Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia

13. A New Spirituality: The Confluence of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy in Russian Religious Thought

13 A New Spirituality: The Confluence of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy in Russian Religious Thought Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, of enormous influence in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian thought and culture,1 seemed to speak directly to the crisis of values induced by modernization, especially for intellectuals dissatisfied with the prevailing ideologies and seeking new ideals and values by which to live. Nietzsche’s challenge to rationalism, positivism, and Christianity nourished Russian religious thought and was eventually absorbed into new interpretations of Orthodoxy. Facilitating the absorption were surprising affinities between Nietzsche and Orthodoxy. The most significant text in this interaction was The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), in which Nietzsche counterposed forces he saw as symbolized by Apollo, the Greek god of clarity and form, and Dionysus, the Greek god of orgiastic ecstasy. “Apollo [is] the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis through which alone the redemption in illusion is truly to be obtained; while by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”2 The union of Apollo and Dionysus gives birth to new forms of art. Nietzsche believed that myth is essential to the health of a culture. By “myth” he meant a ruling idea or ideal, that which gives a society its coherence and from which are derived personal and national identity, morality, art, science , and government. “Myth” springs from the Dionysian substratum of suffering and wisdom that underlies all existence and is given form in Apollonian images. For Nietzsche, “myth” is not the antonym of “truth”; as the universe is in constant flux there is no ultimate “truth.” Moreover, life has no intrinsic meaning; human beings endow it with meaning in the form of myth. There is 330 nothing in The Birth ofTragedy about the Superman, the will to power, the death of God, or the individualism often associated with Nietzsche. In this book Nietzsche exalted “the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation would be broken in augury of a restored oneness.”3 Among Nietzsche’s most ardent Russian admirers were the symbolists— poets and writers who viewed phenomenal reality as a symbol of a higher or occult reality. Primarily interested in the “inner man” (the soul or the psyche), they perceived Nietzsche as a mystic, a prophet, and a liberator of passions repressed by Christianity and bourgeois civilization. Intent on a Nietzschean “revaluation of all values,” they wanted to create a new man and a new culture. They came to believe (contra Nietzsche) that ultimate truth does exist, beyond the Dionysian flux, and the poet could reach it. In the first years of the twentieth century, the symbolists became interested in religion.They and their allies were dubbed God-seekers (bogoiskateli), even though some were already believers, because they sought new religious truths, or new understandings of old truths, to guide humankind in the twentieth century. This essay delineates the surprising affinities between Nietzsche and Orthodoxy and then turns to the combinations of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy by Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), popularizer of symbolism and of Nietzsche and founder of the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society; Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), symbolist poet and one of the movement’s most influential theorists; and the polymath priest and Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), a God-seeker before he became a priest. All three considered conventional Orthodoxy too remote from the problems of life on earth. Nietzsche helped shape their critiques of conventional Orthodoxy and their attempts to revitalize it. Affinities between Nietzsche and Orthodoxy When Nietzsche’s first admirers found his philosophy inadequate, for reasons explained below,they tried to combine it with Christianity.When that venture foundered, they absorbed aspects of his thought in new interpretations of Orthodoxy.TheaffinitiesexaminedherehelptoexplainNietzsche’sinitialappeal as well as the subsequent modifications and embellishments of his thought. Anti-rationalism Orthodox theology is mystical. Orthodox Christians associated rationalism with the “Latin West” (the Roman Catholic West), and then with the “pagan” A New Spirituality 331 332 Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Enlightenment and its nineteenth century derivatives—positivism, liberalism, and socialism. Nietzsche attacked Socratic rationalism and faulted the rationalism of his own time for “actually holding out the prospect of the lawfulness of an...