“But eternal vigour of life is the important point: what matters ‘eternal life,’ or indeed life at all?” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Nietzsche’s Text
The journey to Hades
I too have been in the underworld, even as Odysseus, and I shall often be there again. Not sheep alone have I sacrificed that I might be able to converse with a few dead souls, but not even my own blood have I spared. There were four pairs who responded to me in my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With them I have to come to terms. When I have long wandered alone, I will let them prove me right or wrong; to them will I listen, if they prove each other right or wrong. In all that I say, conclude, or think out for myself and others, I fasten my eyes on those eight and see their eyes fastened on mine. May the living forgive me if I look upon them at times as shadows, so pale and fretful, so restless and, alas! so eager for life. Those eight, on the other hand, seem to me so living that I feel as if even now, after their death, they could never become weary of life. But eternal vigour of life is the important point: what matters ‘eternal life,’ or indeed life at all?
The Blood That Gives Voice to Shadows
In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, the hero digs a pit, pours into it the blood of the sacrifices, and the shades of the dead come to drink it, because without blood they cannot speak. Homeric death is a poverty: Achilles, questioned by Odysseus, says he would rather serve as a hired hand on earth than rule over all the dead. The shade is a being without mind and without voice, living only on what the living give it.
Nietzsche carries the image further: not only sheep, but not even his own blood has he spared. This confession deserves to be taken seriously, because it names the price of a true encounter with the thought of those who have departed: reading someone truly, you give of your own life so that he may speak. But here the difference from the Church shows. The saints do not ask for our blood in order to speak; they are “a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1), and out of the fullness of Christ they give us their prayer rather than asking for ours. For “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him” (Lk. 20:38).
That is why Scripture forbids necromancy (Deut. 18:10-12; 1 Kings 28): not because the departed are nothing, but because man seeks to compel the dead to speak, instead of listening to the Living One. Dialogue with the books of the departed is not necromancy; the Fathers read the Greeks all their lives. The question is a different one: what do we expect from them?
The Tribunal Chosen by the One Being Judged
Four pairs; each seems to hold two answers to the same question: how does one live in the face of death and suffering? Epicurus and Montaigne answer with serenity, Goethe and Spinoza with the fullness of nature, Plato and Rousseau with the ideal and the natural, Pascal and Schopenhauer with the misery of man. This is my reading, not Nietzsche’s; he says only that he wants to listen to them set one against another.
The psychologist Hubert Hermans described the self as a “dialogical self”: a multitude of I-positions, each with its own voice, speaking to one another within. Thinking is not a monologue but a parliament, and a healthy man is one in whom the voices can truly contradict one another. Nietzsche knows this: he does not want to be proved right by a single witness, but by two who judge each other. Yet the jury is chosen by the one on trial. The man who chose the pairs has chosen the question too, and psychology knows well the tendency, described by Peter Wason as early as 1960, to seek the voices that agree with us. The sharper the mind, the more easily it finds witnesses among the dead.
The Fathers answer with something other than intelligence. Scripture says: “Lean not on your own understanding” (Prov. 3:5), and “the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to counsel” (Prov. 12:15). In the Paterikon, when Abba Anthony is asked which virtue guards against the snares of the enemy, he speaks of discernment, diakrisis; and he adds that monks were lost not for lack of labor but for lack of it. Intelligence without discernment has much talk and little choice. Discernment is born in a place where someone has the courage to be contradicted by a living person, by a spiritual father, by a community, by a God who cannot be invited to the table at will.
Shadows with Life and the Living with Shadow
Nietzsche looks at the living as pale, fretful, restless shades eager for life, and at the eight dead as living. There is in this a half-truth that Scripture knows. It knows the living who are dead: “You have a name that you are alive, but you are dead” (Rev. 3:1); “you who were dead in your trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1); “let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60). And it knows the dead who are alive: “He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live” (Jn. 11:25).
But Nietzsche’s criterion is intensity, and the Gospel’s criterion is communion. Moreover, the signs he sees in the living (fretfulness, restlessness, greed for life) are, in the language of the Fathers, the signs of the passions. Evagrius called apatheia not insensibility but freedom from passionate agitation, from which love is born. Greed for life is precisely the mark of the shade: a hunger that is not satisfied, because its food is not where it is sought. Nietzsche sees the sickness with rare clarity; but he seeks the cure among dead men whose eyes, he says, are fixed on his own, that is, in a mirror. The eight can look only at what his gaze gives them.
“What Matters Eternal Life?”
Nietzsche takes eternity out of the equation: what matters is vigour, not duration. The Fathers would agree with part of this: eternal life is not ordinary life prolonged without end. The Gospel defines it otherwise: “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God” (Jn. 17:3). Zoe, not bios: life as participation in Life, not mere biological existence.
Modern man fears eternity as an endless boredom, and Nietzsche names, without saying so, weariness of life: what the Fathers called acedia, the noonday demon (Ps. 90:6), which Evagrius and Cassian describe as a nausea toward time, toward place, toward oneself. And his wish, that the eight should never grow weary of life, has a precise answer in the theology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa. In the Life of Moses he describes the soul that stretches ever “toward what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13, epektasis): the soul is satisfied without being sated, because God is infinite, and fulfilled desire gives birth to new desire; the true vision of God is the insatiable desire to see Him. A life that cannot grow bored is not a more intense life but a life whose Object cannot be exhausted. Every finite object, whether Plato or Goethe, is used up; the Infinite is not. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed the same thing in his own language: the state of flow lasts only while the challenge grows with the skill; a finite goal ends it.
The One Who Descended Lower
Nietzsche descends into Hades with his own blood in order to hear voices. But the Gospel has another descent: “He descended into the lower parts of the earth” (Eph. 4:9), He preached also to the spirits in prison (1 Pet. 3:19; 4:6), and the icon of the Resurrection shows Him taking Adam by the hand and raising him. His blood does not give voice to shadows; it gives them life. The Paschal homily, read on the night of the Resurrection, says that Hades was embittered when it met Him below: it took a body and found God, it took earth and met heaven. Hence: “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?” (1 Cor. 15:55).
Elsewhere Nietzsche said that God is dead. The Church does not answer with denial but with Pascha: the Immortal One tasted death in the flesh He assumed (the Godhead does not suffer, but the Person suffered in the flesh, which is why we sing: “Holy Immortal, who was crucified for us”), and death itself died: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.”
One thing must also be said with gentleness. The most human sentence in the text is this: “When I have long wandered alone.” The man who descends so often into Hades so as not to be alone tells the truth about a hunger to which the Church has an answer: the communion of the saints, in which the dead are alive and ask for no blood.
What Can Be Taken from the Eight
The Church does not pronounce on the salvation of these men, and neither need we. But the Fathers had a method: Saint Justin Martyr spoke of the “seeds of the Word” scattered through Greek thought, and Saint Basil the Great, in To Young Men, taught them to do as the bee does: take the honey and leave the rest. Applied to the eight, the method looks like this:
- Epicurus saw that fear of death troubles life and sought serenity; he stops at a world without Providence, with pleasure as the goal and the soul dissolving.
- Montaigne saw the worth of self-knowledge, measure, and doubt toward the pride of reason; he remains in resignation, without ascent.
- Goethe saw the fullness of life and the beauty of creation; he stops at fullness as the goal, with no personal Creator.
- Spinoza saw freedom from the passions through knowledge and the love of God; he identifies God with nature, while the Church distinguishes uncreated from created.
- Plato saw the ascent toward the Good and the immortality of the soul; he stops at the pre-existent soul and the despised body, whereas the Church awaits the resurrection of the body.
- Rousseau saw the goodness of nature and the falseness of social life; he does not see the wound of the will, inclined toward evil.
- Pascal saw the greatness and misery of man, the God of Abraham and not of the philosophers; his Jansenist rigorism on grace is not the teaching of the East.
- Schopenhauer saw suffering as the foundation, compassion, and the beauty of the ascetics; he understands renunciation as extinction, not as love, and so asceticism without a Person.
Each saw half of the truth, and that half is true. What none of them saw is the One who descended into that very Hades they described with such lucidity.
At the End of the Descent
Odysseus returned from Hades alone, with the words of the shades. Adam was led out by the hand. Whoever descends with his own blood hears shadows; whoever is descended to by Christ hears the Voice. And the eternal life about which Nietzsche asked so impatiently whether it matters is not an intensity that we sustain, but a Person who holds us and whom we shall never exhaust.
