European Literature Archives - Page 4 of 6

Magic Sentences – Flaubert’s Three Tales

The thing with Flaubert is that he knows how to write a sentence. And not one of those magnificent but coldly complex sentences, of the sort that Henry James or William Gass carved out on a regular basis – a sentence that you admire like you admire a marble sculpture – from a distance, aesthetically. No, what Flaubert wrote were real, living, breathing sentences. I can’t read a sentence by Flaubert without wishing his ghost could find its way into my wrist and guide it to write something similar. Flaubert, this superhuman master of realism, is one of the only authors whose style I feel obliged to imitate. Because although he does nothing fancy, unlike almost everyone else in the world each and every sentence he wrote somehow comes out original and fresh.

He somehow could not think in clichés. He was repulsed by them. The only thing we as readers and writers can do to avoid falling completely under his linguistic spell is to try to remind ourselves that his work was the result of an extreme effort – these novels and stories were the real sculptures. Whereas the likes of Zola and Balzac were pumping out novels faster than your average 19^th century bourgeois French intellectual could read them, Flaubert barely managed a handful over the course of his life.

Whether or not you like the content is in a way besides the point. Personally, I didn’t like the plot of Madame Bovary that much. But the Three Tales, which I read last week, are rather fun. They are all very different. They range from the beautiful “A Simple Heart” to the weird “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” to the also weird but now in addition confusing “Herodias”. What was surprising for me, knowing Flaubert only from Madame Bovary, was seeing Flaubert’s range. Here’s a medieval tale, here a piece of historical fiction. It’s surprising because I tend to associate realism with writing about one’s own time and world, but Flaubert shows that neither need be a limitation.

Anyway, on to the stories, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation!

A Simple Heart

“A Simple Heart” is the most standard of the stories collected in Three Tales. It is essentially the telling of the life story of a single woman, Félicité, who is a servant. Though she has the appearance of “a woman made out of wood, driven as if by clockwork”, that does not mean the tale is boring. There is an element of daring in this story, because Félicité is from low down in society, and in “A Simple Heart” there is neither ogling nor idealisation of the poor going on – Félicité simply is a human being, in spite of her simplicity. As a young lady she was disappointed in love, was divided from her siblings as a result of the need to earn a living, and eventually ended up in the service of a Madame Aubain, who is not particularly pleasant as a master, though she could, one supposes, be a bit worse.

Allow me now to mention a sentence, or rather two. We have been learning about the guests who turn up at Madame Aubain’s house. We have just read about the Marquis de Grémanville, who is somewhat profligate and prone to alcohol and overall not entirely welcome. The paragraph ends, and the next begins, as follows:

“I think you have had enough for today, Monsieur de Grémanville! Do come and see us again soon!” And she would close the door behind him.
But she was always delighted to welcome Monsieur Bourais, a retired solicitor.

What a transition! I had to stop reading and fetch my pencil. It is the most prosaic thing in the world, and yet, so perfect. The closing of the door and the closing of the paragraph, the way that we feel the sudden delight of Félicité seeing Monsieur Bourais thanks to the suddenness of his sentence, as if we ourselves were opening the door! I know, it is a minor thing. But like learning the parts of a mechanical watch, being able to look out for these details and savour them is what makes the Three Tales, and Flaubert in general, so wonderful.

Félicité works tirelessly. Her cares, for the children of Madame Aubain, for her own nephew when she meets him, all result in dejection and failure. But Félicité, who has a simple faith, just keeps going with life: “She doted on her mistress with dog-like fidelity and the reverence that might be accorded to a saint”. In some sense Flaubert’s tale reminds me a little of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Both stories take someone whom society was inclined to think relatively worthless – a servant and a petty scribe – and show that they have a certain dignity about them, in spite of their low origins. Félicité is treated awfully by those around her, but she does not lose her faith. And as a result, the reader comes out at the end of the story with a sense of the strength and the value of every individual. A better moral couldn’t be found.

The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator

I didn’t like the other two of the Three Tales as much as I did “A Simple Heart”. I am a bore, I know. “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” tells the story of how a certain Julian became a saint. As a theme, this is rather off-putting to the modern reader. I mean, who reads about saints these days? The most we might expect is a boring-old morality tale. And of course, that is part of the story. But there is more to it.

Julian is born in a castle, and to his mother and father respectively it is prophesied that he will become a saint and an emperor. As a young man he is a hunter, and here was something I had not expected – Flaubert’s violence. This tale is pretty unpleasant to read for even the most steak-loving of readers. Julian kills everything. For pages and pages we read about how he slaughters – and I mean slaughters – this or that creature. “They circled round him, trembling with fear and looking up at him with gentle pleading eyes”. And he kills them anyway. Lakes of blood, and all that – it’s all here! Eventually though, the animals fight back and Julian is told a curse is upon him. He will kill his father and mother. Uh-oh.

To save his family Julian runs off, becomes a mercenary, and gets a palace of his own – as you did, back then, in the days of knights and shining armour. Here’s another sentence: “The whole palace was so quiet that you could hear the rustle of a scarf or the echo of a sigh”. What suggestion!

Anyway, Julian does kill his parents, in the kind of ridiculous comedy-of-errors manner that is only possible in Greek tragedies and the Middle Ages, and commits to a life of voluntary wandering. Julian’s suffering as he wanders is just as intensely described as the suffering he inflicted on the animals, which meant it was effective even as it was difficult to read. But it is the end of the story that is the hardest part of all to read. A leper comes to Julian asking for help and Julian does everything he can to help the man, even hugging him tightly while they are both naked so as to give the man his warmth. I know we don’t have lepers these days, but Flaubert’s descriptions made me shrink back in disgust all the same.

Yet this, I think, is what makes the story so powerful – it really makes us feel what it must have been like to be a saint. We feel after reading like we have an idea of what is asked for. This is in stark contrast to, say, Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” where it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tolstoy and his main character just need to get a better therapist and maybe go outside more. Julian’s faith feels lived in a way that Sergius’s always felt on the edge of parody.

Herodias

Finally, the last of the Three Tales is “Herodias”, Flaubert’s retelling of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. I basically only know that story from the Klimt painting. And I have just googled it and discovered that the painting has nothing to do with this story to begin with, which means I know even less about the story than I thought. I didn’t like the story. I found it hard to follow. There are far too many characters and I do feel that readers without a sense of the background (more than just the tl;dr “John the Baptist gets decapitated” summary) are going to be just as confused as I am. Perhaps if I read it again slowly, after reading the Bible version, things would be clearer.

As it stands, I appreciated bits of it but not the whole thing. Moments like this description of a dancer will remain in my memory –

“Her feet moved rhythmically one in front of the other to the sounds of a flute and a pair of hand cymbals. She extended her arms in a circle, as if she were calling to someone who was fleeing her approach. She ran after him, light as a butterfly, like Psyche in search of her lover, a soul adrift, as if she were about to take flight.”

So too will the speech given by John the Baptist himself, which has a certain Biblical force about it. And finally there is this image, as the ruler of who has had John the Baptist imprisoned looks out over the desert, which has the same power as Shelley’s Ozymandias:

“His spirits sank as he looked out over the desert; in its fold and convolutions he seemed to see the shapes of ruined amphitheatres and palaces.”

But overall, I must say the story left me more confused than awed.

Conclusion

At under a hundred pages in my edition, the Three Tales are short enough to read over the course of three hours – in my case I read one each day. And I am certainly glad I read them, even “Herodias”. I really can’t express fully how giddy with excitement Flaubert’s prose makes me, even though it is distorted by translation. And in his use of historical topics, and not just the world around him, he has reminded me of the full range of literary possibilities associated with realism. Finally, these stories do have a certain thread of continuity to them. All of the Three Tales are concerned with faith, and the differing ways it manifests itself. And in the way that the faiths here are in the most part unusual – the prophet’s faith of John the Baptist, the saint’s faith of Julian – these stories are interesting and powerful to read, and not just beautiful. Though they are, certainly, that too.

The Joys of Youth: Boris Vian – Mood Indigo / Froth on the Daydream

Oh, how wonderful it is to be young and happy, rich and idle. Such is, in some sense, the first impression I got from the French writer Boris Vian’s novel, Mood Indigo (after one of its film adaptations), originally translated as Froth on the Daydream. The work is absurd, and at first glance meaningless – people hop on clouds, the sunlight makes pleasant sounds. For the first third of the book I had thoughts of dropping it and getting on with something serious. Who actually likes to read about happy people? Certainly not me. And especially when that happiness is located in a world of absurdity, where nothing seems to matter or have a connection to our own world… in short, the book started to annoy me.

But Vian is playing a game in Mood Indigo. His characters are indeed happy, their world is indeed absurd. But this is just the setup. Because soon enough, a rot appears under the joyous façade, and all that was wonderfully absurd now becomes terrifyingly absurd, and the initial messages the book trumpeted now struggle to sustain themselves once things have started going wrong. And they go very wrong in this book. In the end, Mood Indigo moves on from its silly initial impression to become a brilliant reflection on mental health and more.

Our Colourful Cast of Characters

The silliness of Mood Indigo is in evidence from the very first words – “Colin finished his bath”. It is a meaningless phrase; its lack of drama subverts our expectations for what an opening line normally looks like. Our hero, Colin, is joined by Nicholas the butler and cook, Chip his friend, and Alyssum and Chloe to make up our main characters in Mood Indigo. They have silly names and lead silly lives. Colin has a lot of money and does nothing all day except enjoy himself. His world is yellow – the colour of positivity, of energy. Sunbeams flood his house with joyous sounds (as part of the way everything is connected in Mood Indigo, even normally soundless things all make noises).

The overall impression, come to think of it, is similar to a children’s television show. Colin not only eats strange things, such as an eel found in his sink, but he also has a huge store of Rube Goldberg machines, including a drinks mixer that doubles as a piano. Everything is possible in this world, and everything is positive. Colin’s great anxiety is over finding himself a girlfriend – both he and Chip are in their early twenties. Other than that, we might say that “life is but a dream”.

A Rube Goldberg machine. Colin has lots of devices that make his life exciting and pleasurable.

Things Go Wrong

Until it isn’t. At a party Colin meets a young lady, Chloe, and falls in love with her. His courtship of her is, as with everything else, an extreme affair – the world reforms itself to suit his new mood of infatuation. He finds that a “street led straight to Chloe”, and when they are together they can literally step onto clouds to enjoy themselves. In a moment of kindness Colin gives Chip part of his fortune – Chip doesn’t have money of his own – so that Chip can, in his turn, marry Alyssum, another friend of theirs. In the meantime, Colin and Chloe celebrate their marriage. It’s a wonderful, expensive, lavish affair – Vian enjoys describing everyone’s clothes in Mood Indigo – marred only by the sudden death of a music conductor when he falls from his perch in the church. But we don’t pay such things any mind. Death doesn’t bother us.

On their honeymoon Chloe begins to get sick, and it is here where Mood Indigo becomes really interesting. At first it’s a sickly, overly happy story about young love – but now darkness begins to creep in. Chloe has a disease of the lungs. There is a waterlily in her right lung, and the only way to save Chloe is to surround her by other flowers in the hope that they will scare the waterlily away. It is not a cheap affair, and Colin spends more and more of his money in trying to save Chloe from her illness. But nothing seems to have any effect, and soon Colin finds himself running low on funds and forced to find work for himself. Meanwhile, Chip and Alyssum’s relationship is also under strain – Chip hasn’t used Colin’s money on the wedding, as planned, but on his obsession with the writer, Jean Pulse Heartre, instead.

Objects and Objectification

Chloe’s illness, and Chip’s increasing obsession – he spends his money on everything possibly connected to Heartre, from books to old clothes the writer might once have worn – both mark the novel’s decline from its cheery beginning into gloom. Both of these events are also important because the decline in Mood Indigo can be partly explained as stemming from its treatment of people and objects. What I mean, is that in some way the novel is an argument against objectification, overt and covert. We can think about this through the example of Chloe’s illness. Chloe’s personality is pretty non-existent in Mood Indigo. She is simple, concerned only with objects – at one point she says she wants to buy: “things and things and things”. Every time she is described its by reference to her beauty – at first this annoyed me, but now I see it was deliberate.

“Chloe’s such a pretty girl,” one character says of her. “I can’t imagine her being ill.”

Chloe is treated like an object by everyone around her, and in a way it kills her. Colin loves her, but the treatment she gets is all through objects – in the end, she is left fading away on a bed, surrounded by plant pots. It is a strange image, but a striking one – she is literally being destroyed by beauty. Chip’s case is similar. In his obsession with objects connected with Heartre, he neglects the human he is supposed to love – Alyssum. All of the girls in Mood Indigo, by the way, have names connected with flowers (Chloe is from the Greek word for fertility). And like flowers, the girls are left to blossom and then die, without the water of true affection. They are never treated like people, like individuals with personalities.

Money and Emptiness

Connected with objects is the way money is used in Mood Indigo. At first it seems to be a source of liberation for Colin, letting him do whatever he wants. He goes ice skating and kills people (by accident) without facing any consequences. He goes to parties and meets pretty girls. The characters of Mood Indigo seem to enjoy the fullness of youth. Chip, when he gets Colin’s money, is able to pursue his passion for Heartre without any limits. Chloe is able to buy all the things she wants. But as Mood Indigo continues the emptiness of their lives becomes harder to avoid.

Chloe’s things are worthless once her illness takes hold, and Chip’s passion soon morphs into an addiction, excluding everything else in his life which once he had valued. Finally, as soon as Colin’s money starts running out, his entire house and world begin shrinking, growing dark and unhealthy in reflection of his inner state. By spending, by not paying attention to the consequences of their actions – most noticeably they random deaths of the early parts of Mood Indigo – the characters avoid trying to grow, to develop themselves or find a real and lasting happiness.

Boris Vian, the French author of Mood Indigo, was a multitalented person, producing not just novels but also songs and poetry. He was an important figure in the French jazz scene, connecting American artists with their French counterparts, and knew how to play himself. Source: Photomaton Archives Cohérie Boris Vian” (propriétaire du cliché), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

It is a wonderful thing to be young, to be rich and live irresponsibly. At least it seems so, while it’s happening. The horrors of the world, its terrifying absurdity, barely affect us or our happiness. Mood Indigo perfectly captures that mood of joy. But the novel goes further, in showing us that under our pleasure there lurks someone else’s pain, that the happiness we think we have is often bought at the price of someone else’s. Ultimately, happiness comes in part from choosing not to see the world. During Chloe and Colin’s honeymoon, at the last stage of Mood Indigo’s “happy part”, Chloe finds herself unable to look through the window of their car onto the world outside – the sight is too distressing. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. You can just put a filter on the window, see only what you want to see, and everything will be okay.

Ultimately, Mood Indigo is about the dangers of easy solutions, of turning the world into your playground, of treating others as objects and shirking responsibility. You will have a great time, at least at first. But soon enough something will happen that you could not have predicted – like an illness – and you will find how little you are prepared for the world hiding behind your dreams. I wasn’t expecting to like Vian’s novel, but I did. It’s intelligent, fun, and has much more to say than I have written about here. I’m grateful to my girlfriend for recommending it.

The title of Mood Indigo comes from a piece by the legendary (and repeatedly namedropped in Mood Indigo) jazz artist, Duke Ellington. Here’s a version on Youtube.

What Does it Mean to Hate God? – Misotheism and Literature

I have always been interested in faith. Growing up in a wasteland, with the boundless sea on one end of my vision and high mountains enclosing the other, it would probably be strange if I hadn’t been left feeling like something was out there. But for me, the faith itself has always been more interesting than the container into which that faith was poured. Perhaps that’s because I myself have believed in many things, and from each of them in turn departed, disappointed in either myself or in the ideas themselves.

Dostoevsky was my literary catalyst for thinking about faith. Time and time again, he produced characters who believe in something – whether it’s a kind of superman, like Raskolnikov; or God’s injustice, like Ivan; or that menacing nothingness of Stavrogin. For the Russian mind, faith is almost a fact of life. As Dostoevsky himself wrote, only a Russian can believe in atheism.

A photo showing the light and hills of Scotland — The Highlands of Scotland, the place where I grew up. To live in such a place without believing in something is impossible, whether it be named God or nature.

This piece was motivated not by Dostoevsky though, but by two poems, which recently made me think about a particular type of faith. Misotheism, or hating God, is not the same as disbelieving in him. It is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is not to consign oneself to an eternity of void and emptiness, but to actually take arms against a hostile God and willingly go to hell sooner than submit to his will and failed world. To me, it is the ultimate act of bravery, of courage – but it is an act that has lost its meaning. So part of this essay will also ask what action, what rebellion, could today hold the same significance as turning one’s back on God. Could anything?

Two poems of Misotheism

Two writers, both Germans, started me off on this train of thought. Goethe’s “Prometheus”, and Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Fate”, both present a view of the world where there is a turning against God, a rejection of him without a denial of his existence. It was the height of German Romanticism, where rebellion was valued for rebellion’s sake.

Goethe’s Prometheus

Goethe’s work is the one that most embodies Misotheism. In “Prometheus” Zeus, who stands for all gods, is subjected to an attack from Prometheus himself. There is no respect here, none whatsoever. The gods would die, “If children and beggars / Were not trusting fools”. They have never helped the speaker – his only source of strength and achievement has been “My sacred glowing heart”. The poem shows the journey from a positive belief to Misotheism. “While yet a child”, Goethe writes, “I turned my wandering gaze / Up toward the sun” – nature, the source of almost all great belief, is the source of Prometheus’s belief also, but it is a belief that dies. “Who helped me / Against the Titans’ insolence?” – not the gods, but his heart alone.

Prometheus, in rejecting god, finds strength in that rejection, as the last two stanzas show. He does not learn to hate life, “Because not all / My blossoming dreams grew ripe”. Instead, he builds a new race, a people “To suffer, to weep, / To enjoy, to be glad, / And thee to scorn, / As I!”. In opposition to the boring perfection and isolation of the gods, lopping off the heads of thistles up above, Prometheus demands the birth of a people who will experience life, in all of its colours and shades of feeling. Rebelling, we take our attention away from the gods, and bring it down to earth. In so doing, though we will suffer, we will also be able to create a pride in ourselves. Only in independent opposition to god can we truly love ourselves. Such is the idea of Goethe’s Prometheus.

A painting showing Prometheus bringing fire to humankind. — Heinrich Füger, *Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind*. Goethe’s poem presents a Misotheism where our suffering becomes our salvation, letting us experience the world more intensely than the gods above.

Hölderlin’s Hyperion and his Song of Fate

Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem, “Hyperion’s Song of Fate”, is not in and of itself an example of Misotheism. As with any poem, it is highly interpretable, and as I tried just now to find a translation for the blog the matter gets even harder because none that I have found really seem to get at what I myself see when I read the German. Given that, I’ll have a go at translating the bits I need myself.

Hölderlin’s poem is broken up into three stanzas. The first two address the gods, who “wander above in the light / On soft ground”. Their life is easy, one of art and of breezes. Unlike us they are “Schicksallos” – fateless, or without a destiny controlling them. But Hölderlin, at least to me, does not find in this situation anything to be envious of. The gods are like children – he compares them to the “Säugling”, or “babe”. And I read in his description of their “eternally blooming” spirit and “eternal clarity” of their eyes, with his repetition of the word “ewig” – eternal – a kind of scorn. In another poem, “To the Fates”, Hölderlin asks the Fates not for eternal life, but just for “one more year” to ensure he can achieve all of his creative potential. He does not want to be a boring god, but a successful human being.

Compared to his treatment of the gods in the first two stanzas, this is how he describes our kind:

But for us it is given,
On no place to rest - 
We fade and we fall,
We sufferers of fate,
Blindly from one
Hour to the next,
Like water that's thrown
From cliff onto cliff,
Year by year down into the unknown.

I read rebellion in these lines. Not in Goethe’s sense, not in the sense of an active revolt. But rather in the sense that Hölderlin wishes to show that in spite of our suffering – he doesn’t shy away from showing it – we still have a kind of dignity. “Year by year” we suffer, the playthings of fate, but it is precisely in this suffering that we find our uniqueness and redemption. I admit my idea’s perhaps too much indebted to Dostoevsky, but I do think Hölderlin may have had something similar in mind. We have “no place to rest”, which sets us apart from the gods, eternally resting up above. But their rest is not valuable – in our struggle we are achieving great things, we are actively living. As with “Prometheus”, “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” finds humankind’s glory in terms of our activeness, versus the gods’ passivity.

Job

Both Goethe and Hölderlin turn to a kind of Misotheism in response to the gods’ passivity. Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man, which I have written about here, takes a different approach. Here, Mendel Singer, the modern Job that is the hero of his story, turns against God because of God’s cruelty. Mendel teaches children his religion, he has served and believed in God all his life, and yet God has made him lose one son to the Russians, killed another son in war, disappeared the third, and left Mendel’s daughter in a mental asylum. Mendel’s faith has not simply not been rewarded – God has actively spat on it. As Mendel yells, “The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel”.

Mendel is ultimately unable to burn his bible, but for a moment his Misotheism has reached heights of emotional intensity that not even Goethe and Hölderlin are able to reach. The reason for this is simple – the distance that Mendel has to travel is greater. He goes not only from faith to hostile faith, but from a loving faith to a hostility that has all the signs of despair.

An illustration of Job, conversing with his friends. Job's Misotheism is powerful because of the emotional distance he needs to travel when rebelling. — Job, as illustrated by Gustave Doré. Job’s suffering gains its power by just how far he has to go to turn against God, from love all the way to hate.

Ivan

Ivan Karamazov, of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, is no Job, but his Misotheism is equally powerful. When he declares that he is “returning his ticket to God” his reasons are not personal, but universal. He is concerned with the problem of evil, that thorny thicket that poses a challenge for anyone with religious belief – why does an omnipotent, omniscient God allow evil to exist? In the great chapter, “Rebellion”, Ivan tallies up God’s injustices not against adults, who after all have had time to sin, but against the children. For the suffering of children is the hardest suffering to justify, emotionally speaking, and for Ivan it is too much. He returns his ticket, turning his back on God without denying his existence. But unlike Job, or Goethe or Hölderlin, Ivan’s rebellion is not only Misotheism, but also a kind of Apotheosis – a kind of becoming God.

Because what Ivan wants is a better world. He wants, in a way, to be the God that God isn’t – kind and helpful and good. Because he turns our ideas of Misotheism on their head, he is in some sense unique among the misotheists. And his struggle is, for me, particularly tragic, precisely because it is doomed. One can successfully hate God, one can successfully rebel against him in the name of freedom for oneself, but one cannot rebel against God to make the world a better place. Or at least, one cannot achieve that goal, because we are not gods here on earth. But Ivan’s Christ-like determination to try, to take the sins of the world upon his shoulders and try to solve them, that makes his rebellion, his Misotheism, so glorious, so magnificent, so powerful.

Why is going against God so powerful?

It has been a whistle-stop tour of literature’s Misotheism. What we have seen is that under the unifying banner of rising against God or gods a great many motivations and aspirations can coexist. I find them all compelling, exciting. To go against God is to condemn oneself, it is to love life so much that we turn our back on anything beyond it. That requires great emotional depths – great suffering, great bravery. It requires, in short, determination and passion.

But Misotheism has lost its touch. As a rule, we do not believe in God anymore, which means we cannot go against him. We can still be impressed when someone turns their back on God, but only at a surface level. Deep down, we’re still a little confused as to why they bother believing in the first place. I am not saying that society, in the West or anywhere else, has become atheistic. Instead, we have simply lost God. So when we have such anger, as felt Ivan, as felt Job, we have no outlet for it. There is no target. Our God now is the wind in the reeds, and just as difficult to catch. As a result, we cannot fight.

At its heart, Misotheism is a rebellion against a deeply held belief. This is still possible in our own time. A religious person can still go against God, a communist might turn against their beliefs after reading about their historical applications, while a capitalist might lose faith in their system’s ability to solve all problems. Someone who loves their family might turn against it. But what is true is that we have lost a universal belief, binding us all together. Almost everyone, publicly at least, believed in God in most of the 19^th century. Charles Bradlaugh, the first British atheist MP, only joined Parliament at the end of that century. Misotheism was powerful in literature because it was a universal theme – now that is not the case. So perhaps the question is, what has replaced it?

Nietzsche – a modern alternative to Misotheism?

Friedrich Nietzsche is the person I naturally turn to when I think about religious faith in the modern era. In The Joyous Science section 125 he writes about the madman in the marketplace, who declares that “God is dead”. This declaration wasn’t designed to shock Nietzsche’s readers, just as it doesn’t shock those in the marketplace. Almost everybody in the 19^th century, just as they publicly acknowledged God, privately also didn’t much care for his existence. But they went no further. Without God’s existence, Nietzsche points out, we must live differently. We must interrogate every one of our underlying conceptions and ideas to determine which have a solid basis, and which are only the legacy of a religious system we now ought to throw away. That was Nietzsche’s project, and it was a failure. Most still live by those past values as before.

A photo of Friedrich Nietzsche — Friedrich Nietzsche describes with his philosophical works a world in which the very rebellions that Misotheism describes – against the gods, to favour the lived life on earth – would become unnecessary. Unfortunately, nowadays we do not love the world like Nietzsche had hoped. And as a result, there is no modern act analogous in power to rebelling against the gods. We neither believe in God nor in the earth.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche makes what I consider his hope for what a modern version of Misotheism would look like. It would be, essentially, a reversal of the traditional one. Zarathustra, the prophet of the book, declares in section 3 of his Prologue that “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth”. With Goethe we saw the most powerful and touching rebellion as moving from a focus on the divine to a focus on the earthly. In its place Nietzsche sees the most spirited (but here wrong) rebellion as one that rejects the earth instead. If Nietzsche’s project had been successful, he would be right. We would all be stunned and impressed by those who reject the earth for God, even as we mostly disagree with them.

It is not so.

Religious Terrorism as a Nietzschean Misotheism in practice

We do not believe in anything. What Nietzsche feared most of all, the descent into nihilism he saw as inevitable so long as we continued along Christian lines of thought, has come to pass in the West. We have lost our spiritual centre but have put nothing in its place. Of course, there are exceptions. Many of us now have a weak spiritualism and think of a kind of God up there, even if we cannot quite make him out. But this faith is personal, and rebellion against it is an act of mind, and not of body, as it is with Ivan, with Job, with Hyperion and Prometheus. It is less tragic to witness, and more simply sad. Few of us love the earth, because we do not have a connection to it. We are trapped in cities, desperate to survive, preyed on by systems far more powerful than ourselves.

But to rebel against these systems is nothing special either. Because nobody really supports them. Terrorism is perhaps the closest thing to a reverse-Misotheism in Nietzsche mould, but I have not one positive word for it (obviously). There are no positive angles to terrorism for anyone except the perpetrators: none of the hope and kindness of Ivan, none of the love of freedom and emotion of Goethe’s Prometheus. The power of Misotheism lay in the fact that when we rejected God we rejected him for something that in our hearts seemed even greater. With terror we reject the world for something lesser.

Conclusion

I wish I knew what the answer was to these problems of faith. I wish I knew a way to bring a kind of faith back. Not one that takes us from the world, but one that binds us to it, and to each other, more closely. At times I have felt like literature, truly great literature, can achieve this. I think of Levin in the fields, or Ivan again – these people made me want to live. They affirmed life, when nowadays most of us only live it. But literature only offers a kind of personal salvation. The only way to make people live, that I have found, is to get out and live yourself, and lead by example. Only then do we recapture some of the heroism, some of the bravery, that makes Misotheism in these great works of literature so powerful.

Thanks for reading. For more Dostoevsky, here’s Crime and Punishment; my review of Roth’s Job is here; as for thinking about the state of the modern world, Joker, Capitalist Realism, and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends all have things to say.

If you enjoyed the piece and have thoughts of your own, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear what others have to say about the ideas I have discussed here.