Death in Venice and the Specter of Christ

At first glance, Death in Venice fits neatly within the convenient narrative of a secular, or at least post-Christian, modernity. When exploring Thomas Mann’s sources of inspiration, scholars rightly emphasize explicitly anti-Christian philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Judging by the bulk of criticism related to Death in Venice, we might easily assume that the closest it comes to religious concern is a Nietzschean fascination with pre-Socratic paganism. Though some critics explore the role of Christianity in Mann’s later work, religion receives little attention in relation to Death in Venice. Granted, the novella does not read like other decidedly Christian texts of the twentieth century: Jones’s In Parenthesis, Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Nevertheless, Christ haunts Mann’s novella, and Christianity provides an implicit alternative to the moral and aesthetic vacuum at the heart of Death in Venice.

I. Mann’s Christ

In her article, “The Religious Base of Thomas Mann’s World View: Mythic Theology and the Problem of the Demonic” (1993), Susan von Rohr Scaff—one of the few critics who acknowledge Mann’s complex relationship with Christianity—rejects depictions of Mann as a decidedly non-Christian or anti-Christian writer. Mischaracterizations of Mann, she asserts, stem in part from the tragic vision of his novels, including Death in Venice.¹ Scaff acknowledges Mann’s opposition to much of conventional Christian dogma while simultaneously drawing attention to the many ways in which his thought and art affirmed Christian myth and teaching, often in unexpected ways. Like Northrop Frye, Mann embraced myth, and Christian myth in particular, as an antidote to the kind of exploitative ideology that gave birth to twentieth-century fascism. According to Scaff, both men “granted the New Testament myth of the Crucifixion a certain preeminence” because of its emphasis on self-sacrificial love: “Myth, Mann says, is the very ‘legitimation of life.’ It is by recognizing ourselves in myths that we come to know ourselves and to justify and consecrate our lives. . . . When reminded of such fundamental and ennobling myths as that of the Messiah’s sacrifice, a people may be recalled to its own deep or ‘mythic’ inclinations to generosity.”² Mann did not, like C. S. Lewis, view Christianity as a “true myth,” but he did see the ennobling potential of Christian myth. Scaff demonstrates how Mann’s later work embraced Goethe’s understanding of Christianity as the vital foundation without which morality and civilization would give way to chaos and barbarism: “[Mann] identifies in his myth of Goethe the Christian values that have sustained human dignity throughout the ages. Christianity, he says, built the moral foundation of Western civilization that holds firm against anticivilizing or “barbaric” forces. . . . Christianity, civilization, moral character—all combine to form a humanist disposition that Mann finds epitomized in Goethe.”³ Mann did not begin explicitly developing this conception of Christian myth until 1925. For this reason, Scaff focuses primarily on Mann’s later work, and especially Doctor Faustus, in which, she argues, Mann presents Christian grace as a counteragent to a diabolic, Nietzschean artistry.⁴ Though she mentions Death in Venice in passing as a novel in which Mann first explores this idea of a demonic artist, Scaff does not note how Mann’s earlier work directly anticipates the Christian dynamic she identifies in his later work.

II. Nietzsche, Socrates, Christ

Critics uniformly agree that the tensions between Nietzschean philosophy and Socratic ethics in Death in Venice lead to Gustav von Aschenbach’s moral degeneration. Nearly all recognize the importance of Nietzsche’s philosophy of art for explaining Aschenbach’s degenerative slide from artistic spokesman for German fortitude to eros-tormented stalker; moreover, critics rightly assert the importance of these competing philosophies: the Socratic and the Nietzschean. What they uniformly fail to acknowledge is the role of Christianity, which represents a third ideological force in Mann’s narrative. Intentionally or not, Death in Venice presents Christianity as an alternative to, and perhaps even remedy for, Aschenbach’s moral degradation. In so doing, this early work anticipates the affirmation of Christian mythology in Mann’s later work.

Before discussing the specific case of Aschenbach, we must first understand how Mann depicts the artistic endeavor in general. Mann engaged directly with Nietzsche’s classification of artists as either Socratic or pre-Socratic. Jerry Clegg asserts in his article “Mann Contra Nietzsche” (2004) that the pre-Socratic artist, hereafter referred to as the Nietzschean artist, created art by embracing the tension between the Greek gods Apollo (representative of rational order) and Dionysus (representative of irrational, undifferentiated chaos). He clarifies that, according to Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus “are, then, different but compatible forces that balanced each other in ancient Greece.”⁵ Most often these Nietzschean artists create tragedy. Socratic artists do not engage in the tension between Apollo and Dionysus. They instead embrace, “moralizing, Aesopian fables in the form of the Euripidean theater, operas, and those genteel domestic dramas known as novels.”⁶ At the risk of reducing a complex argument, we might say that the Nietzschean artist pursues tragic art in the productive tension between primal order and primal chaos, while the Socratic artist pursues moralizing art through adherence to strict ethics and notions of virtue. With these two artistic types clearly outlined, we can grasp Mann’s analysis of both through the one conflicted character of Aschenbach.

Frequently The Birth of Tragedy serves as critics’ Rosetta Stone for translating Mann’s vision of art and artists in Death in Venice. Michael Minden in “Mann’s Literary Techniques” (2002) and Victor Brombert in “Aschenbach and the Lure of the Abyss” (2002) posit that Nietzschean philosophy directed Mann’s hand in all his writing to the extent that he intentionally portrays Aschenbach embroiled in the tug of war between chaos (Dionysus) and order (Apollo).⁷ In the conventional telling, Mann’s story reflects an Apollonian artist’s moral degradation as a result of giving in to Dionysian desire. Viewed from this perspective, Death in Venice is a patently Nietzschean novel.⁸ Clegg deplores this tendency to misunderstand The Birth of Tragedy because it leads to such misreadings of Death in Venice. He contends that although critics rightly draw attention to Mann’s engagement with Nietzsche, they routinely misrepresent the latter’s arguments. Clegg emphasizes that, according to Nietzsche, humans do not actively choose between the Dionysian or the Apollonian, as critics often claim. Instead, Nietzsche proposed that true art stems from the tension between the two notions of differentiated order and undifferentiated chaos. Mann’s novella, Clegg insists, is best understood as an “apologia for the Socratic artist.”⁹ Ultimately, it “is the Socratic, not the Apollonian, who, for as long as his energy lasts, effectively opposes the gloomy, foreign superstition that is Dionysian wisdom.”¹⁰ With this correction in place, Clegg reads Death in Venice as a “riposte to Nietzsche’s aesthetic proscriptions.”¹¹ Contrary to popular consensus, he insists that Mann uses the idea of a moralizing, Socratic artist despised by Nietzsche as a counter to Nietzsche’s prescription for artmaking.

Arman Niknam augments Clegg’s reading of Death in Venice by placing special emphasis on the novella’s Dionysian denouement. In “Nietzsche, Mann and Gide: On the Transition from a Socratic Realm of Reason to a Harmful Dionysian Whirl” (2015), Niknam corrects Clegg’s review of Nietzsche’s philosophy: “When Nietzsche states that Apollo, as a deity, stands for self-knowledge and moderation used against any bad kind of excess, I believe that Clegg commits a grave error when he labels the Venice that Aschenbach comes to as an ‘Apollonian cultural zone.’ Apollo—as we know him from The Birth of Tragedy—would never endorse and support the vice and disregard of morals which Aschenbach met in Venice.”¹² Essentially, Niknam counters Clegg’s assertion that Aschenbach degrades into an “Apollonian” artist. He insinuates that Aschenbach instead falls headlong into the passion and desire associated with Dionysus. Terminological wrangling aside, what matters is that Death in Venice presents Aschenbach’s entanglement with competing artistic and moral systems (Socratic, Apollonian, or Dionysian) as a dilemma demanding choice rather than synthesis. Only by understanding the novella as a story about an artist’s choice of alternatives can we grasp the implicit Christian alternative to both Socrates and Nietzsche. When both Nietzschean and Socratic artistic modes fail Aschenbach, the novella offers a salvific substitute, the Christian artist.

Competing critics characterize Aschenbach as either an outof-balance Nietzschean artist who slides down the slippery slope of Dionysian passion or a Socratic artist who degenerates into a Dionysian fanatic. All miss the Christian subtext presented through the narrator’s repeated criticism of Aschenbach. They overlook the fact that Mann’s narrator is deeply critical of both the Socratic artist and the Dionysian degenerate. Death in Venice is not a novella about a Socratic artist devolving into a Dionysian fanatic. It is a novella that, through the narrative and narrator, criticizes both types of artist and suggests the possibility of an alternative, the Christian artist.

III. Sebastian without a Halo

Von Aschenbach lives a life of habituated creative virtue. His art has little to do with fits of inspiration. It relies instead on consistency. Each day begins with writing, followed by the relaxation needed to enable more writing the next day. On the day we meet Aschenbach, something has gone awry. Left uncharacteristically enervated and frustrated by writer’s block, he sets out on a walk to ease his mind. This constitutional terminates at a cemetery and leaves the writer even more exhausted than before. While waiting for a tram to take him home, Aschenbach contemplates the Christian iconography on the Byzantine façade of a mortuary: “Its façade, decorated with Greek crosses and brightly hued hieratic patterns, also displayed a selection of symmetrically arranged gilt-lettered inscriptions concerning the afterlife, such as ‘They Enter into the Dwelling Place of the Lord.’”¹³ The “mysticism emanating” from these formulas concerning the afterlife lulls Aschenbach into a reverie for several minutes—a reverie to which we are not privy. This daydream abruptly ends when Aschenbach notices a redheaded foreigner standing on the mausoleum steps. This foreigner inspires a very different contemplation, one to which we are allowed access:

He saw a landscape, a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky—sultry, luxuriant, and monstrous—a kind of primor-dial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora; saw fantastically malformed trees plunge their roots through the air into the soil, into stagnant shadow-green, looking-glass waters, where, amidst milk-white flowers bobbing like bowls, outlandish stoop-shouldered birds with misshapen beaks stood stock-still in the shallows, peering off to one side; saw the eyes of a crouching tiger gleam out of the knotty canes of a bamboo thicket—and felt his heart pound with terror and enigmatic craving.

(6)

The unexpressed thoughts provoked by the Christian iconography served to distract Aschenbach momentarily; the detailed vision produced by the redheaded foreigner fills him with fear, desire, and something else, a “restive anxiety” he interprets as wanderlust. The foreigner, not the cross, conjures desire for action. Aschenbach feels a journey will quiet his restive soul and enable him to return to his art. He is, of course, wrong.

The narrator does not endorse Aschenbach’s casual treatment of his brush with mortality. On the contrary, he points out that Aschen-bach mistakes the overwhelming contemplation of the afterlife as wanderlust. Aschenbach, the narrator explains, feels “the urge to flee,” to run away from his existential crisis by going on vacation—a tactic doomed to failure (8). Although Aschenbach articulates the urge as an escape from his work, the narrator poses an alternative consideration: “Could it be that his indentured sensibility was now taking its revenge, abandoning him and refusing henceforth to bear his art on its wings, depriving him of all pleasure, all delight in form and expression?” (9). The narrator understands that the author’s dilemma is something more than a mere urge. The narrator’s rhetorical question about Aschenbach’s “indentured sensibility” indicates Aschenbach’s mode of artmaking is beginning to erode. This erosion of the creative faculty, mistaken as an urge to flee writer’s block, spurs him to react uncharacteristically—to travel abroad. Therefore, Aschenbach decides to end his night researching a destination for his escape rather than reflecting on the anxiety he experiences in the cemetery.

With Aschenbach’s itinerary set in chapter one, Mann’s narrator seeks to anatomize his protagonist in chapter two. Aschenbach’s creative paralysis threatens to alter the fabric of his identity, an identity characterized by habit and ancestry. The men in the Aschenbach family tree were all “disciplined,” and “decently austere” soldiers and civil servants (12). Conversely, Aschenbach’s mother seems to be the source of the passion and the desire he has spent his life repressing through his disciplined approach to art. She provides the “darker, more fiery impulses” in Aschenbach’s genetic makeup (12). The narrator strategically positions the only clergyman in Aschenbach’s ancestry between the dedicated statesmen and the passionate mother: “A certain inner spirituality had manifested itself in the person of the only clergyman amongst them, and a strain of more impetuous, sensual blood had found its way into the family in the previous generation through the writer’s mother, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster” (12). The cleric stands out in a genealogical nexus that presents a blueprint for Aschenbach’s current crisis. Aschenbach inherits the tension created by a commingling of a Dionysian mother and a Christian clergyman. Aschenbach is the vertex of these divergent lines. His mother provides the Dionysian passion; his patriarchs provide the Socratic ethics. A single outlying predecessor adds a specifically Christian spiritual dimension to the blended personalities that constitute Aschenbach. However, as we will see, Aschen-bach repeatedly subordinates Christ rather than recognize him as the alternative to Socratic ethics and Nietzschean chaos. Ultimately, we are meant to infer that the union of Aschenbach’s parents (Dionysus and Socrates) cause his divergence from the familial professions of statesman and soldier. In the end, he serves art rather than his country. The clergyman and Aschenbach stand apart in that they serve entities higher than public office: Christ and art. But these masters pay very different wages.

No matter Aschenbach’s divergence from the family tradition of diligent civil service, he is still conditioned to work industriously. He produces art with the same discipline his paternal ancestors exercised. A critic alluded to in the novella observes that Aschenbach lives his life like a tightly closed fist rather than an open, relaxed hand (13). From this point forward we understand why Aschen-bach finds himself in a crisis. His existence depends on his ability to labor in spite of hardship. The narrator brings to light the foundation of Aschenbach’s ethical system, observing that, “his motto was Durchhalten, ‘Persevere,’ and he regarded his Frederick-the-Great novel as nothing short of the apotheosis of this command, which he considered the essence of a cardinal virtue: action in the face of suffering” (14). Aschenbach weds the limited virtue of fortitude to the dubious life goal of productivity; he believes that a life well lived is “one that has been vouchsafed productivity at all stages of human existence” (14). Aschenbach’s hollow devotion to productivity evinces the fragile nature of his ethical system. His ethical code rests solely on fortitude, the third of the four classical virtues, in Christian parlance the four cardinal virtues. In his book The Four Cardinal Virtues, German philosopher Josef Pieper highlights the danger of treating fortitude as an end in itself:

If the specific character of fortitude consists in suffering injuries in the battle for the realization of the good, then the brave man must first know what the good is, and he must be brave for the sake of the good. . . . Fortitude therefore points to something prior. Essentially it is something secondary, subordinate, deriving its measure from something else. It has its place in a scale of meaning and value where it does not rank first. Fortitude is not independent, it does not stand by itself. It receives its proper significance only in relation to something other than itself.¹⁴

The fragility of Aschenbach’s ethical system stems from its obliviousness of the good. Instead of persevering in service to a clearly defined notion of the good, Aschenbach suffers for the production of art as an end in itself. His collapse reminds us that the cardinal virtues cannot stand alone. In the Christian tradition, they function in service to the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. Together, the two groups represent the union of classical reason with the revelation of Christ. The latter gives substance and metaphysical foundation to the former. For Aschenbach, classical virtue and Christian revelation never intersect; the narrator implies throughout the novel that they ought to.

The narrator outlines Aschenbach’s ethical system and subsequently aims four pages of criticism at the artist’s dedication to fortitude as an end in itself. Drawing attention to the fundamental flaws in this rickety ethics of perseverance and productivity, the narrator first takes aim at Aschenbach’s art. Consider the narrator’s first line of criticism: “[Aschenbach’s writing] was all very beautiful, clever, and precise, though it erred on the side of passivity. Because composure in the face of destiny and equanimity in the face of torture are not mere matters of endurance; they are an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the Sebastian figure is the most beautiful symbol if not of art as a whole then certainly of the art here in question” (17). The narrator provides St. Sebastian as a symbol of Aschenbach’s art. Self-sacrificial artmaking defines Aschenbach’s existence; therefore, St. Sebastian’s martyrdom is analogous with Aschenbach’s art. Yet, Sebastian embodies fortitude in dedication to a defined and ultimate good, God. Sebastian served Rome as a Christian soldier under Emperor Diocletian, who sentenced Sebastian to death for his faith. He was shot through with arrows and presumed dead; however, he survived his execution and subsequently delivered Diocletian a message from God detailing the emperor’s sins. Diocletian, naturally, had Sebastian clubbed to death. He was later canonized for this martyrdom. It is worth noting that Sebastian’s status as an icon of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gay culture adds a strong suggestion of latent contranormative sexual desire to the comparison.¹⁵ Most importantly, however, the narrator implicitly sets Aschenbach apart from Sebastian because Aschenbach “suffers” for art, not God. The self-sacrifice that defines Aschenbach’s entire ethical and aesthetic life is founded on a singular idea: “moral fortitude.” In one of his more damning observations, the narrator reflects on the dangers of building a house on such sandy ground: “But does not moral fortitude beyond knowledge . . . entail a simplification, a moral reduction of the world and the soul and hence a concomitant intensification of the will to evil, the forbidden, the morally reprehensible?”¹⁶ The story of Aschenbach’s degeneration from artist of moral fortitude to pedophiliac provides a resounding “yes” to the narrator’s rhetorical question. Fortitude, treated as an end in itself, becomes a hypertrophied will. Tethered to nothing other than itself—no aspiration toward faith, hope, and love—the will to persevere becomes what Mann calls the “will to evil.”

The narrator ends chapter two with his final critique in the form of an examination of the physical toll of Aschenbach’s life-long dedication to art. Aschenbach, a man whose monkish exterior belies the chaos of his soul, has prematurely aged: “On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, over-refinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender” (23). In essence, Aschenbach dedicated his early life to his craft, living the life of a monk worn down in service to art, not God. The narrator observes, where the protagonist cannot, that a life of labor rooted in an ungrounded moral system dedicated to art must inevitably lead Aschenbach to the will to evil. His service to art rather than God leaves him unfulfilled and ultimately unprepared when confronted with the crisis of his own mortality and the barbarism of the unrestrained human will.

IV. Art as Mask

Groping for a solution to this crisis, the writer resolves to escape Munich. Aschenbach discovers after fleeing to Trieste and then hopping to an island off the coast of Istria that this escape has left him dissatisfied. His solution: a different resort in a different city. On the barge to Venice Aschenbach experiences a brief presentiment of his moral slide while watching an old fop carousing with a group of younger men. This repugnant man conjures in Aschenbach “the impression that something was not quite normal, that a dreamlike disaffection, a warping of the world into something alien was about to take hold and that by covering his face for a spell and then taking a fresh look at things he might stave it off ” (29–30). A later encounter with the old imposter, now worn down and bedraggled after a night of drinking with the younger men, engenders a similar response: “Aschenbach watched him with a frown, and once more a feeling of numbness came over him, as if the world were moving ever so slightly yet intractably towards a strange and grotesque warping, a feeling which circumstances kept him from indulging in” (33–34). Before this “feeling of numbness” overcomes him, the barge approaches Venice. The seaside entrance to Venice distracts Aschenbach because he experiences Venice in a new light. In previous visits to the city, he entered by train, never beholding the splendor of St. Mark’s Basilica from the water. Statues of lions and saints line the canal into the city. The Christian icons and Renaissance architecture momentarily enrapture Aschenbach. He feels as though he had always approached Venice as if he were “entering a palace by the back door and that one should approach this most improbable of cities only as he had now done by ship” (34). This fresh experience only distracts Aschenbach momentarily from the “warping” he felt on the barge; it brings him no closer to Christianity. He views the basilica and saints as the mise-en-scène of a fairy tale, not as a destination to save him from his looming crisis. Christian icons appear throughout the narrative as signals to Aschenbach. Christianity beckons Aschenbach, unsuccessfully, to take notice, and his myopia appears to exasperate the narrator, whose criticism becomes increasingly harsh. When Aschenbach disembarks from the ship and makes his way to his hotel on the Lido, for example, the narrator notes the hotel’s isolation and relates it to the artist himself: “Solitude begets originality. . . . But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden” (43). The narrator clearly foresees Aschenbach’s route to degeneracy. As Aschenbach slips into depravity, he too intuits that his life’s work is losing meaning. The rest of the novel catalogs his failed attempt to fill this void with the worship of a young boy.

Aschenbach’s moral slippage is on full display when he first encounters Tadzio, whose family is directly and repeatedly associated with Catholicism. His “nun-like” sisters enter the room before him, seeming to set the scene for his apotheosis (45–46). Not surprisingly, they are unremarkable to Aschenbach; however, Tadzio’s beauty immediately impresses him. The juxtaposition of the sisters and Tadzio represents the polarity of Aschenbach’s orientation spiritually and artistically. The nun-like girls are unremarkable and the young Adonis is exalted. The narrator takes the opportunity to provide yet another biting critique of Aschenbach: “Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege” (47). The narrator levels this criticism against Aschenbach’s bourgeoning infatuation with the boy in order to demonstrate how the exaltation of art often masks immorality. Moral depravity, to the narrator, can be easily shrouded behind the façade of art because artists can hide their corrupt desires (pedophilia in this case) behind a veil of aesthetics. Art becomes Aschenbach’s means to conceal moral depravity.

Aschenbach tries to return to the daily routine and work ethic—his only ethic—that he left behind in Munich. He awakens early, reads, and decides to walk through Venice. Yet again his routine fails to garner results. He feels the same unrest and emptiness as before, “But this stroll brought about a major change in his mood and intentions . . . Aschenbach felt more irritated than invigorated by the bustle of the crowd. The longer he walked, the more afflicted he was by that odious condition brought on by the combination of sea air and sirocco . . . An immediate decision was of the essence” (62–63). He resolves to leave Venice. His last hope for escape depends on his departure. On what ought to be Aschenbach’s final day, he spends time basking in Tadzio’s presence. As he leaves, Aschenbach mutters, “God bless you,” in passing (67). This parting pleasantry seems peculiar given his near blindness to God in all the preceding encounters. It gestures toward a rightly ordered relationship, in which the older man desires not sexual possession, but the good of the boy’s soul, as Socrates insists is proper in both the Symposium and the Phaedrus. Aschenbach leaves the hotel and finds that the employees mistakenly sent his luggage to the wrong destination. Rather than providing a forwarding address and continuing to his next destination as logic might dictate, he reacts unexpectedly to the situation: “Aschenbach had difficulty maintaining the only plausible facial expression in the circumstances. A reckless joy, an unbelievable glee took almost convulsive hold of his breast” (70). Aschenbach returns to the Lido rather than instructing the staff to forward his luggage to meet him at his next destination. His fortitude loses to desire in the first of many dispossessions.

In chapter four Aschenbach’s interest in Tadzio transforms into obsession. Venice no longer repels him. He no longer fears for his health. Venice and the Lido provide him with the escape he sought in Munich. Aschenbach not only changes his opinion of Venice, but he also changes his daily routine. He spends his mornings watching Tadzio’s every move. The boy’s beauty arrests him and holds Aschenbach in Venice. He reasons that he must stay. Wallowing in delusion, Aschenbach comes to believe that the boy embodies the beauty he has spent his life attempting to articulate on paper. Aschenbach once served art instead of God. Tadzio becomes his new god. Aschenbach refers to him as the “chosen one” and turns a pretty Polish boy with bad teeth into a messianic figure (81). The writer strove his entire life to capture the kind of beauty he now beholds. He labored to capture it with words, and he finds it in the flesh in a boy of fourteen. He venerates the child: “His eyes embraced the noble figure standing there at the edge of the blue, and in a rush of ecstasy he believed that his eyes gazed upon beauty itself, form as divine thought, the sole and pure perfection that dwells in the mind and whose human likeness and representation, lithe and lovely, was here displayed for veneration” (82). The narrator reveals that Aschenbach’s current state stems from repression early in life. Aschenbach finds himself intoxicated by Tadzio as “ancient thoughts passed on to him in his youth though never yet animated by his own fire” begin to resurface (82). Tadzio becomes the inspiration out of the crisis of his failed lifelong artistic process and becomes the object for the revival of suppressed urges. The writer mistakes his lusting after the boy for inspiration, but the will to cling to the basis of his identity—producing art—beguiles Aschenbach into believing he has found his way through his existential crisis. In this moment, “He suddenly desired to write. Eros, we are told, loves indolence, and for indolence he was created. But at this point in his crisis the stricken man was aroused to production. The stimulus scarcely mattered” (85). The narrator’s indictment here is quite clear: the stimulus should and does matter.

Amidst this tantalizing experience, Aschenbach attempts to wed his perverse aesthetics to a perverted philosophy. He does so by inaccurately reimagining and distorting the Phaedrus, specifically the discussion about love and beauty between Socrates and Phaedrus. Their conversation grounds Aschenbach’s lust for Tadzio. He recalls Socrates’s words, “ For beauty, my dear Phaedrus, and beauty alone is at once desirable and visible: it is, mark my words, the only form of the spiritual we can receive through our senses and tolerate thereby” (84). Tadzio inspires Aschenbach; his beauty replaces perseverance as the focal point of the artist’s world. The author now creates art based on beauty, or at least Tadzio’s beauty. Aschenbach embraces what he believes, or wishes he believed, Socrates prescribed: pursuit of the Beautiful; however, Aschenbach mistakes Tadzio’s bodily beauty for the Eternal Beauty that stands at the apex of the “ladder of love,” about which Socrates learned from Diotima and related in the Symposium. He abandons his ethics as the story progresses in part because he is giving way to repressed desires. Aschenbach pursues Tadzio daily, and the narrator notes, “Emotions from the past, early, delightful dolours of the heart swallowed up by the strict discipline of his life were now reappearing in the strangest of permutations—he recognized them with a perplexed and puzzled smile” (91). Aschenbach finally recognizes the source of his crisis, and he realizes that he has stifled desire for the sake of producing art his entire life; moreover, his perplexed smile signals his resignation to these stifled desires. By the end of chapter four, Aschenbach gives in and uses a distorted Socratic argument to gild lust with philosophy.

At this point in the novel, Aschenbach suspects something nefarious transpiring in Venice. He enters the city driven by a mad desire to stalk Tadzio. Failing to find his idol at St. Mark’s Square, he takes tea close to the basilica. The smell of germicide interrupts his musings about Tadzio, so he resolves to investigate the origin of the stench. Through careful investigation and interrogation of local business owners, he learns that Venice is in the midst of a raging epidemic. Despite a bourgeoning threat of disease, Aschenbach stays in Venice. What’s worse, he also decides to keep his findings secret from Tadzio’s family, hoping to keep the boy close. In this way, the epidemic serves to shroud and symbolize Aschenbach’s lust. The spreading disease hides from public scrutiny Aschenbach’s pursuits. This revelation excites him: “And so Aschenbach felt a morose satisfaction at the officially concealed goings on in the dirty alleyways of Venice, that nasty secret which had merged with his own innermost secret and which he, too, was so intent on keeping” (100). His failure to warn Tadzio’s family represents the nadir of Aschenbach’s ethical collapse. It reaffirms the narrator’s early assertion that perseverance as an end unto itself, propped up only by sheer human will, is fated to collapse. Aschenbach lives because he wills it. This collapse affirms the groundlessness and inherent nihilism of Aschenbach’s ethical system. His obsession eventually leads him to one last confrontation with Christ and the narrator’s most damning denunciation.

The deranged artist searches for Tadzio and finds the boy attending Mass at the basilica. Tadzio and the congregation perform the rights of the Catholic service; Aschenbach stands at the back of the church watching the boy, seeing Tadzio and nothing more. He maintains an oblivious stance toward Christ. Even among the architectural grandeur and elaborate acts of worship within the basilica, the alternative to Aschenbach’s failed morality does not register. The sacrifice of the Mass evokes no response. Only Tadzio is worth his attention. The narrator frames this scene as a reporter might set the scene of a predator caught in the act. The following passage must be quoted at length:

He had not been content of late to leave the possibility of seeing and being near the beautiful boy to chance or daily routine; he had pursued him, tracked him down. On Sundays, for instance, the Poles never came to the beach. Having surmised that they would be attending mass at San Marco, he would hurry there and, entering the golden dusk of the sanctuary from the square’s torrid heat, locate the boy he had so missed, his head bowed at worship over a prie-dieu. He would then stand at the back on the cracked mosaic floor amidst a host of people kneeling, murmuring, and crossing themselves, the massive splendor of the oriental temple weighing opulently on his senses. At the front the heavily bedizened priest walked to and fro, officiating and chanting, the incense billowing up and clouding the feeble flames of the altar tapers, and the sweet and stuffy sacrificial odor seemed to mingle with another: the odor of the diseased city. But through the haze and flicker Aschenbach would see the beautiful boy turn his head, seek him out, and sight him.

(101)

Rather than respecting the worship going on about him, Aschenbach fails to recognize the church as a holy site. The narrator identifies the Roman Catholic cathedral as “oriental” and, in so doing, identifies Christ as a competitor with Dionysus, who (Nietzsche reminds us) comes from the East. While the congregation around him worships God, he worships Tadzio and serves Dionysus. The narrator openly detests Aschenbach’s predatory behavior. After the service ends Aschenbach “lurk[s] in the vestibule, hiding, lying in ambush” (102). Aschenbach stood in the one place that might offer him deliverance from utter moral degradation; however, his pursuit of the boy no longer concerns itself with art or the Beautiful. Tadzio, the beautiful, becomes the creator, the Beautiful. Aschenbach no longer resembles the monk-like character dedicated to suffering for the sake of art. His fortitude yields to desire, “Yet it cannot be said he was suffering: he was drunk in both head and heart, and his steps followed the dictates of the demon whose delight it is to trample human reason and dignity underfoot” (102). As fortitude fails him, he has indeed become possessed by something truly sinister, and lust—the “demon”—takes Aschenbach.

Following the scene at St. Mark’s, Aschenbach returns to the hotel on the Lido, dines there, and then briefly entertains the possibility of escape and redress. But it is too late. He has given up any vestiges of the ennobling self-sacrificial virtue Mann saw at the heart of Christian myth. It crosses his mind to warn Tadzio’s mother, but his obsession prevents him from doing so. “[Aschenbach] felt,” the narrator tells us, “infinitely far from seriously wishing to take such a step. It would lead him back, restore him to himself, but there is nothing so distasteful as being restored to oneself when one is beside oneself ” (124). He realizes his previous life repulses him, and he can never return to it. Only Tadzio matters to Aschenbach. After fanta-sizing momentarily about doing the right thing, Aschenbach has one last moment of critical self-analysis before his plunge into the abyss:

The consciousness of his collusion, his share of guilt intoxicated him as small quantities of wine intoxicate the weary brain. The image of the infested and abandoned city throbbing wildly in his mind kindled hopes unfathomable, beyond reason, and outrageously sweet. What was that serene happiness he had dreamed of a moment before compared with such expectations? What were art and virtue to him given the advantages of chaos? He said nothing and stayed on.

(125)

At last, the façade of pursuing Tadzio so that he might capture the boy’s beauty through art falls away. His choice to keep secret the status of the diseased city demonstrates that, as the narrator predicted in chapter two, the “will to evil” has replaced perseverance. The theological virtue of love or charity, which St. Paul insists must inform and animate all other virtues,¹⁷ has no place in Aschenbach’s Dionysian world. Far from desiring the good of others as a reflection of God’s selfless love for humanity, Aschenbach has made his lust for Tadzio into the ultimate good.

Following his conscious refusal of moral restoration, Aschenbach has a horrific dream, which the narrator characterizes as a “mental experience which did indeed befall him with a life of its own” (125). The dream represents and enacts Aschenbach’s ethical collapse in the face of lust and desire. In it, his fortitude figuratively gives way to the will to evil. In it, the Socratic artist gives way to the Dionysian extremes of the Nietzschean artist. At first, Aschenbach is not a player in his dream; he does not observe himself taking part in the action of the dream. Rather, the narrator informs us that his dream is in fact “his very soul” (125). Some critics see this dream as an expression of his repressed desires finally loosed within him. The narrator and I see the dream as the only viable result of the groundless ethics of modernity diagnosed and lamented by Nietzsche. We know from the narrator that Aschenbach does not see himself experiencing the chaos in his dream. The scene instead shows “the events breaking in from without, violently crushing his resistance, a deep, spiritual resistance, and, having run their course, leaving his entire being, the culture of a lifetime, devastated, obliterated” (125–26). Aschenbach’s deep, spiritual resistance is his ethical system and perhaps the vestiges of the priest in his genes. His dream is the manifestation of his ethical collapse. A life of ardent devotion not rooted in something higher gives way to a pagan nightmare turned fantasy. Although Aschenbach begins the dream as an observer, it emanates from his soul. The narrator takes care to point out that the scene “breaks out from within” and that, “[Aschenbach] was seized by wrath, by blindness, by numbing lust, and his soul longed to join in the round-dance of the god” (126; 128). Far from simply observing the Dionysian rites, he becomes an active participant: “But the dreamer was now with them [the revelers], within them: he belonged to the strangergod. Yes, they were now his own self as they hurled themselves upon the animals, lacerating them, slaughtering them, devouring gobbets of steaming flesh, as they dropped to the trampled mossy ground for unbridled coupling, an offering to the god. And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom” (128). His soul has submitted to Dionysian frenzy. A demon fills the void left by ungrounded perseverance.

The narrative proximity of this dream and the Mass at San Marco is not accidental. Aschenbach experiences the rites of Christ’s bloodless sacrifice and then partakes in the bloody pagan sacrifice of Dionysus. Both the Christian and pagan sacrificial rituals are highly symbolic, but they are diametrically opposed. Christ sacrifices himself to redeem human sin and break all cycles of blood sacrifice. Pagan ritual sacrifice functions as a recurring cycle of bloodshed meant to purge those desires that threaten social stability. As René Girard asserts in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, the voluntary self-sacrifice of Christ ended the need for ritual sacrifice—especially pagan blood sacrifices. Christ’s death ended what Girard calls the “mimetic cycle,” the process whereby victims are sacrificed in order to purge unfulfilled desires, such as the will to evil that has taken over Aschenbach.¹⁸ His dream symbolically fulfills his lust for Tadzio by partaking in the pagan ritual. As Girard warns, however, such fulfillment requires repeated violence to purge desire. For this reason, the object of desire often remains unattained by those caught in the mimetic cycle. The sacrificial victim, or scapegoat, serves as a vessel for unfulfilled desire, but the release provided by ritual violence is temporary. Girard posits that humans repeat this cycle of sacrifice ad infinitum to keep order in society because desire needs repeated acts of violence to be quelled. Therefore desire, in Girardian terms, is most insidious because it begets ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat. Covetousness requires so much restraint that the Hebrew God explicitly forbids it in the Ten Commandments. It is the only emotion expressly forbidden among the nine other actions the commandments outlaw. Girard avers that, “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely, but they don’t know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them. We do not each have our own desire, one really our own. The essence of desire is to have no essential goal.”¹⁹ Unlike past victims, Christ willingly sacrifices himself to end the cycle of violence desire begets. He becomes the object whereby humankind escapes the ritual of violence and desire necessary to keep order in society. Girard’s emphasis on Christ’s self-sacrifice again calls to mind what Scaff identifies as Mann’s belief in the ennobling nature of the Crucifixion and the Christian notion of self-sacrifice.²⁰ With this understanding of sacrifice in mind, Aschenbach’s physical presence at the Mass and psychological participation in the pagan ritual highlights the tension between salvific Christianity and self-indulgent, Dionysian diabolism in Death in Venice.

Mann gleaned this notion of a Christian-Dionysian dualism directly from Nietzsche. In his preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche reaffirms his essential argument that “art, rather than ethics, constitutes the essential metaphysical activity of man.”²¹ This insight, he claims, led him to reject moralizing Christianity and damn it through silence: “The depth of this anti-moral bias may best be gauged by noting the wary and hostile silence I observed on the subject of Christianity—Christianity being the most extravagant set of variations ever produced on the theme of ethics.”²² If, as Nietzsche posits, Dionysus is but one possible name for “the Antichrist,” for the embodiment of a supreme aesthetic, antimoral principle of existence, then Aschenbach has met the Antichrist and shared in his sacrificial rituals. Mann does not relish the meeting. Although a cursory reading of Death in Venice often leads critics to classify Mann’s story as pessimistic or anti-Christian in a Nietzschean sense, these critics miss entirely the implicit role of Christian myth as a counterforce to Nietzschean aesthetics and Socratic ethics. Death in Venice cannot be reduced to either the work of a secular humanist or a nihilist. While both perspectives influence the story and its author, the narrative displays a far more complex vision of humanity, one that affirms the necessity of morality for the sustenance of both aesthetics and ethics.