In philosophy’s halls, relatively few provide reason to be remembered as artists, not just philosophers. Solomon, Plato, the author of Job, these have that distinction. The second half of the nineteenth century brought its own candidate: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, unlike most famous philosophers, had real literary skill, skill he applied to create the narrative elements of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and his philosophy has elements which reflect his artistic ability. Nor did he stop his artistic endeavor with personal skill. Indeed, he pursued that endeavor into a theory of artistry’s origin in interaction with the world. This was his early work concerning a dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian art. Therein, Nietzsche displayed at once hypocrisy, insight, and myopia.

Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, outlines a belief that art arises from the constant battle between the ‘Apollonian’ and the Dionysian influences, between order and passion (804-5). To Nietzsche, the Apollonian order is a scab overlaid upon the nothingness-reality of the Dionysian impulse (809). To Nietzsche, this was a psychological necessity of the Greek system, a way of coping with nothingness by overlaying a fantasy upon it: man forms a dream, lives within it, and observes it as exterior, all in the same character as his Apollonian artistry (805, 809). Yet, Nietzsche cries in ecstatic prose, there is freedom and apotheosis in the Dionysian persona of art (806). All men may “[stride] among the treetops and [be] taller than the trees,” becoming gods in their own rights (Chesterton, Lepanto). They are gods, here, because they make the world in their desired image, as did God.

His view of the Apollonian may be summed as follows. First, the Apollonian art is an illusion pressed by man to cover for the Dionysian nothingness. Second, it is an illusion which is promulgated in a societal form, allowing it to achieve a juggernaut force, even as, like the Juggernaut, it crushes its worshippers beneath it (Devotees). Thus it forms an egregoric simulacrum over reality, a thing composed by society to justify its own existence and self-image (Nietzsche 808-9). Third, when his view of historical philosophy is taken into account, it is necessarily a manifestation of the will to power of those professing it, a means and manifestation of their making the world of other men as they see fit (Bahnsen 44:00). That it is delusion (according to Nietzsche’s own will to power) he might disapprove of, but truth exists only as a convenience and method, so when effective, delusion is not (47:00).

His view of the Dionysian, meanwhile, is of a vast, inimitable gulf which is the reality of the world. This his world has no meaning, no weight, no reality outside the self, and within the self only passion has weight, only motivation effect, only effect truth (Nietzsche 807; Clark, Forms of Reason). The truth of reality is of a chaos and a void; man forms something from nothing by the force of his desire. If he forms passion and desire, he has achieved the Dionysian; if he defaults to pretending order and dispassion, he has fled to the Apollonian. In this already can be seen Nietzsche’s preference vis a vis the two modes.

To say that Nietzsche condemns the Apollonian as evil would be hasty. Certainly there is a superficial necessity of his doing so. The Apollonian order which is imposed on the Dionysian ecstasy in civilization is, he thinks, doomed, doomed even to fruit into its own opposite (807). The passion will out; nothingness will reassert itself from beneath; the great god Pan will never die. Thus, Nietzsche considers this order contemptible, contemptible because it is weak, because it refuses to face head-on the reality of reality, curling up in a shelter of naivete (805,809). After all, insofar as Nietzsche presents a moral standard, he places weakness as one of the two fundamental evils.

Even so, Nietzsche must not be accused of entire consistency. He perceives this Dionysian thing, the strength which the Apollonian stream attempts to hold back, as being a force of deindividuation (Nietzsche 808). Yet, if an evil as great as weakness exists, if weakness has another definition, it is to Nietzsche lack of individuality, the fruit and essence of deindividuation (Bahnsen 42:00). To dance to another’s tune is the essence of Apollo’s evil, to abuse the word ‘evil’. Therefore, whereas the Apollonian stream is evil in its weakness, in refusing reality and deluding itself into the belief that reality has order, is capable of abstraction, the Dionysian stream must be evil in its nirvana-esque elimination of individuality, subsuming into reality.

Though he gives neither stream a true condemnation or approbation (albeit he gets much closer in considering the Apollonian), the fact is that his philosophy requires the rejection of both streams of art, a rejection of these two forces which produce artistry- a hypocrisy, given Nietzsche’s own artistic streak. The Apollonian is a foe of reality, a producer of illusion, a mere mayfly on existence (Nietzsche 809). Conversely, the Dionysian is a nothingness and destruction. He may be more enamored of the ecstasy of the Dionysian, more contemptuous of the falsity of the Apollonian, but the will to power demands something which is foreign to both, foreign also to their blend: to accept reality as meaningless and live meaningfully regardless (Bahnsen 42:00). Whether this can generate art the text does not address.

Art, then, is formed from the struggle of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Man has passion and expresses it in music, disregarding the abstract and the orderly of language, preferring the instinctive and the concrete and the affective of body (808). Here the medium is the message- a thesis in ways reminiscent of the pet theory of another philologist, J.R.R. Tolkien, regarding the identity between mythology and language, an identity Nietzsche also conceived of, though from another, more hostile angle (Flieger 138-9; Bahnsen 50:00). Besides his passion, man also has terror of the ecstasy and the void; he designs, therefore, a vast framework of religion and order and verbal art to be his pretense, to give him pretext to call life ‘good’ (Nietzsche 808-9). Oddly enough, while the Apollonian is abstracted from reality, it is the Dionysian which Nietzsche conceives of as excelling in the symbolic, seemingly on the ground of symbolism being more visceral and therefore more passionate (808).

These two combine and clash. The Apollonian restrains the Dionysian. The Dionysian wells up and forces the Apollonian to new measures and lengths (807). The result is first a height of naïve order; necessarily, it is second a destruction of that order and descent into deindividuation (807-9). Like a balloon the Apollonian swells and reaches a summit, and then the Dionysian which is within bursts forth, leaving the ragged tatters of the Apollonian as near decoration.

As was stated before, Nietzsche is simultaneously hypocritical, insightful, and myopic in this assessment. The first hypocrisy, already considered in part, comes in his preference for the Dionysian. In the Nietzschean framework, to enforce will upon another is not only natural but desirable (Bahnsen 42:00). Nietzsche, however, despised the egregoric, the popular will; he despised those who sought to enforce their will upon others (44:00). The Apollonian element of art, properly considered, is in fact an expression of the will to power, when both are formulated as Nietzsche did; it is an imposition of a desired understanding of reality without respect to actual reality (actual reality being nothingness). To condemn it is therefore a condemnation of the will to power. Because Nietzsche’s standard is arational, however, because it is standpoint-dependent, Nietzsche is in fact perfectly consistent to condemn this will to power, for it contradicts his own (Clark, The Forms of Reason). In other words, Nietzsche’s philosophy can contain hypocrisy without inconsistency because its nature is inconstant with regards to content; action alone matters.

Nietzsche has another defense though: that if there is a sin in his world, it is futility and failure. To quote a novel, as seems appropriate to the subject matter, “The strongest is right in himself; the weaker is right in that which he can do; the stronger is right in what he can do and no more…. The only sin is failing to do what you want” (Potter, Ch. 8). This is the morality of Max Stirner, who recognized that without authority there is no sin, only success and failure, only amoral factuality (29-31). Nietszche’s world is one in which the will to power is preeminent and the only value, the only meaning. For the Apollonian to be a failure, therefore, is for it to be meaningless, valueless, and contemptible. Component to this is the rationale for Nietzsche’s contempt of external standards, that he wanted men to be Conan, making their own will into the rule, rather than Solomon Kane, enacting the law of another.

His bleak view of the world’s true nature, oddly enough, is the point also at which Nietzsche’s first insight becomes apparent. The Dionysian world, valueless, sensuous, empty, formless, is the world which Ecclesiastes declares as the issue of its author. The Preacher cries, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity,” for he finds no consolation in all man’s life under the sun (Ecc. 1:2-3). The world without God is empty. This Nietzsche saw truly. Unlike the Preacher, however, he would not “Fear God and keep His commandments” (Ecc. 12:13). Thus, Nietzsche’s insight spurred him only further into foolishness, pursuing hypocrisy and furthering myopia.

As for that last, Nietzsche’s first myopia is in his avowal of a dichotomy between order and passion, between order and content (though, as with many of his failures, this is a myopia flowing necessarily from his philosophy, not a mere intellectual misstep). Content, here, refers to the meaning expressed; passion refers to the emotion which is component to all art’s meaning; order refers to the logical, ‘Apollonian’ arrangement of the art. The intuitive and obvious fact is that meaning without order is not meaning; all meaning exists by relationship- with the concept of meaning at the very least. Nietzsche recognized as much in his famous quip on the theistic essence of grammar (Bahnsen 50:00).

This particularly appears from the symbolic nature of all communication. Symbolism, of course, is an expression of order, of a relationship artificial or natural between two things such that one’s meaning can be the other. In a world such as Nietzsche’s, where meaning and order exist only by an effort of the individual’s will, all symbolism is created and imposed; in the world of God’s making, symbolism can be either innate or manufactured (Potter, Implications). Regardless, symbolism requires relationship, and relationship is a form of order. Dionysian art, Nietzsche thinks, unleashes a riot of symbolism- which requires and includes order, the Apollonian trait (808). So the dichotomy between Dionysian and Apollonian is already faltering.

Perhaps, though, the dichotomy between order and passion is an incorrect portrayal of Nietzsche’s position; perhaps he means to present instead a dichotomy between the order of the abstract and the order of the concrete. This fix does not quite cohere with his portrayal of the Dionysian as the basic substrate of suicide-justifying nothingness and ecstasy, but even if it did, it would not fix the issue (807). The dichotomy Nietzsche draws between concreteness (passion and sensation) and abstraction (order and religion) would still require a false understanding of man’s nature.

In Heretics, Chesterton points out the great foolishness of thinking passion and sensation are more basic than faith and understanding. He gives, in that vein, a parable of the destruction of a lamppost, drawing a contrast between the moderns, who rush the lamppost and destroy it in a paroxysm of varying passions and creeds, concretely similar and abstractly divided, and the medieval, who starts with the consideration of whether Light, in the abstract, is good (Introduction). The point Chesterton draws here is that action and the concrete are as closely allied to principle and understanding as to passion, that over the long term principle is more affective to the concrete than is passion alone.

Understanding, the Apollonian virtue, produces more vigor of life, more actual effect, than all the undirectable ecstasy of Dionysiac excess. As Wimsey says in Gaudy Night, “ The first thing a principle does- if it is really a principle- is to kill somebody” (Sayers 380). This fact of human nature, however, renders Nietzsche’s contention- the vigor of the Dionysian versus the weakness of the Apollonian, over the long term- into nothingness. Men have faith for much longer than they have passion, as it turns out, and with much greater force, much greater consistency. In the history of literature, therefore, men of principle are those who produce that which is of the greatest passion: Beowulf, the Divine Comedy, Pride and Prejudice, The Lord of the Rings, etc.

Because all communication is symbolic, whether verbal or in action (for a punch to the mouth communicates anger without being anger, making it necessarily symbolic), because all communication relies on relationship, all communication relies on order. Order, of course, is contrary to Nietzsche’s philosophy (Bahnsen 50:00). This aside, his thesis of art as the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between order and passion, therefore has at once a merit and a break: a merit, in that it posits order as integral to art; a break, in that it considers order a destructive necessity, not an absolute integrality.

This leads into the second grand myopia of Nietzsche’s formula: his overall view of the nature of art’s relationship to exterior reality. Previous arguments have assailed components of Nietzsche’s position or (in once case) echoed the same. Nietzsche despises order, when order is fundamental to communication and symbolism; he makes order the contrary of both symbol and passion, of the concrete which an abstract order is the most effective means to interact with. In these ways his contraries of order-abstraction and passion-symbolism are invalidated, part by part. Yet Nietzsche’s conception of art’s relationship with the world has a greater, more unavoidable issue: art is not a clash between order and passion, at its core. Components of order may clash with parts of passion, as components of order will clash with other components of order (at least, if apparent order is considered order, as men must in their finitude and fallibility) and parts of passion with parts of passion, but the nature of art’s interaction with the world is prior to this clash, includes it but is not defined by it.

The fundamental world-interaction of art is to reflect reality; it is secondary creation, sometimes more complete, as in Tolkien’s legendarium, sometimes less, as in Austen’s Regency romances (Tolkien, On Fairy Stories, 18, 23). This definition is in part a necessity of logic: men make art by recombining elements perceived without and within them, out of the bits of reality (13-14). Thus, their work is necessarily a recombinant of reality, and more it is a biased recombination, biased by the intention, blindness, and perception of the maker.

Of course, art is a sub-element of reality. As such, it is smaller than what it reflects, less full. It cannot and does not reflect reality as a whole, anymore than man’s reflection of God is complete (Gen. 1:26). Even if it had that capacity, its artists do not possess the ability to perceive reality wholistically. The only sense in which art reflects reality wholistically is that in which man reflects God wholistically: by showing a truth, a goodness, a beauty, the entirety of truth, goodness, and beauty is implied, if not in a way man can of his own intellect follow. Apart from this allowance, art reflects only a part of reality; because it is made with intent (‘unintentional’ art still required intent to label it such), it reflects a particular view of reality, the view inherent to its making-intent; because artists are imperfect, its reflection is imperfect.

If these facts are synthesized, the following definition of art’s interaction with the world emerges: art reflects a facet of the world as the artist sees it, modified in accuracy by the artist’s skill. It is not a clash between passion and order, between symbolism and abstraction. This can be seen in considering the reality which art reflects. If reality is truly nothingness, as Nietzsche posited, then one half of his equation is true; if that half is true, moreover, it is natural (though irrelevant to reason) for man to desire something to make it bearable, an Apollonian order above the Dionysian void. The result would be a world of passion as opposed to order. Yet this is not the nature of reality.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). In other words, at the beginning of the world, God is; when He acts, then the world is. The true nature of reality is not, as Nietzsche postulated, “terrors and horrors of existence” (809). It is not an eternal recurrence of substance without meaning, in which the individual is reiterated to the point of hilarity (Clark, The Superman, Eternal Recurrence). The world’s true nature is an existence in relation to God, and because it is of His work, it is not basically negative, all terror and horror as Nietzsche said. The universe’s fundament is the good will of God and thus all the truth, goodness, and beauty which is rightly expected from the original Artist. “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).

In all this, it cannot be denied that Nietzsche was not dealing with nothingnesses in speaking of the Dionysian and the Apollonian patterns of art; he had some insight. The “Panic philosophy” and the “shining fantasy of the Olympians” which allows willful ignorance of that philosophy, these things have real existence in history (Nietzsche 809). Passion and order, however they may be associated with symbolism and abstraction respectively (the first association is, as has been demonstrated, remarkably dubious in excluding symbolism’s connection to order), are still part of literature.

Passion in reality and literature is endemic. Dorothy Sayers addresses this relation through the words of Harriet Vane. Vane, having been challenged to “ abandon the jigsaw kind of story and write a book about human beings,” responds, “I’ll think about that. It would hurt like hell,” to which her interlocutor replies, “What would that matter, if it made a good book?” (Sayers 348). Men are emotional beings, and thus their stories are quite soaked through with the stuff. Imrahil weeps; Beowulf exults; David rejoices before the Lord (Tolkien, The Return, 826; Beowulf, ln. 957-78; 2 Sam. 6:16). The heart of man is no unmoving thing, and art must portray and interact with that emotionality, whether through words or colors or rhythm.

Order, meanwhile, is equally fundamental and even more pervasive. The order of a story is what gives relationship of each element to the other. Man may be swept up into an ecstasy of feeling by the narrative, but the narrative accomplishes this by precisely ordering its contents to affect. Incoherence, the lack of order, is likewise swift death to a narrative. If the reader cannot understand, if the hearer finds no correspondence between one note and another, if the viewer sees no relationship between any two strokes of paint, any two colors, the book, the symphony, the painting disintegrates into unmeaning noise, mere sensation without affect.

This should be no startlement. The nature of reality was already summed in Genesis 1:1. Reality is made by God, and God is a being of both order and passion. He never changes, and He orders all (Mal. 3:6; Rom. 8:30). He loves, and He hates (1 John 4:8; Deut. 12:31). Reality follows His pattern in imitation, in glorification, and art imitates reality in sequence, art reflecting art reflecting Artist.

Nietszche’s philosophy, in the end, despite the value in its few right elements, does not present a view of art which coheres to reality. It cannot, for its maker does not submit to the Maker of reality, to the first Artist. He therefore makes a philosophy to justify himself, and his philosophy, whether it succeeds internally or not (and in a sense an arational philosophy cannot fail there), leads him astray regarding all else. To reject God is suicide of thought.

God bless.

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