ANCIENT GREECE, CHRISTIANITY, AND HUMAN NATURE
What makes ancient Greece a singularly healthy culture, according to Nietzsche, is its fulsome acceptance of human, all too human, nature - including the human being’s “dreadful capabilities and those counting as inhuman [unmenschlich]” - as an inevitable but also potentially ennobling force in life.
For “Man, in his highest and noblest powers, is all nature and carries nature’s uncanny dual character in himself” (HC, 177).[622] As Nietzsche explains,[t]he Hellenic genius [Der hellenische Genius] had yet another answer to the question, “What does a life of struggle and victory want?” and gives this answer in the whole breadth of Greek history. In order to understand it, we must assume that Greek genius acknowledged the existing drive [Trieb], terrible as it was, and regarded it as justified.... Struggle and the pleasure of victory were acknowledged... (HC, 179)
To illustrate Nietzsche’s point with an example from the Iliad, the Achaians not only vent their “terrible” drive for the “pleasure of victory” in battle against the Trojans but, when there is a respite from battle, they establish athletic games in order to afford themselves additional opportunities for venting that relentless drive and enjoying that sweet pleas- ure.[623] In this way, Nietzsche might say, the Achaians acknowledge and deem justified this powerful impulse of human nature.
As Nietzsche further explains,
[t]hey [the Greeks] took this all-too-human to be unavoidable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion [Kultus]: indeed, everything in man possessing power they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that expresses itself in dreadful qualities but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the most harmless possible outflow, confine them to definite cults [Kulte] and days.
This is the root of the moral free-mindedness [moralistischen Freisinnigkeit] of antiquity. One granted to the evil and suspicious, to the animal and backward, likewise to the barbarian, the pre-Greek and Asiatic, that still lived on in the foundations of the Greek character [Wesen], a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation. (HATH 2:220)As an example from Homer that one might cite to support and illustrate Nietzsche’s account here, in the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus mercilessly slaughters the 108 suitors of his wife Penelope not only in order to eliminate the threat they pose to his family but also to discharge his animalistic desire to overpower and destroy those who stand in his way. As Homer describes Odysseus when his old servant Eurykleia finds him after his triumph over the suitors: “Then she found Odysseus with the slain corpses, spattered with blood and gore, like a lion who, having devoured an ox of the fields, goes off, and all his chest and cheeks, then, on both sides are bloody, terrible to look at in the face; so was Odysseus spattered in his feet and his hands above them” (22.401-406).
Nietzsche goes on to explain that the Greeks sought, through their political orders, not to tyrannize over human nature but to allow it to express itself and flourish:
The entire system of such procedures was comprehended in the state, which was constituted to accommodate, not individuals or castes, but the ordinary human qualities. In its construction the Greeks demonstrated that wonderful sense for the typical and factual that later qualified them to become natural scientists, historians, geographers and philosophers. The constitution of the state and of the state religion was determined, not by a circumscribed priestly or caste-dominated moral code, but by the most comprehensive regard for the reality of all that is human [die Wirklichkeit alles Menschlichen]. (HATH 2:220)
By finding outlets, for example, for the spirited, self-asserting, power- willing, love of victory in wars against external enemies, factious republican political life, athletic and artistic contests, and philosophical debates rather than condemning such spiritedness as sinful and evil, the Greeks allowed that potentially destructive passion to be vented, channeled, and elevated, and thereby enabled human nature to thrive and to excel:[624] “Since the desire for victory and eminence is an inextinguishable feature of nature...
the Greek state sanctioned gymnastic and artistic [musischen] contest between equals, that is to say marked off an arena where that drive could be discharged without imperiling the political order” (HATH 3:226);The Greek artists, the tragedians, for example, poeticize in order to be victorious; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest.... It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment; they want actually to be more excellent; then they extract agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment (HATH 1:170);
“Every great Hellene” such as Homer and Plato or Miltiades and Themistocles “passes on the torch of the contest; every great virtue strikes the spark of a new greatness” (HC, 180-181).[625] Indeed, Nietzsche contends that “Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic competition [erotischer Wettbewerb], as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions” (TI 9.23; see also 2.8). Greek culture was therefore healthy and good because it allowed human nature to express, channel, and ennoble its spirited will to power. For “[w]hat is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself” (A 2). Similarly, the Greeks allowed human nature to express freely and honorably its life-giving eros: “For the Greeks the sexual symbol was therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety. Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings” (TI 10.4).
What renders Christianity, according to Nietzsche, a singularly unhealthy culture is its attempt to purify human nature of its essential elements, for example, its erotic passion and its spirited love of victory: “It was Christianity, with its ressentiment against life at the bottom [auf dem Grunde], which first made something impure of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the presupposition of our life” (TI 10.4; see A 56). In the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled “Morality as Anti-Nature,” Nietzsche explains that, because of its condemnation of all natural human passions, Christianity is incapable of channeling and sublimating those passions:
The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its “cure” is castratism.
It never asks: “How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?” It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule [Herrschsucht], of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life (5.1);“The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch.... Life has come to an end where ‘the kingdom of God’ begins” (5.4 - ellipsis is in the text). But such a war against the passions is futile, since such passions are inevitable features of our nature.[626] Accordingly, the passions survive the Christian attack, but in Christian culture, in contrast with Greek culture, the passions express themselves in unhealthy ways. For example, Achilles’ savage hatred of Hector leads him to commit the “horror [Grausen],” of abusing the corpse of Hector as well as to commit what Homer himself calls the “evil” deed of killing 12 Trojan youths at the funeral of his friend Patroclus (HC, 177; Iliad 23.175). However, Achilles’ discharge of that passion also enables him, Nietzsche might argue, to display a noble compassion for Hector’s father and people by granting them a 12-day truce to celebrate the funeral of Hector in peace (Iliad 22.395-409, 23.170-183, 24.14-18, 24.471-670). In contrast, since Christians must strive to love their enemies, rather than forthrightly express and discharge their passion for victory over their enemies, they forgo direct action against their enemies; cherish an impotent, ever intensifying, and cruel longing for victory over their enemies; and ultimately envision the greatest happiness imaginable - “the bliss [Seligkeit] of this Paradise” - as one in which they see their enemies suffer unspeakable torments for eternity (GM 1.15).
What is more, the Christian condemnation of human instincts leads to a cruelty and torture against oneself. For “[a]ll instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward” and this internalization produces a “bad conscience,” that is, a condemnation and punishment of one’s own natural, animal passions, and hence “man’s suffering of man, of himself ” (GM 2.16; see also 2.17-19).
The consequence of such an effort to prevent the natural expression of the passions - an effort that is not exclusive to Christianity but that, in Nietzsche’s account, appears to be most fully and clearly expressed in Christianity - is to produce guilt- ridden, self-hating humans who strive in vain to suppress their passions, loathe themselves for the persistence of such passions, ultimately loathe their human nature and human existence as sinful, and seek to vent their spirited will to victory over enemies against themselves (GM 3.20). As Nietzsche explains,that will to self-tormenting, that repressed cruelty [Grausamkeit] of the animalman made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the “state” so as to be tamed, who invented the bad conscience in order to hurt himself after the more natural vent for this desire to hurt had been blocked - this man of the bad conscience has seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to a gruesome pitch of severity and rigor. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture to him. He apprehends in “God” the ultimate antithesis of his own ineluctable animal instincts; he reinterprets those animal instincts as a form of guilt before God... he ejects from himself all his denial of himself, of his nature, naturalness, and actuality, in the form of an affirmation as something existent, corporeal, real, as God, as the holiness of God, as God the Judge... (GM 2.22; see D 77, 91)[627]
Rather than fulfill human nature, then, Christianity renders such fulfilment impossible:
Christianity has succeeded in transforming Eros and Aphrodite - great powers capable of idealisation - into infernal kobolds and phantasms by means of the torments it introduces into the consciences of believers whenever they are excited sexually. Is it not dreadful to make necessary and regularly recurring sensations into a source of inner misery, and in this way to want to make inner misery a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon in every human being! (D 76);
“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated - into a vice” (BGE 168; see also A 17, 26, 27, 47, 49).44 Nature is not effectively expelled by Christianity, but the effort to expel it results in appalling human misery.
The contrast with the ancient Greeks is clear: “Greek antiquity” was “a world without feelings of sin”;
Such natures, as those of the Apostle Paul, have an evil eye for the passions: all they know of the passions is what is dirty, disfiguring and heartbreaking: hence their idealistic tendency aims at the annihilation of the passions, and they find perfect purity in the divine. Very differently from Paul and the Jews, the Greeks directed their idealistic tendency precisely toward the passions and loved, elevated, gilded, and deified them. Evidently, passion made them feel not only happier but purer and more divine. (GS 135, 139)
Rather than fight the brute fact of human nature, the necessity of their nature, the Greeks accepted that necessity. Rather than condemn human passions and nature as sinful in the sight of God, the Greeks honored those passions and that nature - their own passions and nature - as divine. And they learned to deify their passions and their nature from the “deifier, the golden nature,” Homer (GM 3.25).