HOMER AS THE FOUNDER OF GREEK CULTURE

Nietzsche suggests that “perhaps” it was Homer and other poets who established the distinctive harmony between Greek culture and human nature that allowed Greece to flourish so spectacularly:

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 - Where did the Greeks acquire this freedom, this sense for the real [das Wirkliche]? Perhaps from Homer and the poets before him...

How, according to Nietzsche, might Homer in particular have founded the singularly healthy, humanistic culture of the Greeks? Homer did so most simply by creating the distinctive religion of the Greeks. Following Herodotus, Nietzsche contends that Homer gave “to the Greeks their gods” and therefore his poems were the equivalent of the Bible of the Greeks (Herodotus 2.53; GS 302; HATH 1: 262). Nietzsche does not claim that Homer created the Greek gods ex nihilo. There was a pre- Homeric religion that he drew on to create the Homeric religion.^[628] But the religion Homer created was, in apparent contrast with all other religions, one that proclaimed a reverence for what is distinctively human rather than for what is distinctively divine.

In order to grasp what, according to Nietzsche, is unique about Homeric religion, let us step back and consider the nature, not only of Christianity, but of all non-Homeric religion. The essence of all religion - that is, of all belief in beings in some sense higher than human beings, whether or not they care about human beings - would seem to be a depreciation of that which is human. For to reveal that there are super­natural, immortal beings would seem necessarily to reveal that, in the light of such beings, we human beings are defective, that we are merely human, that our lives are all too short, and that we are all too burdened with mortality and all the afflictions that mortality brings.^[629] As Zeus remarks in the Iliad to Achilles' divine, immortal horses, who weep over the death of Patroclus: “Wretches, why did we ever give you to lord Peleus, a mortal, you who are ageless and immortal? So that among ill- fortuned men you too may have woes? For, of all things, as many as breathe and crawl upon the earth, none is at all more miserable than man” (17.443-447).

Nietzsche suggests that such a depreciation of human beings as inferior in every way to wholly nonhuman, mysterious, and incomparably super­ior gods was characteristic of pre-Homeric Greek religion, a religion he describes as “a paltry, crude, in part horrible superstition” (HATH 1:125); a religion that is similar to that of “Italic peoples” who “have a real peasant religion, with continual anxiety over evil and capricious powers and tormenting spirits [Qualgeister]” (HATH 1:114); and a reli­gion that he links to Asia - a religion given to “Asiatic pomp... mysticism and elemental savagery and darkness” (HATH 2:219) - and therefore, indirectly, to Christianity. As he explains,

Christianity... crushed and shattered man completely and buried him as though in the mud: into a feeling of total depravity it then suddenly shone a beam of divine mercy, so that surprised and stupefied by this act of grace, man gave vent to a cry of rapture and for a moment believed he bore all heaven within him. It is upon this pathological excess of feeling, upon the profound corruption of head and heart that was required for it, that all the psychological sensations of Christianity operate: it desires to annihilate, shatter, stupefy, intoxicate; the one thing it does not desire is measure and that is why it is in the profoundest sense barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Hellenic.^[630]

Pre-Homeric religion, while not itself monotheistic, therefore resembles revealed monotheistic religion in its emphasis on the inscrutable, frightening, awe-inspiring otherness of the divine: in Judaism, for example,

God and humanity are here so separated, are thought of as such opposites, that there can basically be no sinning against humanity - every deed should be considered solely with respect to its supernatural consequences, without regard for its natural consequences; that is what Jewish feeling, to which everything natural is that which is the unworthy [das Unwurdige] in itself, demands.

According to Nietzsche, Homer transformed Greek religion in two fundamental ways: he depicted the gods as human and thereby deified and celebrated humanity; he also depicted the gods as indifferent to humans and as limited in their power and thereby liberated humanity from reliance on divine providence. The humanization of the gods and the consequent deification of what is human by Homer, the “deifier” and the “artist of apotheosis,” is a most momentous change (GM 3.25; WP 846; see GS 370). Nietzsche suggests that previous poets attempted to bring this change about, but were always thwarted by the pious insistence on identifying the gods as mysterious, awe-inspiring beings who were wholly different from humans:

so long as the divinity was introduced into trees, pieces of wood, stones, animals, and felt to reside there, one shrank from a humanization of their form as an act of godlessness. It required the poets, existing outside the religious cult and the spell of religious awe [dem Banne der religiosen Scham], to accustom the imagination of men to such a thing: overweighed again by more pious moods and moments, however, this liberating influence of the poets again withdrew and the sacred remained, as before, in the realm of the monstrous, uncanny, and quite specifically non-human [des Unmenschlichen]. (HATH 2:222)

Homer succeeded in breaking this “spell of religious awe” because he had first freed himself from that spell: “Homer is so much at home among his gods, and as a poet takes such pleasure in them, that he at any rate must have been profoundly unreligious; with that with which popular belief [ Volksglaube] presented him - a paltry, crude, in part horrible supersti­tion - he trafficked as freely as a sculptor with his clay” (HATH 1:125).

This, in Nietzsche’s account, is the Homeric revolution in human affairs - Homer created gods in man’s image, gods who reflected the full range of the human soul: male and female, wrathful and erotic, passionate and shrewd, stern and playful.

The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods as set above them as masters, or themselves set beneath the gods as servants, as the Jews did. They saw as it were only the mirror image [Spiegelbild] of the most successful exemplars of their own caste, that is to say an ideal, not an antithesis of their own character [Wesen]. They felt related to them, there existed a mutual interest, a kind of alliance [Symmachie]. Man thinks of himself as noble when he gives himself such gods (HATH 1:114);

“everything in man possessing power they called divine and inscribed it in the walls of their Heaven” (HATH 2:220);

that there are nobler uses for the invention of gods than for the self-crucifixion and self-violation of man in which Europe over the past millennia achieved its distinct­ive mastery - that is fortunately revealed even by a mere glance at the Greek gods, those reflections [Wiederspiegelungen] of noble and autocratic men, in whom the animal in man felt deified, and did not lacerate itself, did not rage against itself. (GM 2.23)

The Greeks regarded such features of their nature as their passions for victory over enemies or their yearning for erotic bliss as justified by their religion since their very gods - Zeus and Hera, Ares and Aphrodite, Apollo and Athena, Poseidon and Hermes - shared those passions.^[631] As Nietzsche puts it in The Birth of Tragedy, “[t]hus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it - the only satisfactory theodicy!” (3). No matter how fully aware they were of the foibles of their human, all too human nature, the Greeks always retained an instinctive belief in the essential nobility and goodness of their humanity.^[632] Accordingly, thanks to Homer, the core of Greek piety was not humble awe before the towering greatness of the gods but gratitude for their own blessedly human nature: “What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way” (BGE 49; see also WP 845). And if one should ask, what about our mortality? How can one be grateful for the mortality that defines humans and marks the limit to whatever happiness we may enjoy in this all too short life? Nietzsche intimates that Homer teaches, through the example of that hero who was to represent the “Greek ideal,” that one should feel more gratitude for the happiness in life one has enjoyed than sorrow over the mortality that terminates that happi­ness: “One should part from life as Odysseus parts from Nausikaa - blessing it more than in love with it” (D 306; BGE 96; see also WP 544).

One might think that, if the Homeric gods are similar to humans, they might also love humans and hence be reasonably looked to by humans for support and justice, as indeed the gods, especially Zeus, the Father of Gods and Men, are repeatedly looked to by Homer’s characters for providence. However, as we have seen in Homer’s text, and as Nietzsche explains with Alcinous’s words in the Odyssey (8.579-580), Homer “paradoxically]” reveals that the gods are fundamentally indif­ferent to human beings:^[633]

Is there anything more audacious, uncanny or unbelievable shining down on the destiny of man like a winter sun than that idea we find in Homer:

then did the gods make resolve and ordain unto men

destruction, that in after times too there might be matter for song.

Thus we suffer and perish so that the poets shall not lack material - and this according to the decree of the gods of Homer, who seem very favorably disposed toward the pleasures of coming generations but all too little [allzu wenig] toward us, the men of the present. (HATH 2:189)

Nietzsche also cites another testimony of divine indifference from Homer’s own words in the Odyssey (8.62-64):

Yes, the favour of the Muses! - What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through [greift ins Herz]: “the Muse loved him [the singer Demodocus] dearly [herzlich] and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song” - This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good and evil, that is her way of loving more dearly [von herzlicher Liebe]! (HATH 2:212)

In a similar vein, in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche emphasizes that, in Homer’s account (most notably Zeus in Iliad 11.67-83, 20.20-23), the gods “rejoice” and “delight” in watching the Achaians and Trojans slaughter one another:

It is certain, at any rate, that the Greeks still knew of no tastier spice to offer their gods to season their happiness than the pleasures of cruelty.

Homer’s revelation of the gods’ indifference to humans would seem to contradict his revelation of the gods’ similarity to humans. For the reason that the gods are indifferent to human suffering and that they even might enjoy the spectacle of such suffering is that, as immortal beings, they themselves do not partake in such suffering. As Achilles observes to Priam, “Such is the way the gods spun life for wretched mortals, that we live our lives in grief, but the gods themselves have no sorrows” (Iliad 24.525-526). The gods’ indifference to humans therefore reflects the essential and profound difference between the immortal gods and mortal humans and hence the utter impossibility, according to Homer, of “deify­ing” human beings. Indeed, Homer’s gods in his poems highlight the paramount significance of the difference between mortal and immortal beings precisely by presenting the immortals as seemingly human in every respect besides their immortality.^[635] On the other hand, Nietzsche might argue, the practical effect on the Greeks of Homer’s revelation of the gods’ indifference to humans would seem to reinforce the practical effect of his revelation that the gods resemble humans. Since the gods are indifferent to us, since they indifferently bestow good and evil upon us and even take pleasure in our suffering, we cannot look to them for divine providence when facing the ills of the human condition; we must look to ourselves for whatever providence is to be found in this cold and cruel world. But since we resemble the gods in our very natures, since our very selves reflect the grandeur and splendor of the gods themselves, we can feel considerable confidence in our ability to face the ills of the human condition successfully.

Given Nietzsche’s contention that the Homeric religion deifies human­ity and thereby infuses humans with a confidence in their own strength, it is not surprising that Nietzsche associates Homer in Human All Too Human and in On the Genealogy of Morality with what he dubs in Beyond Good and Evil “master morality.” In Beyond Good and Evil, he explains that there are “two basic types” of morality, “master morality and slave morality” (260). Master morality is the morality of those human beings who are conscious of their own independent strength:

The moral discrimination of values has originated either among a ruling group whose consciousness of its difference from the ruled groups was accompanied by delight - or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every degree. In the first case, when the ruling group determines the concept “good,” the exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order of rank.

It is because the noble humans are confident in their own power to do justice that they identify the “good” with the strong:

The noble human being separates from himself those in whom the opposite of such exalted, proud states finds expression: he despises [verachtet] them. It should be noted that in this first type of morality the opposition of “good” and “bad” means approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible [verdchtliche].”... In the foreground there is the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow.... The noble human being honors himself as one who is powerful.

Conversely, slave morality reflects “a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition of man,” a suspicion that humans who wish to enforce justice are too weak to do so without the aid of superhuman beings, and a belief that it is the “evil” who are powerful and who “thus inspire... fear” (BGE 260).

Nietzsche’s first account of these two types of morality is in Human, All Too Human, and there he cites Homer’s poems as presenting the example par excellence of master morality. First Nietzsche explains the identification of the good with the powerful, an identification that is certainly not exclusive to Homer - as Nietzsche makes clear when he later cites Scandinavian Vikings as well as “the Roman, Arabic, Germanic, Japanese nobility” as examples of master morality (BGE 260; GM ι.ιι) - but an identification that is strengthened by the Homeric deification of human nature: “He who has the power to requite good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practises requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad” (HATH 1:45). Nietzsche then goes on to allude to the mutual respect of the Achaian and Trojan heroes through­out the Iliad and also, perhaps, to the contempt of such Achaian heroes as Odysseus and Achilles for the purportedly ignoble Achaian Thersites, who speaks rather than acts, and reviles rather than counsels:^[636] “In Homer the Trojan and the Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but he who is contemptible who counts as bad” (HATH 1:45; see GM Preface.4). Furthermore, in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche cites the Homeric heroes as well as Pericles' Athenians - who raise “imperishable monuments” to their “goodness and wickedness [Guten und Schlimmen]” - as examples of those who identify the good with “the noble, powerful one, the ruler” (1.11; Thucydides 2.41.4). In this way, Nietzsche suggests that it was Homer's account both of the gods and of master morality - that is, his religious and moral education - that made possible the tremendous flowering of Greece up through the age of Periclean Athens (see BGE 238).