Sunday, September 18, 2005
(1:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Nietzsche on the Hebrew Bible
While reading the following passage in The Birth of Tragedy, I couldn't help thinking of the Old Testament, particularly the psalms:At the Apollinian stage of development, the "will" longs so vehemently for this existence, the Homeric man feels himself so completely at one with it, that lamentation itself becomes a song of praise.I wondered if Nietzsche's religious background had made it impossible for him to detect something like that -- or at least something positive -- in the Old Testament, but now I wonder no more:
In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and will have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe, which wants by all means to signify as against Asia the "progress of man." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 52)UPDATE: In an effort to make this post even less popular, I will bring in some Church Fathers-related material -- AKMA has added Ignatius his Lego version of the Apostolic Fathers. I personally can't wait until he starts in on the Shepherd of Hermas.
UPDATE (2): Also, if I were to be reading Origen's entire commentary on Romans and decided that as a result, I was not morally obligated to read the entire Against Celsus, would anyone out there in reader land know what sections in particular I should read in order to get the basic gist? Or would it just be a matter of starting at the beginning and reading until he inevitably started repeating himself?
