Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

All the same, a fuse had been lit and would continue to burn, winding slowly and tortuously back and forth for the whole century. The sulphurous smell of that fuse was strongest round one name in particular: Dionysus. Last of the Olympians, a foreigner, an Oriental, a dissolver of ties, Dionysus set foot in Germany after a long absence from Europe, an absence that stretched back to the times of Pico and Ficino, Poliziano and Botticelli in a Florence where he was worshiped as the god of mysteries and divine rapture. All those centuries ago the memory of one plain and cutting remark of Plato’s had been enough to get the god’s cult going: “Madness is superior to temperance [ sophrosýnē ], because the latter has a merely human origin, while the former belongs to the divine.” The Germany of the early nineteenth century, however, was a great deal more shy and prudish, so much so that the illustrious translator of Homer Johann Heinrich Voss rendered the “nocturnal orgies” of Dionysus as his “light entertainments.”

How much more astonishing, then, is the naturalness with which Dionysus turns up in the poetry of Hölderlin. At the beginning of “Brot und Wein” it is the night that takes our breath away, in eighteen lines all in the present tense. Rarely has the pure power of naming showed itself so very clearly. Then from the isthmus of Corinth comes Dionysus, “the god who arrives unexpected.” And this time he’s not the last god, but the penultimate; he comes before him who “brought to completion and closed, consoling, the celestial feast.” The last, unnamed, is Christ. Such an exalted and silent concentration of the divine is not easily borne. Withdrawing it from man is an ironic act of grace on the part of the gods:

Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches Gefäss sie zu fassen, Nur zu Zeiten erträgt göttliche Fülle der Mensch.

As a weak vase isn’t always able to receive it, Only at intervals can man bear divine fullness.

So, no sooner was he back than the “advent god” had to go into hiding again, in the form the gods had come to prefer: among the pages of scholars. And, if possible, of scholars under fierce attack from those of their colleagues who were always ready to smell out the menacing footprint of the god in a forest of texts and, like Pentheus at Thebes, stop him getting through. In 1808, still grieving over the suicide of his beloved Karoline von Günderode, Friedrich Creuzer published, in Latin, his Dionysus , which he opened by saying that in the “almost infinite” multitude of the Greek fables, “ulla unquam tarn late patuit, quam illa, quae per Bacchicarum rerum amplissima spatia ducit”—“none underwent such a huge expansion as the story of the Dionysiac adventures, that takes us across vast spaces.”

And immediately he pays homage to the vast Dionysiaca of the poet Nonnus, a work that for centuries had lain “situ squaloreque obsita,” “covered in dirt and debris.” As if to insinuate that since ancient times the name Dionysus had been the object of a Western conspiracy that sought to suppress, through him, any influence from the East.

Other links would be added to this chain of erudite men: Joseph Görres, in whose Amazonian exuberance myth surfaces like the ruins of a sunken world; K. O. Müller, who died of sunstroke in Greece after having introduced the term “chthonian” into classical studieS, as though until then Winckelmann’s gods had had no contact with the soil — and even less with the subsoil where Hades reigns: “But Hades and Dionysus are the same god,” said Heraclitus. And finally there is the visionary Bachofen, who discovered the most menacing Dionysus of all, the Dionysus who is in league not only with the East but with female sovereignty too.

Until one day — June 18, 1871, to be precise — a young professor at Basle University, one Friedrich Nietzsche, went into the library and borrowed both Creuzer’s Symbolik and Bachofen’s Gräbersymbolik . He was close to finishing The Birth of Tragedy . Through that book, Dionysus was preparing to burst out onto a stage which now amounted to the whole world.

Only in Nietzsche do the gods reappear with an intensity comparable to that we find in Hölderlin. From The Birth of Tragedy to The Dithyrambs of Dionysus , and the last “notes of madness,” we sense the vibration of something like the same pathos, assuming, that is, that we use the word “pathos” in the way Aristotle meant it, as a technical term which describes what happens in the Mysteries where “ou matheîn ti deîn, allà patheîn kaì ” —“one must not learn but suffer an emotion and be in a certain state.”

Unlike their contemporaries, Hölderlin and Nietzsche didn’t write about the Greeks; rather, from time to time they could themselves become Greeks. The opening of a hymn of Hölderlin’s immediately makes one think of certain opening lines in Pindar. In Nietzsche’s notebooks we find fragments that might easily be attributed to one of the pre-Socratics, or to Plotinus perhaps — like this one which was written early in 1871: “In man primordial oneness turns towards itself, looking through appearance: appearance reveals essence. Which means: primordial oneness looks at man — to be precise, at the man who is looking at appearance, the man looking through appearance. For man there is no way toward primordial oneness . He is all appearance.”

Beyond Schopenhauer, this passage gestures toward the ultimate mystery of Eleusis: the double gaze that binds Hades to Kore, the girl who is the pupil, the gaze or look that observes the person looking — and opens up every secret knowledge. Likewise the form of this fragment — all a play on the verb “to look,” schauen —makes one think more of a Neoplatonist than of a soldier of Bismarck’s, which is what Nietzsche had just been, albeit in the role of a nurse.

In those tempestuous days Nietzsche was convinced, as time and again he wrote in his notebooks — that, like tragedy in ancient Greece, myth was about to be reborn “from the spirit of music.” Here “music” must be understood as a synonym for Richard Wagner. All one had to do, then, was recognize it , since “in the presence of music we behave as the Greek behaved in the presence of his symbolic myths.” Result: “Thus music has generated myth once again for us.” Music was the amniotic fluid needed to protect an obscure process, thanks to which we would once again be able to “feel mythically.” And here the recurrent dream of the good community would lead Nietzsche to make a fatal mistake. Section 23 of The Birth of Tragedy is entirely given over to the claim that if “the gradual reawakening of the Dionysiac spirit in today’s world” was to be magically brought about by Wagner’s music, then its true subject would be the “German nature,” a euphemism behind which the German nation was barely concealed. The reference here is no longer to the Mysteries but to the theatre of European politics, where Germany is being spurred on, albeit with lofty words, to assert its hegemony: “And if the German should look around, hesitant, in search of a guide to lead him back to that long lost homeland, to which he has almost forgotten the path, the road — let him listen to the wonderfully alluring call of the Dionysiac bird, who hovers over him and will show him the way that leads in that direction.”

But the ardent decisiveness of these proclamations was complicated, in Nietzsche, by his awareness that the Germany of his time was headed in exactly the opposite direction. While he was writing The Birth of Tragedy , sketching out the shape of a civilization that had been radically renewed, Nietzsche was also preparing The Future of Our Schools , the most formidable attack ever launched on what is the foundation of the modern conception of culture: education. Nietzsche’s premise was that the very institution that ought to represent the culture of the time in its most severe and exemplary form — the illustrious German high school — in fact bore witness to a “growing barbarity in the duties assigned to culture.” Behind the progressives’ mirage of a “generalized culture,” Nietzsche saw only the ferocious determination of the state — and first and foremost the German state — to breed reliable employees. “The factory rules,” he noted, summing up the century to come in just a few words. Whenever we claim that culture must serve some purpose , he goes on, then sovereignty passes from culture to utility: “You only need to start thinking of culture as something useful and all too soon you’ll be confusing what is useful with culture. Generalized culture turns into hatred against true culture.” Hence, precisely in its most enlightened and celebrated endeavor, its attempt to bring education to everybody, the modern world was actually guided by a profound aversion to culture. In a fanciful moment immediately after the war with France, Nietzsche had written that perhaps “the Germans had fought the war to free Venus from the Louvre, like a second Helen of Troy.” This, he went on, as far as he was concerned, could be the “pneumatic explanation of this war.” All the more brutal would be his return to reality a few months later when he heard that the Communards had set fire to the Tuileries. And the Louvre too, insisted the first confused — and, as it turned out, false — reports. Appalled, Nietzsche wrote a letter to Gersdorff over which looms the specter of the “war against civilization.” A war waged not, in this instance, by a modern state seeking to make us all slaves to its goals, but by a shapeless multitude, excluded from culture and fundamentally hostile to it, so much so that they sought only to destroy it. Yet Nietzsche couldn’t bring himself to condemn the arsonists. He wrote: “It is we who are guilty of bringing these horrors to light, all of us, and with our entire past: so we absolutely must not put on pious airs and blame this crime of waging war against civilization on these wretched people alone.”