Ecce Homo

The Tragic Passion of Auguste Rodin

by Rainer J. Hanshe

Master Sculptor, Rodin in Istanbul

Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul, June 13, 2006 – September 3, 2006

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2006. Copyright © 2007 Rainer J. Hanshe and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

Note: The following essay does not engage in formal aesthetic analysis of specific works of art by Rodin; its dynamic or propulsive force is different. It commences with a theoretical prelude on passion and then embarks on a meditative analysis of Rodin’s work born of an experiential encounter with it. It reflects upon the work as a revelation and expression of being and explores the multitudinous ways in which one can live with Rodin’s art as an active force.

Art shows mans his raison d’etre. It reveals to him the meaning of life, it enlightens him upon his destiny, and consequently points him on his way.

The great artist, and by this I mean the poet as well as the painter and the sculptor, finds even in suffering, in the death of loved ones, in the treachery of friends, something which fills him with a voluptuous though tragic admiration.

When he sees beings everywhere destroying each other; when he sees all youth fading, all strength failing, all genius dying, when he is face to face with the will which decreed these tragic laws, more than ever he rejoices in his knowledge, and, seized anew by the passion for truth, he is happy.

—Rodin, Rodin on Art

Paganism is the deepening of appearances.
—Cioran, Tears & Saints

But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me into a towering passion.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

I

Passion is one of the signature affects, perhaps the primary one, of our era; it is panegyrized as the paramount attribute. Devoid of this potent affect, life appears meaningless, or so lacking in fervor that, without passion, the blood seems gelid. Of the dispassionate, it is said that they are ‘dead’; it is as if they are without heat; they emit no energy and no light. In passion, not only do we find our selves, but, through it, inscribe our selves in the world. Through the expression of our passion, we communicate who and what we are, or at least some fragment of our selves, whatever grain of being we’ve come to know of our enigmatic natures. And we are a piece of nature, as much animal as not; though many kill the beast in favor of the angel, and that is a dangerous erasure. To live with both is imperative. This split is not the revelation of an inner contradiction which should torment us as it did the pious, but, as Goethe and Hafiz knew, it should be an enticement and seduction to life. The passion of our epoch though is a pale shadow of what passion truly is, if one can at all deign to call ours passion. The fundamental quality or aspect of passion, that which gives it its true force, that which keeps it from degenerating into mere excitement or zeal and makes of it something much more formidable, something which either brings forth wisdom or reveals existence to us and imbues it with gravitas, is almost wholly absent from what we call passion. Without this primary ingredient, passion is meaningless; or rather, it isn’t passion at all, just an intense desire, an excessive or strong emotion devoid of insight. What makes it something powerful enough to transfix those who encounter it in others is absent.

The unbridled expression of emotion, whether by an artist or those who imagine themselves to be artists, and there are all too many, is extolled as the right of the passionate. Artists are given license, or bestow upon themselves the license to express their passions without restriction, and this is considered an act of freedom, the mark of one completely devoid of boundaries. The zealous, unwavering, ruthless pursuit of a goal—typically fame, not expressive power—and the wanton, almost profligate indulgence of ceaselessly satisfying one’s senses are other signs of those supposedly rich with passion. The latter isn’t emblematic of passion at all though—it is hedonism and hedonism alone, hardly a form of the Dionysian as many are wont to believe. The sacred aspect of the Dionysian is generally absent; to turn Dionysus into the mere figurehead of excess is to dilute, to reduce, and, finally, to deform the Dionysian through eradicating one of its central components. This is not the sacrifice of the ‘god,’ only the desecration of him, and it reveals that the multitudes of hedonists are blind to the more complex configuration which makes up passion. The pursuit of the sacred in the epoch of the requiem aeternam deo is no longer an exigent concern, or, lamentably, a concern for an elect few.(1) In our age, passion is predominantly innocuous—the most mundane activities now qualify as things to be impassioned about. Passion, like love, borders on or rather is a dead affect; one long bereft of its original potency and value. To liberally indulge in one’s passions isn’t necessarily an act of freedom; more than anything, people are not the masters of their passions; rather, they are the slaves of them. What we are in the midst of, and have been, is the banalization of passion. Like God, passion is dead. Its ghost continues to haunt us yet, unlike God, it must be resurrected.

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In the Laches, Plato outlined what he considered to be the four fundamental passions, which were joy, sorrow, hope, and fear; later thinkers would advance theories on passion out of these categories, but throughout the following epochs they would remain relatively the same. The earliest, most comprehensive extant account of the Stoic theory of the passions is contained in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. In his text, Plato’s configuration is altered and grief and desire displace sorrow and hope as primitive passions; this division of the passions was embraced later by Virgil, Augustine, and Boethius. Thomas Aquinas would advance a more streamlined and simple classification. In his Summa Theologica, he creates a very basic division between concupiscible and irascible passions. Other divisions expanded the list and included aversion and love. From the eleventh century onward, figures from the troubadours to Thomas Wright, Hobbes, Timothy Bright and Descartes and Spinoza would write extended treatises on the passions, some diverging from the established Stoic division established by Cicero. While each of these accounts conceived of the passions and of how man lived with them differently, bearing the weight of each of these affects and giving them their force was one extremely vital ingredient: suffering. In each category of passion, suffering is an integral if not basic component. If it is absent, passion doesn’t exist, or is incomplete. True passion, authentic passion involves suffering. Not to suffer is to be devoid of passion, to live without the risk that makes life chilling. The terror we experience before the world, and the awe that makes us shudder, is lost without suffering. To be devoid of passion is not to be alive, to be without joy, for the joyful one suffers, too; the joyful one suffers because of a knowledge of life, yet in this suffering there is reverence—life itself is recognized as holy. Like Prometheus on the scabrous crag, the joyful one is painfully cognizant of the truth that one suffers for knowledge. Humanity exists on an obelisk of suffering and it suffers for life; all that is most exemplary in humanity, its morals, its philosophy, its sciences, its art, everything that has become part of its inner world, of the forces which guide and direct it, all of it was born of some exacting suffering. Socrates chose to perish in order to uphold certain ideals as others like Copernicus and Galileo and Descartes and Spinoza risked their sanity if not lives in pursuing the liminal bounds of the mind, at war with a complacent and dogmatic world opposed to such daring risks and transvaluations. Our greatness is born of our suffering; our triumphs, our sacrifices, our surrender to goals, “almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ rests on the spiritualization of, and giving depth to, cruelty” as Nietzsche recognized in Beyond Good and Evil. Without passion, that is, without cruelty and suffering, man is nothing. One might say, without suffering, life is meaningless and that it is suffering that is a sign of the actual meaning of our lives. One doesn’t need to find a meaning for suffering—suffering is the meaning, just as joy, when we are joyful, is the meaning.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest noted meaning of passion refers to Christ, and passion is commonly associated with Christ. It is related to physical pain and suffering, the main objects or instruments of the Passion being the cross, the crown of thorns, the scourge, the nails, etc. All are too familiar with the images of this myth and now we are being bludgeoned with it again and again and seem to be in the midst of another Dark Ages. While the Via Crucis or Twelve Stations of the Cross unquestionably involve suffering, it is only suffering, thus a perversion of passion. Joy is eradicated from the ‘Savior’s’ passion, which becomes a form of torture or punishment, something endured because of man’s ‘sinful’ nature. It is a path for ‘rectifying’ the world, not a passion for the world, not one which realizes the world is holy but suffers to achieve holiness at the end of time. The world need not be rectified though; what must be overcome is the non-tragic, finite conception of temporality which Tertullian and the Christian empire inculcated and which has been reinforced over centuries and centuries. Today, distressingly, we are in the midst of a fervent religious revival, while even science and philosophy as Nietzsche revealed with stunning perspicacity can be religious, too. What is more unsettling is that Christians are still diligently working to convert the world, and this is no minor phenomenon. On the Mission Frontiers website, a stated solution for the current world crisis in the article “Finishing the Task” is to convert the entire world to Christianity. They note that they are “in the final era” of their missionary task, “which is to establish an indigenous church planting movement within the language and social structure of every people on earth.” The tragic reality for them is that there will “still be billions who would never come to faith.” What is vital is to make the gospel “available to every person on earth” since “Satan holds whole peoples in bondage” and “there will be” they note “a ‘power encounter’ between the armies of God and the powers of darkness. Conquering the ‘kingdoms of the world’ requires an invasion of God’s glory within each people.” Muslims, “tribal” people, Hindus, and Buddhists are according to them “challenging peoples” and “the most resistant” but, as they confess, they “are learning that when a people seems ‘resistant’ it may only mean our approach has been defective.”(2) These monotheist zealots still have not learned from history; it is not sufficient to believe what they wish to believe, but they must reinforce their belief through eradicating all other forms of belief and ‘saving’ the world. But the end of the world is not coming: there is no inferno, there is no purgatorio, and there is no paradisio. The divine is man’s comedy, and we are the world’s tragedy. If the end of the world is at hand, it is man who will bring it about and man alone. If that occurs, so be it; perhaps it’s time we perish. Another world will come in our wake. While we’re here, what we need to live with is a different kind of suffering. It is not a god who we must suffer for, but our selves. The Christ myth is too reminiscent of other deities to seem wholly authentic and original, and certainly far from true, just as the myth of Noah’s ark is directly adopted from Gilgamesh, which adopted it from the Epic of Atra-hasis. If one is to speak of passion, to find the great exemplar of it, one must move beyond Christ and instead trace passion back to an earlier figure of suffering—Dionysus. He, one of the original figures of sporagmos or dismemberment, is also the rapturous figure who invokes ecstasy, the symbolic deity locked in an eternal dance with his agonistic counterpart, Apollo, and it is Apollo who measures the passions. We are eating the wrong god.

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Since Tertullian, passion has denoted the suffering of a martyr and martyrdom as well as physical suffering and pain. It is probably with the father of the Latin Church, whose vehement condemnation of pagans is well known, that the prior association of suffering and passion with Dionysus was severed. Under Constantine the pagans would suffer ridicule, scorn, and persecution and late in the fourth century, the astrologer (what is today astronomy) Firmicus would exhort the emperors to strip the pagan temples of their adornments. In De Errore Profanarum Religionum he proclaimed that they should let “the fire of the mint or the blaze of the smelters melt them down, and confiscate all the votive offerings to your own use and ownership. Since the time of the destruction of the temples you have been by God’s power, advanced in greatness.” The religion of the pagans was to be eradicated with extreme prejudice and they violently punished; “we know,” he says with wicked relish, “the dangerous nature of their crime, and we know what punishments are appropriate for delusion; but it is better for you to save them against their will than to let them follow their wishes into perdition.” The “severest laws of [the emperor’s] edicts” were to be employed to insure this task would be accomplished and the pagans were threatened with death and the confiscation of their property if they continued to practice their rites. In 391 Theodosius I would once and for all outlaw paganism; two years later, the Olympic Games would be abolished and Olympia would suffer vandalism and the ravages of history, not to be rediscovered until 1766. Pagan culture was dead and buried. The nails from Christ’s hands were the nails which secured the coffin of Pagan culture.

In the eleventh century, passion would be vigorously transformed by the troubadours, the first culture to rupture the tyranny of Latin and inaugurate the modern era, though they would eventually be decimated in the Albigensian Crusade. God was no longer the agent of passion—instead, passion was a flame which arose in the veins of each individual. Divine subjectivity was displaced and the free individual was born. The explicit meaning of passio in Old Occitan, the lingua franca of the troubadours, was violent love; while playful masters of lo gai saber, the troubadours were no strangers to suffering, cultivating it in their lives and works. But the legacy of the troubadours would be thrust into oblivion just as pagan culture was thrust into darkness. With the late Renaissance, though hardly a pure pagan era, Greek culture flourished again only to end in extreme excesses, resulting in the lamentable Bonfire of the Vanities. When Botticelli cast his own paintings into the inferno at the behest of Savonarola, Dionysus’ vines were saturated with bitter tears. The Greek revival would essentially begin again with Winckelmann and intensify in the late nineteenth century when German archeologists would begin digs in 1875, three years after Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy. While Winckelmann encouraged imitation of the Greeks, Nietzsche struggled to instigate a rebirth of the same kind of greatness in his own time through the influence of Greek culture, not an empty mimesis of it. The anti-Christ’s study of earlier epochs served as a force by which to measure his own age; knowledge was continually to be in the service of life, never an end in itself. At last, fifteen hundred years after their interment, the Olympic Games would begin anew, brought to life in Greece not by one of its natives, but by Pierre de Coubertin, a Parisian. Dionysus was once again in our midst, though his revival, again, would be short-lived.

Unlike the troubadours, mankind is blind to the importance of suffering, of infusing passion with suffering. The form of personal love or passion we inherited from the troubadours is certainly devoid of their violent or agonistic suffering of the heart and, despite Nietzsche’s texts and a seeming rebirth of Greek culture, the association of suffering and passion with Christ still persists. Our form of paganism, if we can even claim to have it, is just frivolous; it lacks the sacred dimension and without it we’re just drunks. Not sacred practitioners, only decadent and indulgent sows. Paganism has been co-opted by the hedonists. Though the death of God was pronounced in 1882, people still live with Christ as if he were a revitalizing force, yet the suffering of believers is a perversion of existence, a sign of an insidious contempt for life. Outside of many of the faithful, who, perceiving them as sinful, extirpate their passions out of misjudgment, what many of the faithless want is pure satisfaction, the simple fulfillment of pleasures—one distorts suffering, the other evades it. But without what Nietzsche called the “discipline of suffering, of great suffering,” the enhancement of humanity is not possible, and authentic passion is beyond us. The path away from Christ and towards Dionysus will not be clear. In evading our suffering, we also evade our deepest joy and life, the fullest, most encompassing, rich, variegated and profound life is distant from us. Gilgamesh, the joy-woe man, is not or is very rarely in our midst. The human, Nietzsche declared in Beyond Good and Evil, “necessarily must and should suffer” for out of that suffering it will be “made incandescent,” it will be “purified.” It is our duty to purify our selves not of sin but of what is human, all too human; purified of the need for a redemptive god. To ruthlessly resist pity is to resist every debilitating comfort we devise in order to endure, or worse, elude the tragic dimension of existence. To resist pity is to resist every placid illusion which only serves to weaken us. In resisting pity, we resist Christ and move towards our suffering, we embrace and love it, for that is what passion demands. No one can suffer for us; we must suffer for our selves. Our suffering though bears gifts from which all may receive rewards, and the most incandescent and resonant transfiguration of suffering is found in art. To restore and redeem passion, there is only one thing that we can do: we must eat Dionysus. In partaking of Dionysus we partake of our selves and regain our suffering.

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