Back to Nietzsche: The Ass Festival
In the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents his readers with a special gift–the “ass festival.” Zarathustra has gathered to his cave the higher men, who are a group of men with various strengths (one of them is responsible for the death of god, though we are not told how). He leaves them along for a while, and upon returning, sees that they have gathered around a donkey (hence the “ass”) and are singing to him, worshipping him.
It turns out to be a clever joke upon Zarathustra that the higher men are playing. They aren’t really worshipping god in the form of an ass, although they explain why they believe god is a donkey:
“Perhaps I may not believe in God; but it is certain that God seems relatively most credible to me in this form. God is supposed to be eternal, according to the witness of the most pious: whoever has that much time, takes his time. As slowly and as stupidly as possible: in this way, one like that can still get very far.”
Why am I talking about this? Well, aside from the fact that it somewhat reminded me of a Unitarian Universalist worship service (except that unless the Discordians are leading it, there’s not the layer of irony)*…I need to write a couple of papers for my Nietzsche class. The parts of his writing that grab me are those which discuss what “truth” involves. He pairs the inflexibility of “truth” with religion (specifically Christianity), and rejects them both together.
Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a Christian, although I have played one in seminary. It’s the air I grew up in, and I’m grateful for the level of biblical literacy it’s given me, as well as an appreciation for the way that suffering can be transformative. Etc.
So as I read Zarathustra, part of me wants to say Amen (or Yee-Yah, as the ass brays). Another part of me wonders whether Christianity necessitates the understanding of truth that Nietzsche seems to read. He’s certainly not saying that there is no way things “are”, but he’s making a point about how we understand our selves, our words, and our relationship to this “way things are.” In the third part of TSZ, Zarathustra encounters someone mimicking him (”On Passing By”). The man recites a litany of complaints, all indistinguishable from what Zarathustra might say.
But Zarathustra responds, “…even if [my] words were a thousand times right, still you would always do wrong with my words.” Without getting into the question of theories of justification, it seems like Jesus, in the gospel of John, had a similar intuition about his relationship between truth and the facts of the world (specifically, about the way Jews ought to be in relationship with Yahweh), when he said “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”
Of course, Nietzsche wouldn’t disagree with this–in The Antichrist, he makes it clear that he views Jesus as the only “genuine” Christian, because he showed people how to live, but didn’t “save” them.
What is interesting, though, is what Nietzsche says about Jesus and truth: “he accepted only inner realities as realities, as “truths”–that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical, only as signs, as occasions for parables.” Zarathustra, likewise, reached his own truth (not “the” truth), but unlike Jesus, when people asked him “the way”, he said “This is my way; where is yours?”
Just sorting through possible paper topics, really. There’s no grand conclusion to this post, in case you were looking for it. I will scan some of the literature (I know Nietzsche has been done to death in theological circles; I’m not expecting to contribute anything novel) and try to tighten up a theme.
*The line that made me think of this was this one, that the old pope said to Zarathustra: “Forgive me, Zarathustra, but in what pertains to God I am even more enlightened than you. And that is proper. Better to adore God in this form than in no form at all!…”