Easter with the Anti-Christ: In Praise of Pontius Pilate

"I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. 

All who love the truth recognise that what I say is true."

      "What is truth?" Pilate asked. [1] 

 

 

Of all the many characters named in the New Testament, there is only one whom Nietzsche deems worthy of honour; Pontius Pilate, the man who governed Judea by the authority of Rome and held ultimate responsibility for determining that Jesus should be crucified.

 

It is, of course, a provocative choice; one that is guaranteed to delight some and offend others. But it's not simply designed to amuse or outrage his readers; Nietzsche has good reasons why Pilate captures his respect.

 

For one thing, Pilate displays noble indifference when confronted with the case of Jesus; he simply refuses to care about what is essentially a squabble amongst religious fanatics: "To regard a Jewish affair seriously - he cannot persuade himself to do that." [2]

 

In addition - and this is perhaps the key thing - Pilate is scornful of the concept of truth being advanced (or attested to) by Jesus. 

 

For Nietzsche, the question: Quid est veritas? not only dismisses but destroys the entire basis of what will come to be known as Christianity as well as revealing Pilate to be a man who is unconcerned with the details of the matter brought before him (including the question of whether Jesus is guilty or not guilty of the charges made against him; whether he does or does not deserve to die).

 

Pilate may make a pretty poor governor, but he has an ironic and philosophical disposition and that's why Nietzsche admires him - he's disdainful of the very idea of Truth with a capital T (of truth as something one might not only live by but die for). 

 

This is further revealed, of course, in his symbolic handwashing and the fact that, many years later, when asked about the case he has no memory of the Nazarene [3].

 

Mark Bauerlein provides the perfect paragraph with which to close:

 

"Nietzsche's Pilate, then, isn't a weak administrator trying to finesse a tricky adjudication. He is a cosmopolitan showing his superiority to parochial bickering. His question reduces Christianity from the truth of the world to a partisan contention. He doesn't attack Christianity; he transcends it. [...] His entrance into the theater of the Passion is a virtuous and vigorous interruption of the Christian narrowing of life in all its energy and variety into a single, universal mode of being. Pilate's irony dissolves the historic reality before him into a show. While everyone else in the drama is committed to the outcome, Pilate stands apart, a disinterested observer, an anti-dogmatist wary of truth-seekers and religious types." [4]

 

 

Notes

[1] John 18: 37-38

 

[2] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), §46.

[3] I'm referring here to a fictional account given by Anatole France in his short story "Le Procurateur de Judée" (1892), which portrays an elderly Pilate who has been banished to Sicily.  When asked by a friend if he remembers the trial of Jesus, Pilate thinks for a moment and then replies that he cannot recall the case. An English translation of this tale by Michael Wooff is available as an ebook on Project Gutenberg: click here to read online. 

 

[4] Mark Bauerlein, 'Nietzsche's Pilate', in First Things (August 2019): click here. 

      It is important to note that this most certainly isn't Bauerlein's own position. In fact, he no sooner says this than he slams on the brakes and fully reverses, dismissing modes of philosophical irony - be they pre-Nietzschean like Pilate's, or post-Nietzschean, like Richard Rorty's - as ultimately just sophisticated word games played by those who daren't make the leap into faith.

      There's nothing ironic about Jesus, says Bauerlein, and his Passion makes Pilate's skepticism and cleverness simply appear glib. Those who pride themselves on their curbed enthusiasm and insincerity might mock, but, says Bauerlein, we need to rediscover "forces deeper than words" - forces such as devotion, conviction, and sacrifice ...

 

 

Readers interested in the first Easter post spent with the Anti-Christ, should click here. 

 

For the 2019 version, click here. 

 

And for the 2020 version, click here.     

On the Risen Christ

Jesus with Erection - a satrirical image from 

the student newspaper The Insurgent (2006) [1]

 
 

I.

 

For me, the most daring, most beautiful, and most philosophically important of all D. H. Lawrence's tales is The Escaped Cock (1929). In this short novel, he makes a major contribution to the Nietzschean project of a revaluation of all values as advocated in The Anti-Christ (1895).

 

And he does this by insisting upon what Leo Steinberg describes as a long-suppressed matter of fact: that as well as being a Man of Sorrows keen to show us his wounds, the resurrected figure of Christ was also a bringer of joy, proud to sport an erection. 

 

In other words, just like the Renaissance artists who produced a large body of devotional imagery centred on the penis of both the baby Jesus and the 33-year-old crucified Christ, Lawrence obliges us to "recognise an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostantatio vulnerum" [2]. 

 

Whilst many Christians still prefer to look away, Lawrence emphasises in the phallic second part of his tale that if Christ rose, he did so in the flesh in order to experience the pleasures of the latter, including the pleasure of feeling "the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins" [3]. 

 

This is his glory and triumph over death, not some mad fantasy of ascension that defeats the whole point and purpose of his Passion. All that suffering - including the terrible effort of leaving the tomb - doesn't make sense if he is simply obliged to "lurk obscurely for six weeks on earth" [4] before then being whooshed up to heaven on a cloud and never put down again.      

 

Flesh and blood, as Lawrence says, belong to the earth - and only to the earth. And Jesus was risen flesh and blood: both mortal and sexed. Christ's erect penis signifies his humanation and whilst St. Augustine might find the male member shameful (not least of all in its disobedient nature), the man who died does not.  

 

And those who, like Lawrence or Michelangelo, do what they can to stress this fact are not being sacrilegious; on the contrary, the "rendering of the incarnate Christ ever more unmistakably flesh and blood is a religious enterprise because it testifies to God's greatest achievement" [5].         

 

 

II.         

 

So, where are we now? Are we finally prepared to acknowledge Jesus as a man of flesh and blood, if not, indeed, accord the Son of Man a place alongside Osiris and Dionysus within a pantheon of ithyphallic deities? 

 

Probably not. Jesus with Erection, the satrirical image seen at the top of this post, still caused controversy when it was published in the student newspaper The Insurgent in 2006, with all the usual suspects rising to the bait. 

 

The picture, one of twelve iconoclastic images depicting events in the life of Jesus, was intended to demonstrate that Christians could be just as easily (and deeply) offended as those Muslims who were offended by the Danish cartoons of Muhammad [6]. 

 

However, one suspects that those responsible for the images of Christ published in The Insurgent knew very well that whilst some Christian groups and individuals might vociferously protest, there weren't going to be riots in the streets and no one was likely to be killed [7]. 

 

Their provocation was not, therefore, quite as daring, nor as radical, as it might first appear and the image lacks all the potency, profundity, and piety of those works of Renaissance art discussed by Steinberg, or, indeed, of Lawrence's beautiful novella.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Student Insurgent is a radical political journal published by a collective of students and community members. The paper's coverage shifts periodically, but has covered anti-capitalist, environmentalist, and anti-war topics and expressed solidarity with such groups as the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First! 'The Jesus Issue', featuring images of Jesus - including Jesus with Erection - was produced in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (see note 6 below). 

 

[2] Leo Steinberg, 'The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion', essay in October, Vol. 25, (Summer, 1983), p. 1. Published by the MIT Press. Available to access on JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/778637   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 159.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Risen Lord', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 270. 

[5] Leo Steinberg, op. cit., p. 10.

      When I mention Michelangelo, I'm thinking of his marble sculpture Cristo della Minerva (1519-21), usually known in English as the Risen Christ. Admittedly, this figure does not have a hard-on, but, nevertheless, the sexual organs are exposed in order to show that Christ's sexuality is uncorrupted by sin and free of shame. It might also be noted that during the Baroque period a bronze loincloth was added and that this has remained in place ever since - an act of sheer barbarism carried out in the name of propriety.     

[6] The Muhammad cartoons controversy began after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve editorial cartoons on 30 September 2005, most of which depicted the founder and prophet of Islam.  This led to violent demonstrations around the world which resulted in a more than 250 reported deaths. 

[7] It's not that Christian fundamentalists are any less fanatic than Islamists, but Christianity doesn't hold to the strong tradition of aniconism that Islam subscribes to and the idea of blasphemy has no legal basis any longer in the West, with most laws relating to it having now been repealed. In the US, of course, the First Amendment protects all forms of free speech and any attempt to draft or enforce blasphemy laws would violate the Constitution. 

Sympathy for the Devil: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Luciferianism (Easter with the Anti-Christ 2020)

William Blake: Satan in his Original Glory (c. 1805)

Ink and watercolour on paper (429 x 339 mm)

tate.org.uk

"Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong." [1]

"Jesus becomes more unsympatisch to me, the longer I live: crosses and nails and tears and all that stuff! I think he showed us into a nice cul de sac." [2]

"Yes, I am all for Lucifer, who is really the Morning Star. The real principle of Evil is not anti-Christ or anti-Jehovah, but anti-life. I agree with you, in a sense, that I am with the antichrist. Only I am not anti-life." [3]

These three brief extracts from Lawrence's letters, written between January 1925 and June 1929, reveal much about his relationship to Christianity; a relationship which became increasingly marked by hostility to the Nazarene on the one hand and sympathy for the Devil on the other. 

I'm not sure Lawrence would ever have gone as far as Nietzsche in characterising Christianity as the "extremest thinkable form of corruption" and the one "immortal blemish of mankind" [4], but he certainly positions himself like the latter as versus the Crucified and takes up Nietzsche's project of revaluation in poems such as 'When Satan Fell'; a lovely postromantic text, reminiscent of Milton and Blake, which makes perfect reading for an Easter beyond good and evil [5] ... 

When Satan fell, he only fell
because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high,
a bit beyond himself.

So Satan only fell to keep a balance.

"Are you so lofty, O my God?
Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft?
Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell
with vines and poppies and fig-trees
so that lost souls may eat grapes
and the moist fig
and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell,
on the way to dark perdition."

And hell and heaven are the scales of the balance of life
which swing against each other. [6]

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3343, [26 January 1925], p. 205. 

[2] Ibid., letter number 3516, [26 October 1925], p. 322.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, letter number 5140, (12 June, 1929), pp. 331-32. 

[4] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 62, pp. 196-97.

[5] It's important to note that when Lawrence writes of Lucifer (or Satan), he does so without subscribing to the Christian belief that, post fall, he became the enemy of mankind and the source of all evil in the world. As the last lines of the above verse make clear, for Lawrence, heaven and hell are both vital states of human experience necessary for 'the balance of life' and should not be given a simplistic moral interpretation.  

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'When Satan Fell', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 624.

Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, on D. H. Lawrence and the poetry of evil: click here.

For the 2013 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here.

For the 2019 version of Easter with the Anti-Christ, click here. 

Islamism: What Would Nietzsche Do?

I. If Islam Despises Christianity, It Has a Thousandfold Right to Do So

Whilst it's true that Nietzsche does praise Islamic civilisation - particularly the wonderful culture of the Moors - within The Anti-Christ (1888), you rather get the impression he's doing so in order to provoke his mostly Western readers who pride themselves on the superiority of their own Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian inheritance.

For Nietzsche surely knew that Islam - as part of the same moral-religious tradition as Judaism and Christianity - is as problematic in terms of his own critique of values as either of the latter. He might like to romanticise the Arabs as a noble and manly race in comparison to the modern European, but such orientalism was common in the 19th century and needn't detain us for too long.

Besides, Islamism - a militant form of fundamentalism - is very much a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries and so wouldn't have been something that Nietzsche would have been familiar with. He did, however, anticipate the rise of such murderous ideologies and he did directly address the question of revolutionary fanaticism in his mid-period writings.

It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate to speculate how Nietzsche might have responded to the question (and the threat) of Islamism ...       

II. Serenity Now

Firstly, it's important to point out that, despite what many of his adherents as well as opponents often claim, Nietzsche - for all his anti-humanism - remained pro-Enlightenment; that is to say, someone with a deep admiration for the faculty of reason. It was important to Nietzsche that he not be regarded as an irrationalist or fanatic; i.e., one who demands faith and obedience from his followers, whilst displaying all the irritable impatience and resentment of the invalid.  

As Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, Nietzsche conceived of philosophy as a method for curbing excessive forms of enthusiasm and tempering the emotional and mental hysteria that we encounter in the world's hot-spots. As so many of these hot-spots happen to be Muslim majority countries, one is tempted to characterise the entire Muslim world as one huge tropical zone full of absurdly violent passions and "the most savage energies in the form of long-buried horrors and excesses of the most distant ages" [HAH 463].

Ultimately, moderation is the key to Nietzsche's mid-period therapeutics. And the main aim is to counter all forms of religious and ideological stupidity. It is the duty of those he calls free spirits to cool things down in a world that is "visibly catching fire in more and more places" [HAH 38], via an analytical naturalism and a dose of eudaemonic asceticism.

Ansell-Pearson is keen to trace such a practice of philosophy back to the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus and he makes a very strong case for why it is instructive and legitimate to do so. Personally, however, I'm more interested in how Nietzsche's thinking resonates within contemporary popular culture; such as in the work of comic genius Larry David ...


III. Zügel deine Begeisterung

Like Nietzsche, Larry is driven by a stubborn and sceptical form of honesty that tolerates no bullshit or groundless idealism. And like Nietzsche, Larry encourages us also to find joy in the small things - in details and in the minutiae of daily existence (including our language). Ansell-Pearson writes:

"There remains a strong and firm desire for life but [...] this voluptuous appreciation and enjoyment of life [...] is modest in terms of the kinds of pleasures it wants [...] and in terms of its acknowledgement of the realities of a human existence." [43] 

Such a philosophy is clearly antithetical to any faith that claims absolute moral authority. And so, it's little surprise then that in the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry runs foul of the Islamists and has a death sentence placed upon him by the Iranian Ayatollah.

His crime: Mocking Muslim clerics on a TV talk-show whilst discussing his new project, Fatwa!, a musical-comedy based on the Salman Rushdie (Satanic Verses) affair.

His defence: Religion should be made fun of. It's ridiculous. If I believed that stuff, I'd keep my mouth shut lest somebody think I was out of my mind.

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Vol. I., trans. Gary Handwerk, (Stanford University Press,1995). 

To watch a clip from the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9, featuring a rehearsal scene from Fatwa!, click here.  

Submission (On Christianity, Islam and the European Migrant Crisis)

Cover of the Hungarian edition of 

Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015)

These are strange times indeed! 

So strange, that one even finds oneself in agreement with Peter Hitchens - yes, the slightly younger, much less lovable brother of Christopher Hitchens - on an increasing number of questions, including the European migrant crisis. 

For he's right, surely, to argue that we in the West will not solve this apparently insoluble problem, or be in a position to help anyone, if we destroy our own continent with its own unique history, culture and system of values in the process, or simply give it away, as he writes, "to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves". 

Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn't examine this emotional spasm gripping the political leaders of Europe, the media, bleeding-heart celebrities, and, apparently, large numbers of the British public who were moved by a single photo. And, of course, the reason he doesn't examine it is because it's rooted precisely in the Christian moral tradition of which he is such a vocal exponent. Thus Hitchens is on tricky ground and his analysis of current events is compromised ultimately by his own faith. 

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that it is our own idealism - particularly the ideal of self-sacrifice - that is at play here; we are still attempting to imitate Christ hanging on the Cross and commit one final auto-da-fé en masse so that we too can whisper with our dying breath and face turned towards heaven consummatum est. 

It is finished; meaning, our time as a people is finally over; we give up, let those who are younger, stronger, more devout, more numerous, have a go at running things. Michel Houellebecq understands this suicidal and sentimental fatigue and how our will to love has effectively undermined our will to survival. In his novel, Soumission (2015), he writes perfectly convincingly of how a near-future France easily transforms into an Islamic society.   

It's a book that Hitchens has read and admires. But, again, I don't think he quite understands the work or sees why it is Europe has adopted this submissive position; how what he describes as weakness and cowardice is, in fact, the result of our corrosive and toxic virtues including: pity, charity, and humility.

The sad and terrifying fact is that we would rather turn the other cheek and love our enemies, even when they want to murder us, than be seen to be unkind or unjust in any way. Just as Jesus died for our sins, we want to die for the sins of others. And so we hold open the gates and meekly smile and clap hands as hundreds of thousands of migrants push past and give thanks to Allah for the soft stupidity of the kuffar. 

          

Notes: 

Peter Hitchens's recent Mail on Sunday piece entitled 'We won't save refugees by destroying our own country' can be read here. 

Michel Houellebecq's novel has been translated into English as Submission, by Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Obviously, Nietzsche - not an author I suspect Peter Hitchens has much time for - identified Christianity as more harmful than any vice over a century ago and predicted what would happen to Europeans as a result of adopting this slave morality and attempting to put it into practice. That we have not repudiated this creed once and for all not only does us no credit, but it brings down a curse upon us. And if Islam despises the Christian West, writes Nietzsche, "it is a thousand times right to do so: for Islam presupposes men ..." [The Anti-Christ, section 59.]