15 minute read
The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars
PROLOGUE
Friedrich Nietzsche in Bayreuth
One would expect the life of a self-styled antichrist to be full of turbulence, but in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche it was rather boring. Apart from lightning flashes of conviction that “God is dead” and that a beastly savior called the “superman” would soon alter the culture of Christendom—thoughts inspired by brooding strolls in the Alps—there is little in his biography that can really be described as excitement.
The son of a village pastor, Nietzsche was raised for a time following his father’s death by a monotonously conventional mother (along with an aged grandmother and a pair of unmarried aunts). As a young professor of philology, he was so stricken with migraines and nausea that much of his time was spent lying in the darkness of his bedchamber. At one point he took up the idea of fighting in a war, but after falling from his horse and then being stuck in a train for three days with wounded men, he abandoned it. Women did not interest him, though there was one exception: he became infatuated with a thrilling Russian freethinker named Lou Salome. She spent her life seducing great intellectuals, and her attention briefly turned toward him. One day he gathered the courage to propose marriage to her. She declined. A little later he decided to propose again, and she declined again. Nietzsche’s life was thus spent alone, climbing mountains and thinking, longing for transcendence and cursing a civilization that offered him none. Externally, beyond the storms of his mind, life was never anything but dull. In fact, the only really dramatic thing Nietzsche ever did was to go insane.
Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1870s
Nietzsche’s most rewarding escape from the solitude of writing came when he gained access to the inner circle of the great contemporary musician Richard Wagner. There was nothing dull about this man’s life. Carried across a Napoleonic battlefield as an infant, he grew into the most precocious of romanticism’s many self-taught geniuses. He considered himself a revolutionary in compositional style, and when in 1848 an actual political revolution broke out, he immediately joined in the excitement. After burning down a theater in Dresden that he considered too small for the kind of music he intended to compose, he assisted rebels in the street fighting that followed. Driven into exile, for nearly a quarter century he lived the life of an artistic vagabond—at once self-confident and estranged from society. All the while, he held court over a society of talented intellectuals who looked to the “Master” (as he preferred to be addressed) for inspiration. This he provided in abundance, holding forth on subjects ranging from music to religion to philosophy to politics. Along the way, he railed against the vulgar bourgeoisie and extolled the virtues of vegetarianism. There was no subject his brilliant and audacious genius did not address. But the center of discussion was always music—his music.
Recognizing talent (and admiration) when he saw it, the imperious Wagner invited Nietzsche to attend piano-side discussions that were more disquisitions by the Master than conversations among guests. At one point during his exile, Wagner lived in a mansion on the shores of Lake Lucerne. This is where Nietzsche first visited him and where, under Alpine peaks, he fell in love with the composer’s vision of the “artwork of the future.” In Nietzsche’s words, Wagner was a “mystagogue for the secret doctrines of life and art.” 1
Later, Wagner moved to the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in order to build the long-desired theater worthy of his great music. There he had a new house built while he awaited the completion of the theater. As funds were slowly raised, so was the theater—though at an equally slow pace. In the meantime, Nietzsche became a regular in Wagner’s drawing room and fervently participated in discussions around its piano.
Bayreuth became, for Nietzsche no less than for Wagner, a beacon of what the West would one day become.
By the time the musically inclined Nietzsche met him, Wagner had produced some of the most daring and exciting compositions in history. One of these was the explosive prelude to act 3 of Lohengrin, a melodic adrenaline rush expressing the overpowering desire of a man for his beautiful young bride. But at the end of the prelude, the music changes tempo and transitions into something much more conventional. This was the sequence that came to be known as Wagner’s “Wedding March.”
Isolated from the rest of the opera, the piece would prove to be one of Wagner’s most enduring works—even among those with no interest in opera (or weddings). For instance, millions in the West today would feel cheated if the “Wedding March” (otherwise known as “Here Comes the Bride”) were not played when the bride makes her way down the aisle. 2 The song’s absence would make the vow “I do” seem incomplete. And because of this, the composer of such a melody might be considered a champion of marriage, an anchor for one of Christendom’s most important social institutions. But nothing could be further from the case. When it came to the traditional culture of the West, Wagner turned out to be a believer in nothing.
In the most notorious episode, he fell in love with Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and the wife of a devoted friend named Hans von Bülow. The latter was a conductor, and during Wagner’s time of exile when the composer could not set foot in Germany without being arrested, Hans faithfully advanced the Wagnerian cause in opera house after opera house. This did not prevent the Master from seducing Cosima and initiating a thinly veiled affair with her. Eventually, she bore Wagner a child while still married to Hans. Then she bore him another. And then another. Wagner saw nothing wrong in this; his creativity demanded “inspiration,” and he found it in Cosima’s arms. When the miserable Hans could take no more of the charade, he did what he considered the honorable thing for a man in his situation to do. This was not to challenge the rake to a duel, as many dishonored husbands of the time would have done. Instead, he valiantly surrendered his wife to the Master by granting her a divorce. Hans von Bülow remained a devoted Wagnerian for the remainder of his career. As for Minna, all of this broke her heart and she died a castaway, abandoned and forgotten.
Richard Wagner in the 1870s
Nietzsche found Wagner’s infidelities unseemly, but the huge success of the “Wedding March” grimly impressed on him the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. That someone with Wagner’s moral character could produce a monument to marital fidelity was simply absurd.
In any case, the philosopher was much more intrigued with those of Wagner’s compositions that openly subverted conventional morality. These included Tannhäuser, which features an orgy in the opening scene and the enticements of Venus (an actual character) throughout. They also included Tristan and Isolde, which celebrated adultery and discredited moralism. Even bolder was The Ring of the Nibelung, the massive series of operas whose plot celebrates an act of adultery and “free love”—even to the point of incest.
The Ring contained a musical sequence known as “The Ride of the Valkyries.” This would become equal in popularity to the “Wedding March.” For Nietzsche, it was a mythical celebration of martial vigor, a reminder of the primitive virtues lost to the West under the civilizing influences of Christianity and humanism. Nietzsche was not a militarist, but he considered warfare necessary for the free operation of what he came to call the “will to power.” Later in life, he expressed contempt for
Wagner’s music, especially that contained in the Ring, gave expression to a new voice Nietzsche was beginning to hear within himself. He would eventually give the voice a name: Zarathustra, the terrible prophet of a new morality, which was no morality at all but a destruction of that inherited from Christianity and the secular humanism that followed it. A moral revolutionary like Wagner, Nietzsche had come to look with contempt on the bourgeois society of his time. An entirely new culture was needed—one that was vigorous, fearless, and free from the values of the past.
Bayreuth promised such a culture, and it was defined by nihilism.
The word nihilism was coined by Germans during the nineteenth century. Its root is nihil, which in Latin means “nothing.” As such, nihilism has come to designate a philosophy or moral conviction that there is nothing of value in existence, that all values are empty and worthless. Human life is fundamentally meaningless.
This, in any case, is its fullest and most precise meaning. Some self-proclaimed nihilists might shy from such an extreme definition. Indeed, the movement in nineteenth-century Russia known as political nihilism did not reject the value of human life or social organization at all, just the historical forms they took under the tsarist state and the established Church. Outraged by the existing social order of Christendom, those nihilists sought to sweep it all away and establish an entirely new, post-Christian order founded on scientific standards of morality. The world had meaning for them, even if it must be transformed into something completely different from what it had been theretofore.
Bayreuth Theater
Moral and philosophical nihilists, on the other hand, claimed that there really is no ultimate meaning to human life and society, and therefore the transformation of the world, even by the standards of utopia, is ultimately pointless. For them, nothingness is absolute.
During the Renaissance, however, the transformational imperative was secularized. The saeculum—the spiritually untransformed world—offered an escape from what secular humanists considered the paralyzing pessimism of reformational Christianity. But secularism left a terrible hole in the civilization of the West. The transformational imperative no longer had a transcendent orientation. Paradise was replaced by its counterfeit, utopia, and progress became the new cultural myth. Transcendence was thus all but lost with the rise of secular humanism, despite desperate efforts by nineteenth-century romantics to restore it. In the end, it fell to the ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism—all themselves counterfeits of traditional Christianity—to reinvent transcendence. Utopian Christendom now came to look to a kingdom of posterity for its experience of harmony and fulfillment.
And it was in this new Christendom, where secular humanism had been transforming the world into utopia for four centuries, that nihilism suddenly and inevitably appeared.
Nietzsche was the first to give nihilism a comprehensive philosophical expression. He had learned much from Wagner, perhaps too much. For despite the surging enthusiasm he felt for the Master’s vision of culture, conversations at Bayreuth often disappointed and even disturbed him.
Indeed, many of Wagner’s views have been proven by time to be so much heady mental junk. If one reads through the narcissistic content of the composer’s innumerable articles on just about every subject under the sun, one finds in them so much of what was wrong with nineteenth-century thinking. He was not just a Renaissance Man in an age of science. He was an inveterate egoist blinded by contempt for any who failed to take up the Wagnerian cultural cause. He considered Johannes Brahms, for instance, an unskilled idiot. Convinced by modern philosophy and science that Christianity was bankrupt, he held a faddish interest in Buddhism. Though he was capable of the most convincing romantic melodies in his operas, his attitude toward the opposite sex was frequently mawkish. He was an aggressive German nationalist at a time when Otto von Bismarck’s policy of “blood and iron” was despoiling Germany’s neighbors and upending Europe’s diplomatic balance of power. Most infamously, Wagner was an intransigent anti-Semite, detesting all Jewish influence in modern culture and being callous enough to write openly about it.
All these opinions have earned the contempt and censure of historians. Nevertheless, Wagner was Germany’s greatest composer of the day, and no one could deny it. As the American Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein would later put it, “Wagner, I hate you; but I hate you on my knees.” Nietzsche himself would eventually come to hate Wagner too.
But in 1876 there was much in the cult of Wagner that still fascinated the young philosopher. That year, he traveled once again to Bayreuth, where the long-awaited theater finally stood completed. Wagner was planning a grand opening marked by a festival at which the Ring of the Nibelung would be performed in its entirety. This had never happened before, though excerpts of the work such as “The Ride of the Valkyries” were well known and a few performances of the individual operas had been staged.
The work consisted of no fewer than four interlinked operas, to be performed in sequence over the course of successive evenings. Nothing of the sort had ever been produced in music history prior to it, though the Church had long presented liturgical narratives of the Passion and other events over the course of multiple days. Wagner, though a freethinker, would have appreciated such a comparison. For him, opera—or, as he renamed the art form, “music drama”—was to replace the outdated and culturally irrelevant liturgy of Christendom with a new ritualized piety centered on myths created by geniuses like himself.
After arriving in Bayreuth, Nietzsche paid court to the Master at his home. He then headed for the theater to observe rehearsals. There he saw something he no doubt had longed for many years to see: the dramatization of the character Siegfried, the great heroic tenor of the Ring, after whom one of the four operas was named. Nietzsche had long heard the composer hold forth about the hero’s significance for the culture of the future. Siegfried was, significantly, nihilism personified. He was perfectly fearless, an offspring of transgression who loves without boundaries and kills without remorse. Nietzsche would later declare that Siegfried amounted to
As Nietzsche watched the character take shape at the rehearsals, he must have seen a premonition of his own nihilistic hero, Zarathustra.
At the Master’s request, Nietzsche had years earlier agreed to write an essay on the cultural scene of Bayreuth. Now, to mark the year of the first Bayreuth Festival, he decided to publish it. Constituting the final part of a work entitled Thoughts out of Season, the essay was itself given the title “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” An appropriate alternative title would have been “Friedrich Nietzsche in Bayreuth,” for it spoke as much about the philosopher’s cultural vision as about that of the composer.
Granted, at this stage in the Wagnerian philosopher’s career the two were nearly one. Comparing Wagner with Alexander the Great (whose conquests had opened the way to a transformation of ancient culture), Nietzsche declared his mentor to be “one of the greatest civilising forces of his age.” As with Alexander, the cultural transformation personified by Wagner could not proceed peacefully. It required violence, even destruction. In this case, it required the annihilation of the bankrupt values of utopian Christendom. “Modern culture,” Nietzsche claimed, must be “stormed and conquered.” And for those like him who were inspired by the fearlessly promethean figure of Siegfried, “Bayreuth is the consecration of the dawn of combat.” 5
Militantly Wagnerian, a young Friedrich Nietzsche announced the beginning of an age of nihilism.
1 Quoted in Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and Music (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 316.
2 Though they would not likely be Orthodox Christians: Orthodoxy allows for only one rite of matrimony (or “crowning”), that of the ancient Church, which has no place for secular music.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Helen Zimmern (London: T. N. Foulis, 1910), 349.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 619.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. Anthony Ludovici and Adrian Collins (San Bernadino, CA: Pantianos Classics, 2017), 147–96.
