Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

Michael Mendoza

            Friedrich Nietzsche introduced his philological study of the Ancient Greek’s Apollonian and Dionysian duality in 1872 with his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music.  His interpretation of the two Greek gods underpinned his philosophy of the will to power, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence throughout his career. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy would have some merit as a metaphor for Greek culture and the German society in which he lived if his underlying assumption about atheism is correct. His explicit rejection of Christianity, however, led to a fatal flaw in his reasoning because the existence of the Christian God can be rationally defended as the inference to the best explanation[i] in an Apollonian manner. Anyone can also experience a Dionysian life-affirming existential encounter with the Living God. Jesus declared, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”[ii]

Nietzsche’s assessment of Christendom in late nineteenth-century Europe was essentially correct. Christianity in Europe had become stale and spiritless. German Protestantism, especially, gave in to the temptations of anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny. Nietzsche even showed some of these traits. Because of the failures of German religiosity, Nietzsche felt Christianity represented the negative aspects of the Apollonian denial of life. He held that Christianity would necessarily lead to Nihilism, and “the Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine to the Dionysian.”[iii] Jerry Walls described Nietzsche’s view of the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell as “a way for weak, dishonest people to get vengeance on their powerful enemies.”[iv] The German philosopher could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance. A genuine existential experience with the God of the Bible, however, fulfills the positive elements of Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche sought.

Others have taken up the question of whether Nietzsche’s evaluation of Apollos and his brother Dionysus is accurate;[v] therefore, I will not delve into the matter. I also do not suggest that the genuine Christian experience is Dionysian in the sense of chaotic or uncontrolled frenzy. Nor is Christianity solely an intellectual assent to a set of philosophical ideas. Instead, I use the Apollonian and Dionysian duality as a metaphor not only for Greek culture but as a foundation for understanding modern Christianity. I will demonstrate how embracing Christianity is both an intelligent and life-affirming choice – a true will to power. I begin with a summary of Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian duality focusing on the so-called life-affirming aspects of Dionysus. Next, I examine the fatal flaw in his understanding of Christianity. I provide examples of Dionysian Christians in the Old and New Testament as well as current trends in Christendom. I conclude with Dionysian elements of Christianity by defending the claim that the positive aspects of Nietzsche’s Dionysian life-affirmation are found in a genuine relationship with the God of the New Testament. A balance of Apollonian and Dionysian elements brings music, art, science, and Christian faith into a joyful dance.

NIETZSCHE’S APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN DUALITY

            Nietzsche described Apollo and Dionysus as the “two art deities of the Greeks.”[vi] Anne-Marie Schultz summed up Nietzsche’s view of the Apollonian aspect of human experience. She wrote, “the Apollonian is associated with reason and rationality, intellectual vision, healing, and dreams.”[vii] He is the god of calm stability and self-control. Apollonian art represents the motionless aspect of the Platonic ideal. Apollonian art is symbolic. Walter Kaufmann pointed out that Nietzsche used Apollo as a symbol for the aspect of Greek culture that “found superb expression in classical Greek temples and sculptures: the genius of restraint, measure, and harmony.”[viii] Thus, paintings and sculptures in Apollo’s domain represented the static or motionlessness endurance of life. Nietzsche held that the colorless marble of Greek statues and architecture characterized Apollonian culture as sterile and dreamlike. He is the god of the “beautiful illusion.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote, “This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies [bildnerischen Kraefte], is at the same time the soothsaying god.”[ix] Thus, he is also the god of the inner world of fantasy, “ruler over the beautiful illusion.”[x] Apollonian art is a denial of this world. Nietzsche compares this to the Christian focus on the next life. Apollonian and Christianity are life-denying.

On the other side of Greek culture, Nietzsche understood that the Dionysian art of music and dance referred to the world of frenzied intoxication. According to Ulfers in his introduction to Nietzsche’s The Dionysian Vision of the World, this intoxication is not a narcotic stupor, but an exhilarating “rush,” a Rausch “that spells unboundedness.”[xi] Ulfers further explained that “Speech – conceptual language (the Begriff) – is replaced by singing, and the measured steps of walking are overtaken by dancing.”[xii] Dionysus is the liberator, and the intoxicating ecstasy tears down the boundaries of the Apollonian. Schultz explained that the Dionysian “resides in the disruption of everyday experience” and “in ecstatic moments where one loses a sense of self in communal experience.”[xiii] In the Dionysian festival the individual’s self-control is lost. The euphoric experience of this side of Greek culture in its ritualistic music and dance was, as Kaufmann pointed out, “barbarous by comparison and found expression in the Dionysian festivals.”[xiv] According to Nietzsche, Greek Dionysian festivals happened under the influence of a narcotic draught or the “potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy.”[xv] The emotions intensify, and in the frenzied state everything is subjective; for example, the Apollonian principium individuationis disappears into “complete self-forgetfulness.”[xvi]

Regarding Dionysian music, Nietzsche held that other cultures such as Egypt and Babylon celebrated similar festivals which centered around “sexual licentiousness, the annihilation of all familiarity through an unbounded hetaerism.”[xvii] The Greek celebration of Dionysus, as seen in Euripides’ The Bacchae, differed from them in that “from it flows that same charm, the same musically transfiguring intoxication, that Skopas and Praxiteles concretized in statues.”[xviii] Nietzsche’s focus was on the euphoric experience of the music and dance rather than the orgiastic nature of the Dionysian ritual. The point of the ceremony was for people to join as a unified whole. Safranski describes Nietzsche’s view of Dionysian music as the ecstasy that “melts away the masks representing specific characters to expose an emphatic sense of unity.”[xix] The music draws people into a oneness that communicates more fundamentally and profoundly than words. Safranski explained that music was, “the oldest universal language, intelligible to all people, and yet impossible to translate into any other idiom.”[xx] Music is the voice of the cosmos. The Christian parallel for the cosmic voice is Λόγος (Logos).  The cosmic language is the Word and the cosmic activity is the dance. Sokel added, “It is the union of universal energy and individuated form or shape which the Dionysian orgiastic dance triumphantly enacts by projecting as an individual image the force that binds all together.”[xxi]

In his essay Attempt at Self-Criticism, Nietzsche urges Christians to learn the art of this worldly comfort and laugh to “dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil.” Then he adjures Christians in the words of Zarathustra, “Rise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Rise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better, stand on your heads.”[xxii] Dance is an expression of Dionysian life-affirmation. In the book The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote, “In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing.”[xxiii] Enthusiasm in pure rapturous music compels the Dionysian to dance and embrace life. Dionysian art “gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of song, and of dance.”[xxiv]

Yet, Nietzsche saw how Dionysian drama turns into tragedy. It is through the Dionysian tragedy that hope is abandoned, and the will must intercede. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, as well as eternal recurrence, is born out of the symbolism of the Dionysian Greek tragedy. The Dionysian must accept the fact that life is meaningless and painful. Sorrow and suffering are inevitable. Nietzsche’s formula for embracing life’s pain is amor fati. “The Dionysian affirmation of the world, as it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice – it would have eternal circular motion.”[xxv] Nietzsche insisted the tragedy of the world is that even though nothing matters because everything is doomed to recur, the superior man will say yea rather than nay. Nietzsche concluded his discussion of Dionysus in The Will to Power with these words:

The tragic man says yea even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it.[xxvi]

Only through tragedy can the will to power be exercised. For Nietzsche, the greatest tragedy is that life repeats itself in the eternal recurrence. Since there is no hope, the will to power must seize life and embrace the tragedy.

Nietzsche, however, did not intend for Apollonian and Dionysian duality to be considered antithetical. They are not opposites in a Hegelian sense of thesis and antithesis. In Section 1 of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche looked back at his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, and said it “smells offensively Hegelian.”[xxvii] Nietzsche’s position is that both the Apollonian and Dionysian are “conditions in which art manifests itself in man as a force of nature... Both of these states let loose all manner artistic powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind.”[xxviii]  Apollonian art produces the power of vision and poetry. Nietzsche held that Socrates sprang from Apollonian intellectualism and thereby developed into all philosophers who devise the fiction of an unseen world or thing-in-itself.

Christopher Cox pointed out that although Nietzsche’s duality looks like a dialectic in the sense of Hegel or Socrates, it is not. “Were it so,” Cox explained, “the Dionysian would be sublated in a higher form. But tragedy does no such thing. Rather it thoroughly affirms the Dionysian.”[xxix] In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, tragic pessimism is superior to the optimism of Socratic and Hegelian dialectic, and thus it is preferred to Apollonian culture.

Years after he published The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche added an essay titled, An Attempt at Self-Criticism. He made it clear that even though he did not mention Christianity, it was nevertheless written as an attack on the Christian faith. He wrote, “Perhaps the depth of this anti-moral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book – Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected.”[xxx] His atheism and antipathy toward Christianity is well documented in many of his works. In The Will to Power, for example, he railed against the “falsehood and fictitiousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and its history.”[xxxi]

At this point, Nietzsche’s fatal flaw about Christianity must be examined.

Notes:

[i] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[ii] John 10:10. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A10&version=KJV.

[iii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Including Autobiography and Selected Personal Letters, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 554.. Digital version.

[iv] Jerry Walls, “How Could God Create Hell?” God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable, Edited by William Lane Craig & Chad Meister, (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 158.

[v] Silk, M., & Stern, J. (2016). Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge Philosophy Classics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316534786. See also, Nickolas Pappas, “Nietzsche’s Apollo,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No.1 (Spring 2014), pp.43-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0043.

[vi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited, with Commentaries, by Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: The Modern Library Edition, 1992), 4.

[vii] Anne-Marie Schultz, “Nietzsche and the Socratic Art of Narrative Self-Care: An Apollonian and Dionysian Synthesis,” Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue, Edited by Ann Ward, (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 139.

[viii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 8.

[ix] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35. Bildnerischen Kraefte is better translated, artistic energies. The word plastic was first coined in 1907. Nietzsche would not have had that in mind.

[x] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,35.

[xi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, Translated by Ira J. Allen, Introduction by Friedrich Ulfers, (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013), 9.

[xii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 9.

[xiii] Schultz, 140.

[xiv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35.

[xv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.

[xvi] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.

[xvii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.

[xviii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.

[xix] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Translated by Shelley Frisch, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 100.

[xx] Safranski, 101.

[xxi] Walter H. Sokel, “On the Dionysian in Nietzsche,” New Literary History, Autumn 2005, 36, 4; ProQuest, page 501.

[xxii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 26.

[xxiii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 34.

[xxiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

[xxv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 540.

[xxvi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.

[xxvii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 726.

[xxviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 432.

[xxix] Christopher Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, (UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 498.

[xxx] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23.

[xxxi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 17.