephemeral_, the passionately painful sensation of superabundance, in darker, fuller, and more fluctuating conditions; an ecstatic saying of yea to the collective character of existence, as that which remains the same, and equally mighty and blissful throughout all change, the great pantheistic sympathy with pleasure and pain, which declares even the most terrible and most questionable qualities of existence good, and sanctifies them; the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, and to recurrence; the feeling of unity in regard to the necessity of creating and annihilating. The word "_Apollonian_" expresses: the constraint to be absolutely isolated, to the typical "individual," to everything that simplifies, distinguishes, and makes strong, salient, definite, and typical to freedom within the law. The further development of art is just as necessarily bound up with the antagonism of these two natural art-forces, as the further development of mankind is bound up with the antagonism of the sexes. The plenitude of power and restraint, the highest form of self-affirmation in a cool, noble, and reserved kind of beauty: the Apollonianism of the Hellenic will.
This antagonism of the Dionysian and of the Apollonian in the Greek soul, is one of the great riddles which made me feel drawn to the essence of Hellenism. At bottom, I troubled about nothing save the solution of the question, why precisely Greek Apollonianism should have been forced to grow out of a Dionysian soil: the Dionysian Greek had need of being Apollonian; that is to say in order to break his will to the titanic, to the complex, to the uncertain, to the horrible by a will to measure, to simplicity, and to submission to rule and concept. Extravagance, wildness, and Asiatic tendencies lie at the root of the Greeks. Their courage consists in their struggle with their Asiatic nature: they were not given beauty, any more than they were given Logic and moral! naturalness: in them these things are victories, they are willed and fought for--they constitute the _triumph_ of the Greeks. 1051.
It is clear that only the rarest and most lucky cases of humanity can attain to the highest and most sublime human joys in which Life celebrates its own glorification; and this only happens when these rare creatures themselves and their forbears have lived a long preparatory life leading to this goal, without, however, having done so consciously. It is then that an overflowing wealth of multifarious forces and the most agile power of "free will" and lordly command exist together in perfect concord in one man; then the intellect is just as much at ease, or at home, in the senses as the senses are at ease or at home in it; and everything that takes place in the latter must give rise to extraordinarily subtle joys in the former. And _vice versâ:_ just think of this _vice versâ_ for a moment in a man like Hafiz; even Goethe, though to a lesser degree, gives some idea of this process. It is probable that, in such perfect and well-constituted men, the most sensual functions are finally transfigured by a symbolic elatedness of the highest intellectuality; in themselves they feel a kind of _deification of the body_ and are most remote from the ascetic philosophy of the principle "God is a Spirit": from this principle it is clear that the ascetic is the "botched man" who declares only that to be good and "God" which is absolute, and which judges and condemns.
From that height of joy in which man feels himself completely and utterly a deified form and self-justification of nature, down to the joy of healthy peasants and healthy semi-human beasts, the whole of this long and enormous gradation of the light and colour of _happiness_ was called by the Greek--not without that grateful quivering of one who is initiated into secret, not without much caution and pious silence--by the godlike name: _Dionysus._ What then _do_ all modern men--the children of a crumbling, multifarious, sick and strange age _know_ of the _compass_ of Greek happiness, how _could_ they know anything about it! Whence would the slaves of "modern ideas" derive their right to Dionysian feasts! When the Greek body and soul were in full "bloom," and not, as it were, in states of morbid exaltation and madness, there arose the secret symbol of the loftiest affirmation and transfiguration of life and the world that has ever existed. There we have a _standard_ beside which everything that has grown since must seem too short, too poor, too narrow: if we but pronounce the word "Dionysus" in the presence of the best of more recent names and things, in the presence of Goethe, for instance, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or Raphael, in a trice we realise that our best things and moments are _condemned._ Dionysus is a _judge!_ Am I understood? There can be no doubt that the Greeks sought to interpret, by means of their Dionysian experiences, the final mysteries of the "destiny of the soul" and everything they knew concerning the education and the purification of man, and above all concerning the absolute hierarchy and inequality of value between man and man. There is the deepest experience of all Greeks, which they conceal beneath great silence,--_we do not know the Greeks_ so long as this hidden and sub-terranean access to them remains obstructed.
The indiscreet eyes of scholars will never perceive anything in these things, however much learned energy may still have to be expended in the service of this excavation--; even the noble zeal of such friends of antiquity as Goethe and Winckelmann, seems to savour somewhat of bad form and of arrogance, precisely in this respect. To wait and to prepare oneself; to await the appearance of new sources of knowledge; to prepare oneself in solitude for the sight of new faces and the sound of new voices; to cleanse one's soul ever more and more of the dust and noise, as of a country fair, which is peculiar to this age; to _overcome_ everything Christian by something super-Christian, and not only to rid oneself of it,--for the Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine to the Dionysian; to rediscover the _South_ in oneself, and to stretch a clear, glittering, and mysterious southern sky above one; to reconquer the southern healthiness and concealed power of the soul, once more for oneself; to increase the compass of one's soul step by step, and to become more supernational, more European, more super-European, more Oriental, and finally more _Hellenic_--for Hellenism was, as a matter of fact, the first great union and synthesis of everything Oriental, and precisely on that account, the _beginning_ of the European soul, the discovery of _our "new_ world":--he who lives under such imperatives, who knows what he may not encounter some day? Possibly--a _new dawn!_
1052. _The two types; Dionysus and Christ on the Cross._ We should ascertain whether the typically _religious_ man is a decadent phenomenon (the great innovators are one and all morbid and epileptic); but do not let us forget to include that type of the religious man who is _pagan._ Is the pagan cult not a form of gratitude for, and affirmation of, Life? Ought not its most representative type to be an apology and deification of Life? The type of a well-constituted and ecstatically overflowing spirit! The type of a spirit which absorbs the contradictions and problems of existence, and which _solves_ them! At this point I set up the _Dionysus_ of the Greeks: the religious affirmation of Life, of the whole of Life, not of denied and partial Life (it is typical that in this cult the sexual act awakens ideas of depth, mystery, and reverence).
Dionysus _versus_ "Christ"; here you have the contrast. It is _not_ a difference in regard to the martyrdom,--but the latter has a different meaning. Life itself--Life s eternal fruitfulness and recurrence caused anguish, destruction, and the will to annihilation. In the other case, the suffering of the "Christ as the Innocent One" stands as an objection against Life, it is the formula of Life's condemnation.--Readers will guess that the problem concerns the meaning of suffering; whether a Christian or a tragic meaning be given to it. In the first case it is the road to a holy mode of existence; in the second case _existence itself is regarded as sufficiently holy_ to justify an enormous amount of suffering. The tragic man says yea even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor, and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it;--Dionysus cut into pieces is a _promise_ of Life: it will be for ever born anew, and rise afresh from destruction.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.