Genesis in Nietzsche: The Case of "The Bestowing Virtue" Speech in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

"Genesis in Nietzsche" is a pretentious title, to be sure. The topic of the use of Genesis in Nietzsche would best be dealt with in a Ph.D. dissertation or a scholarly monograph, rather than in a short blog post--and in my case I have yet to read any of his writings beyond his Thus Spake Zarathustra. Having said that, I do want to discuss the use of Genesis 3 in the final speech of Zarathustra in Part 1: "On the Bestowing Virtue" (sections 1 and 2; the third section has a different topic focus).

For Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the virtue he would communicate to his disciples is one that "bestows"--that is, gives gifts. Just as gold never loses its lustre or its status as wealth, so this virtue continually "bestows" gifts to those who achieve it. The use of gold serves as a hook just as in previous chapters, Zarathustra has used the images of love, war, unhappy marriages, and depression as "hooks" upon which to hang his doctrine of the overman (Übermensch).

In our text, an actual object is made out of gold: a staff given to Zarathustra by his disciples. The staff is crowned by a golden knob that is surrounded by a serpent, which functions as a pointed allusion to Genesis 3. Zarathustra delivers a sermon using this gift of a staff as a starting point. What Nietzsche has done, then, is to associate gold, snake, and continually-gift-giving virtue together.

This virtue is described as "a ruling thought"; in other words, it cannot be achieved by obedience--the sort that God had commanded Adam and Eve. Rather, it is

"a new good and evil! Indeed, a new, deep rushing and the voice of a new spring! It is power, this new virtue . . . and around it [is] a wise soul: a golden sun and around it the snake of knowledge".

I interpret the golden knob as emblematic of the forbidden fruit of Genesis 3. Nietzsche is decrying here--as he does throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra-- systems of ethics and morality that are based on theology. His way to the overman first requires a change in our value systems to make them focused not on the realm of the divine, but on the realm of the human. When humans accept this new fruit, the knowledge of the serpent, they cease to be human and become wise, just as the old serpent had suggested to Eve.The ultimate purpose of achieving a new system of ethics is to "give the earth its meaning, a human meaning!" (Indeed, as one who goes on the earth without legs, the snake is indeed the best animal symbol for this.) In creating this new meaning, Zarathustra says, humans cease to be "genus" and become "super-genus"--that is, they cease to be human and become overmen.

Wednesday Announcement

Hello lovely students!

I'm sorry to say that we must postpone the trip downtown to next Wednesday (July 20th). Apologies for any inconvenience!
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UPDATE: The purpose of our trip is to visit a small private art gallery; I will give you some readings to prepare you for this visit before we go. We will not have class on the morning of the 20th; instead, we will meet in the ELI lobby at 2:45pm and then head downtown.

Boats at White Rock

The Serpent and the Titan

The famous biblical critic Robert Alter once likened the Bible to a pillar in the history of the Western tradition; he likened the tradition of ancient Greece to the other pillar. The two bodies of literature have, indeed, been wound together by centuries of study.  It's intriguing, then, when they appear to tell the same story.

The story under consideration at the moment is this: a divine macho-male, "father" deity makes people and determines not to share his knowledge and power with them. A trickster figure, an intermediary between earth and heaven, intervenes to help the people gain knowledge, and in so doing earns the opprobrium and physical punishment of the sky God.  

And so we have, obviously, the third chapter of Genesis (attributed to J), and myth of Prometheus, a story that would be made into a trilogy of plays in the fifth century BCE.  The only surviving play from this trilogy, Prometheus Bound, has been commonly attributed to Aeschylus, though this attribution is now increasingly less popular.

In Genesis 3, of course, the serpent has an ambiguous role that has been interpreted for millennia to be in some way nefarious, and he has been identified as Satan for much of this time.  However, if we as readers can strip away the blinders of traditional religious interpretation, we can see that the serpent is not so bad as we thought.  In fact, he is the opposite.  The snake's status as a helper of humanity is clearly indicated in the text by no less than the narrator himself.  "If you eat of the fruit," the snake had said, "your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil".  And indeed, when Adam and Eve take the fruit, "their eyes were opened," says the narrator--and the proof of this in the text is that they (a) realize they are naked, and (b) do something about it by learning how to make clothing.

Neither Zeus nor Yahweh come off looking very rosy in these stories.  Zeus pursues a personal vendetta against Prometheus, who had helped him become king of the Gods, by ungratefully ordering him to be chained to a mountain at the edge of the known world.  Similarly, God curses the serpent, which is the aetiological explanation for the lack of legs on a snake.  But the God of Genesis shows himself a coward--like Zeus--when he says, "And now, lest he [i.e. man] reach out his hand, and take from the fruit of the tree of life, and live forever--". The sentence is as unfinished in Hebrew as it is in English.  This God, so different from the traditional portrayals of him in Judaism and Christianity, knows fear in addition to jealousy.  He is afraid that he will not be the only immortal being in the world, and so he promptly forces Adam and Eve to leave the garden, and makes sure they cannot get back in.  He also curses them with pain in childbirth, and with the necessity for hard work to make a living.

The humans in the myth of Prometheus are mostly there by implication: they are helped by the great and generous Titan.  The humans in Genesis, though, are more finely described, though to the same end.  In fact, it is the woman, Eve, who listens to the serpent and shows the greater leadership of the pair; the man simply eats what she gives him.  Furthermore, it was the woman who "saw that the fruit of the tree was to be desired to make one wise".  In the same vein, the active pair make clothes for themselves, and even make excuses to God when he confronts them.  The vision of humanity in the Genesis story, then, ascribes to our species a power and intelligence that is on par with the post-Prometheus humans, people who use fire and speak in language.  

There is a curious feature of the story of Prometheus that is not there in the story of the serpent: namely, Prometheus's foresight.  The titan can see the future. This being so, he becomes not merely a trickster figure, but a tragic and selfless one, a Christ-figure, in fact.  Since these two stories are so similar in their other aspects, one may be forgiven for wondering whether the serpent should not similarly be identified as a Christ-figure.  In the end, though, both stories remain eloquent testaments to the power and potential of the human mind, a mind which nonetheless keenly feels its limits amidst a universe that so often seems hostile and inscrutable.  Perhaps we can finally realize that while we are most certainly not Gods, we have within each of us the Trickster and the Christ-figure.

The Two Creation Accounts in Genesis

Since the Bible is perhaps the foundational book of Western civilization, and studied in the minutest detail for over two thousand years, it is surprising that the plain sense of the text in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 was to be properly understood only in the nineteenth century with the publishing of Julius Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis. Wellhausen's ground-breaking theory, nowadays considered the cornerstone of biblical scholarship on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, surmised that there had been in antiquity  four different texts, known as J, E, D, and P, and that these texts had been edited together by someone nicknamed "R" for Redactor.  These four texts have been spliced together, Wellhausen persuasively argued, throughout Genesis to Deuteronomy, and since his time much scholarship has gone into identifying the different texts through standard source-critical methods.  Although many scholars today disagree over individual verses and in some cases, chapters, there is broad agreement on Wellhausen's methods and conclusions.  Perhaps in no case has the fruit of modern scholarship been as productive as in the first two chapters of Genesis.

Of course, the chapter division has (as is not uncommon in the Bible), been put into entirely the wrong place.  Scholars debate over precisely where to put the division--at the beginning of 2:4 or in the middle--but it is apparent that this is the transition between two very different accounts of creation.

The first account, attributed to P (for "priestly writer) is concerned with all the sorts of things that used to occupy the minds of the priests of the ancient world. Calendrical concerns are precisely indicated in the language describing the sun, moon, and stars in terms of their being "for signs and seasons, for days and years."  Social hierarchy is revealed in the comparative adjectives "greater" and "lesser" for the sun and moon, respectively, and both are indicated to "rule" the skies just as humanity--both genders--is to "trample on" the rest of creation, as P so bluntly puts it.  Similarly, social institutions like the Sabbath, are attributed by the text to the actions of God in creation, while the famous "perfect number", seven, apparently has its origin there.  (In fact, seven as a symbolic number pre-dates P, and that is precisely why he chose to use this number so programmatically.)   Several regular refrains give structure to the account.  On all the days of creation, God creates by speaking, and his power, majesty, and distance are solemnly portrayed.

The God of the second creation account, attributed to J (for "Yahwist"--J being a throwback to Wellhausen's German, where j corresponds to the English consonantal y) is presented far more anthropomorphically--and is given his name in the formation "Yahweh God" (rendered "LORD God" in most English Bibles). Where the God of the first account had created simply by speaking, Yahweh God in the second plants, forms (like a potter), puts, breathes, makes, and "builds" (the original Hebrew word describes how he made the first woman).  Similarly, when P describes God as having carefully planned everything, so carefully that days 1, 2, and 3 create the idea, or "space" and days 4, 5, and 6 the reality, or "filler", J's Yahweh God does everything by improvisation, even making the animals for the first man to see if one of them could be suitable as the man's mate.  Curiously, the narrator of the second account mentions specifically that Yahweh God did not know what the man would call the animals.  In the end, perhaps just a little frustrated with his efforts with the earth, the playful deity decides to "build" the woman from one of the man's ribs.  Yahweh God first makes man, then plants a garden, and then finally makes the first woman.  This is in contrast to the God of the first account, who had made humanity in both genders only after having made the vegetation, and then the animals.  

Like the first account, the second account is aetiological.  The origin of marriage dates to the formation of Eve, whose name in Hebrew resembles the word for "living".  But just as the social institutions focused on by the two accounts are different, so too are the concerns.  The first account had spoken of "dominion" over nature, while the second account leads naturally into Genesis 3, which is an aetiology that purports to justify the dominance of man over woman.  In this respect, each account would be, sadly, the beginning of much human or planetary misfortune in the western line of history.  Conversely, though, the vision of gender equality in the first account, and the second's insistence that humanity* "serve" and "take care of" (as the Hebrew words would literally be rendered) the land do have something positive to share.
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*There are a few puns in the original Hebrew which do not carry over well in translation.  The Hebrew word for ground is 'adamah, while 'adam is the name of the first man (rendered in English as "Adam").  Similarly, 'ishshah is the word for woman, and resembles the Hebrew word for man, 'ish.  Therefore, man comes out of the ground just as woman comes out of man.