The Word Without a Signature and the Name to Which Glory Is Given, Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human — “The Name on the Title-Page”
“The name on the title-page. It is now a matter of custom and almost of duty for the author’s name to appear on the book, and this is a main cause of the fact that books have so little influence. If they are good, they are worth more than the personalities of their authors, of which they are the quintessences. But as soon as the author makes himself known on the title-page, the quintessence, from the reader’s point of view, becomes diluted with the personal, the most personal element, and the aim of the book is frustrated. It is the ambition of the intellect no longer to appear individual.” Friedrich Nietzsche
The Quintessence and Its Admixture
The aphorism begins from a small fact and carries it all the way through. A good book is the quintessence of a man: what remained of him after what was worth saying had been sifted out of his life. But the reader does not receive the quintessence alone; he receives the name too, and the name brings the rest in its train: the face, the biography, sympathy or aversion, the party, the reputation. “The most personal element” mixes into what was meant to stand above the person, and the aim of the book, Nietzsche says, is frustrated. This is no accusation against the person; it is a physics of attention. The reader has one attention only, and whatever goes toward the author is subtracted from what goes toward the truth.
Psychology confirms this physics with unpleasant precision. In an experiment that became classic (Geoffrey Cohen, 2003), the same social policy was approved or rejected according to the party label attached to it, not according to its content, and the participants swore they had followed the arguments. Hovland and Weiss (1951) described the “sleeper effect”: a message received from a despised source gains strength as the source is forgotten, which is to say that what is said frees itself from the name of the one who said it only with the help of time. Foucault (1969) showed that an author’s name is no mere proper name but a function: it classifies, limits, guarantees; in the Middle Ages scientific texts required a name as their warrant, while literary ones circulated anonymously, until the relation was reversed. Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” in 1967 as a victory of the reader; the aphorism had named, nearly a century earlier, the same thing as an asceticism of the intellect: not the death of the author, but the “ambition” of the intellect no longer to appear individual.
The First Title-Page in History
The first title-page in history is found in Genesis: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top reaches to heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4). Brick by brick, the aim of the building is the name, and the consequence is the confusion of tongues, which is precisely what the personal admixture does to the word: when the name is the stake, words cease to be understood. To Abraham it is said otherwise: “I will make your name great” (Gen 12:2), a name given, not made. Between the two texts lies the whole difference between signature and baptism. “I am the Lord, that is My name; My glory I will not give to another” (Isa 42:8): whoever puts his name on the work takes for himself a glory that is not his; therefore the Psalm asks by a double erasure: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your name give glory” (Ps 113:9 LXX). And the Savior asks the question before which every author is left without an answer: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:44). Faith, which is the reception of truth, becomes impossible in an economy of mutual glory; this, at the level of the soul, is the dilution of which the aphorism speaks.
The Fathers saw the mechanism from within. Evagrius shows that the thought of vainglory is the subtlest of all, that it slips precisely into those who practice virtue and urges them to make their labors known and to hunt for the praise of men; and its need of a witness is so deep that it stands in the order of thoughts before pride: pride can do without an audience, vainglory cannot. The title-page is the witness institutionalized, the audience set into the page. The psychology of motivation adds a detail: in the study of Lepper, Greene and Nisbett (1973), children who drew for pleasure and were then given an announced reward drew less afterwards, as though the reward had moved the meaning of the deed from the deed into the payment. The name on the cover is the finest of payments: what was done for the work begins to be done for the signature, and only the rule of Proverbs stands: “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips” (Prov 27:2).
Testimonies That Were Not Signed
The Church wrote for a long time without signing, and Scripture itself keeps this rule. The Epistle to the Hebrews bears no author’s name, and Origen, in the word preserved by Eusebius, says that who wrote it only God knows. The Gospels carry no signature in their text; the titles “according to Matthew,” “according to Mark” were set by the Church to witness to the source, not to advertise the hand, and the disciple whom Jesus loved remains nameless in the fourth Gospel. In the Paterikon the weightiest word often begins with “a brother asked an elder,” a nameless brother and a nameless elder; and the icon-painter “writes” the icon, he does not “paint” it, and leaves his hand, most often unnamed, in the shadow of the Face. Saint John the Baptist is the whole image of this order: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23); the voice is precisely what vanishes into the Word, and “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30) is the entire canon of the writer.
Corinth shows what happens when the personal element mixes into the quintessence: “I am of Paul,” “I of Apollos,” “I of Cephas” (1 Cor 1:12). The name made a party out of the word, and the Apostle answers not with a defense of himself but with an undressing: “What then is Paul? And what is Apollos? Servants… Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth” (1 Cor 3:5-7). The Lord Himself says: “My teaching is not Mine” (John 7:16), and “The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own” (John 14:10). A dogmatic precision is needed here, because the saying can be drawn into two wrong waters: it is not a dissolution of the Son into the Father, for Sabellius taught that the Persons are masks that change, and the Church rejected this; nor is it a subordination of the Son to the Father, for Arius attempted it, and the Church rejected that too. It is the witness of one nature and one will in Persons who remain distinct. “It is not Mine” does not abolish the Person: it reveals Him as wholly in communion.
Pagan philosophy too had the foreboding. Heraclitus: “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one” (fr. B 50). Plato says in the Seventh Letter (341c) that there is no writing of his on the greatest matters, nor will there be, and in the Second, whose authenticity is disputed, that what circulates under his name belongs to a Socrates become young and beautiful. Kierkegaard signed his books with pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, so that no one would stop at the man behind them, and added a “last declaration” stating that not a single word in them is his. Pascal observes that whoever says “my book” would do better to say “our book,” since there is more of other people’s good in it than of his own. And Abba Macarius gives the lesson its harshest face: the brother sent to the graves to insult the dead and then to praise them, returning the second time with the same news that they had answered nothing, learns that so must be the one who wants to be saved: dead to praise and dead to insult.
The Boundary of the Aphorism: Individual, Person, and the Name That Is Given
Here the aphorism finds both its measure and its boundary. “The ambition of the intellect no longer to appear individual” is half an Orthodox ambition: if by “individual” is meant the self that asserts itself by opposition, that makes a name for itself, that swells in every sentence, then yes, this must vanish from the page, and not from the page alone. But the quintessence is not, in Orthodoxy, a faceless essence into which the person would dissolve like a drop, as a line of thought from Plotinus onward would have it, nor is truth an impersonal idea: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). The quintessence of good books is, in the end, a Person, and therefore the right movement leads not from person to the impersonal but from individual to person. Vladimir Lossky, and after him John Zizioulas, distinguished the two: the individual is a part of common nature and asserts himself by separating; the person asserts himself by giving himself and is himself only in communion, hypostasis as ek-stasis, a going out of oneself. The Apostle signs his epistles so: “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ” (Rom 1:1); the name appears on the title-page as an undressing.
The second nuance concerns the very need of the name. Plato knew it: the written word, says the Phaedrus (275e), rolls about everywhere and cannot defend itself, needing its father. The Church called the greatest of her writers “Fathers,” not for brilliance, but because behind the word stands a life that guarantees it, and a saying from the Paterikon states it briefly: “Give blood and receive Spirit.” The Father’s name is not a brand but a witness (martyria), and so must Foucault be understood: the medieval text’s name-as-warrant is, in the Church, the warrant of a life that justifies the word. The aphorism is right where the name asks attention for the one who speaks; it is no longer right where the name points to the witness who paid.
The irony of the aphorism is that it was fulfilled upon the one who wrote it: few works are read so much through the author’s biography and so little through themselves as Nietzsche’s, and Ecce Homo, with its chapters “Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Write Such Good Books,” is the title-page raised to the rank of a work. The man who saw most clearly the poison of the name did not know how to avoid it; and this is no reproach, but proof that no asceticism of the intellect suffices, because what must die is not the name but the craving for a name.
God does not erase the name; He moves it. “I have called you by name; you are Mine” (Isa 43:1). “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). “To him who overcomes I will give a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it” (Rev 2:17). Psychology has found no better formula for this double need of the soul than Winnicott’s: the joy of being hidden and the disaster of not being found. The soul needs to be hidden from men and found by Someone; and the title-page gives to men what belongs to Him alone.
Without a Signature, but Not Without Temptation
The one who writes has no other work than the sower’s: “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how” (Mark 4:26-27). “One sows and another reaps” (John 4:37); “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor 3:6). Psychology has named “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi) the state of total absorption in which self-consciousness disappears into what is being done; the title-page brings the self back into the room: it makes of the gift a work “of mine,” and of the reader a judge. “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matt 6:3), and “enter your room” (Matt 6:6) is, among other things, a rule of editing.
But anonymity is not a shelter. Evagrius says that vainglory slips into those who practice virtue, and the Ladder, in the twenty-second step, describes the thorn that does not forgive: he fasts, and is proud; he relaxes his fast to hide it, and is proud of the wisdom of hiding; he dresses well, and is conquered; he dresses poorly, and is conquered again; he speaks, and is conquered; he is silent, and again conquered; however it is turned, the thorn stays pointing upward. Whoever does not put his name may come to be known precisely because he does not, and silence may turn into the most refined signature. The remedy is neither the signature nor its erasure, but what Abba Macarius shows at the graves and the Savior in the Gospel: “When you have done all that was commanded you, say: We are unprofitable servants” (Luke 17:10), that is, to let the work go its way without asking an accounting of whom it was owed.
The only title-page on which the name dilutes nothing is the one on which the name is not written by the one named: “their names are in the Book of Life” (Phil 4:3). Until then, the good book may present itself without a name, or with a name that knows it does not belong to it, and may end as the Psalm ends, with a double renunciation and a single glory: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your name give glory, for Your mercy and Your truth” (Ps 113:9).
