Great Books Archives - Page 15 of 26

Prospero’s Island

now, ‘t is true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples.

Thus says Prospero, breaking the fourth wall, at the end of The Tempest (by Shakespeare, but you knew that already).

Prospero, a magician with an island of his own, decides to forgive all those who wronged him, set everyone free, break his staff and drown his book and reclaim his status as mere human. Lots of interesting things to contemplate there, but for now, let’s just look at this epilogue.

The play has ended; everyone is going home. But, then Prospero walks out and announces to the audience (that would be you), that his fate now has to be decided. If you clap, he gets to go home. If you don’t clap, he will forever be trapped on his island in this play. Which will it be?

Now, you, like most of my students, may think this is a pathetic bid for applause at the end of a performance. But, give Shakespeare a little credit here and imagine this is a rather important part of the play itself. You have just become part of the play. You not only have the opportunity to decide Prospero’s fate, you must decide his fate. Either you clap or you don’t. Prospero is waiting.

You are still thinking, “It’s just a play.” But wait. Earlier in this play, Prospero puts on a play of his own, and that play gets interrupted when Prospero remembers he has other things he should be doing.

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Here is the question: in that last sentence, who is the “we”? Just the people in the play? Ah, but remember that epilogue? You are one of the actors in this play.

Are we the stuff which dreams are made on? Dear Reader, are you and I characters in a play? Is all the world a stage (different play, same author)?

The question of whether we are all just characters in a play left a room full of normally quite boisterous Mount Holyoke students silent. Truth be told, I am not sure whether the silence was born of deep contemplation or incredulousness that I was asking such a painfully silly question.

But, as I sit here writing my monologue, there is nobody else on the stage with me right now. There are a couple of distant figures walking across the lawn in the background outside the window of my office. But the only conversation going on is me talking to you, the audience, Dear Readers.

Of course in the play that is your life, you are right now reading a letter written to you by a character (me) who is off-stage right now. Maybe there are other people on the stage with you right now. Maybe not. I have no idea—that’s not my play.

Prospero doesn’t want to be left on his little island in his play. To get off, he needs you to clap. Did you help him out yet? Or is he still stranded there? Of course, as soon as you clap, you are acknowledging that Prospero is real. So maybe you shouldn’t clap and just leave him on his island in his play.

Prospero is begging you to help.

Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.

You and Prospero aren’t all that different, are you? You too lack spirits to enforce and art to enchant. You too are on an island in your own play, bound by the limits of your humanity. You too need others or your end truly is despair. You too are asking for prayer to assault Mercy itself that you will not be left alone on your island with all your faults unforgiven, bereft of the power to leave without the aid of others who have no more reason to aid you than you have to aid Prospero.

A decade later, John Donne picked up the theme.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Is that just wishful thinking?

You are surrounded by Prosperos, not the magician with the staff and the book and the power to create a world, but the human at the end who lacks the power to escape the island. All you have to do is clap. But to do that, you have to notice Prospero first, you have to delay leaving the theater just a moment, linger briefly on the stage of the other person’s life before dashing off to the next exciting adventure in the play of your own life.

Smile and say “Hi” to someone today…even to the stranger who wanders briefly onto your stage by mere accident.

More Surprises in The Brothers Karamazov

As I have noted before in this space, one of the amazing things about The Brothers Karamazov is that it contains within it a zillion different themes.

I recently read it with one of my reading groups.

I was talking with one of the students a few days before we were going to meet and asked her which of the endless possibilities she thought would be an interesting discussion. Her reply, to put it mildly, surprised me.

She really wanted to talk about Perezvon.

If you haven’t read the book, the name means nothing to you. If you have read the book, the name also means nothing to you. You are wondering “One of the monks? People in town? Lawyers? Kids?”

Don’t feel bad that you do not remember Perezvon.

Perezvon is the dog. And, you may not even remember there was a dog in the novel. In a 750 page novel, he gets a couple dozen pages of screen time.

I expressed my skepticism that the dog could merit much discussion. To which I got this reply:

It can’t be hard to talk about Perezvon. You get this book full of insane rants about everything from free will to murder to loyalty to moral guilt, and yet the thing that makes the saddest character happy is finding his dog. I mean, Ilyusha is this insanely troubled and problematic kid, he’s literally dying, but he’s thrilled when he sees Perezvon again. It sort of makes me want to give up school and reading and history and just live on a ranch. Plus, then you have the whole thing where Kolya keeps his dog from him, prolonging the suffering in an attempt to make the dog even better and whatnot. It’s tragically beautiful.
(Izzy Baird, e-mail to author, February 1, 2020)

As I thought about her comment, I realized that the episode with Perezvon is even more interesting than I thought when I first read Izzy’s comments.

We need to revisit the story. Perezvon was not Ilyusha’s dog. He was a stray dog. Ilyusha, a young kid was induced to throw a piece of meat to the stray dog which contained a pin inside it. The idea was to enjoy the amusement after the dog gobbles up the meat and is tortured by having a pin in its stomach. (People can be cruel.) Ilyusha tosses the meat, the dog gobbles it up, and runs off in great pain presumably to die of internal bleeding. Ilyusha is devastated at what he has done.

Shortly thereafter, Ilyusha is on his own deathbed when one of the other kids, Kolya, shows up with Perezvon. Kolya found the dog shortly after Ilyusha’s act; the dog had not actually swallowed the pin. Then in order to surprise Ilyusha, Kolya spent weeks training the dog to do all sorts of fun tricks. One day, Kolya brings Perezvon to Ilyusha’s bedside. Ilyusha is incredibly happy.

It is, indeed, tragically beautiful.

Here is what is particularly fascinating. The story of Perezvon is a retelling of a rather more famous story. The stray mangy dog is wounded and presumed dead. Then one day the dog comes back transformed into a newer, more vibrant and whole self. It is a story of the death of the old dog and the rebirth as a new dog and the new dog is so much more glorious than the old dog. Ilyusha goes from the grief of knowing he killed to the old dog to the joy of realizing that the dog has been reborn in a new glorious state.

Sin and cruelty lead to death. But death is not the end. The end is glory.

Oh, Dostoevsky is a clever writer. The Perezvon story is a microcosm of the entire Brothers Karamazov. The themes of death and rebirth are everywhere in the novel, including in what seems like an interesting little aside to the larger tale. Noticing that, you suddenly realize that the story of Perezvon is embedded in a longer story of Ilyusha’s death, which is part of a larger story of Alexei bringing redemption and life to the Ilyusha, Kolya, and their friends. That story is thrust right in between the arrest and the trial of Dmitri, who will have his own experience of dying to his old self and being reborn after his vision of the Wee One.

Stories within stories within stories all pointing the same direction. Yeah, this really is the greatest novel of all time.

Bibliography
Baird, Izzy. E-mail to author. February 1, 2020.

[Izzy told me I had to provide a proper citation and a bibliography when I told her I was going to quote her. She also insisted that I use Chicago-style citation methods. Izzy is a historian and thus does not know that APA is the vastly superior citation method. APA does not include personal communications in the bibliography; Chicago does. So, yes this bibliographic entry is completely redundant and useless, but I know I would be roundly chastised by Izzy if I did not include it, and truth be told, I already get chastised by Izzy for enough things.]

Looking For Love after the Apocalypse

Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars is one of those books I really want to like more than I did. I really want to say it is a novel you should rush out to read. The praise for it on the back cover is over-the-top.

I would like to join the chorus.

Sigh.

The Dog Stars is the tale of Hig (Big Hig if you want two names), living in a post-Apocalyptic world. The chief virtue of the book is the style.

In his former life, Hig was a contractor who really loved poetry. The contractor bit comes in handy in a post-Apocalyptic world. The poetry bit comes in handy in writing the novel.

Open up any page, and you see the style. The paragraphs are all separated by double spacing. Why? Each paragraph is like a miniature poem. Not rhyming or scanning poems (this is no Paradise Lost), just prose written with poetic sensibilities, or at least pseudo-poetic sensibilities.

Picking a paragraph at random (literally opening the book to see the first paragraph that pops off the page):
(It’s a rumination of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her companion when her plane vanished:)

Starvation. Slowly burning through time like a fire in wet wood. Attenuating to bone, to walking bones, then one dies, then the other. Or attacked by passing islanders maybe better.

That is a pretty good example of the style. Staccato sentences, ignoring rules of grammar and punctuation. A mix of paragraphs advancing the plot and pausing to ruminate. Lots of rumination. Easy to read. Flows along. Writing like this. Annoying. Could be. But not always.

At a minimum, the style has potential to be the backbone of a really good novel.

But, what about the plot?

Post-Apocalyptic literature is a genre unto itself. And, a popular genre at that. It’s worth thinking about why. Suppose you are writing a post-Apocalyptic book. What do you need to do?

First, obviously, the world as we know has to come to an end. It never really matters much how. In The Dog Stars the culprit is Lawrence Livermore Lab…a nice safe organization to blame in our politically charged age. (You can date post-Apocalyptic books by looking at the cause of the Apocalypse.) So, no need to think much about how the world ended.

Now that the world has ended, you decide on The Problem. The hero, usually someone like an idealized version of the author, has to navigate the landscape. There is no lack of problems to overcome in this new world. So, you’ll have to choose which problems you want your hero to overcome.

Figuring out how to overcome The Problem is exactly the appeal of post-Apocalyptic literature. The Reader gets placed in the position of seeing the problem along with the protagonist and then imagining how to solve the puzzle. The Reader gets to cheer the protagonist for doing the right thing and wince when the protagonist fails.

Your novel can either be hopeful or terrifying, depending on which problems your hero has to solve. You can have a whole story about overcoming the problems of survival, how to get food and shelter. You can spend the whole novel solving technological problems. You can rebuild a whole civilization. You can, on the other had have roving bands of evil—wild animals, depraved gangs of young men, zombies—which your hero can never quite completely defeat, but must find a way to overcome. Lots of options here.

What option does Heller pick? By the start of the novel we are nine years after the Apocalypse. Hig has already solved all the problems of survival. He lives at a rural airport with a dog, Jasper. He has a neighbor, Bangley, with whom he regularly interacts. Fortunately Bangley is one of those omnipotent action heroes straight out of every Rambo-like movie you ever watched. Lots of food, water, electricity and an airplane which Hig uses to fly around to check out the surrounding area.

So, what is Hig’s problem? He needs companionship. Jasper is great and all, but he is, well, a dog. Bangley is useful and all—he has a godlike ability to kill off all those marauding bands of rovers—but he is, well, curmudgeonly and hard to like. There is a local Mennonite family which Hig stops in to see on occasion, but (alas) they have the deadly disease which seems to have been fatal for everyone other than this family, and, well, that puts a damper on the relationship.

Hig desperately wants human contact. He misses his wife and unborn child, but mostly tries to ignore that fact. It’s not that there are no other people in this world; it’s just that everyone who ever wanders into the airport or the surrounding area has to be shot. I guess nice people never wander around the country looking for love.

After half the novel has passed, Hig finally gets around to doing what it was pretty obvious he would do at some point—why it took half the novel, I have no idea—he finds some other nice people. Insert sounds of Joy.

A novel like this could work. A novel like this written in the style it was written could work really well. But, it fails. Why?

None of the people in this novel even rise to the level of two-dimensional. This is not a fatal flaw for a post-Apocalyptic novel, by the way. If the novel is about solving technological problems, the people can be completely devoid of depth and the novel can still be quite good.

But, if the puzzle the novel is trying to frame is how to find companionship in the world, then you really need to have people in it that are actually three-dimensional. Instead we get a few stock characters who Hig somehow instantly knows are good people and then a bunch of soon-to-die evil people who live a couple of pages before being shot.

The development of Hig’s relationships with his new found friends is truly ham-handed. Cringe-inducing, to be honest. Similarly, even Bangley gets his moment of utterly painful to read “character development.”

Thus a novel with potential because of its style dies due to the fact that Heller apparently has no idea how to craft people. Oddly, if Heller had set out to solve a different problem in his post-Apocalyptic world, this novel could have been vastly better. The unwritten prequel to this novel would surely have been better.

What about the larger puzzle? In the post-Apocalyptic world, how great is the need for companionship?

It will surprise precisely nobody when I say that I think I could be quite content living in an abandoned town with a large library. (There is a Twilight Zone episode about a guy like that. Not Exactly a Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t end well.) Yes, I would terribly miss all the people I currently know and love. But, I am not at all sure I would feel compelled to seek out replacement friends and family.

That, I suppose, is the greatest disappointment of The Dog Stars. It tries to convince me of the need to find a family in a post-Apocalyptic world, but it fails to even make me wonder about the idea.

Big Brother Doesn’t Need to Watch You

Big Brother is watching You.
Newspeak.
Thoughtcrime.
Doublethink.
Two minutes hate.

George Orwell’s 1984 needs no introduction.

I read this book with one of my reading groups in the Fall. In this particular group, each of the students sends in a question which crystalized in her mind while reading it. Just a question; there is no obligation to try to answer it.

There is one question which has haunted me since it showed up in my Inbox.

But, first the background. Our hero, Winston, has been captured by the Party and is undergoing his mental retraining exercises (commonly called torture) in the dreaded Room 101. In the midst of this process, his tormentor notes the following:

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside—irrelevant.

That is a striking claim. Is it true?

Let us first note that in the modern age, everybody talks as if it is true. Well, it is true of other people.

Think about the current discussion about politics. There are many interesting facets of the polarization which is on everyone’s mind, but for now think about how people on the other side of the divide from you get their news and their views on current events. You immediately thought of FOX News/Talk Radio or Mainstream Media (MSM, if you are really hip).

Now what do we know about those people on the other side? They have been brainwashed, obviously. They have been conditioned by Fake and Misleading News to believe a narrative about the world which simply isn’t true.

You, of course, get your news from reliable news sources and you think for yourself. But, those other people are clearly deluded. It’s really quite obvious, isn’t it? Surely, no thinking, reasonable person would ever agree with them.

Those other people are incredibly malleable. They cannot resist the manipulations of the nefarious forces wielding misinformation and lies in an attempt to gain power.

So, yes, the quotation above is scary because you know it is true. You are watching it unfold. Malleable people being blindly led into a world of Newspeak where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and most importantly, Ignorance is Strength.

You do know those other people think that you are the one who is malleable and misled. But, you also know that is absurd. After all, you are the thoughtful one who reads widely and thinks clearly.

Set aside for a second the question of why you are so certain you are right. (Don’t worry. Of course you are right. It is really rather silly to even wonder if you are. Those people on the other side of the political divide are the hapless sheep following malevolent forces trying to lead us to doom. You, on the other hand, are free-thinking, thoughtful, and right. It’s obvious.)

Here is the question from the student which has haunted me:

In Room 101, hypothetically what would have happened if Winston hadn’t given in? I know that’s very unlikely because of the amount of physical and psychological torture he had already gone through, and the fact that the room contains each person’s worst fear. But isn’t there some possibility that someone would be able to resist even the torture in room 101? Or as Winston thinks later, rebel by hating Big Brother in the last seconds before the bullet hits their head? It just seems like there has to be some way to retain even the smallest amount of independent thought, even after going through Big Brother’s torture and conditioning.

Am I infinitely malleable? Could I retain even the smallest amount of independent thought in the face of a coordinated and systematic attack upon it? Note the start of the last line in that question: “It just seems like there has to be some way…” It must be true? Right?

Why must it be true? The alternative is terrifying. What if the Party is right? What if every last bit of independence in me could be driven out?

And then the real horror steps in: why am I so certain that this hasn’t actually happened to me already? What if I have already been completely formed by people outside myself? Why am I so certain that I do have independent thoughts?

The reason this question has haunted me is not because I am concerned that I no longer have independent thought. Obviously I do. The thing that concerns me is that I am not concerned about that question. After all, actually having independent thought and being infinitely malleable would be indistinguishable to me—in both cases, I would think that I was the one forming my opinions.

Like I said, I am not really worried about that. But, this generated another question, also implicit in my student’s question. In an age when everyone knows that those other people are mindless, infinitely malleable sheep, why have I been able to so firmly resist the siren calls of the Party? If everyone else is so susceptible to losing independence of thought, then what is the secret to resisting it in the face of exactly the same pressures everyone else is facing?

Another way of putting it: If many people are infinitely malleable and have lost independence of thought, what is the thing that allows the free thinkers to avoid that trap? Curiously, the first thought is that the free thinkers have found all the other free thinkers and are influenced by those people rather than the brainwashers…but, that rather begs the question doesn’t it?

I don’t know the answer to the question of how to preserve independence of thought in an era when so few people seem to have it. Like I said, my student’s question has haunted me.

But, I suspect the answer has something to do with the Great Books and a genuine liberal arts education. Reading and thinking deeply about a range of books which were not written in the current era but speak timeless truths has to help. Most importantly, the fact that the authors of all those Great Books agree on precisely nothing also helps. When you struggle with Plato and Nietzsche and Orwell, you have to think about deeper things and you realize that no matter what you conclude, hard thinking requires humility. What if this author is correct?

What is the way to preserve independent thought? I have no idea if it would work in Room 101 (and I hope to never find out), but surely treating Great Books authors seriously, even when (or especially when) you think they are wrong, has to work. It just seems like this must be true. Right?

The Love of Scrooge

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Obviously, I recently reread A Christmas Carol. I’ve been reading this story every December for three decades. If the definition of a Great Book is one which you can reread many times and always discover something new, then A Christmas Carol is indisputably a Great Book.

If T.S. Eliot were to write A Christmas Carol, it would begin with an old man, stiffening in a decaying house, unconsciously saying, “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact?” In the face of a dying world, we are all Ebenezer Scrooge. When I have noted in the past that we are living in the Waste Land, I am frequently met with an objection that the world isn’t all that bad. Indeed, to compare us all to Scrooge will strike many (most? all?) as absurd. So, consider anew Dickens’ tale. And then ask yourself, Whom do you Love?

Love has been unbelievably corrupted in the modern world. Consider this: When I say I love my wife and my kids, everybody nods politely. (Or, if they are Mount Holyoke students, they say “Ahh, that’s so sweet.”) If I say I love humanity, well, it’s actually just boilerplate and nobody will bat an eye. But if I say I love my students, then either it sounds like another banal triviality or something sounds a bit off. And if I were to look a student in the eye and say to her, “I love you”…well, you can imagine the reaction.

But why? The second greatest commandment is what?

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22: 34-40, ESV)

And, what does it mean to love your neighbor?

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, ESV)

Now I can say I love Humanity and that’s OK. But the Good Samaritan didn’t love Humanity; he loved the hurting man on the side of the road to Jericho. He loved him enough to make sacrifices for that man; he cared enough for that man to take the time to treat the man as if he was important, solely because that man was inherently important. The Good Samaritan is a model of love.

And Scrooge is also a model of love. Scrooge is what we can become. Because of Christmas, because in the juvescence of the year /Came Christ the tiger, we have the possibility of loving our neighbors.

Yet, we have no language with which we can express that love. I do love my students. It’s my Christian obligation to do so, but that doesn’t make the love somehow less genuine.

Some of my students I love a lot. I hope those students know that, but sometimes I am not sure they do. It is surely a sign of the poverty not of our language but of our culture that I cannot simply tell those students, “You know, of course, that I love you.” Most of the time, this probably doesn’t matter all that much. But every now and then, I have been talking to a student, for whom the simple statement “I love you” would make a world of difference, and yet because of the degradation of our culture, there is no way to say those words without the very real risk of them being terribly and horribly misunderstood.

We all know that feeling loved is vital to the human soul; it is not some strange accident that the two greatest commandments are both about Love. And yet, we have lost the ability to express the very idea of a love without an overtone of the romantic or the erotic or the merely abstract.

And so, this Christmastime, I want to say to those students, both current and past, with whom I have a deep bond of friendship, and I hope you know who you are: I love you. A lot.

If you haven’t read A Christmas Carol yet this year, I’d highly recommend it. And, even better, read the text from which that book draws its moral lesson. Then, emulate Scrooge at the end of the story, and pick someone you know who is not a member of your family and for whom you feel no romantic or erotic attachment at all, and tell that person, “I love you.”

Nietzsche and the Apostle Paul

Nietzsche doesn’t get invited to many Christmas parties.

Something about declaring “God is dead” has made him persona non grata at gatherings of Christians.

But, before dismissing him, let us first note that his most famous aphorism was, in fact, correct.

By the late 19^th century, in European intellectual circles, God was, indeed, dead. It wasn’t always so; look back at the writings of earlier generations and you find a plethora of Christian intellectuals. Even the non-Christian intellectuals made nods in the direction of God. But, by the 1870s, all that God-talk had largely vanished. God, who sed to be the center of European intellectual discourse, was no longer there are all. God, the idea and relevance of God to the intellectual arguments of the late 19^th century, was indeed quite dead.

Nietzsche looked out at the godless landscape, and what did he see? A true curiosity. While nobody wanted to talk about God anymore, everyone still had all these moral codes which looked a whole lot like the Christian moral code. “Why?,” Nietzsche asks.

That is a really good question. It is the sort of question both Christians and non-Christians ought to be asking. If there is no God, why exactly should I love my neighbor? If I am strong enough, why shouldn’t I kill my neighbor and take all his stuff?

When I ask students this, they inevitably immediately reply, “Well, you don’t want someone to kill you, do you?” They announce this proudly, like it is the ultimate answer. But, it is, of course, just a sign of their weakness. If I am strong enough, why would I worry that others will kill me? Only weak people worry about that. So, again, why shouldn’t I kill my neighbor?

If there was a God who did not want me to murder my neighbor, then that gives me an answer. But, if there is no God? Why not then? Here Nietzsche comes in with an answer. His answer sprawls among a great many books, but the easiest place to start is The Genealogy of Morals.

Once upon a time, the strong could kill their neighbors. Those were the good old days. In those days, there was only the strong and the weak. The strong were good; the weak were not good. The weak did not like being preyed upon by the strong, so they banded together to create a moral code which would constrain the strong. Don’t be strong, said the weak. Be weak like us.

That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength

Thus began the slave revolt in morality. Henceforth all expressions of strength will be called “evil.” All expressions of weakness will be called “good.” The Church arises to impose this new moral code on everyone, constraining the strong and elevating the weak. These new Priests of Weakness, the tarantulas, have gradually poisoned everyone to the point where nobody can see the truth any more.

A predominance of mandarins always means something is wrong; so do the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining life there are.

Even Science has led us further down the same path. Once upon a time, Humans were the Masters of the Universe, ruling the World. Now, we are mere animals, pathetic little creatures acting like a virus on a small planet which is no longer the center of anything at all.

Has the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement, not progressed irresistibly since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God (“child of God,” “God-man”).

All this was the history of the world when Nietzsche wrote. But, he warned, it was about to get worse, much worse.

What happens when people become aware that the moral codes they have been using are not actually True? What happens when Truth itself gets called into question?

As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.

The great spectacle: world wars, genocide, mass killings…all in the name of power. If the 20^th century has shown us anything, this Will to Power in the absence of any Truth is a very ugly thing. Nietzsche was right.

Should that surprise us? Well, not if we have read the Apostle Paul.

Nietzsche may be the most perceptive commentator on the writings of Paul which the world has ever produced. Paul and Nietzsche completely agree on one thing: in a world without God, there is no moral code, and people behave abominably.

In the absence of God, Paul and Nietzsche fully agree that there is no check upon the wickedness of man. In the absence of God, there is no reason that strength should not express itself as strength. In the absence of God, the Christian Church is just imposing a moral code in an attempt to restrain these natural inclinations we all have. Paul notes the wickedness at the heart of all humans; Nietzsche explains the implications of Paul’s observation about human nature.

If there is no God, then we do in fact live in that the Nietzschean world. Prepare yourself for another century of horror. Get used to the Will to Power being the only Rule of Law. If you want to dream, then dream with Nietzsche that maybe the Overman, the Superman, will arise to lead us out of this dark pit.

How do we escape the Nietzschean horror? Easy. If the premise is wrong, then the conclusion is wrong. If there is a God, then weakness and love are indeed good.

Paul and Nietzsche lead to the same place. Both look forward to a redemptive moment in the future to save us from our plight. And both agree on this: if we assume the absence of God, Nietzsche is entirely correct. There is no moral code; there is only power. And if you don’t think that conclusion is True, then maybe it is the assumption that needs modification.