Alcoholic drinks are no good for me; a glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to make life for me a ‘Vale of Tears’ – Munich is where my antipodes live.
(Ill. 22.22)
‘How much beer there is in the German intelligence!’ he complained. ‘Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our forefathers were given to drinking through the entire Middle Ages … The Middle Ages meant the alcohol poisoning of Europe.’
In the spring of 1871, Nietzsche went on holiday with his sister to the Hôtel du Parc in Lugano. The hotel bill for 2–9 March shows that he drank fourteen glasses of milk.
It was more than a personal taste. Anyone seeking to be happy was strongly advised never to drink anything alcoholic at all. Never:
I cannot advise all
more spiritual
natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely.
Water
suffices.
Why? Because Raphael had not drunk to escape his envy in Urbino in 1504, he had gone to Florence and learned how to be a great painter. Because Stendhal had not drunk in 1805 to escape his despair over L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné, he had gardened the pain for seventeen years and published De l’amour in 1822:
If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the
religion of comfortableness
. How little you know of human
happiness
, you comfortable … people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case,
remain small
together.
17
Nietzsche’s antipathy to alcohol explains simultaneously his antipathy to what had been the dominant British school of moral philosophy: Utilitarianism, and its greatest proponent, John Stuart Mill. The Utilitarians had argued that in a world beset by moral ambiguities, the way to judge whether an action was right or wrong was to measure the amount of pleasure and pain it gave rise to. Mill proposed that:
[A]ctions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
The thought of Utilitarianism, and even the nation from which it had sprung, enraged Nietzsche:
European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas [is the work and invention of]
England
.
Man does
not
strive for happiness; only the English do that.
He was, of course, also striving for happiness; he simply believed that it could not be attained as painlessly as the Utilitarians appeared to be suggesting:
All these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to
pleasure
and
pain
, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are foreground modes of thought and naïveties which anyone conscious of
creative
powers and an artist’s conscience will look down on with derision.
An artist’s conscience because artistic creation offers a most explicit example of an activity which may deliver immense fulfilment but always demands immense suffering. Had Stendhal assessed the value of his art according to the ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ it had at once brought him, there would have been no advance from L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné to the summit of his powers.
(Ill. 22.23)
Instead of drinking beer in the lowlands, Nietzsche asked us to accept the pain of the climb. He also offered a suggestion for town-planners:
The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to
live dangerously
! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!
Vesuvius, exploding in 1879, three years before the above statement was written (Ill. 22.24)
And if one were still tempted to have a drink, but had no high opinion of Christianity, Nietzsche added a further argument to dissuade one from doing so. Anyone who liked drinking had, he argued, a fundamentally Christian outlook on life:
To believe that wine
makes cheerful
I would have to be a Christian, that is to say believe what is for me in particular an absurdity.
18
He had more experience of Christianity than of alcohol. He was born in the tiny village of Röcken near Leipzig in Saxony. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was the parson, his deeply devout mother was herself the daughter of a parson, David Ernst Oehler, who took services in the village of Pobles an hour away. Their son was baptized before an assembly of the local clergy in Röcken church in October 1844.
(Ill. 22.25)
Friedrich loved his father, who died when he was only four, and revered his memory throughout his life. On the one occasion when he had a little money, after winning a court case against a publisher in 1885, he ordered a large headstone for his father’s grave on which he had carved a quotation from Corinthians (1 Cor 13.8):
Die Liebe höret nimmer auf
Charity never faileth
‘He was the perfect embodiment of a country pastor,’ Nietzsche recalled of Carl Ludwig. ‘A tall, delicate figure, a fine-featured face, amiable and beneficent. Everywhere welcomed and beloved as much for his witty conversation as for his warm sympathy, esteemed and loved by the farmers, extending blessings by word and deed in his capacity as a spiritual guide.’
(Ill. 22.26)
Yet this filial love did not prevent Nietzsche from harbouring the deepest reservations about the consolation that his father, and Christianity in general, could offer those in pain:
I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption … [it] has left nothing untouched by its depravity … I call Christianity the
one
great curse, the
one
great intrinsic depravity …
One does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so … Everything in it is cowardice, everything is self-deception and closing one’s eyes to oneself … Do I still have to add that in the entire New Testament there is only
one
solitary figure one is obliged to respect? Pilate, the Roman governor.
Quite simply:
It is indecent to be a Christian today.
19
How does the New Testament console us for our difficulties? By suggesting that many of these are not difficulties at all but rather virtues:
If one is worried about timidity, the New Testament points out
:
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5.5)
If one is worried about having no friends, the New Testament suggests
:
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil … your reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6.22–3)