Dionysus versus the Crucified : Nietzsche's struggle with God

Abstract

From the Egyptian cult of Osiris, the god of the dead to Plutarch's theme in De Defectu [XVII] where Plutarch announces that, «The Great Pan is dead.» Later this theme of the dead Pan, is revived back by Pascal in his Pensees [695]. In literature, Rabelais (who came before Pascal) revives the theme of the dead Pan in his Gargantua and Pantagruel. In Book Four, chapters 27 and 28, Rabelais writes that the Stoics believed that all gods were mortal and that there was a god who was immortal, but in the next chapter Rabelais proceeds to announce how the legend of Pan's mortality came to exist. That strange frightening voice which ordered Thamous [the Egyptian captain] to announce that the Great Pan is dead and, «No sooner had he spoken the last word than loud sighs, lamentations, and shrieks were heard from the shore, coming not from one person alone, but from many together.» The chaos unleashed by Pan's death envelopes me in wonder; as did Nietzsche's cry that «God is dead» when I read it for the first time. I have always pondered what this word «God is dead» means and as an untimely word it remains eternally open, it yields a stubborness, a resistance against being placed in a context. This eternal struggle is perhaps one of the reasons why I chose the title Dionysus versus the Crucified, the eternal stuggle between them have occupied without my knowing the volume of my life. While I dwelt 'in' its undull darkness, it emerged partially that the dead God was killed by those who postulated him as the ultimate value and the ultimate cause of everything. In this insight I am indebted to Heidegger in his seminal chapter, «The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead». The postualtion of God as the highest value must be killed for it had brought forward the eclipse of metaphysics. The insanity of two millenia must be annihiliated and overcome in order to return to the 'Other'; that 'Other' who does not postulate itself as the highest and ultimate value, else the 'Other' will be replacing God. I embark upon a pale boat and I navigate through the ludic waves of Nietzsche's thorough voyage. His word «God is dead», plunges deep into sick ManKind - he continued struggling with the deadness of God, until he was overcome by the shipwreck of madness and of Death. As we all crudely wait for Death, the few will wait in Beauty for this awkward gesture to come and erase Man, before the Anxious Beauty - Death arrives, when I do not know...I continue to navigate towards the zenith of noon, and in that brightest moment of my ludic dance I glimpse death and the dance of thinking by the madman - that thinking which, «begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiffnecked adversary of thought.»