Nietzsche and Art

by Anthony M. Ludovici

For the first act of the Christian power was not to volatilize the stone bulwarks of the monuments of antiquity, neither was it to spiritualize the citizen of the Roman Empire; but it was to convert Rome the secular administration into Rome the Eternal City.

Long before the exterior of the Græco-Roman column was divided up and sub-divided, until, despite its volume, it seemed to have no solidity whatever; and long before men's eyes and bodies were transformed from broad, spacious wells of life into narrow, tenuous cylinders of fire, a teaching was spread broadcast over the Roman Empire, the devouring power of which was astounding, and the like of whose digestion has not been paralleled in history.

The Romans in their latter days had degenerated through the decline among them of that very principle which is the basis of all great art—restraint. Always utilitarians, in the end they had become materialists, and finally their will power had disintegrated.

Then, suddenly—perhaps through the very fact that their will power had declined, and through a preponderance among them of a class of people who were unfit to allow themselves any material enjoyment, and who were conscious of this shortcoming—the pendulum of Life swung back with a force so great to the opposite extreme, that the Pagan world was shaken to its foundations, and in its death-agony stretched out its arms and embraced the foreign creed which said—

"Flesh is death; Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."[2]

Here was a fundamentally new valuation, a totally novel outlook upon the world of man. Some extraordinarily magnetic creator of values had spread his will over an empire, and stamped his hand upon a corner of the globe, and "the blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass,"[3] promised to be his.

Here was a principle which obviously must have found its origin in a class of mind which, in order to overcome the flesh at all, knew of no better means thereto than to cut it right away and for ever. It was not a matter of contriving some sort of desirable inner harmony; the will of the people in whom this creed took its roots was incapable of such an achievement. The order went: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee ... if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off!" Whenever the Spirit was mentioned it was spelt in capital letters and uttered in exalted tones; while the body, on the other hand, as the great obstacle to salvation, was written small. States of the soul became surer indices to the qualities "good," "beautiful," and "virtuous," than states of the body, and the paradox that Life was the denial of Life, was honestly believed to be an attainable ideal. In Lübke's words: "Christianity disturbed the harmony between man and nature, and introduced a sense of discordance by proclaiming to man a higher spiritual law, in the light of which his inborn nature became a sinful thing which he was to overcome."[4]

The people who acclaimed this teaching by instinct ultimately organized themselves, conquered the Pagan world, enlisted Pagan elements into their organization—Pagan spirit and Pagan order—and gradually accomplished a task which no other European values seem to have been able to do. They established one idea, one thought, one hope, in the breasts of almost all great Western peoples, from Ireland to Constantinople, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.

The power of their creation—the Church—was such that it co-ordinated the most heterogeneous elements, the most conflicting factors, and the most absurd contrasts. And, however much one may deprecate the nature of the type they advocated, and the ignoble valuation of humanity upon which their religion was based, as a Nietzschean, one can but acknowledge the power they wielded, the might with which they made one ideal prevail, and the art with which for a while they united and harmonized such discordant voices as those of the people of Europe.

One can admire all this, I say, even though it is but a spiritual reflection of Rome's former power, her former victories, and her former law and order.[5]