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| 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.
