Crusade

against the Cross, 14

While it is true that Nietzsche was unable to detect the Jewish subversion that many in the 19th century could already detect, he was able to see, like no other, the subversion that had come from Judaism through Christianity. As Stefan Zweig wrote in the most lyrical essay ever written on the plummeting of the anguished eagle:

Nietzsche came to see that the malevolent thing was Christianity with its belief in a life beyond the tomb; that this was the principle which cast a shadow upon the modern world. ‘Evil-smelling Judaism, a compost of rabbinism and superstition’, had ruined and supressed the sensuality and merriment of the world. For fifty generations it had served to dope and demoralise mankind, to paralyse all that had previously constituted the vital force of the universe. But now (and suddenly he sees the mission of his life) a crusade against the Cross must begin to reconquer the holy places of man’s realm and existence upon this earth.

By embarking on a crusade, Nietzsche underwent the most radical change of his life from 1880 onwards. The previous year he had turned thirty-five, and he had always had the superstition that he would go into a mental tailspin just as his father had gone at the age of thirty-six.

Nietzsche was a little-known author: a marginal figure considered talented, but too eccentric for German speakers. But he discovered that it was precisely in the most painful periods of his existence that his philosophical productivity increased: what we now call a psychological defence mechanism. By way of super-compensation for what was happening to him, he began to believe that he needed to leave for posterity an epoch-making legacy now that the Judeo-Christian god was dead.

These were the times when Cosima had decided that Nietzsche had committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, i.e. that he couldn’t be forgiven, and when Peter Gast wrote from Venice that he had to guide his friend Nietzsche through the streets like a blind man. Headaches continued to ravage him. Nietzsche himself wrote: ‘On five occasions I pleaded, as a doctor, for death’.

He sought refuge in the high mountains. He had to search long and hard before he found a suitable place: Sils im Engadin/Segl, also known as Sils-Maria, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden: whose name will henceforth be inseparably linked to his own because of the time he spent there, despite the terrible fatigue that such a journey entailed for a half-blind. At 1,830 metres above sea level, Sils-Maria was sometimes snowy and cold even in the middle of summer, and Nietzsche had to endure something that he found fatal: many storms. It is curious that he later he researched in Genoa where there might be an ideal place without clouds and storms—Nietzsche couldn’t bear an eternally cloudy sky—and even entertained the idea of moving to Oaxaca in Mexico for its clear, cloudless skies and the sun he longed for.

To his only apostle at this point, Peter Gast, Nietzsche wrote: ‘There is nothing that can make up for the loss, in recent years, of Wagner’s sympathy for me. How often I dream of him, and always in our comforting meetings!’ He had been abandoned by all his friends, who could no longer tolerate the freedom of his thought, the new viewpoint of the eagle who looked down on Europe from on high. Only the faithful Peter Gast was left to him.

As I have said, Nietzsche was a man against his time: a fact he could never digest and he spewed it out in his somatic attacks. That was why, like a wayward defence mechanism, with open arms he accepted the pain and sang his hymn of saying ‘yes’ to life. If he discovered that his illness served as a sting to his philosophising and that it was thanks to it that he left Basel, then the disease with its birth pains freed him so that his Zarathustra could be born. ‘Only pain gives knowledge’, he intones in poetic prose. ‘Only pain liberates the spirit, only pain forces us to descend into the depths of our being’.

A martyr by contraries, he was not put to the torture because of a faith which had already become established in his mind. No, it was out of torment, it was when he was upon the rack, that he formulated his creed… Thus he ran over and over again to the fiery whirlwind of pain and submits to the torments so as to recapture ‘the enchanting sensation of good health’.

No sooner had he grasped the meaning of his illness and enjoyed the voluptuous delight of health than he wished to transform it into an apostolate… He desired further and more agonizing martyrdom… and in the excess of his enthusiasm… he goes out raising that flag without realising that it is the one that, at the same time, draws the bow that is going to shoot him the deadly arrow.

But the philosophy of Amor fati was deceptive magic for an eagle that sees everything! I have already said so on this site when trying to communicate with a racialist whom I treated one week in London (a young man who had previously been committed to a mental institution and is now serving a prison sentence).

If we look at Nietzsche’s life not as today’s bio-reductionists want to see it, but as the all-too-human human he was, we will see that with the fall that really happened to him—though not in his 36th year but in his 44th—we come upon a fact. With madness his ills disappeared, so I deduce that they were psychosomatic. Nietzsche himself had used, in speaking of himself, the metaphor of a machine that was about to explode: something that undoubtedly referred to his future insanity.

Werner Ross tells us in his biography: ‘Insanity, therefore, is no longer an organic disease’. It was something almost premeditated in pursuit of a posthumous resurrection I would dare to add, so that the man against his time would miraculously become, after the psychotic outbreak, a man of his time.