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.

James G. Frazer, from here

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¨.

The Golden Bough, as glimpsed on Kurtz’s bedside table in Apocalypse Now.

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.

Friedrich 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.

Nietzsche and Carlyle

Nietzsche and Carlyle’s critical reputations have taken opposing trajectories: Carlyle was feted and hugely influential in his lifetime, but soon afterwards dismissed and never since rehabilitated; Nietzsche was an outcast and almost readerless during his writing career, before becoming one of the great influences on 20th century thought. They are sometimes name-checked together as the primary advocates of hero-worship in western letters. They had a lot more in common than just that, though, in their ideals and opinions, and in their temperaments.

Nietzsche, like all well-read individuals of his era, was familiar with Carlyle’s work, and mentions it in his works a few times, most notably in Twilight of the Idols:

Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician by necessity, who seems ever to be tormented by the desire of finding some kind of strong faith, and by his inability to do so (in this respect  a true Romanticist!). To yearn for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, but rather the reverse. if a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of scepticism; he is strong enough, firm enough, well-knit enough for such a luxury. Carlyle stupifies something in himself by means of the fortissimo of his reverence for men of a strong faith, and his rage over those who are less foolish: he is in sore need of noise. An attitude of constant and passionate dishonesty against himself – this is his proprium; by virtue of this he is and remains interesting.

Not a fan, then, though he does admit that Carlyle is interesting, which is praise by Nietzsche’s standards. Given how scornful Nietzsche was of his fellow philosophers, an “interesting” should not be underestimated, but rather seen as a demonstration that Nietzsche could not dismiss Carlyle quite as completely as he would like to.

Shams and actors

Many of Nietzsche’s main themes in Idols are indeed similar to Carlyle’s. When Nietzsche asks “Art thou genuine or art thou only an actor? Art thou a representative or the thing represented, itself?” (maxim 38) we are getting very close to Carlyle’s central preoccupation. Carlyle rarely used the term “actor”, but when he did it was in the same sense as Nietzsche, as when he castigates his implied reader, calling him “a cowardly play-actor in God’s universe” (“New Downing Street”, Latter-Day Pamphlets). This points up a concern Nietzsche and Carlyle shared. Rather than actor, Carlyle would usually talk about a “sham”, but it was his constant preoccupation to tell the actor/sham from the true that was central to the clothes metaphor in his early meisterwerk Sartor Resartus, and revisited often and at length in his later career. Contemporary life, for Carlyle, was all sham; ruled by sham, and ruled by shams, that is, leaders, who “were not ruling at all; they had merely got the attributes and clothes of rulers” (“The Present Time”, Latter-Day Pamphlets). They were not the thing represented, but a sham in the clothes of the thing represented, and for both Nietzsche and Carlyle this disengagement from truth and instinct symptomatized a degenerate society, a society slavish rather than truly aristocratic, without real leaders.

Such a society was one that said “no” to life. Carlyle and Nietzsche were both conscious of their own need to say “yes” to life, and the fact that this alienated them for the surrounding society. They used similar terminology to articulate this: compare Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea” in Sartor to Nietzsche’s “aristocratic affirmation” in Genealogy of Morals, I, 10., or indeed the latter’s notion of becoming a “yea-sayer“.

Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche – separated at birth? 

System v. the individual

Similarly, when Nietzsche says “I distrust all systematizers, and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty”, he’s hitting another Carlylean keynote. Again, of course, there’s the obsession with honesty, integrity, being-the-thing-itself, that the two writers shared, but also the hatred of system. Carlyle had famously decried what he called The Mechanical Age in the early essay “Signs of the Times” (1829); he showed how the will to a system had infected every aspect of human existence, for example with regard to government. He remarked with bitter sarcasm on the mood of the age:

A good structure of legislation, a proper check upon the executive, a wise arrangement of the judiciary, is all that is wanting for human happiness. […] our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances.

This state of affairs bothered Carlyle because it left the individual with no choice but “to unite to a party, or to make one.” He believed systems didn’t work for humans because they operated on mechanical principles, but people, whether they knew it or not, operated on dynamic principles, and thus: “one man that has a higher wisdom, a hitherto unknown spiritual Truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not” (“Sing of the Times”). Why should such a man of wisdom join a party, mechanize his intellect? For both Nietzsche and Carlyle, the seed of the cult of the hero was the hatred of systematization, and a mechanical and industrial society was one that baulked the superior individual at every turn. With the hatred of system, came also a hatred of rationality, which was thinking by system, and which failed to account for the deepest human drives. At bottom of every organism was the Will to Power, as Nietzsche saw it; Carlyle, too, had notoriously been interpreted as holding that “mights make rights”, i.e. that morality (“rights”) was to be determined by the power (“mights”) of the party concerned. One had the right only to what one had the power to take and keep. (See the “Mights and Rights” chapter in Carlyle’s Chartism – his attitude is more complex [or perhaps simply more self-contradictory] than an open power-worship, but he does seem close to it at times).

One could go on: their tendency to racial hierarchisation, their attitude to violence and war, their attitude to pity and charity, etc. – they had far more in common than Nietzsche suggested. There are also similarities of tone: confrontational, oppositional, scornful of those who held opposing views. There is perhaps most of all a sense of two passionate, intelligent and deeply frustrated individuals lashing out against a society they feel has not allowed them the proper avenues of self-expression or a satisfactory way of life. In both cases, they don’t admit to this: Carlyle projects everything outwards. Rather than talking about his own difficulties with faith and engagement in society he furiously castigates society at large for its lack of faith and lack of real human relations, implicitly positing himself as having surmounted such difficulties (and living in the Everlasting Yea of faith and optimism). Incidentally, that’s why, when Carlyle’s private papers came out after his death, they dealt a huge blow to his reputation: it became obvious he didn’t live by his own stated principles, and his writings suddenly read like self-hatred turned into sadistic authoritarianism and (as we might say in post-Freudian times) superego violence. Nietzsche insists on his own transcendence, but in tones of increasing desperation, the more grandiose his self-celebration, the more obviously false it was. Nietzsche was able to see Carlyle’s passionate dishonesty against himself, but never admitted to his own.

Finally, both Carlyle and Nietzsche unwittingly documented, to varying extents, their own mental disturbance through their writings. Anthony Trollope said when he read the Latter-Day Pamphlets: “I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad through literature and who has now done so.” Nietzsche, meanwhile, really did suffer the complete mental breakdown that is presaged in late works (Ecce Homo, in particular), and wrote not a word after the age of 45. Carlyle went on for much longer, but perhaps he shouldn’t have. If he had stopped at around Neitzsche’s age, before he wrote the Pamphlets, et al., his reputation might have survived.