Christianity and the Transvaluation of Values in Nietzsche and Frazer
This blog’s last post looked at the use of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in Apocalypse Now (1979). The book’s re-emergence in such a concentrated form in a Hollywood film 90 years after its first publication is an indication of its influence. The ideas in The Golden Bough moved a generation of poets and writers. Its deep resonance came not from its exploration of primitive or ¨savage¨ myth and ritual per se, but from what Frazer was saying about his contemporary society, even if, most of the time, he was saying it indirectly.
Centrally, the implications of Frazerian thought for Christianity were profound. Frazer’s technique involves comparing myths from different systems and societies, and he sometimes brings in Biblical accounts and points out their similarity to older pagan stories. For example:
When we reflect how often the Church has skilfully contrived to plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen Adonis, which, as we have seen reason to believe, was celebrated in Syria at the same season. The type, created by Greek artists, of the sorrowful goddess with her dying lover in her arms, resembles and may have been the model of the Pietà of Christian art, the Virgin with the dead body of her divine Son in her lap, of which the most celebrated example is the one by Michael Angelo in St. Peter’s.
The Golden Bough, one-volume edition (Wordsworth, 1993), p. 345 [all quotes in this post are also found in volumes 5 and 6 of the 12-volume edition]
It is not only Easter that is of dubious provenance, because a few pages later Frazer briefly notes “the festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen rival¨ (358). Taken in total, such passages create a strong sense of the unoriginality of Christianity and suggest its doctrines are heavily reliant on older pagan beliefs. The death of Christ is not seen as a historical account of God’s presence but as a derivative of tales concerning Adonis, Osiris and other gods of yore. Insofar as the reader accepts Frazer’s account, the status of Christianity becomes seriously diminished.
Frazer is also not above using sarcasm to implicitly question Christianity, as in the following reflection on divine body parts being found at various locations according to legend:
[Osiris’s] heart was at Athribis, his backbone at Busiris, his neck at Letopolis, and his head at Memphis. As often happens in such cases, some of his divine limbs were miraculously multiplied. His head, for example, was at Abydos as well as at Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably numerous, would have sufficed for several ordinary mortals. In this respect, however, Osiris was nothing to St. Denys, of whom no less than seven heads, all equally genuine, are extant.
The Golden Bough, p. 366
Frazer mocks the Osiris cult’s ascription of ¨remarkably numerous¨ legs to their deity but then turns his withering sarcasm on Christianity and adherents of St. Denys, whose seven heads are “all equally genuine” – that is to say, clearly not genuine at all. Thus Frazer, rather than confronting Christianity head on, is mostly content to throw occasional jabs in its direction and thereby undermine its truth-telling credentials gradually.
There is one passage in which Frazer takes a more deliberate aim at Christianity and makes the central reason for his antipathy to it clear in a single long and dense paragraph.
The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of crude savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a multitude of similar Oriental faiths which in the later days of paganism spread over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the European peoples with alien ideals of life gradually undermined the whole fabric of ancient civilization. Greek and Roman society was built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual whether in this world or in a world to come […] All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. […] [H]owever much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilization is only possible through the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them.
The Golden Bough, p. 357
Here Frazer suggests that his main issue with Christianity is not that it is untrue and derivative, but that it was through the Oriental religions including Judaism and Christianity that a massive change came about in how people related to each other and the world, and it was not for the better. In Greek and Roman society, Frazer maintains, the individual was subordinate to the community, people were generally ready to lay down their life for their state and self-interest was discouraged. With the coming of the Oriental religions, the commonwealth was forgotten as adherents focused on “communion of the soul with God” as the highest good. Frazer makes no bones about it: this is a “selfish and immoral doctrine”, and one which leads to a ¨general disintegration of the body politic¨.
Frazer is suggesting nothing less than an entire reorientation of values and morality, one which led from a Greco-Roman worldview based on the common good with the ideal of the patriot-hero to a worldview based on the eternal life of the soul with the ideal of the saint-recluse.
It is not dissimilar to the transvaluation of values famously suggested by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1887’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche claimed that ancient societies, including Homeric Greece and imperial Rome, were based on an “knightly-aristocratic” morality, while contemporary societies were based on a “priestly-aristocratic” morality of Judeo-Christian derivation. Judeo-Christian society was, according to Nietzsche, a revenge of the slaves. The knightly aristocrats of Roman times had been “blonde beasts”, who he described as being “like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an ample theme to sing and celebrate” (On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel (Barnes & Noble, 2006, p. 15-16).
That sounds unpleasant yet the priestly aristocrats of contemporary society fare even worse at Nietzsche’s hands. The blonde beast was fearsome but Judeo-Christian man is contemptible:
One may be perfectly justified in being always afraid of the blonde beast that lies at the core of all aristocratic races, and in being on one’s guard: but who would not a hundred times prefer to be afraid, when one at the same time admires, than to be immune from fear, at the cost of being perpetually obsessed with the loathsome spectacle of the distorted, the dwarfed, the stunted, the envenomed? And is that not our fate? What produces to-day our repulsion towards “man”?—for we suffer from “man,” there is no doubt about it. It is not fear; it is rather that we have nothing more to fear from men; it is that the worm “man” is in the foreground and pullulates; it is that the “tame man,” the wretched mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider himself a goal and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle, a “higher man”;
On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 17
Both Nietzsche and Frazer, then, see a decisive break between the ancient world and Judeo-Christian society. They both seem to have a marked preference for the former world, which is aristocratic and knightly. They both believed that the Judeo-Christian world promoted a priestly image that impoverished life: by loosening individual ties to family and state in Frazer; by elevating the resentful priestly personality according to Nietzsche.
It is interesting to note that Nietzsche’s ideas were deeply scandalous, while Frazer, though his work gave rise to some controversy, was an establishment figure who enjoyed a long career at Oxford and received a knighthood for his anthropological work. Yet his ideas were scarcely loss revolutionary than Nietzsche’s. The difference is one of tone. One of Nietzsche’s works is subtitled “How to philosophize with the hammer” and his tone reflects this. Frazer used implication, occasional sarcasm and a generally mild tone, as well as more systematic attention to sources; Nietzsche used over-statement, re-iteration and only occasional reference to philologico-historical evidence to back up his statements. Had he learned to philosophise with the rapier as well as the hammer he could have gained more scholarly appreciation for his work in his lifetime but perhaps he would have lessened the posthumous popularity which came his way and which shows few signs of abating. In a transvaluation of critical opinion, On the Genealogy of Morals is now more esteemed than The Golden Bough.
The Victorian Sage 