(The most interesting impression
from Nietzsche’s defense of human suffering is how closely it comes to the
Christian glorification of suffering, particularly characteristic of the
Russian Orthodox tradition. I am not saying that Russian Christian thought has
been influenced by Nietzsche in this case, for the simple reason that it
chronologically precedes Nietzsche’s thoughts by ages and ages, while it is
inconceivable that Nietzsche himself had suddenly become an ardent proponent of
Christian suffering. I conclude that, like in the case of his creative child,
Nietzsche here is ascending the same high mountain, but along his own trail of
the lonely genius, only to find that, at the top, all great religions and great
philosophies are bound to meet, and right then and there to finally discover the
great secret that although they have all climbed differently, yet they have all
reached the one and the same summit.)
On several occasions already, I
have commented on Nietzsche’s exceptional affinity with the Russian spirit, and
I observed how, in spite of all his anti-Christian rants and ravings, the most
profound Russian Christian mystics and all Russian Christian Intelligentsia had
accepted him as their own, and in many ways had even been influenced by him in
their Russian Christian thought.
Nowhere has this affinity of the
kindred spirits come out more forcefully, explicitly, and indisputably, than in
their common insistence on the necessity of suffering… I will be immediately
and vigorously contradicted here, and my detractors will be pointing out that
the Russians and Nietzsche may have indeed both glorified suffering, but for
altogether different reasons.--- For the Russians, suffering is the pain of
redemption, whereas for Nietzsche it is the pain of creation, the positive, childbearing pain, rather than the
negatively-charged pain of an inflicted punishment. I will have a strong
disagreement in principle with the critics who regard this as a contradiction,
and I disagree on several grounds… But first, let us have the Nietzsche passage
in Jenseits 225, given here in excerpts.---
To be continued…
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