“Hold your highest hopes holy,” says Zarathustra in one breath, and “God is dead” in another. For Nietzsche the creator God is forever gone. But the God that represents man’s highest hopes and aspirations remains very much alive.
What Nietzsche fears most is that creator-man will die along with his creator-God, leaving nothing but “the last man” who has transformed himself into a mere component of an orderly industrial machine. The last man “makes all things small,” including himself. He no longer aspires to create something great, but only to play his tiny part in the machine. The last man enjoys his entertainment, but it must always remain superficial. “He's careful that his entertainment never takes hold of him.”
When duty makes man small, as it does in an industrial society that asks him to become a gear in a vast machine, man must cast a “holy no” in the face of duty. Creating freedom is the first step of all creativity. In the past man put “thou shalt” in his holiest place. “Now he must find frenzy and willfulness in his holiest place.” Creativity demands saying no to the duty that makes man small, and then “a new beginning, a first movement, a holy yes-saying.”
“If you can’t be the holy men of insight, at least be its warriors, the vehicles and harbingers of its holiness.” Nietzsche envisions a new religion where all the piety and reverence we had once directed to the unknown God is directed to a God of insight. He wants us to retain all the evangelical fervor we have lavished on the gospel, but now directed towards a new gospel of creative searching.
What is most praiseworthy is what is most difficult. The next step on the path to greatness is the one that leads uphill. You will invariably seem eccentric. No one will understand your path, except the friend willing to walk beside you.
“To value is to create.” The last man no longer creates. So he can no longer value. What his neighbor seems to value, he avidly adopts as his value. But his neighbor doesn’t create either. The carcasses of dead values circulate in place of living ones. And the stench is overwhelming.
“You must want to burn up in your own flame. How will you become new if you haven't first turned to ashes?” Nietzsche, like Jesus, wants his disciples to die to the world and be born again. Baptism of fire prepares us for a new life of courageous creativity.
Thanks so much for the interesting article. I'm not quite ready, however, to completely give up the idea of a creator God.
ReplyDeleteBiology has taught us that man’s flesh (hardware) is not created by God, but rather by a sequence of nucleic acids. But for man’s mind (software), nucleic acids can’t claim full credit. Part of the mind’s contents is certainly handed down from generation to generation by words. Now if the word is God, as John tells us, then we might still reasonably say that the mind is created, at least in part, by God. Considering how large a part religion and its gods have played in the development of our culture, I think we must admit that, at least in part, religion did indeed make us who we are today.
For those who would interpret scripture in a spiritual way, or, as we would say today, a “psychological” way (as if using Greek instead of the Latin somehow made the study of mind-soul-spirit into a new science), it is indeed still perfectly legitimate to speak of a creator God.