Philologists are the invented clergy of the new era

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Sections 40~45 offer a genealogical sketch of the evolution of values, spanning from antiquity to the modern era. This essay focuses initially on the first half of this process (40~42) to examine how Nietzsche analyzes the trajectory of ancient Greek culture. As a foundational source of Western civilization, this culture is shown to have declined from its zenith, been supplanted by the Romans, and subsequently experienced a resurgence at the hands of Alexander—thereby giving rise to the "Hellenized Romans" and opening the gates to the Trojan Horse of Christian culture.

40. The position we have taken up towards classical antiquity is at bottom the profound cause of the sterility of modern culture; for we have taken all this modern conception of culture from the Hellenised Romans. We must distinguish within the domain of antiquity itself: when we come to appreciate its purely productive period, we condemn at the same time the entire Romano-Alexandrian culture. But at the same time also we condemn our own attitude towards antiquity, and likewise our philology.

41. There has been an age-long battle between the Germans and antiquity, i.e., a battle against the old culture. It is certain that precisely what is best and deepest in the German resists it. The main point, however, is that such resistance is only justifiable in the case of the Romanised culture; for this culture, even at that time, was a falling-off from something more profound and noble. It is this latter that the Germans are wrong in resisting.

42. Everything classic was thoroughly cultivated by Charles the Great, whilst he combated everything heathen with the severest possible measures of coercion. Ancient mythology was developed, but German mythology was treated as a crime. The feeling underlying all this, in my opinion, was that Christianity had already overcome the old religion · people no longer feared it, but availed themselves of the culture that rested upon it. But the old German gods were feared. A great superficiality in the conception of antiquity--little else than an appreciation of its formal accomplishments and its knowledge--must thereby have been brought about. We must find out the forces that stood in the way of increasing our insight into antiquity. First of all, the culture of antiquity is utilised as an incitement towards the acceptance of Christianity · it became, as it were, the premium for conversion, the gilt with which the poisonous pill was coated before being swallowed. Secondly, the help of ancient culture was found to be necessary as a weapon for the intellectual protection of Christianity. Even the Reformation could not dispense with classical studies for this purpose. The Renaissance, on the other hand, now begins, with a clearer sense of classical studies, which, however, are likewise looked upon from an anti-Christian standpoint: the Renaissance shows an awakening of honesty in the south, like the Reformation in the north. They could not but clash; for a sincere leaning towards antiquity renders one unchristian. On the whole, however, the Church succeeded in turning classical studies into a harmless direction . the philologist was invented, representing a type of learned man who was at the same time a priest or something similar. Even in the period of the Reformation people succeeded in emasculating scholarship. It is on this account that Friedrich August Wolf is noteworthy he freed his profession from the bonds of theology. This action of his, however, was not fully understood; for an aggressive, active element, such as was manifested by the poet-philologists of the Renaissance, was not developed. The freedom obtained benefited science, but not man.

"We Philologists", Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

The earlier sections focused on discussing the oppositional relationship between ancient and modern values. But the opposition between ancient and modern is particularly unique because it introduces the dimension of time, and time is always continuous. It's hard to imagine that a continuous thing could ultimately reach its own opposite. If ancient values were not a narrative fabricated out of thin air, but even if they were misunderstood, distorted, and altered during transmission, still retaining some original features, then the antagonistic relationship between ancient and modern values becomes a particularly thought-provoking issue. It's like the theory of evolution in biology, where only by fully presenting the evolutionary chain spanning millions of years or even longer, such as the evolution from dinosaurs to birds, are all the "evidence" of evolution meaningful. How to understand that the ancient values of admiring strength, being aggressive, and being cruel could ultimately evolve into modern values of equality, gentleness, and "loving one's neighbor"? This question is similar to: how did enormous animals like dinosaurs eventually evolve into small and delicate birds? The only convincing answer is the gradual process of value evolution, as demonstrated in his Nietzsche's later work *On the Genealogy of Morality*, where each step of this long process is like showing each link of the evolutionary chain of species.

In academic terms, Nietzsche's greatest contribution today lies in showing how cultural change can be understood through historical change, how to trace the roots of a nation's overall culture to restore its spiritual appearance and values and explain how its cognitive frameworks and behavioral preferences evolve. This research method aims to understand psychological changes in humans, particularly how the interaction between individuals and groups shapes these changes (individuals only have a higher status in this sense, that is, only individuals can create new values, individuals are active, and groups are passive), and then to depict how values gradually change from one period to the next until they become unrecognizable.

Sections 40~45 give a general impression of Nietzsche's view of this evolutionary process. This article first deals with the first half of this evolutionary process (40~42). In connection with the previous section's comments on Homer, the starting point of the story is not Caesar or Alexander, nor Socrates, but the pre-Socratic era, the ancient times when historical consciousness had not yet begun to bud. At that time, values had not been moralized but were very close to the values of nature, namely the law of the jungle, where the strong are good, and the terms of value are "strong" and "weak," not "good" and "evil." When a lion is eating a gazelle, there is no question of good or evil. This nature-like value system appears "inhuman" to later generations because humans have deliberately distanced themselves from nature. (As mentioned earlier, whether such an objective natural value hierarchy really exists, and whether this value hierarchy is entirely determined by biology, are both highly questionable. Nietzsche himself was quite ambiguous on this issue, because he also believed that "man is the symbolic animal," and constructing a symbolic world above nature is man's "essence," but this means that man has no essence.)

Socrates introduced reason into the spirit of ancient Greece, which, in Nietzsche's view, was already a sign of the decline of the Greek national spirit. Man no longer faced the material, pluralistic, political reality of the world, but gradually turned his attention to theory, reasoning, and contemplative life. When this theoretical preference gradually exhausted its charm in reality, when theoretical optimism gradually gave way to realistic pessimism, the spirit of ancient Greece, the core of ancient Greek culture named "classical," decayed.

Subsequently, the Roman Empire and Alexander the Great inherited and modified the culture of ancient Greece. But the Romans and Macedonians were 终究 not Greeks. The formation of the Roman Empire politically meant the expansion of civil rights (from the Latin League to Italy and then to the vast Mediterranean region), and in terms of national spirit, it meant a shift from localism to universality, from pursuing excellence to inner care (this "inner turn" is most evident in figures like Marcus Aurelius, Diogenes, etc.). This provided space for the later shift in Christian values. In Nietzsche's view, the rationality of Socrates and the inner focus of Marcus Aurelius, the greatest danger did not lie in themselves but in the shift of their focus: a rational and introspective person is easily inclined to dismiss the material and physical life as coarse and inferior, gradually "detached from the ground."

In terms of national spirit, although the Romans were only separated from the Greeks by the Adriatic Sea and both belonged to the southern part of Europe, the Romans were significantly more physical and less spiritual than the Greeks. Mommsen observed that the Romans' religion was more "material" than the Greeks'; the gods of the Greeks were all embodied by abstract concepts (beauty, justice, abundance, etc.), whereas the gods of the Romans, from weather and thunder to door and kitchen gods, were mostly embodied by concrete material objects. The Romans and Greeks best showed how a nation could "rise through spirit and fall through spirit": the Greeks were ethereal, so during their national peak, they have brilliant culture and arts, but they always lacked political cohesion, and ultimately fell due to the internal strife between Athens and Sparta. The Romans were pragmatic, with a strong political instinct, so at their peak, they created the Roman Empire spanning Europe, Asia, and Africa, and governed vast territories with a relatively small imperial bureaucracy (the governance difficulty of the Roman Empire was no less than that of the Han Dynasty in the same era, but the Roman bureaucracy was smaller, with greater political stability and continuity). However, when the Romans' pragmatic spirit was gradually replaced by the Greek-influenced abstract mindset, and when Roman cosmopolitanism suffocated its indigenous nature, the Romans were "uprooted" and placed in an unprecedentedly large-scale world, detached from the old society, individuals gradually felt disconnected from the world and turned to the internal pursuit of cynicism and Stoicism. By then, the Roman spirit had almost vanished.

The roots of Western culture have undergone multiple twists and rewrites, witnessing the rise and fall of various nations, as if acting as a giant axis that absorbs the youthful vitality of different peoples, forming new national entities and national concepts. But this absorption process also carries deep dangers: when new nations inherit the culture of old cultures, it is very easy to cause distortion and degradation, which is a "discarding of the essence and picking of the dross" of the old culture. In Nietzsche's view, this is exactly what happened to the Romans during the Hellenistic period. When Alexander the Great promoted the Hellenization of the Roman Empire, he introduced the darker side of the Greeks into the Roman world, while corrupting both Greek and Roman cultures. Neither Greece nor Rome is wrong; it is the "Hellenized Roman" that is wrong.

The German nation also has its national spirit and life cycle, but unless its cultural inheritance relationships are clarified — where it acquires foreign culture and classicizes it, in other words, how it views the broader Western tradition — it will only repeatedly repeat the fate of Alexander. Another danger is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the self of a nation is always a "multiplication of many pasts," then any radical rejection of history is just self-suffocation. When the Germans oppose classical culture, they are very easily caught in this trap.

The hostility of Christianity toward Germanic mythology is like the suppression of cultural authorities toward potential competitors. Nietzsche said that this hostility is fundamentally because people feel that "Christianity had already overcome the old religion," so the suppression of Christianity is not out of fear but out of contempt and arrogance. But this means that Christianity, as an organizational form, no longer fears the challenge of ancient religious organizational forms, not that Christianity no longer fears the ancient spirit or cultural life, so Nietzsche said "the old German gods were feared." This reflects the modern emphasis on form and the neglect of content, that modern people always only see the exterior of the ancient and never see its core.

But how was this achieved? How did Christianity "tame the masses"? First, it did not radically reject all ancient culture, but rather packaged it as a cultural prize, using it as a sweet coating for appeasement; second, Christianity needs "the help of ancient culture," specifically the reintroduction of Platonism-Aristotelianism (i.e. Aquinas), because Christianity, in itself, lacks speculative ability, and to respond to the objections of non-Christians, it had to borrow the techniques of ancient Greek philosophy to develop a whole set of theological tools. The use of philological techniques by Valla in the 15th century to prove that the Donation of Constantine was a forged document is an example. The philologists who were all the rage in the 18th and 19th centuries were actually degenerate versions of medieval theologians, and the medieval priests had learned argumentation techniques from the "poets-philologists" of the Renaissance (such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Valla, Erasmus). So Nietzsche would say that philologists are an "invented" identity, essentially clergy, serving a predetermined and unquestionable ideology. 

Humanism, like that of Petrarch and Erasmus, gradually lost its focus on human beings during the Reformation and its subsequent softening process. Humanism became humanitarianism. Man ceased to be a plural, concrete, vivid, biographical existence and became an extremely simplified abstract type, or at most a "distribution" of these types. This transformation diluted the aggression and initiative that people exhibit when meeting face-to-face to the point of nonexistence, just as today when two people meet, they immediately need to use a lot of labels to define each other: gender, occupation, family background, marital status, level of education... to the extent that a gender-ambiguous person, such as a woman with a buzz cut, is naturally perceived as aggressive by the vast majority. Therefore, when the theological edifice is overturned and when Wolf successfully liberates philologists from the cage of theology, what is saved is only the discipline of philology. The value of human beings still awaits salvation.