Between heaven and earth

Rembrandt - Christ
To depict Christ, Rembrandt chose his models in the Jewish community of Amsterdam

A week of retreat, in silence, at a monastery: a good time to make oneself more vulnerable, more receptive to the light, more open to what is given. It also means free time to pray, to read, to reflect. This year, for the fourth or fifth time I returned to reading what I have always considered a masterpiece of spiritual literature, The Heart of the World, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, a great Swiss theologian. His poetic power, his sober lyricism, his spiritual musicality, all contribute to making a work that is very original and moving.

Here is a passage that really touched me this time. It is found in the first part of the book, in chapter two, entitled, “He Came into the World”, which refers to the incarnation of the Word, his kenosis and his glory.

            “The divine ocean forced into the tiny wellspring of a human Heart! The mighty oak tree of divinity planted in the small fragile pot of an earthly Heart! God, sublime on the throne of his majesty and the Servant --- toiling with sweat and kneeling in the dust of adoration --- no longer to be distinguished from one another! The eternal God’s awareness of his kingship pressed into the nescience of human abasement! All the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge stored in the chamber of human poverty! The vision of the eternal Father shrouded in the intuitions of faith’s obscurity! The rock of divine certainty floating on the tides of an earthly hope !The triangle of the Trinity balanced by one tip upon a human Heart!

            Thus does this heart hover between heaven and earth like the narrow passage in an hourglass, and incessantly the sand of grace trickles from the upper compartment down to the earthly bottom. Then again, through that tight duct, a weak aroma rises from below to the upper spheres, a scent foreign to the heavens, and no portion of the infinite Godhead remains untouched by this new perfume. Softly and steadily a reddish vapor begins to tint the white region of the angels, and the unapproachable love of Father and Son acquires the color of heartfelt affection. All of God’s mysteries, which until now had hidden their countenance under six wings, disclose themselves and smile down at men. For in the mirror of the earthly region God’s mysteries unexpectedly see their own countenance reflected, as if they now had a double.

            Everything that had been one becomes double and everything double becomes one. It is not a pale image of heavenly truth that is acted out on earth; it is the heavenly reality itself, translated into earthly language. When the Servant here below falls to the ground tired and spent from the burden of his day’s labor, when his head touches the earth to adore his God, this poor gesture captures in itself all of the uncreated Son’s homage before his Father’s throne. And the gesture forever adds to this eternal perfection the laborious, painful, inconspicuous, lusterless perfection of a human being’s humility. But never had the Father loved the Son with such ultimacy as when he beheld him collapse to his knees in exhaustion. At that moment he swore to himself that he would raise this Child, even to the paternal Heart --- this Son of Man who was also his Son --- and that, for the sake of this One, he would raise up also all of the others who resembled him, his greatly Beloved – all of those in whom he could discern the traits of his Son, even in their distortion and concealment.”^(*)

This is worth many a dry treatise of speculative theology, isn’t it?

Fiodor

(*) Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1980, pp. 49-51.

A Pathetic Superman

Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

In the first days of January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche collapsed in the middle of the street in Turin, a city where he had been staying since April, 1888. A few days later, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Basel. Until his death on August 25, 1900, he would be without his faculty of reason.

But who is this "prophet of the 3rd millennium", this "most important philosopher since Plato", this Antichrist who promises to be the true God inaugurating a new era? And what if Friedrich Nietzsche, whose thought continues to dominate the contemporary intellectual scene, was a man destroyed by his own immoderation?

A recent book provides a fascinating analysis of the last months before Nietzsche’s breakdown. It is a work of a historian, rigorous and well-documented (more than 30 pages of bibliography and close to 400 book titles). But the originality of this work lies mainly in a confrontation between Nietzsche and the Crucified, hence the title of the book^(*).

In Turin, Nietzsche stayed a few hundred meters from the cathedral chapel which shelters the Holy Shroud. Whether or not you believe in the authenticity of the Shroud as a testimony to Jesus crucified, this closeness is striking when one connects the influence that Nietzsche has on the world today and the fact that he was literally obsessed by Jesus during the last months of his lucid life.

Might these last months of sanity, then this decade of breakdown, be the sign of a spiritual struggle in the depths of the one who proclaimed God's death? It was in 1888 that he wrote the Antichrist and Ecce Homo. It was during this period that the name of Christ appears most often in his writings, but only to describe him as an "idiot". In his last letters, in 1889, his signature repeatedly reads "The Crucified". And, on January 3rd, 1889, while pointing to himself, he announced that "God is on earth."

During the same period, the "superman" worried especially about his food; he writes in Ecce Homo, "the salvation of humanity depends on the question of diet much more than on any theologian's old subtlety". He dedicates considerable time and extensive correspondence to the acquisition of a stove from the Nieske company in Dresden. He was passionate about the worldly gossip and funerals of Turinese celebrities. Finally, the man who wrote that "without music, life would be a mistake" and who, as a young man, thrilled over Bach, Palestrina and Wagner, fell to such a low point that his passion focused on La Mascotte, of Audran (whose famous aria clearly demonstrates the heart of its concern: "I like my turkey, I like my sheep, when they make their soft glug glug, when each of them makes bê bê bê..."), and music hall shows!

Anyway, the superman had become quite pathetic. His descent into hell had begun. Would he meet Christ there? Didier Rance assumes so and then proposes a striking parallel with a poem by Baudelaire, Punishment of Pride. Judge for yourself:

(…)

It is said that one day a most learned doctor

— After winning by force the indifferent hearts,

Having stirred them in the dark depths of their being;

After crossing on the way to celestial glory,

Singular and strange roads, even to him unknown,

Which only pure Spirits, perhaps, had reached, —

"Excellent description of Nietzsche’s megalomaniac pride just before the breakdown", writes Rance.

Panic-stricken, like one who has clambered too high,

He cried, carried away by a satanic pride:

"Jesus, little Jesus! I raised you very high!

But had I wished to attack you through the defect

In your armor, your shame would equal your glory,

And you would be no more than a despised fetus!"

"... To the contemptuous 'Jesus, little Jesus' (...) corresponds [Nietzsche’s] retarded Jesus, and parallel insults spring from both mouths! 'Fetus!', 'idiot!' "

After the insulting pride follows madness. The superior intelligence is broken, locked, and the key is lost...

At that very moment his reason departed.

A crape of mourning veiled the brilliance of that sun;

Complete chaos rolled in and filled that intellect,

A temple once alive, ordered and opulent,

Within whose walls so much pomp had glittered.

Silence and darkness took possession of it

Like a cellar to which the key is lost.

And the poem ends with "a description of the fallen proud became a poor lunatic, who looks very much like the crazy Nietzsche during his walks in the streets of Weimar..."

Henceforth he was like the beasts in the street,

And when he went along, seeing nothing, across

The fields, distinguishing nor summer nor winter,

Dirty, useless, ugly, like a discarded thing,

He was the laughing-stock, the joke, of the children.

It was during one of these walks, in Weimar, between 1897 and 1900, that Nietzsche met a little girl who looked at him with big, questioning eyes. He stopped, put his hand on the child's head and told his companion: "Is this not the image of innocence?" Didier Rance recalls that Daniel Halevy, after reporting this episode, says that Nietzsche, like Goethe's Faust, had surrendered himself to the devil. But he wonders where the Marguerite is who will save him by her prayer. The answer will be later suggested to him by a reader: "You ask what voice will pray for Nietzsche? Why not this girl encountered on a Weimar path?"

Fiodor

(1) Didier RANCE, Nietzsche et le Crucifié. Turin 1888, Ed. Ad Solem, 2015, 470 p., 27 €. Let us hope that the book will be translated into English.