This text is one of three epilogues that Balthasar wrote to thematic
anthologies of Nietzsche?s writings that he himself collected. They were
originally published in 1942 in three volumes: Nietzsche, Von Gut und Bose;
Vom vornehmen Menschen; and Vergeblichkeit.
=====================
Good and Evil: Epilogue to Nietzsche
(first paragraph omitted)
On the surface, Nietzsche?s ethics is clearly based on anti-Christian ideas;
indeed, its entire positive strength appears to come from the denial of a
transcendent meaning to the world. However, the deeper we penetrate through
the surface of these theses, the more questionable their superficial
appearance becomes. We then discover that in his struggle against a
secularized Christianity of a bourgeois stamp, Nietzsche unwittingly
rediscovered some of the most genuine and frequently disregarded Christian
values, and he portrayed them as the fundamental demands of human ethics.
Regrettably, with the exception of Langbehn, whose research was
questionable, hardly anyone has been daring enough to address these deeper
dimensions of Nietzsche and to bring out their positive Christian meaning.
The reason may be in part that Nietzsche himself consistently lent the
expression of his insights an emphatically anti-Christian coloring, and that
he never pressed forward to the ultimate liberating truths of Christianity,
but always lingered in penultimate regions. In this respect, the selections
will be and remain a disappointment to all those who wish to take home only
black and white theories, rather than to confront the matter itself, no
matter how darkly it may be veiled. But the decisive reason why Nietzsche?s
ethical ideas have not yet brought themselves to bear on Christian ethics
lies elsewhere - namely, in the fact that the values that Nietzsche praised
most have been forgotten.
Nietzsche?s ethics demands both a loosening and a tightening of fundamental
ethics concepts. What we need to loosen, he says, are the connotations of
the terms good and evil; he carries out this task by offering (certainly
very doubtful) historical analyses of their origins as well as by
undermining their claims through psychological arguments. Still, Nietzsche?s
errors remain relatively insignificant when compared to his insight that
there is an ultimate mystery that takes the measuring scales of good and
evil out of the hands of human beings. In the end, all things come down to
this mystery. All values refer back to it and serve as its instruments. What
is absolute in human existence and conscience is nothing but the final,
hidden position one takes in relation to the Absolute.
This super-ethics that lies beyond any objectively graspable norm, this good
and evil beyond any good and evil that can be determined by rules, is
governed by two criteria. There is, on the one hand, what Nietzsche slightly
misleadingly names the instinct for purity, decency, and nobility: an
ultimate, yet immanent, norm beyond all material individual norms. This norm
has the role of ensuring the authenticity of these other norms in the face
of the falsifying and masking influences of ressentiment and other forms of
deception. Though it may have strong vitalistic, indeed biological,
overtones, this norm nevertheless serves as indispensable function and ranks
among Nietzsche?s great ethical achievements. Beyond this norm, which can
still be grasped from within the world, lies that ultimate, somehow
transcendent reference point of all ethics. This reference point, which
takes the place of the divine in Nietzsche, is a vanishing point that judges
everything inner-worldly on the basis of the Absolute and thereby calls it
into question; it is a pole at rest beyond all movement. The essence and
name of this supreme reality remains unspoken in Nietzsche, but it manifests
its tangible presence everywhere. At first - especially during the period
when he was most under Schopenhauer?s influence - it appears as the
always-palpable mystery of being, hidden behind all world-phenomena. Later,
it appears only as the wind blowing through all things and inviting us ever
again to rise up and beyond, a wind that forbids us to cling to anything
earthly, but obliges the great love for the earth to express itself
paradoxically in a renunciation of the earth. Beyond good and evil is a
genuine beyond, even if it refuses to be an other world.
Where Nietzsche refrains from hasty theorizing, but instead entrusts himself
to the inner logic of this act of transcending, possibilities come into
being that point directly to ultimate human, and even Christian, situations:
there is the acknowledgment of pain without a trace of ressentiment; the
ascent of the fundamentally self-despising ego over and beyond itself;
sacrifice that does not pose as an achievement, but simply takes itself as
something that goes without saying; self-denial that is in no way a flight
from the self; competition and cruelty, which even in their inexorable
harshness are the forms that joy and love are necessarily forced to assume
within the context of this world.
Through arduous ascents, the heroic existence is hardened, but not without
immediately having to overcome the heroic itself. Once the summit has been
reached, the pain of the ascent is forgotten and the immense panorama dwarfs
the insignificant climber. The ensuing contemplation of the whole leaves no
room for the temptation to vanity. The heavy self has been overcome, and
soaring becomes the ultimate form of existence. This soaring is an ecstasy,
for which one has wrestled over many nights, and whose truth is safeguarded
in the necessity of the eternal.
Looking back from these heights, there is admittedly much one could say
about the hidden Christian meaning of the middle strata of Nietzsche?s
thought, which present themselves as so outspokenly anti-Christian. To
mention only one significant example, it would be a fundamental
misconception of the very core of the Will to Power to understand it simply
as the antithesis of Christianity. Indeed, the entire redemptive order of
Christianity can stand only on the abiding foundation of a natural ethics,
in which self-esteem, self-love, and the virtues of proper action and
natural authority, along with the legitimate pride that follows from them,
merely represent the conscious expression of self-reliance, and of the value
and nobility of individual life and the individual spirit. Prudence and
fortitude, moderation and justice - did Nietzsche realize that these
constituted the four cardinal Christian virtues?
Furthermore, the rehabilitation of the passions and instincts could not be
more Christian in its origin. Even if morality is not, as Nietzsche
ultimately exaggerates it, merely the veiled play of vital passions, it is
nevertheless - just as the soul is the "form of the body" - the point at
which this sub-moral world takes shape, where the primitive drives take on
form and spiritual meaning. But even when cut, a stone remains a stone, and
even when integrated into an order, a drive remains a drive. It is possible
that many Christians have become too "spiritual" and too prudish to be able
to look with unflinchingly objective eyes upon the anatomy of morality. The
material of the moral act is in itself not moral; Nietzsche is right in
saying so, and the bold manner in which he investigates this underworld -
despite its blindness to the irreducibility of the moral itself - still has
something to teach us today. We might also add that the boundaries between,
on the one hand, vital and instinctual strength, and on the other,
righteousness, greatness and authentic morality, can all too often be fluid.
At what point do cunning, slyness, and instinctual self-preservation become
prudence? Where are the boundaries between instinctual drive and love,
between the self-esteem of a prosperous life and spiritual arrogance? Not to
mention the transgressions, such as revenge, cruelty, vampirism, and the
drive to control other people, that pass themselves off as moral behavior
under thousandfold masks of virtue.
Whenever Nietzsche glorifies "evil," he always makes use of an ambiguous
metaphor. On the one hand, in the language of a soft latecomer, inclined too
readily to pity, the word expresses nothing other than the physical
roughness and non-sentimentality of an unabridged human and worldly virtue.
Though the Renaissance concept of virtu, which Nietzsche lauded, underscores
the vital and predatory aspects of worldly manliness (vir-tus) perhaps too
one-sidedly, it is no less true that human beings remain "skillful"
(tauglich) and "excellent" (tuchtig), only insofar as they remain warriors -
just as the word Tugend (virtue) implies in its root meaning. "Wickedness"
(Bosheit) has for Nietzsche a further more spiritual resonance, signifying
the mischievous and playful dimension of tender love, and, at the deepest
level, the "cruelty" of any, even divine love, which drives the beloved into
the night, into the cold, and into solitude, to prune him so that he may
reach his fullest ripeness and yield. Finally, some passages make a sharp
distinction between "evil" and "bad," and attribute to the latter term alone
what natural and Christian ethics commonly defines as the naked core of
evil: namely, wretchedness, cowardice, baseness, and the impotent revolt
against the laws governing one?s own existence and existence as a whole.
Nietzsche mercilessly strips away the masks worn by this puffed-up
nothingness, which cloaks itself in virtue out of revenge and a craving for
admiration - even if he does not give the primal evil that has been thereby
exposed the ethical name "sin," but instead calls it decadence, perversion,
and the poisoning of life.
But it is not only the laws of a natural-worldly morality, which Nietzsche
admittedly obscures through myriad misunderstandings, that find their
advocate in him. Even the distinctively Christian finds a decisive place, in
spite of all resistance. If it is true that Christianity has chosen, not
strength, but weakness as the privileged form of redemption; if it has
called blessed the poor in spirit and has thus seemingly called into
question the value of virtus, it is because lowliness and grace have been
joined together by nothing less than a covenant. Christian virtue is so far
removed from the ressentiment of life that it can prevail only to the degree
that ressentiment and rebellion against the law of existence fail. The fact
that, when weakness rebels, it prefers Christian masks and pretexts changes
nothing about this state of affairs. The "weakness" that characterizes
Christianity is instead disclosed precisely where every life, even the
strongest, becomes transparent to its futility. Nietzsche?s steep path to
self-sufficiency ends in a hellish need for self-offering; the wealth of
power and truth that he hoards drives him to the cruel fate of Midas, who
instead of living bread clutches in his hands only inert gold. Nietzsche?s
ravenous craving for truth without lies strays into a jungle of pathless
semblances, a hall of mirrors filled with incalculable lies; his courage for
the utmost virtue and purity collapses into the experience of a mean and
base underworld without escape. Even the strongest life runs up against its
limits in death, and there, entangled in the briers of its inescapable fate,
it falls prey to the divine hunter and good shepherd.
Essentially, it matters little in the long run that the curtain drops before
the sacrificed hero utters his final yes, and that we catch only fragments
of the dialogue between the divine hunter and the trembling and blindly
resisting prey; nor is it important that the soul?s terrible cry for help in
"Ariadne?s Lament" or in the "Nightsong" is later presented as an
intermezzo, followed by a mischievous coda. We have seen enough - even
though we do not understand the language of this tragic scene - to guess
what was fought out here. The deadly earnest of the only visible actor
assures us that nothing serious is being taken too lightly. And thus, as the
curtain falls, we are left with not only an uncertain hope, but with a
hesitating conjecture at the meaning of this script, a meaning that will
nevertheless defy interpretation to the very end.
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