Tag: Job

How Not to Write Philosophical Fiction – Soren Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Kierkegaard’s title is actually a typically witty joke – it refers to the number of times you need to read this stupid book to understand it. Repetition is one of the Danish philosopher’s earliest works, and as it is quite a bit shorter than Either/Or, I decided to start with it. I am very good at buying Kierkegaard’s books – I own Either/Or, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Papers and Journals, and A Literary Review – but I am less good at reading them, even though I’ve always felt we would get on. After all, he’s often referred to as a foundational thinker of existentialism; at the same time, he was also a devout Christian, and I am interested in both of those things.

I suppose I was finally motivated to read Repetition because of Clare Carlisle’s fun and imaginative biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart, which I read last month. The biography actually turned me off Kierkegaard somewhat – I really had the impression that he was quite sickly, and it’s hard to put from one’s mind Nietzsche’s argument that good, healthy philosophy is always produced by good, healthy minds. But Carlisle’s book got me thinking about the Dane anyway, and so I decided to give him a go – Repetition’s short size didn’t hurt either.

But in all honesty, I am no philosopher. In this post I hope to explain more what is interesting about Repetition than to put forward any kind of interpretation. I cannot say I enjoyed Kierkegaard’s work, but there is a lot to take away from it.

An Overview of Repetition

Repetition is, like many of Kierkegaard’s works, written under a pseudonym – this time, Constantine Constantius. It’s wrong to think that the pseudonym simply masks Kierkegaard or provides a funny pun – the pseudonyms are themselves narrators, exploring views that Kierkegaard himself does not necessarily call his own. My copy of the book even refers to Constantine in the notes, rather than Kierkegaard. I found this a little jarring, for it is as if the fictional Constantine has burst through into reality, but it makes sense.

The work’s subtitle is “An Essay in Experimental Psychology” which means absolutely nothing because in the 19th century people called whatever they wanted to “psychology”. In some sense it is not unlike a German novella. Repetition is a story, rather than a tract, with characters and a sense of being anchored in a world very familiar to our own. There are two central sections, framed by some philosophising by Constantine on the nature of repetition. One story concerns a trip by Constantine to Berlin, while the second, more weighty section, is about a young man who falls in love with a girl and then has to deal with some tortured consequences because he decides he needs to break the engagement off.

Both sections are influenced by Kierkegaard’s own life. The main biographical point everyone knows about him is that he fell in love with, and got engaged to, a girl called Regine Olsen. He then broke off the engagement because he decided he preferred to be unhappy and write philosophy – as you do. The reasons are, of course, slightly more complicated than that – Carlisle is good on them – but it is perhaps helpful to know that Kierkegaard had experienced similar things to his characters, even if the thoughts here are specially produced.

The “philosophy” section

You will be expecting me to tell you what “repetition” actually means. I certainly expected Kierkegaard to. The book’s theme is after all put by Constantine thus: “whether repetition was possible and what it meant, whether a thing wins or loses by being repeated.” Repetition appears to be a way of viewing the world. The Greeks saw all knowledge as recollection – what we learn we really remember. Recollection therefore orientates the one remembering towards the past. Repetition does the opposite. It is “recollected forwards”. But what does that mean?

Constantine tells us that “repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love”. It is happy because unlike hope it does not distract us from the present, and unlike recollection it is not filled with the sorrow of comparing the present to the past. Repetition is a living in the moment, but one with a kind of structure and a sense of limitations. Repetition knows not to demand too much. “Only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy”.

Repetition accepts life’s limitations – it is not greedy. But it does require a kind of courage to desire repetition. “Repetition is actuality and the earnestness of existence”. God himself, we are told, wills repetition. To rephrase Far Cry 3’s Vaas, repetition is not the definition of insanity– it is the only way of living, aside from thinking about the past the whole time, which allows us to live without life dissolving “into an empty, meaningless noise”. Without repetition or recollection, we will struggle to live meaningful lives. And only the former lets us live happy ones.

Berlin

Constantine decides to test if repetition is possible, so he goes to Berlin. He has been there before, and he hopes to find it the same. Unfortunately, but somewhat predictably, the city has changed. His old landlord has gotten married, the theatre isn’t quite what it was the first time. He had left his home in Copenhagen because he was living “the wrong kind of repetition. My thoughts were barren, my anxious imagination constantly conjured up tantalizing memories of how the thoughts had presented themselves the last time, and the weeds of these recollections strangled every other thought.” In Berlin too, Constantine cannot enjoy things because he is recollecting them, rather than actually “repeating” them. He fails to live his own definition.

A Romance

Before and after the Berlin trip Constantine tells the story of “a young person” who considers Constantine his confidant. This person likes a girl, but unfortunately not in the right way. Constantine uses his idea of repetition vs recollection to determine what a good relationship should be like. Almost immediately, this young man is already “in a position to recollect his love.” Rather than concentrate on the girl as a human being in the present, she is already a memory-image in his mind. In a brilliant phrase, Constantine writes that the young man “had leapt right over life”. Perhaps the young man does not love her at all, only the image she created in him. Anyway, Constantine suggests ways of breaking off the engagement that will not hurt the girl too much, mostly involving been seen with other women.

After his trip to Berlin, the young man reappears in Constantine’s life, sending him letters. He has departed Copenhagen, but not followed Constantine’s advice about how to end the relationship. Constantine philosophises about him – “The girl has enormous significance for him. He will never be able to forget her. But that through which she has significance is not herself, but her relation to him. She is like the limit of his being. But such a relationship is not erotic. Religiously speaking, one could say that it is as if God had used this girl to capture him”. In any case, the young man leaves no address, simply writing his thoughts to Constantine for the latter to muse over.

And what are these thoughts? A mishmash of things, mostly centring on God and Job. “Does one no longer dare to complain to God?” the young man asks. In our age we no longer have sufficient faith to argue with Him, or perhaps we are simply afraid. The young man reads Job. “At night I can allow all the candles to be lit in my room, illuminating the entire house. Then I stand and read aloud, almost yelling, one or another passage from Job.” Me too. The young man also offers an interpretation of the bible story in the context of repetition. Namely, that Job, undergoing God’s testing, did not hope for anything, but simply lived, and then eventually things got better – they repeated. Only God can make possible repetition through his “thunderstorm”, which overcomes the tension of life.

Repetition as Philosophical Novella

I do not pretend either to have understood Repetition or to have successfully conveyed what little I did, perhaps, understand. But I would like to critique it as a philosophical novella, because I at least know how to do that. Kierkegaard’s two characters, and his story, encourage us to think. By having action in the real world, Repetition makes its philosophy something directly related to life as we live it. Meanwhile, the two characters prevent us from simply assuming that one or other is the author, and the other is someone to be disagreed with thoughtlessly. Constantine insults the young man – “it was easy to see that he laboured under a complete misunderstanding” – but that does not mean we should. As I noted, Constantine’s trip to Berlin shows he himself does not quite understand repetition as he defined it. Both characters are flawed, but both have important things to say.

But does that make Repetition a successful philosophical novella? What even is philosophical literature to begin with? Is it just a narrative that makes us think about philosophical themes? Most stories are philosophical by that definition, but we’ll go with it. Repetition has the young man’s story, with its letters and Constantine’s occasional snarky commentary. It has the Berlin trip, and it has the philosophy at the beginning and the end. Very well.

But it is not entirely successful as a work of literature. The Berlin section contains far too long a discourse on the nature of the theatre and of farce. There is a bit of humour, a lot of irony, but not enough humanity. The young man’s story suffers similar problems. Constantine notes that the girl is only an image to the young man, but she remains so for him and us too. The young man’s letters are perhaps the best example of the work’s flaws. He asks questions, “Am I lost?”, “Am I perhaps crazy?”, “Why does no one answer?” – which cannot have answers, because he does not leave a return address or even desire Constantine’s response! But that means that there is no dialogue in this text, there are only two monologues, with Constantine’s critiquing the young man’s.

Dostoevsky is often compared to Kierkegaard, but his philosophical novels are a hundred times better than Repetition precisely because they are filled with dialogue between characters. Characters engage with each other’s ideas, and nothing is settled in their world. The great Soviet critic Bakhtin notes that “Dostoevsky’s hero always seeks to destroy that framework of other people’s words about him that might finalize and deaden him”. Here, the young man cannot be in dialogue with Constantine because the correspondence only goes one way. Constantine “finalises and deadens” the young man, without the battle that would take place if they were actually in the same room. Though both characters are supposedly alive, because they have no real relation to each other it’s hard to feel they actually live.

Conclusion

I am unable to judge Repetition’s philosophy. A wiser person than I may one day note in the comments how terribly I have misrepresented it. As I understood it – this orientation towards the present, coupled with a sense of not demanding too much of life – it seems sensible enough. I appreciate Kierkegaard’s careful structuring of his text, but I think it is fundamentally misaligned with how good philosophical fiction must be.

Philosophical fiction shouldn’t just be people talking past each other – even Heidegger has essays with characters chatting, for crying out loud! Philosophical fiction has to elucidate the ideas in a way that philosophy on its own cannot, and that demands action and dialogue. Dialogue through life, rather than simply words passed between others; otherwise we could stick Repetition and some of its early reviews together and call that “dialogue”.

Latency does not make for dialogue. We need characters in the same room – we need to feel, as we feel with Dostoevsky, that at any moment the discussion could fall apart and they could start fighting each other with hands and fists. If this philosophy stuff is actually vitally important – and I’m sure Kierkegaard thinks it is – then its representation in literature demands this. Philosophical literature must make philosophy real, and it must make us feel. Alas, Repetition only just manages the former, and fails completely at the latter.

I will read some more Kierkegaard soon. For more on Job, check out my review of Joseph Roth’s novel of the same name. For more Dostoevsky, look at my thoughts on rereading the first two parts of Crime and Punishment.

Honour in Decline: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March is a story of decline. On one level, it describes the rotting of an Empire, Austria-Hungary; on another, it is a much more personal story, telling the tale of three generations of the Trotta family, a family whose own rise and decline are both the result of their country’s decay, and in a way partly responsible for it. In dealing with the fortunes of a family, it is in some way comparable to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but The Radetzky March is a much tighter book, thanks to its focus on only three characters – grandfather Joseph Trotta, father Franz Trotta, and son Carl Joseph Trotta. As men, they are the administrators and soldiers of the great empire. As a result, their fates are inevitably bound with its own.

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, is the one constant of The Radetzky March. He lived to be 86 and ruled for almost 68 years.

There is a lot to like about the novel. For me, above and beyond Roth’s talent for description and portraiture, what I loved most about The Radetzky March was its description of family and the shifting of the generations. My great grandfather became the world leader in his field and a household name; my grandfather became a famous and influential politician. But my father and his brother, the heirs, both found it difficult to live up to the expectations of the past and in some sense their lives can be read as an attempt to cope. It is now my turn, like Carl Joseph under the gaze of his grandfather’s painted eyes, to face the pressure to be someone I may not be.

The Radetzky March is not a source of guidance on this topic, but it is a picture of a world that is now lost, and we would do well to sift through the ashes in search of what might be worth holding on to.

The Birth of a Dynasty – The Opening of The Radetzky March

The first chapter of The Radetzky March is enough to decide whether the novel is for you. Detailing the life of grandfather Trotta, it works perfectly as a short story. We meet him in the army at the Battle of Solferino of 1859, where he saves the life of the young Austrian Kaiser, Franz Joseph. Joseph Trotta, who is the son of simple Slovene peasants, is ennobled for his deed. No longer is he a Slovene, now he is an Austrian – “a new dynasty began with him”. He receives a promotion, becoming a captain, and now is not merely Trotta, but “Trotta von Sipolje”. We might expect him to be happy, but instead the honour is more of a curse than a blessing. We feel his pain as his identity becomes uncertain, fragmented. “He felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life”.

But he cannot return to the past either. When he meets his father again the conversation is stilted, awkward. The only thing for him is to try to become the aristocrat he supposedly is. Grandfather Trotta marries “his colonel’s not-quite-young well-off niece” – a lovely description conveying all the delicacy of aristocratic reasoning – and raises his only son with military constriction. “Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest.” The son is not damaged by the life of discipline. These were different times, when individuality was less important than service. But things will change.

In the end, the father dies soon after the son comes of age. “Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring – and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.” The rest of The Radetzky March concerns the wheat – his son and grandson, and their fates.

Fathers and Sons

Time changes. The father Franz Trotta grows up and now raises his own only son, Carl Joseph. He raises him in just the same way as his own father did. In these early chapters the only thing Carl Joseph seems to say to Franz (who is almost always referred to by his role, district captain) is “Yessir, Papa”, which indicates the degree of independence of thought the young lad has. There is no intimacy between them. They write each other letters, just as the grandfather wrote his own father letters, out of a kind of obligation and without any heart in them. When, later in the book, there are moments that put father and son together, they are unable to speak to each other.

Always he wanted to say, Don’t cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!”

Honour, of a sort

It is honour, that mysterious network of social rules and regulations, that binds both mouths shut. Honour is not all bad – it was, after all, a great source of dignity, and it bound together members of the upper classes with its common behavioural language. Nevertheless, honour places all of the characters of The Radetzky March in chains, whether they notice them or not. We see this most tragically with a young man, Max Demant, who Carl Joseph befriends early in his military career. He is in many ways a double of Carl Joseph – he, too, finds himself in a social position unthinkable to his ancestors. Demant is a Jew – his grandfather was a tavern keeper, his father a postal official. He is no soldier, no cavalryman, and his wife doesn’t love him. As he puts it, his is “a life with snags”.

One evening Demant departs a theatre performance early, leaving his wife alone. Trotta offers to escort her back, but they are seen by the other officers. The next time they are all together, the other officers drink heavily, leading one of them ultimately to start yelling “Yid, Yid, Yid!” Demant has no choice but to challenge the speaker to a duel. No choice? Demant knows that he has a choice – he knows there are ways to disappear, for example to flee to America. But he is unable to make that decision. “A contemptible, shameful, stupid, powerful iron-clad law was fettering him, sending him fettered to a stupid death.” In spite of honour’s stupidity, if he wants to remain a part of the community, he has no choice but to submit to it.

The ordinary citizens, who live outside the officers’ world, see things as perhaps they really are. “The officers went about like incomprehensible worshippers of some remote and pitiless deity, but also like its gaudily clad and splendidly adorned sacrificial animals.” We do not even see the duel, we only hear its result as Trotta does – second hand. Just as did Effi Briest, The Radetzky March makes duelling into something pointless, depriving it of its romance. Roth skilfully weaves both hope and despair into the final hours before the fight, and even with that the final result still surprised and shocked me. Honour, Roth shows, is something insidious as well as something obvious. It can lead to duels and avoidable deaths, but it can also be responsible for a coldness between family, where really there should be warmth.

Decay

Is honour the source of the decline of the Hapsburg monarchy? I don’t think that Roth suggests that here. Things are more complicated than that. After the duel, Carl Joseph is forced from his prestigious cavalry regiment into the infantry and posted to the Austro-Hungarian border with Russia. I loved the description of the nature there, of how the Austro-Hungarians “sacrificed” gravel year by year in trying to force the swampland into roads and solid ground. Here Carl Joseph meets a Polish Count, Chojnicki, whose pessimism about the Empire’s prospects is unconcealed. Chojnicki, however, sees a solution to the decline, and that solution is violence. He is a dark prophet of reaction. In killing its rebellious elements, there’s a chance the Empire may yet survive.

Back in Moravia, the district captain also witnesses changes as The Radetzky March progresses:

“At first he had merely belittled the nations that demanded autonomy and the “working people” who demanded “more rights.” But gradually he was getting to hate them – the carpenters, the arsonists, the electioneers.”

He does not think that the Empire is ending, but he knows that it has enemies. His transition, as the novel goes on, from benign governance to hatred, is perhaps a better starting point for thinking about the Empire’s decline. Like many others, he is unable to understand why Hapsburg subjects would have any loyalty to anyone other than the Empire and Emperor. His closemindedness, which has made him an excellent bureaucrat, leaves him unable to read his times.

Chojnicki is the borderland society’s leader, and Carl Joseph visits him regularly. With nothing else to do, and grieving for his friend, Carl Joseph takes up drinking. And now the Empire’s decay is coupled with his physical decay.

Demonstrations for universal suffrage in Prague, 1905. Of course, one could just shoot the lot of them. But that tends to have unforeseen consequences.

Blood

We have a chance to see Chojnicki’s theories in action. Carl Joseph is tasked with putting down some striking workers, with violence if necessary. He does not question his orders. “It had not yet occurred to the lieutenant that the workers were poor wretches who could be right.” Carl Joseph’s mind, like his father’s, has been conditioned to serve without questioning. But shooting civilians, even unruly ones, is far less noble than the fate he had once believed would be his. As he prepares to give the order to fire, he tries to imagine what his grandfather would have done. But he cannot. He is living in an unheroic age, and he no help comes to him. Instead,

he saw the times rolling toward one another like two rocks, and he himself, the lieutenant, was smashed between them.

The incident needs to be hushed up. People have died. But for Trotta the memory of that day remains with him as a time when he was powerful. It is a dangerous memory. As Carl Joseph’s decline continues, he gets drawn into gambling debts as a co-signatory to friends, and when the original debtors are unable to pay for various reasons, the creditor, Kaputrak, comes to Carl Joseph instead. Carl Joseph feels powerless before the man, even though he is an officer and the other a mere civilian. Unable to control himself, he grabs his sabre and forces the other out of the room with it, nearly stabbing him in the process. But there is a witness, and all Carl Joseph achieves is a little more time before he has to pay. Without war to give an outlet to his trained violence, Carl Joseph ultimately turns it against others.

The Little Things

What makes The Radetzky March so good is its subtlety. Little things, little ironies, pile up throughout the novel. Towards the end, there are more and more images of clocks and watches, pointing to the limited time left for Austria-Hungary. Then there is the use of music. The “Radetzky March” was a kind of unofficial anthem for the Empire, a tune the boy Carl Joseph used to hear each Sunday, is replaced by the “Internationale” as the workers begin fighting for their own corner, instead of blindly submitting. And then we have the use of portraits. Carl Joseph is haunted by the image of his grandfather, hanging in his father’s house. It represents his obligations to live up to the family name, and he comes back to it again and again.

But there are also portraits of the Emperor too. Early in The Radetzky March Carl Joseph removes one such portrait from a brothel, ashamed to see it there. By the end of the novel, however, the portraits, which once hung all over the Empire, have disappeared, stowed away now that other causes have grown in popularity. The situation with the portraits, as with the Trottas themselves, represents the state of the Empire. When they are taken down, the end is not far off.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed The Radetzky March. It is an extremely rich book, filled with irony and thoughtfulness. Roth treats Austria-Hungary neither as an ideal world, nor as a complete disaster. Within the all-encompassing idea of honour, he finds both good and bad. When he writes that, “all in all, Lieutenant Trotta’s experiences amounted to very little”, there is more than a hint of sympathy in the condemnation. Carl Joseph has been brought up rigidly, in a rigid world, and when he is forced to face things he hasn’t been prepared for he (understandably) falls apart into drinking and violence. If the Empire had not been heading for collapse, perhaps all would have been alright. He would have found a place in the world for himself. But history did not give him that choice.

Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March.

In some way The Radetzky March contains a lot of what makes Tolstoy so good. Roth describes a wide range of characters from various social strata, giving the impression that he understands the entire world. In The Radetzky March even the Emperor himself is a character, which was pretty cool (Tolstoy does the same in Hadji Murat). But Roth is not quite as good as Tolstoy at making characters, and this is especially obvious with the female characters. For the most part they were boring seductresses, serving to demonstrate the Empire’s moral decline. Of course, given the story is mostly about officers, there’s little space for women to have a big role. All the same, I’d have liked to see a bit more variety. Tolstoy, for all his views on women, was definitely a lot better at writing them.

The Radetzky March is a great book in spite of both the women and Roth’s occasionally confusing chronological signposting of events (Roth doesn’t always link the chapters very clearly). It is an insider’s account of the decline of an empire, and a timeless story of the way the generations can fail to connect with one another.

For more about the tension between honour and practice, Effi Briest is worth reading. To look at another world that has faded away, read my review of Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement. For more Roth, I’ve written about Job: The Story of a Simple Man, here.

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 19th 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 19th 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.