Abstract
Chapter 5 turns from the challenges of historical periodization—such as the divisions between ancient, medieval, and modern, or between the Reformation and the Enlightenment—to the problems of literary and autobiographical periodization. To consider the role of powerful periodizing acts in the transformation of a life into a story, Chap. 5 examines two major frame narratives that have scaffolded meaning-making in the postsecular landscape: Augustinian narratives of providence and teleology (in which much is meant to be), and Nietzschean stories of aimlessness and wandering (in which little is meant to be). Moving beyond simplistic divisions between religion and secularity, I show how Zarathustra and the Confessions periodize their narratives in theopolitical ways that challenge the desires to make either providential meaningfulness or contingent meaninglessness compulsory. Rather than being postsecular in a way that would attempt to possess, newly succeed, or be free of either of these powerful ways of understanding autobiographical time and history, I conclude the Chap. 5 with an analysis of the limitations and promises of both.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra : A Book for All and None. Trans. Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Cited in text as (TSZ, pp.). Citations including Roman numerals refer to Augustine, Confessions. (2nd Ed.) Trans. Marie Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2012). This chapter is deeply influenced by the seminars and works of Travis Kroeker, especially “‘Living As if Not’: Messianic Becoming or the Practice of Nihilism?” in Paul, Philosophy and the Theopolitical Vision. Ed. Douglas Harink (Eugene: Cascade, 2010), 37–63.
- 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in The Anti-Christ , Ecce Homo, and Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151.
- 3.
Heidegger writes that “‘For Everyone,’ of course, does not mean for anybody at all, anyone you please. ‘For Everyone’ means for every human being as a human being, for every given individual insofar as he becomes for himself in his essence a matter worthy of thought.” Martin Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche : Volumes 1 and 2. Trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper, 1991), 211. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 101–126.
- 4.
For example, see the Revisions II, 6 (32) [p. 36]: “What others think about them [the books of the Confessions] is for them to say.”
- 5.
Zarathustra is a prophet who teaches his followers that they must become the overman: “the overman shall be the meaning of the earth” / “I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes!” (TSZ, 6). Compare with Confessions X, 9.
- 6.
Compare the collection Nietzsche ’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise. Ed. James Luchte (New York: Continuum, 2008) with Gianni Vattimo, “Zarathustra” in Dialogue with Nietzsche . Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 167–180.
- 7.
See Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment : Nietzsche ’s Zarathustra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23, 25, 27.
- 8.
Consider the argument that the Confessions is structured by a “providentially governed” narrative structured by a “return to origins” in Robert McMahon, Augustine ’s Prayerful Ascent: An Essay on the Literary Form of the Confessions (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), xviii-xix.
- 9.
See Isabelle Cochelin, “Introduction: Pre-Thirteenth-Century Definitions of the Life Cycle” in Medieval Life Cycles: Continuity and Change. Ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (Belgium: Brepols, 2013), 20–21.
- 10.
See Athanasius, The Life of Antony in The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York, Paulist, 1980). Athanasius also praises Antony’s memory, in his mindfulness of the saints (2), in his memorization of scripture (3), and in his ascetic attention to the present (7), each in ways that resonate with Augustine’s memoria, as explored below. I thank Robert Revington for pointing this out to me.
- 11.
See Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine ’s Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 12.
Keith Ansell-Pearson writes that “the thought of return does not simply posit a circular conception of time. Such a concept can lead only to a crushing fatalism,” suggesting that it is this fatalism that the creature fails to resist. See Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 110–111.
- 13.
Martin Heidegger, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche : Volumes 1 and 2, 38.
- 14.
Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, 111.
- 15.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Anti-Christ , Ecce Homo, and Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 171.
- 16.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180. The aforementioned two associations are made in Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche ’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
- 17.
See Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche : An Introduction. Trans. Nicholas Martin (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 114.
- 18.
Referring to IX, 28 Claude Romano writes that “The path by which Augustine progressively reaches his definition is without a doubt phenomenological: the issue is to learn to see and to discern that which is the most manifest, but which becomes obscure because it is too clear, without letting oneself be blinded by its excess of evidence.” See Claude Romano, Event and Time. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 69.
- 19.
See Romano, Event and Time, 68, and Boulding, Confessions, 306 note 86.
- 20.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) I, 6.
- 21.
Ibid., 9.
- 22.
For further connections between distentio and afflictio, occupatio, dissilio, and multiplico see Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 108.
- 23.
Augustine’s distentio animi also resonates with the image of the human being at the beginning of Zarathustra . For Zarathustra the human being is “a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss” (TSZ, 7). The “crossing over [Übergang]” and “going under [Untergang]” that together constitute the human being form a dangerous crossing over from animal being to the overman (TSZ, 7). The rope is taut for Zarathustra, and the crossing involves overcoming that goes over and goes under, exceeding and receding beneath the human. The resonance here with Augustine’s distentio animi is limited but fruitful. Both images understand the human being as being-between two opposites (past and future for Augustine; animal and overman for Zarathustra), and both images see this being in-between as an unstable place (always vanishing for Augustine; dangerous for Zarathustra).
- 24.
While Zarathustra’s narrative and his understanding of time may not be as connected as Augustine’s, elsewhere Nietzsche opposes a sense of history that would be abstracted from the experience of a person, while also opposing the dramatization of history by the ‘objective’ historian who “veils and subdues the past, and expresses his impulse to art—but not his impulse to truth or justice.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History. Trans. A. Collins (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), 37–38.
- 25.
Rosen , The Mask of Enlightenment , 178–179.
- 26.
Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans. Trans. R.W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), XII.14. This is pointed out by Löwith , Meaning in History, 160–173.
- 27.
Two exemplary postsecular narratives that come to mind are Jenny Hval, Girls Against God. Trans. Marjam Idriss (London: Verso, 2020) and Guy Branum, My Life as a Goddess (New York: Atria, 2018).
- 28.
Heinrich Meier, What is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? A Philosophical Confrontation. Trans. Justin Gottschalk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 16–17.
- 29.
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul. Trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 86.
- 30.
Karl Löwith, Nietzsche ’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). In this work, although Löwith makes significant connections between Zarathustra and Nietzsche’s philosophical work, he seems to do so without forcing the literary images of Zarathustra into a pre-decided philosophical system. One way that he unveils connections between Nietzsche’s work in Zarathustra and his other works is by pointing to the central image and problem of noontide and standstill, between today and tomorrow, for Nietzsche’s nihilism and eternal return of the same (3–4, 9–10, 105–107)—terms that we cannot help but understand to be powerful periodizations that divide both time and history, and also provide normative values within a cosmological framework.
- 31.
Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche : An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity. Trans. C. F. Wallraff and F. J. Schmitz (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1965), 418–423. See also Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity. Trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: Gateway, 1961).
- 32.
Karl Löwith, “Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence,” in Sämtliche Schriften. Band 6. Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 416–417.
- 33.
Ibid., 420.
- 34.
Ibid., 422.
- 35.
In the sense developed in Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation. Trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith. Ed. Frederick Neuhouser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For Jaeggi, alienation is a “relation of relationlessness” defined by its failure to appropriate itself towards the world and a loss of meaning, power, and connection (1, 22). That said, her formal and substantial account of its character exceeds this initial definition.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kennel, M. (2022). Periodization and Providence Between Nietzsche and Augustine. In: Postsecular History. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85758-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85758-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85757-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85758-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)