If one is worried about an exploitative job, the New Testament advises
:
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh …
Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3.22–4)
If one is worried at having no money, the New Testament tells us
:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25)
There may be differences between such words and a drink but Nietzsche insisted on an essential equivalence. Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfilment:
The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness’. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.
20
Having a ‘Christian’ perspective on difficulty is not limited to members of the Christian church; it is for Nietzsche a permanent psychological possibility. We all become Christians when we profess indifference to what we secretly long for but do not have; when we blithely say that we do not need love or a position in the world, money or success, creativity or health – while the corners of our mouths twitch with bitterness; and we wage silent wars against what we have publicly renounced, firing shots over the parapet, sniping from the trees.
How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach our setbacks? To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never. Put another way, to resist the temptation to denigrate and declare evil certain goods because they have proved hard to secure – a pattern of behaviour of which Nietzsche’s own, infinitely tragic life offers us perhaps the best model.
21
Epicurus had from an early age been among his favourite ancient philosophers; he called him ‘the soul-soother of later antiquity’, ‘one of the greatest men, the inventor of an heroic-idyllic mode of philosophizing’. What especially appealed to him was Epicurus’s idea that happiness involved a life among friends. But he was rarely to know the contentment of community: ‘It is our lot to be intellectual hermits and occasionally to have a conversation with someone like-minded.’ At thirty, he composed a hymn to loneliness, ‘Hymnus auf die Einsamkeit’, which he did not have the heart to finish.
The search for a wife was no less sorrowful, the problem partly caused by Nietzsche’s appearance – his extraordinarily large walrus moustache – and his shyness, which bred the gauche stiff manner of a retired colonel. In the spring of 1876, on a trip to Geneva, Nietzsche fell in love with a twenty-three-year-old, green-eyed blonde, Mathilde Trampedach. During a conversation on the poetry of Henry Longfellow, Nietzsche mentioned that he had never come across a German version of Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’. Mathilde said she had one at home and offered to copy it out for him. Encouraged, Nietzsche invited her out for a walk. She brought her landlady as a chaperone. A few days later, he offered to play the piano for her, and the next she heard from the thirty-one-year-old Professor of Classical Philology at Basle University was a request for marriage. ‘Do you not think that together each of us will be better and more free than either of us could be alone – and so excelsior?’ asked the playful colonel. ‘Will you dare to come with me … on all the paths of living and thinking?’ Mathilde didn’t dare.
A succession of similar rejections took their toll. In the light of his depression and ill health, Richard Wagner decided that there were two possible remedies: ‘He must either marry or write an opera.’ But Nietzsche couldn’t write an opera, and apparently lacked the talent to produce even a decent tune. (In July 1872, he sent the conductor Hans von Bülow a piano duet he had written, asking for an honest appraisal. It was, replied von Bülow, ‘the most extreme fantastical extravagance, the most irritating and anti-musical set of notes on manuscript paper I have seen for a long time’, and he wondered whether Nietzsche might have been pulling his leg. ‘You designated your music as “frightful” – it truly is.’)
Wagner grew more insistent. ‘For Heaven’s sake, marry a rich woman!’ he intoned, and entered into communication with Nietzsche’s doctor, Otto Eiser, with whom he speculated that the philosopher’s ill health was caused by excessive masturbation. It was an irony lost on Wagner that the one rich woman with whom Nietzsche was truly in love was Wagner’s own wife, Cosima. For years, he carefully disguised his feelings for her under the cloak of friendly solicitude. It was only once he had lost his reason that the reality emerged. ‘Ariadne, I love you,’ wrote Nietzsche, or, as he signed himself, Dionysus, in a postcard sent to Cosima from Turin at the beginning of January 1889.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche intermittently agreed with the Wagnerian thesis on the importance of marriage. In a letter to his married friend Franz Overbeck, he complained, ‘Thanks to your wife, things are a hundred times better for you than for me. You have a nest together. I have, at best, a cave … Occasional contact with people is like a holiday, a redemption from “me”.’
In 1882, he hoped once more that he had found a suitable wife, Lou Andreas-Salomé, his greatest, most painful love. She was twenty-one, beautiful, clever, flirtatious and fascinated by his philosophy. Nietzsche was defenceless. ‘I want to be lonely no longer, but to learn again to be a human being. Ah, here I have practically everything to learn!’ he told her. They spent two weeks together in the Tautenburg forest and in Lucerne posed with their mutual friend Paul Rée for an unusual photograph.
(Ill. 22.27)
But Lou was more interested in Nietzsche as a philosopher than as a husband. The rejection threw him into renewed prolonged, violent depression. ‘My lack of confidence is now immense,’ he told Overbeck, ‘everything I hear makes me think that people despise me.’ He felt particular bitterness towards his mother and sister, who had meddled in the relationship with Lou, and now broke off contact with them, deepening his isolation. (‘I do not like my mother, and it is painful for me to hear my sister’s voice. I always became ill when I was with them.’)
There were professional difficulties, too. None of his books sold more than 2,000 copies in his sane life-time; most sold a few hundred. With only a modest pension and some shares inherited from an aunt on which to survive, the author could rarely pay for new clothes, and ended up looking, in his words, ‘scraped like a mountain sheep’. In hotels, he stayed in the cheapest rooms, often fell into arrears with the rent and could afford neither heating nor the hams and sausages he loved.