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L it e r a r y C r it ic is m a n d
C ultural T heory

E dited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College

A R outledge S eries
L iterary C r it ic ism and C u ltu ral T h eo ry
W il l ia m E. C a i n , General Editor

T he En d of t h e M in d T h e I m pe r ia l Q u e st and M o dern

The Edge o f the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, M e m o r y fr o m C onrad to G reene

Larkin, Plath, and Glück J. M . R a w a
DeSales Harrison
T h e E t h ic s of E xile
Colonialism in the Fictions o f Charles
A u t h o r in g the S elf
Brockden Brown and J. M. Coetzee
Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print
Timothy Francis Strode
Market in British Poetry from Pope through
Wordsworth T h e R o m a n t ic S u b l im e and M id d l e -
Scott Hess C lass S u b je c t iv it y in t h e V ic t o r ia n
N o vel
N a r r a t iv e M u t a t io n s
Stephen Hancock
Discourses o f Heredity and Caribbean Literature
V ital C o n t a c t
Rudyard J. Alcocer
Downclassing Journeys in American Literature
B e tw e e n P r o fit s and P r im it iv is m from Herman M elville to Richard Wright
Shaping White Middle-Class M asculinity in Patrick Chura
the United States 1880—1917 C o sm o p o l it a n F ic t io n s
Athena Devlin Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the
Works o f Kazuo Ishiguro, M ichael Ondaatje,
P o etry and R e pe t it io n
Jam aica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee
Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery
K ath e rin e S ta n to n
Krystyna Mazur
O u t s id e r C itiz en s
T h e F ic t io n of N a t io n a l it y in a n E ra of The Remaking o f Postwar Identity in Wright,
T RANSNATIONALISM Beauvoir, and Baldwin
NylaAli Khan Sarah Relyea

G en d e red Pa t h o l o g ie s A n E t h ic s of B e c o m in g

The Female Body and Biom edical Discourse in Configurations o f Feminine Subjectivity in
the Nineteenth-Century English Novel Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George
Sondra M. Archimedes Eliot
Sonjeong Cho
“T w e n t ie t h - C e n t u r y A m e r ic a n is m ”
N a r r a t iv e D e sire and H ist o r ic a l
I dentity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist R e para tio n s
Fiction A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie
Andrew C. Yerkes
Tim S. Gauthier

W ild e rn e ss C ity N ih il is m and th e S u b l im e P o s t m o d e r n

The Post World War II American Urban Novel The (Hi)Story o f a D ifficult Relationship from
from Algren to Wideman Romanticism to Postmodernism
Ted L. Clontz W ill S lo co m b e
N ih il ism a n d the S u b l im e P o s t m o d e r n
The (Hi)Story o f a Difficult Relationship from
Romanticism to Postmodernism

W ill Slocombe

Routledge
New York & London
Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by
Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
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New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon
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Contents

List of Tables and Diagrams vii

Acknowledgments ix

“The Preface” xi

HISTORY
Chapter One 1
Ex Nihilo: Constructing Nihilism

Chapter Two 25
Stylising the Sublime

THEORY
Chapter Three 51
Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

Chapter Four 77
Postmodern Nihilism

PRAXIS
Chapter Five 105
Postmodern Nihilism and Postmodern Aesthetics

Chapter Six 139

Postmodern Nihilism and Postmodern Ethics
vi Contents

“The Preface Again” 171

Afterword, or, Why I Am (Not) a Nihilist 175

Notes 179

Bibliography 193

Index 205
List of Tables and Diagrams

TABLES

3.1 Nihilistic and Sublime Moments within Ideologies 56

4.1 Forms of Nihilism Before Postmodernism 98

FIGURES

4.2 Modernist Nihilism / Postmodern Nihilism 99

5.1 Variations on the ‘Both/And’ 121

5.2 Nihilism and Narrative Proliferation 130

vii
Acknowledgments

A number of people have helped bring this project from its murky origins in
my subconscious to the book that you read here and there is not sufficient
space to thank all of them personally The first among many who should
nevertheless be named is Tim Woods, who supervised the project upon
which this book is based and who rather adroitly pointed out a number of
connections that I am embarrassed not to have seen myself. Over the years,
both his praise and criticisms have helped no end and, whilst his attempts to
instil some form of academic respectability in me have not been entirely suc­
cessful, most of my ability is due to his patient tutoring. Aside from him
(Him?), thanks must also go to Damian Walford Davies for his sublime sum­
mation of the sublime—a not-so-ironic je ne sais quoi—and to Malte Urban
and John “the words tell themselves empty” Wrighton for their invaluable
discussions over numerous coffees. Further thanks must go to Peter Barry
and Mark Currie, who offered invaluable advice in turning the manuscript
into a vaguely respectable treatise, and to Bill Cain and Max Novick for their
assistance in getting this book into print. Aside from these, thanks go to the
department of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which has
provided support in all manner of ways, and to the University itself, who
provided the funding for the initial project. Without these, this product of
teenage angst would have remained just that, and I am grateful for the
opportunity to prove myself more than merely another ageing teen-nihilist.
My final thanks go to Jennie Hill, who has pointed out that no matter how
many theses I complete, I will still always be a teen-nihilist at heart. It is with
considerable shame that I must therefore admit that this thesis is dedicated
to none of these. It is, and can only ever be, “to no-one in particular.”

ix
 The Preface

This book is in many ways an exploration of nihilism in relation to post­

modernism, although it is not simply a survey of all occurrences of nihilism
within the field. There is more at stake than merely observing what others
have already observed: what is at stake, the ante that is put forward, is the
future of nihilism. There is much more to nihilism than merely, as David
Levin argues, “rage against Being” or “the destruction of Being” (Opening o f
Vision 5). The future of nihilism is not simply a “nihilism of the future,” a
perception of the future in which all is bleak, but the means by which we
admit Gianni Vattimos call for philosophy today “to recognise nihilism is
our (only) chance” (End o f M odernity 23). Although the argument presented
here is obviously distinct from Vattimos, the fact remains that nihilism—the
philosophy of absence and nothingness—must remain paradoxically present
within philosophy and culture. Its eradication would hail a new fundamen­
talism, a new Enlightenment perhaps even more damaging than the first.
Nihilism is our “(only)” chance.
It is necessary to explain at this juncture why exactly this book should
be so oddly titled: why Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern instead of
Nihilism and the Postmodern Sublime? The sublime, an intense emotional
response to something beyond our reason (note that this is necessarily a loose
definition at best), is not merely some component of postmodern thought
because “the postmodern,” as opposed to “postmodernism” or “postmoder­
nity,” is itself sublime. Whilst there is a sublime that is “postmodern,” a form
historically distinct from other formulations of the sublime, it is important
to remember that without the sublime, the postmodern would not exist. The
sublime is not some aspect of the postmodern; rather, the postmodern is an
aspect of the sublime. This distinction is crucial, for all postmodern arte­
facts—whether art or theory—must in some way be sublime, else they are no

xi
X ll “The Preface*”
longer postmodern: they are not part of a “postmodern sublime” but the
“sublime postmodern.”
When seen in this way the arguments of a “nihilistic” postmodern have
to be reappraised. Debates about what postmodernism is are always in some
way implicated with nihilism: those opposed to postmodernism argue that it
is nihilistic because of its rampant textuality and lack of political or ethical
responsibility; those in favour of postmodernism argue that it is anything but
nihilistic because it is a response to an earlier “modernist” nihilism. These
two arguments are incommensurable and so cannot be resolved (and there­
fore I will not attempt to resolve them), but it is worth noting that both of
these rely upon a somewhat loose definition of “nihilism.” Both sides assume
nihilism to be negative, a definition that, whilst fundamentally true, is far
too reductive. Despite the excesses of the twentieth century, it is too simplis­
tic to ascribe a solely negative meaning to nihilism. This book will redress the
balance.
The first section, “History,” can be reduced to a simple observation:
nihilism and the sublime, whilst distinct, are fundamentally connected. As
discussions of the sublime became more prevalent during the late-seven-
teenth and early-eighteenth centuries, discussions of nihilism followed
suit. This is primarily because of cultural shifts that occurred during the
Enlightenment, and specifically during the Romantic period, when scien­
tific rationality came to the fore and the dominant religious ideologies
began to wane. Both of these terms signified different responses to a simi­
lar idea rather than two completely separate ideas. The simplest way to
understand this is to imagine nihilism and the sublime as different sides of
the same coin; hold up the coin and those observers facing heads will see
heads and those facing tails will see tails, despite the fact that it is the same
coin. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the coin had faces of
“man” and "god”—those who saw the ascent of man in their culture saw
the “sublime” face, whereas those who saw the descent of God saw the
“nihilistic” face. Thus, nihilism, assumed by most to be a negative signifier,
and the sublime, frequently interpreted as the positive signifier, are not as
distinct as might be assumed. It would be facile to conclude that both
nihilism and the sublime mean different things to different people; rather,
we must establish why these divisions occur, and so this book is as much an
excavation of the cultural etymology of these signifiers as it is about their
functions in relation to postmodernism.
The second section, “Theory,” is more difficult to define. As I have
already said, the postmodern played a key role in bringing the concept of the
sublime into twentieth-century culture, primarily because it has little or no
 xii

philosophical impetus without the sublime. It is a simple task to see elements

of the sublime in postmodern theory, just as it is relatively straightforward to
find nihilistic overtones in the writings of critics such as Vattimo, Jean Bau-
drillard, and Paul Virilio. However, as the “History” section indicates, both
nihilism and the sublime are fundamentally connected, and so postmod­
ernism, as a philosophy that cannot help but hark back to the past (however
much it tries to avoid it), merely rewrites these ideas within a postmodern
context. Although it is relatively straightforward to read either nihilism or the
sublime into postmodern literature and theory, it is much more difficult to
study the ways in which these interact within postmodernism. Owing to
this, the argument is separated into two discrete areas. The first chapter of
this section, “Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern,” explores how post­
modernism makes use of the Enlightenment to construct its own identity,
and then studies two particular occurrences of the uses (and abuses) of
nihilism and the sublime within the formulations of the “postmodern”
espoused by Jean-François Lyotard and Baudrillard. The second chapter,
“Postmodern Nihilism,” in many ways contains the theoretical heart of the
argument. Moving from the imbrication of nihilism and the philosophies of
poststructuralism and postmodernism, it proposes a postmodern formula­
tion of nihilism that is intrinsically self-reflexive and deconstructive.
Through a study of paradoxes, it then becomes clear that this formulation of
nihilism is, in fact, sublime.
For many readers, the final section, “Praxis,” will be the most useful as
this explores the relevance of a “nihilistic sublime” or “postmodern nihilism”
to contemporary aesthetic and ethical practice. “Praxis,” in the original sense
of the term, is a manner of creative thinking—thought not for its own sake,
but for a particular end. Using a range of postmodern authors, including
Steve Erickson, Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, and Italo
Calvino, these chapters will focus primarily upon the implications and reali­
sations of the concept of a “postmodern nihilism.” The first chapter of this
section examines the ways in which postmodern literature uses many rhetor­
ical and performative devices that are embedded in a nihilistic sublime. Such
stylistic features, part of what might be loosely (and problematically) termed
the “genre” of postmodernism, include absurdity, reflexivity, and narrative
proliferation. In contrast, the second chapter looks at the ethical ramifica­
tions of accepting such a form of nihilism, again primarily through litera­
ture. However, instead of focusing upon the stylistic features of postmodern
literature, this chapter studies how postmodern fictions affect our under­
standing of the “postmodern condition” through readings of “blank fiction”
and the way in which absence is (en)gendered in postmodern literature. This
XIV “The Preface '''

discussion finally leads towards the distinction between “ethical nihilism”

and an “ethical” form of nihilism that is implicit to an “ethics of silence.”
A disclaimer is also required at this point: very few of the translations
presented herein are mine. The histories of both nihilism and the sublime are
entwined with the predominantly French, German, and Russian languages
and cultures that produced them. Where possible, non-English phrases are
explained through different translations of texts, and translators of certain
phrases are indicated for the sake of the clarity. Thus, some of the readings
presented here have already been filtered through a translator. This is an
intractable problem, but one that does not invalidate the readings them­
selves. Any different translations indicated are therefore the result of contrary
translations and any mistakes noted by the reader are purely my own.
Chapter One

Ex Nihilo: Constructing Nihilism

What does “nihilism” mean? This question, posed by Friedrich Nietzsche in

The Will to Power, is difficult to answer simply For Nietzsche, nihilism meant
that “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; why?' finds no
answer” (9; §2). This seems to be the case in the postmodern age, where
morals are without justification, faith is replaced with cynicism, and God is all
too evidently missing, presumed dead. Nihilism did not originate with Niet­
zsche, however, and neither did it end with him. Before Nietzsche, philoso­
phies of nihilism are evident from classical Greece to Enlightenment Europe;
since Nietzsche, and especially since the Holocaust, nihilism is no longer a
marginalized philosophy, but one that has become central to an understand­
ing of the history of modernity and twentieth- and twenty-first-century cul­
ture. How we understand nihilism in a new millennium—a millennium that
is incidentally only possible within a Christian framework—depends upon
how its history is understood.
If nihilism is implicit in the history of modernity, then constructing a
history of nihilism is a monumental task: it is, in effect, a historiographical
exercise incorporating the entirety of Western thought. There are at least two
sides to every (hi)story, however, and nihilism is no different in this respect:
one side argues that nihilism and the history of modernity are fundamentally
entwined, the other argues that nihilism is only part of the history of moder­
nity, only one thread among many. The former argument is seen nowhere
more clearly than in Martin Heideggers philosophical project on the history
of metaphysics:

Nihilism is a historical movement, and not just any view or doctrine

advocated by someone or other. [ . . . ] Nihilism, thought in its essence,
is [. . . ] the fundamental movement of the history of the West. It shows
such great profundity that its unfolding can have nothing but world

1
2 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

catastrophes as its consequence. Nihilism is the world-historical move­

ment of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power
realm of the modern age. (“Word of Nietzsche” 62-63)

Heidegger argues that nihilism is implicit in thought itself and, as such, is

irrevocably a history of modernity. It is a “world-historical movement,” “the
fundamental movement of the history of the West” in which every action
taken is part of the development of nihilism. In contrast, Stanley Rosen
argues: “Although the danger of nihilism is a permanent human possibility,
the actual pervasive influence of nihilism today is due to a series of specific
philosophical decisions in the past” (Nihilism xiv). Here, rather than being
an implicit part of the history of modernity, nihilism is merely one aspect of
it, and it is one that could have been avoided. Although nihilism is a “perma­
nent human possibility,” it is not Heideggers “thought in its essence” but
instead what might be termed “thought in its potential.”
Such arguments illustrate the problem of nihilism, revealing not only
that nihilism is a problem in relation to culture, but also that a definition of
the term is difficult. Similar to all signifiers, “nihilism” has a number of asso­
ciations that cannot be inferred directly from its etymology. This is because
an ideological stance often calls that which is opposed to it “nihilistic” since
it makes that ideology “nothing.” Thus, the term “nihilism” refers historically
to a perception of something that exists in opposition to particular ideolo­
gies, rather than being an ideology of the nihil [nothingness] as such.
Although the word “nihilism” is concerned with negation, it is a qualified
negation based upon the assumption that the opposing ideology is true,
thereby creating a number of historically different “nihilisms” that each
attacks a specific ideology. For example, Christian theologians frequently
called atheism a nihilistic philosophy, but this does not mean that all nihilists
are atheists. Rather, atheism is a particular cultural instance of nihilism in
which God is “made nothing.”
This quality of negation within nihilism means that its usage is cultur­
ally specific. In general terms, nihilism originates ex nihilo [from nothing­
ness]: nihilism is the “system, principle, or ideological movement” (OED) of
the nihil For this reason, one could just as easily begin with the development
of zero in mathematics as with the repeated occurrence of “nothing” in the
plays of Shakespeare when discussing the origins of nihilism.1There are also
formulations of nihilism that are not called “nihilism” and have little to do
with “nothing”: Greek scepticism, for example, exhibits many of the charac­
teristics of nihilism without being directly affiliated with “nothing” because
of the Greek antipathy towards the void (see Barrow Book o f Nothing 58—60,
Ex Nihilo 3

Kaplan Nothing That Is 14-18, and Seife Zero 34-35). There is therefore
more to nihilism than simply “nothing” because it is a cultural appropriation
of the concept of nothing: the value, however negative, that a particular cul­
ture makes of nothingness. Whereas “nothing” denotes an abstract concept,
“nihilism” signifies “nothing” within an ideological framework. In this way,
nihilism is interpellated nothingness, nothingness that has always already
been hailed by a particular ideology.
The cultural specificity of nihilism means that the question posed by
Nietzsche—“what does nihilism’ mean?”—cannot be answered with a sim­
ple statement. Although the first instance of the term “nihilism” in 1799
indicates its emergence as a distinct concept, a number of generic formula­
tions existed before this. The meaning of nihilism is therefore dependent
upon both a spatial and a temporal understanding of any particular formula­
tion: when constructing a history of nihilism, we are not merely talking
about when a particular formulation arose, but also where. There are there­
fore two standard methods of historicising nihilism, one chronological, and
the other genealogical.
Chronological histories of nihilism demonstrate how the concept of
nihilism has progressed over time, charting its development through a linear
chronology. Texts such as Michael Gillespies Nihilism Before Nietzsche fall
into this category because they determine what nihilism means in relation to
a series of historical episodes. Such a method, as Gillespie himself writes, is
“retelling the story of modernity” (xxii) and therefore falls into the trap of
being a grand récit, as John Zammito argues (see “Nihilism Before Niet­
zsche”). Whilst nihilism is an important factor in European history, as both
Rosen and Heidegger argue, nihilism is not equivalent to modernity but the
response to the various processes of modernity. This criticism means that a
chronological history of nihilism is an act of hermeneutic violence towards
the history of modernity, forcing a reading of both nihilism and modernity.
A genealogical history, in contrast, focuses upon a discursive network of dif­
ferent formulations of nihilism. Texts such as Karen Carr's The Banalization
o f Nihilism and Johan Goudsblom’s Nihilism and Culture are genealogical
because they construct nihilism within a spatial framework, proposing a
family tree of nihilism in which a number of different formulations are
explored. A genealogical structure therefore demonstrates that a number of
formulations of nihilism do not fit into the linear pattern of a chronological
history. Such formulations are not independent of history but embedded
within it, emerging in the manner of a genetic inheritance. Thus, genealogi­
cal histories explore the genus [family] of nihilism in relation to a number of
generic constructions.
4 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

Both chronological and genealogical histories of nihilism reveal that

the manner in which a history of nihilism is constructed alters our percep­
tion of its development. This chapter outlines the ways in which nihilism is
constructed historically to demonstrate the extent to which the concept of
“nothing” is reified within certain cultural systems, and hence write a history
of nihilism. However, this must be self-referential, with an understanding
that this construction is itself part of the history: we can never step outside
the history that is being written. Understanding genealogical characteristics
of generic “nihilisms” allows chronological developments of the term to be
gauged, albeit contingently, and so this chapter uses both genealogical and
chronological histories to show the emergence and development of the con­
cept of nihilism. Despite the fact that the chronology presented later in this
chapter is engaged in hermeneutic violence, forcing a reading of the history
of nihilism, the genealogy that precedes it demonstrates why such a structure
is in place, and locates the history itself within a discursive network of other
histories.

GENERA TING NIHILISM: A GENEALOGY OF NOTHING

There are a number of ways of formulating nihilism throughout history and

such formulations distinguish between different ideological applications of
nothingness. Here, rather than applying to historically specific ideologies,
the genera of nihilism apply to different philosophies. Thus, the formulation
of nihilism that deals with ethics—ethical nihilism—is solely concerned with
the relevance of nihilism to the study of ethics. Whilst the study of ethics
itself develops over time, ethical nihilism is the negation of all philosophies
of ethics, no matter where or when they are located. Ethical nihilism is there­
fore disconnected from other areas of philosophical enterprise (such as epis-
temology or ontology) as well as historical formulations of ethics: it is, in a
certain sense, independent of history, existing only within the discursive net­
work of nihilism. Such generic divisions of nihilism are in many ways arbi­
trary, for the structure of the family tree of nihilism is always imposed. The
simplest of these divisions are those such as Karl Jaspers’s distinction between
nihilism as the “denial of values” or the “denial of being” (see Goudsblom
Nihilism and Culture 43), and Nietzsche’s “passive” and “active” nihilism
(although Goudsblom notes eight varieties of Nietzschean nihilism, divided
into four binary oppositions; see Goudsblom 10). One of the most complex
genealogies of nihilism is proposed by Carr, who defines five varieties of
nihilism: epistemological, alethiological, metaphysical or ontological, ethical
or moral, and existential or axiological.
Ex Nihilo 5

The first two categories—epistemological and alethiological nihilism—

are commonly held to be synonymous. Epistemological nihilism states that
knowledge is impossible, whereas alethiological nihilism states that any formu­
lation of truth is impossible. In most cases, if one denies the possibility of
knowledge, one is also denying the possibility of truth, and vice versa, although
Carr disagrees with this. She argues:

If knowledge is taken to be justified true belief, then alethiological

nihilism entails epistemological nihilism; without truth, there can be no
knowledge. If, however, knowledge is understood differently (for exam­
ple, as the beliefs deemed legitimate by a community of discourse), then
one can be nihilistic about truth but not about knowledge [ . . . ] Note
that one can hold a theory of truth—an account of what it would take
for a proposition to be considered true—and believe that it is impossible
to satisfy the necessary conditions (i.e., be an alethiological nihilist). (17)

This distinction allows the possibility of denying knowledge andlor truth.

One can believe in knowledge whilst denying truth, or believe in truth whilst
denying knowledge, although this is inaccurate inasmuch as Carr's “commu­
nity of discourse,” like Stanley Fish’s “interpretative communities,” is a “jus­
tified true belief” in that both knowledge and truth are justified consensually
(and is therefore both alethiological and epistemological).2 Such distinctions
do entail an examination of what “truth” means, however, for Carr’s defini­
tion depends upon whether it is “Truth” (an absolute Truth, what postmod­
ernists would call a “metanarrative”) or “truth” (one in any number of
possible truths, often mutually exclusive, but which all exist simultaneously).
When these terms are synonymous, as is usually the case, epistemolog­
ical nihilism (as it is then called) entails a complete absence of the possibil­
ity of knowledge and truth. We cannot know what is true, and what is not.
One of the earliest examples of epistemological nihilism is scepticism, and
most notably Pyrrhic scepticism, which argued that the intellect cannot rea­
son the truth and that empirical data (from the senses) cannot uncover
knowledge:

Neither our perceptions nor our judgments teach us to know truth or

untruth. Therefore we must not trust either our sense or our reason, but
must remain without opinion, unmoved, inclining neither to one side
nor the other. Whatever the matter in question may be, we shall say that
one can neither deny nor confirm it, or that one must simultaneously
confirm and deny it. (Cited in Goudsblom 114)
6 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

The two internal questions of knowledge and truth continually defer to one
another because to know we must have access to the truth, and yet to have
access to the truth we must know what it is. Once one of these terms is
secured, the other falls into line, yet to the most ardent nihilists neither can
be resolved and therefore there is no truth and no knowledge.
Carr's third formulation, metaphysical or ontological nihilism, signifies
“the denial of an (independently existing) world” (17). This is simply a state­
ment of solipsism—“without me the world does not exist”—although it does
have wider-reaching implications when it is perceived as the belief that noth­
ing exists at all; that is, nothing exists, there is no reality against which to
measure this, and no-one to measure it anyway. It is based upon the belief
that reality is illusory, an arbitrary set of rules that has no meaning. The view
that nothing is real can lead to either a magnificent furore of being the centre
of the universe—without its perception by the observer, the universe does
not exist—or to complete impotence in the face of an overwhelming nullity,
depending upon the extent to which this nihilistic formulation is pursued.
Ethical or moral nihilism, Carr's fourth formulation, claims that there
are no moral absolutes and that no system of ethics has any claim to validity.
All judgements are invalid because they are without ultimate justification. By
far the most important aspect of ethical nihilism is its seeming tendency
towards egocentricity and hedonism, in that if no absolute morals exist, one
can act exactly as one pleases (the “magnificent furore” noted in the previous
paragraph). This ethic of nihilism—“if nothing is true, then everything is
justified”—is ultimately the product of false assumptions. It presumes that if
nothing is true then everything must be justified, although if nothing is true
then nothing is justified: “One need only to glance at the multiplicity of
options [ . . . ] to arrive at the conclusion that nothing is true; if the next
move is to proclaim proudly, 'so everything is justified,’ one has a new princi­
ple for action” (Goudsblom Nihilism and Culture 137). This “new principle
for action,” whether egoism or violence, has no grounding in nihilism and is
the result of the individual finding meaning where there is none: it is an indi­
vidual response to the problem of nihilism, not the logical result of it.
Carr’s final formulation of nihilism is, in fact, not necessarily nihilism
at all. She defines a form of existentialism as “existential or axiological
nihilism,” which is “the feeling of emptiness and pointlessness that follows
from the judgment, 'Life has no meaning’” (18). Carr argues that this feeling
of ennui is the most common variety of nihilism and although the previous
formulations do not necessarily lead to existential despair, they often result in
this formulation being realised. It is doubtful, however, that existentialists
such as Jean-Paul Sartre would agree that it is a formulation of nihilism. For
Ex Nihilo 7

example, Sartre argues in B eing a nd Nothingness (1943) that nothingness is

the point from which being begins to exist “for-itself”:

The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist at a distance

from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty distance which being
carries in its being is Nothingness. Thus in order for a self to exist, it is
necessary that the unity of this being include into its own nothingness
as the nihilation of identity. [ . . . ] The for-itself is the being which
determines itself to exist inasmuch as it can not coincide with itself. (78)

This argument does not logically imply that nothingness leads to existential
despair, but that nothingness is an integral part of consciousness, that con­
sciousness only exists by making a gap (a “nihilation”) between itself and its
perception of itself. As such, existentialism does not intrinsically lead to
despair (hence it is not necessarily axiological nihilism), although it is
nihilism inasmuch as it is an “interpellated nothingness.”
There are formulations of nihilism other than those defined by Carr, most
notably those of theological nihilism, political nihilism, and semantic nihilism,
all of which roughly correspond to the chronological development of nihilism.
Theological nihilism is the denial of God, and is one of the cornerstones of
modern-day nihilism since Nietzsches famous proclamation about the death of
God (see Gay Science 181; III, §108) and the rise of atheism during the Enlight­
enment. It denies the possibility of God and of any other transcendent being
(and often any transcendent form of being), although there are numerous pecu­
liarities to this belief. Many proponents of this, to distinguish it from atheism,
believe in the absence that has replaced God since His demise: not an absence of
belief but a belief in Absence. Likewise, political nihilism is itself divided into
numerous beliefs. Although political nihilism is concerned with the philosophi­
cal rejection of any valid means of government, it is often connected with ter­
rorism, anarchism, and political extremism, such as the nihilism of the Russian
Nihilists.3 Political nihilism and theological nihilism are portmanteau categories
comprised of any philosophical formulation that rejects either politics or divin­
ity, respectively, whilst having little to do with nothingness p er se. The final rele­
vant generic category of nihilism, semantic nihilism, argues that words and
concepts are divided, that communication is an illusion, and that language does
not function. In comparison to epistemological or alethiological nihilism,
semantic nihilism comes into play before such questions of consensual knowl­
edge or truth because such a consensus must be communicated.
These categories reveal some of the common differences perceived within
nihilism, although they are all similar inasmuch as they are each concerned
8 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

with truth. Thus, ethical nihilism argues that there is no truth in any system
of ethics, and epistemological nihilism argues that there is no truth in any
system of knowledge. This use of truth creates problems for nihilism because
nihilism dismisses the truth of any system but its own. For example, Marx­
ism can criticise the truth of Christianity because it relies on the laws of pro­
duction and economy rather than a general question of truth. In contrast,
nihilism addresses other philosophies at the level of truth, forcing itself into a
contradiction: how can nihilism be “true” if there is no truth? If nihilism
only exists to negate another ideology, then it can only be true generically,
not generally. This reliance upon another ideology means that the meaning
of nihilism shifts historically, as new ideologies replace once-dominant ones,
with the term “nihilism” gaining a new meaning as a result. It is clear, there­
fore, that nihilism is diachronic, and this requires a shift in emphasis from
genealogy to chronology.

HUMANIST NIHILISM: THE “DEATH OF GOD”

The rise of nihilism as a cultural entity historically begins with the rise of
atheism in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and, as such,
is deeply rooted in European experience. Although it can be traced back fur­
ther, to philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Nicolaus Copernicus, it is
the appropriation of such philosophers and their philosophies that led to the
use of the term.4 Despite the ease with which we can label such philosophers
as forefathers of nihilism—if we accept that its development is part of the
inexorable progress of Western history—it is not entirely accurate, as Simon
Critchley argues in Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: “the proper name for this
breakdown [of religious orthodoxy] is m odernity’' (2). It would be wrong to
argue that modernity is nihilistic because, as stated previously, nihilism is the
response to the various processes of modernity. However, modernity—and
the nihilism implicitly associated with it—originated in the rise of atheism
that swept Europe during this era.
One such example of the emergence of atheism is the “Blasphemy Act”
of 1697, an Act that effectively banned any expression of atheistic belief; the
“Act for the effectual suppressing of blasphemy and profaneness” forbade the
denial of God and any proposition of pantheism. As David Berman notes,
whilst “there is nothing in this Act which makes atheism culpable” there is an
implicit assumption that “no one could be so depraved as to be an atheist”
(35-36). Atheism could not be tolerated, primarily because an atheist threat­
ened the fabric of society: John Lockes Letter Concerning Toleration (1689),
for example, stated that “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are bonds of
Ex Nihilo 9
human society, can have no hold over an atheist. The taking away of God,
though even in thought, dissolves all” (64). Such attitudes remained preva­
lent during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was only in
the late 1700s that works espousing a coherent defence of atheism began to
emerge. In this period, the first true “atheistic” works emerge, such as Paul-
Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach’s The System o f Nature (1770) and Matthew
Turners Answer to Dr Priestleys Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1782).5
Such works focused upon mechanistic, rather than divine, aspects of nature
and society, and thus led to an increased distrust of rationalist philosophies
that sought to explain the world without reference to God. Even then, they
met with resistance, albeit much less vehemently (and with much reduced
effectiveness). For instance, Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790) promoted the idea that atheism would self-destruct if left
alone: “We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution
a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reasons but our
instincts; and that it cannot prevail long” (187). The denial of God, whilst
implicit in rational humanism, was not the sole purpose of rationalistic dis­
course. Rather than being a simple progression from a predominantly reli­
gious culture to a secular culture, the Enlightenment involved a negotiation
between rationality and faith. Ironically, it is this very negotiation that led to
the emergence of atheism as a cultural dominant. Whilst atheistic works
were far from common, they provoked such debate that they gained some
measure of cultural currency. Seen in this way, critics of atheism promoted,
instead of restricted, discourse on such ideas by the very act o f defending
against it.
Similarly, the emergence of nihilism from such debates on atheism is
heavily ironic. James Sheehan, for example, remarks, “Far from wanting to
eradicate Christianity, [German thinkers] wanted to see it improved, purged
of its imperfections, brought up to date” (175). Immanuel Kant, one of the
foremost German philosophers of the Enlightenment period, is a good
example of this desire to improve humanity’s lot. His “transcendent ideal­
ism,” which was primarily involved with the proposition of humanity’s
essential rationality, was far from an expression of atheistic or nihilistic belief.
However, Johann Fichte, a German idealist in the Kantian tradition,
extended Kant’s philosophy to the point that it became a monstrous egoism.
Fichtean idealism, for fellow philosopher Friedrich Jacobi, “reduces every­
thing to the activity of the I, and thus reduces God to a mere creation of the
human imagination [ . . . ] The good, the beautiful, and the holy become
merely hollow names” (cited in Gillespie 66). In 1799, because of a letter
from Jacobi, Fichte has the dubious distinction of being the first nihilist.6
10 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

Jacobi, whilst praising Fichtes reason, despaired that this would inevitably
lead to atheism: “Truly, my dear Fichte, it should not grieve me, if you, or
whoever it might be, want to call chimerism what I oppose to idealism, which
I reproach as nihilism ’ (cited in Gillespie 65 and Goudsblom 4)7 Such
remarks demonstrate the emergence of the term “nihilism” in the general
debates over religion, rationality, and science. During the heated intellectual
debates of these ideas, those who were pro-rationality and anti-deist were
labelled “nihilists.” These early nihilists signified a break in the union of sci­
ence and religion, with their ever-increasing interest in humankind instead
of God, and in reason instead of faith. This rise of rational humanism is the
origin of what is today called “theological nihilism.”
At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a codification of
the term “nihilism” for those who are atheistic, although this was more of an
extension of atheism than a synonym for it. For example, at this point the
term “nihilist” appeared in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Neologie (1801). This
dictionary defined a new term, rienniste: “NIHILIST OR NOTHINGIST.
One who believes in nothing, who interests themselves in nothing” (cited in
Gillespie 276n5 and Goudsblom 3). The emergence of nihilism from the
decline of the Church was the result of the growing momentum of Enlight­
enment rationality, implicitly connecting Enlightenment humanism to
nihilism. Religious bodies condemned this increasing desire for human
knowledge (at the expense of faith) as nihilistic because it disputed certain
undoubted assumptions, and replaced God with humanity. Logic dictated
that faith was incompatible with the world (at least to such “atheistic” writ­
ers) and so the Church began to distance itself from this growing movement
of reason.
This increased distance between rationality and faith could lead only,
in Franz von Baader’s “Über Katholizismus und Protestantismus” (1824), to
“obscurantist pietism” or “scientific nihilism” (cited in Goudsblom 4)
because one must either be a deist with no recourse to reason or a rationalist
with no moral guidance. Such a divide was by this point an unbridgeable
gulf, and so nihilism became synonymous with rationality, rather than
“merely” atheism, clearly indicated by Donoso Cortès’s Essai sur le Catholi-
cisme, le Liberalisme et le Socialisme (1851):

Thus all socialist doctrines, or, to be more exact, all rationalist doctrines,
necessarily lead to nihilism: and nothing is more natural and logical than
that those who separate themselves from God should end in nothing,
since beyond God there is nothing . . . The negation of all authority is far
from being the last of all possible negations; it is simply a preliminary
Ex Nihilo 11

negation which future nihilists will consign to their prolegomena.

(Cited in Goudsblom 5, Goudsblom’s ellipses)

Cortès’s essay is indicative of the change from nihilism as atheism to that

which includes “all rationalist doctrines.” This negation of divine authority
was, for Cortes, only the beginning. What began as a critique of divine
authority due to humanist influences became part of a much wider social
movement that criticised any kind of authority as ultimately unjustified,
beginning the shift in the meaning of the term “nihilism” away from atheism
towards anarchism.

ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN NIHILISM: STIRNER AND THE

RUSSIAN NIHILISTS

The movement between atheism and anarchism is seen nowhere more clearly
than in the philosophy of Max Stirner (the pseudonym of Johann Kaspar
Schmidt), a philosopher who had been following the Hegelian movement in
Germany. “Left” Hegelianism, with which Stirner was initially associated,
was the proto-Marxist belief that the progress of history was through society
rather than government (which was “Right” Hegelianism), and as such is
implicitly related to the rise of humanism. For example, R. W. K. Paterson
argues that Ludwig Feuerbach declared “God’ is nothing but the name for
the idealized essence of man himself, and that a perfected human species is
the true subject of the attribute 'divine’” (Nihilistic Egoist 29). Stirner, how­
ever, abandoned his leftist roots in favour of something more personal, as
seen in the title of his philosophical text, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum
[The Ego and Its Own] (1845). He believed that both government and soci­
ety held back the individual’s growth and proposed that only the individual
matters. This, coupled with the fact that there was no moral framework to
this philosophy because such a framework would also restrict the individual,
explains why Paterson labels Stirner as a “nihilistic egoist.”
The conflation of “nihilism” and “egoism” is implied throughout The
Ego and Its Own in phrases such as “I am not nothing in the sense of empti­
ness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I as creator cre­
ate everything” (5) and “All things are nothing to me” (366).8 For Stirner, the
self defines everything, even truth: “The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a
material that I can use up. All truth by itself is dead, a corpse; it is alive only
in the same way my lungs are alive—to wit, in the measure of my own vital­
ity. Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or
weed, the decision lies in me” (354). This idea of the truth being dead, or at
12 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

least centred upon the human, means that truth is true only in relation to the
individual, and not outside that relation. Stirner writes that “[truth] has its
value not in itself but in me. O f itself it is valueless. The truth is a—creature’
(354). In this promotion of the egoistic individual, Stirner also rejects any
notion of society, arguing that the goal of Communism—community—is
fundamentally flawed because it is a “hypocrisy of community” inasmuch as
“We are equal only in thoughts, only when we are thought, not as we really
and bodily are. I am ego and you are ego” (311). This is why Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels’s The German Ideology (1846) argues against much of
Stirner’s philosophy—“Saint Max’s” philosophy reflects the bourgeois luxury
of being able to be the absolute creator. Parodying Stirner, they write: “I am
everything in the void of nonsense, 'but’ I am the nugatory creator, the all,
from which I myself, as creator, create nothing” (125). Unsurprisingly, the
primary criticism that Marx and Engels’s acerbically propose of Stirner—
who is later termed “Sancho” (from Cervantes’s Don Quixote)—is that he has
no bearing on “reality”:

His philosophical lack of thought was already in itself the end of philos­
ophy just as his unspeakable language was the end of all language. San-
cho’s triumph was also due to the fact that of all philosophers he was
least of all acquainted with actual relations, hence philosophical cate­
gories with him lost the last vestige of connection with reality, and with
that the last vestige of meaning. (507)

The lack of referentiality found by Marx and Engels in Stirner’s work is a

valid criticism, but they do fail to do justice to the central component of The
Ego and Its Own: anti-authoritarianism. Whilst in many ways a philosophical
dead-end, Stirner’s desire to free individuals from all forms of control,
whether religious or secular, links him with the movement that was develop­
ing in Russia at the time. As such, Stirner’s radical perspective is one of the
links between the decline in religious orthodoxy (nihilism-as-atheism) and
the rise of political extremism (nihilism-as-anarchism), a movement from the
atheistic origins of nihilism towards Russian Nihilism.
As the meaning of nihilism moved from religion to politics in the mid­
nineteenth century, so too did its geographical location, moving east from
France and Germany towards Russia. There was a radical upheaval of the
inherited social order occurring in Russia during the 1850s and 1860s, an
upheaval that brought about a profound shift in the way nihilism was per­
ceived. Russian Nihilism was conspicuously concerned with relating nihilism
to real-world scenarios—a movement from theory to action for which
Ex Nihilo 13

“nihilism” was their term for revolutionary fervour. Despite this, to attribute
any one cause or any one meaning to Russian Nihilism is impossible as there
are two differing approaches towards nihilism in this period. These two per­
suasions of Russian Nihilism are roughly characterised by their respective
political instigators and organs: Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the Sovremennik
[Contemporary], and Dmitrii Pisarev and the Russkoe Slovo [Russian Word].
Chernyshevsky's brand of populism is called nihilism only by default as it
was Pisarev who actually adopted the term after reading Ivan Turgenevs
Fathers and Sons (1862) and empathising with the character of Bazarov (see
Venturi Roots o f Revolution 326 and Pozefsky “Smoke as ‘Strange and Sinister
Commentary on Fathers and Sons'” 572). Chernyshevsky and the Sovremen-
nik group actively opposed the term, arguing that it bore no relation to their
agenda.
The character of Bazarov is one of the earliest depictions of a nihilist
within Russian literature and is a compound of the figures of Chernyshevsky
and Pisarev.9 Although other authors dealt with nihilism, especially Fyodor
Dostoevsky in texts such as Demons (1873) and The Brothers Karamazov
(1880), such texts continued the debate, rather than initiating it.10 Within
Fathers and Sons, the first appearance of the term “nihilism” is met with some
confusion by Nikolai Petrovich, an aged member of the old guard: “A nihilist
[ . . . ] That’s from the Latin nihil, nothing, so far as I can judge. Therefore,
the word denotes a man who . . . who doesn’t recognize anything?” (26). This
is interpreted by Pavel, Nikolai’s brother, to represent one “who doesn’t
respect anything” (26). The response from Arkady, Bazarov’s friend and
Nikolai’s son, clarifies the issue thus: “A nihilist is a man who doesn’t
acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith,
no matter how much that principle may be surrounded with respect” (27).
Turgenev’s depiction of nihilism fuelled an important debate during this
period because it highlighted the problem of how social change was to be
achieved. For example, M. A. Antonovich, a critic for the Sovremennik,
called Bazarov “a venomous creature who poisons everything he touches”
(cited in Pozefsky 571), whereas Pisarev, obviously espousing the Russkoe
Slovo line, wrote that “If Bazarovism is an illness, it is the illness of our times”
(cited in Pozefsky 572).
The distinction between the two branches of Russian Nihilism is an
important one because Chernyshevsky's aim was the Westernisation of Rus­
sia, following Feuerbach and Fichte in a process of anthropocentricism.
Hegelianism had been debated in Germany for many years and had resulted
in what was once a state-authorised philosophy becoming increasingly revo­
lutionary due to its atheistic leanings. Elena Dryzhakova summarises
14 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

Chernyshevsky's position, arguing that he rejected “religious and moral

assumptions as outdated and useless for the solution of social problems” and
found that Feuerbach, and others like him, “provided a totally new founda­
tion for the resolution of moral questions” (59). Gillespie also notes this
reliance on Feuerbach, arguing that “The Russian debate over nihilism is [
. . . ] an extension of the German controversy” (138)—clearly indicated in
Fathers and Sons when Bazarov says “the Germans are our teachers” (30).
Chernyshevsky's appropriation of the German Left Hegelianism moved
the debate from predominantly theological arguments towards the notion of
a “unity of nature.” This unity meant that humanity, as the central element
in both nature and society, derived the greatest good from “rational egoism”
because “what is good is what is advantageous” (cited in Dryzhakova 59).
This introduced the idea of “utility” into the rhetoric of the Russian
Nihilists, as Dryzhakova notes: “utility was declared to be the sole criterion
of good, and goodness and utility were deemed to be simply the product of
‘reason’” (59). This secular and rationalistic belief led to a distrust of all
authoritarian philosophies, whether religious or secular, and so, as Gillespie
argues, “Russian Nihilism attributed to man an almost absolute power to
transform his social existence. The theoretical basis for this nihilist view was
the belief that history was determined not by immutable laws but by free
individuals” (141). However, the Westernising aims of Chernyshevsky, hav­
ing little to do with an institutionalised programme of violence against the
state, were to become corrupted. In 1862, the year that Fathers and Sons was
first published, both the Sovremennik and the Russkoe Slovo were suppressed,
and Chernyshevsky himself arrested, following the St Petersburg fires and the
publication of the notorious “Young Russia.”11
“Young Russia” was an essay written by a student called Petre Zaich-
nevsky that explicitly promoted violence towards the ruling classes: “Soon,
soon will come the day when we shall unfurl the great banner of the future,
the red banner, and with the loud cry of 'Long live the social and democratic
republic of Russia we shall move on the Winter Palace to liquidate its occu­
pants” (cited in Dryzhakova 63). Chernyshevsky's liberal agenda was increas­
ingly undermined at this point by other, more radical voices in Russian
culture. Westernisation gave way to the increasingly violent socialist agenda
of the Russkoe Slovo group, who felt that the attitudes espoused by the writers
of the Sovremennik were not radical enough. Venturi argues that Pisarevs
group reduced everything solely to what might be termed “materialist real­
ism,” saying that “Aesthetic ‘realism’ became in their hands a violent repudi­
ation of art; utilitarianism’ an exaltation of the exact sciences, the only
useful’ kind of human activity; and enlightenment’ a glorification of the
Ex Nihilo 15

educated classes” (Roots o f Revolution 325). This, then, is the real moment of
Russian Nihilism, the point at which it arguably ceases to be populist and
allies itself with the intelligentsia. The Russkoe Slovo group was purely inter­
ested in science—the science of economics, of liberation, and of strength:
“They refused to believe either in ruling classes or even in a myth of the peo­
ple’ and the peasants.’ 'The emancipation of the person’ (i.e. the formation
of independent characters, who think critically’) was more important than
social emancipation” (327).
The politics of the Russkoe Slovo group dominated interpretations of
nihilism at this point, despite the fact that, for members of the Sovremennik
group such as Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, nihilism “is a word devoid of
meaning, less suitable than any other for describing the younger generation,
in which could be found every other kind of 'ism’ but certainly not nihilism”
(cited in Venturi 326). For Nikolai Berdiaev, for example, “The Nihilism of
the ‘sixties” can be defined as “hatred of all religion, mysticism, metaphysics
and pure art, as things which deflect energy from the creation of a better
social order; substitution of social utilitarianism for all absolute morality;
exclusive domination of natural science and political economy, together with
the suspicion of the humanities” (Russian Revolution 17). Hermann Gold­
schmidt argues similarly in Der Nihilismus im Licht einer kritischen Philoso-
phie: “Russian Nihilism was politically liberal, philosophically materialistic
and spiritually atheist” (cited in Goudsblom 9). Russian Nihilism was social
Darwinism: if an institution was strong enough to survive, then it would; if
it was not, then it would fall. Such radicals were not interested in the nihil,
but in revolution, and therefore Russian Nihilism was nihilistic only inas­
much as it relied upon certain aspects of Western philosophy that were them­
selves only tangentially nihilistic. To call the Russian Nihilists nihilistic is
only accurate in historical terms—they are the “Russian Nihilists”—because
their aims and intentions had little to do with nothingness. However,
nihilism became predicated upon, thanks to Chernyshevsky, the idea of a
“new man” who could free himself from history and, thanks to Pisarev,
notions of terrorism, elitist egoism, and anarchism.

ANTI-HUMANIST NIHILISM: NIETZSCHE AGAINST

CHRISTIANITY

Around the same time that Russian Nihilism was in decline, Nietzsche, writing
about a “transvaluation of all values” in The Will to Power (written between
1883 and 1888), brought nihilism back into Western culture.12 Instead of
showing nihilism to be an emergent ideology, as both nihilism-as-atheism and
16 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

nihilism-as-anarchism indicate, Nietzsche argued that nihilism was some­

thing that pervaded all European values throughout history: for Nietzsche,
Christianity itself was nihilistic. Nietzsche argued that Christianity was so
involved with telling the truth that when it was “proved” untrue it left a vac­
uum in its wake and that, in its struggle for the ineffable transcendent, it
rejected the natural world. He wrote of “the damage all human institutions
sustain if a divine and transcendent higher sphere is postulated”: “natural”
comes to mean “contemptible” until “with relentless logic” one arrives “at the
absolute demand to deny nature” (Will to Power 141; §245). According to
critics such as Goudsblom, Nietzsche even went so far as to propose that
nihilism “should be regarded not as the personal whim of inveterate nega-
tivists, but as the product of an irrefutable logic inherent in European cul­
ture” (140).
It is after the preface to The Will to Power that we see Nietzsches answer
to the question “What does nihilism’ mean?”: “That the highest values deval­
uate themselves. The aim is lacking; why?’ finds no answer” (9; §2). He per­
ceived nihilism to be a sickness—ambiguous in that it weakens, but creates
strength when it is overcome—and thus nihilism became something that was
to be overcome. Passive nihilism is a sickness, “a weary nihilism that no
longer attacks [. . . ] a sign of weakness,” whereas active nihilism “reaches its
maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction” (18; §23).
Active nihilism can be characterised in some ways by the tenets of Russian
Nihilism; passive nihilism, according to Nietzsche, was nowhere more preva­
lent than in the Christian monism that had dominated Europe for almost
two millennia.
The fact that Nietzsche labelled Christianity as nihilism is ironic, given
the origins of the term within atheism. To Nietzsche, nihilism arose because
of Christianity’s insistence upon a hierarchy of morals, an absolute—God—
from which to derive all standards. Christianity “granted man an absolute
value, as opposed to his smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of
becoming and passing away” (9; §4), and in so doing “conceded to the
world, in spite of suffering and evil, the character of perfection” (10; §4). In
fact, Christianity “posited that man had a knowledge of absolute values and
thus adequate knowledge precisely regarding what is most important” (10;
§4).13 However, Christian morality was originally created to stop humanity
from falling into the nihilistic abyss: “It prevented man from despising him­
self as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it
was a means o f preservation. In sum, morality was the great antidote against
practical and theoretical nihilism (10; §4). The use of Christian morality to
stem nihilism creates nihilism as a human baseline, a chasm which is forever
Ex Nihilo 17

threatening when one sees that truth is merely contingent upon human
need, when the smallness of humanity is compared to the expanse of the uni­
verse. Nietzsche felt that Christianity was no longer required as a “cure” to
the sickness of nihilism, or at least, “this first nihilism” because, by the nine­
teenth century, “our Europe is no longer that uncertain, capricious, absurd”
and Christianity is no longer required: “‘God’ is far too extreme a hypothe­
sis” (70; §114). Christianity was a means to an end and thus justified by its
initial conditions; those initial conditions, however, no longer applied, and
therefore Christianity, by devaluating its own values and creating atheism,
became the epitome of nihilism.
In 1887 (when Nietzsche wrote this part of The Will to Power), Christ­
ian ideology no longer held the power that it once had. Nietzsche charted
the fall of Christianity back to Christian morality itself, saying: “Among the
forces that morality cultivated was truthfulness: this eventually turned itself
against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective—and now
the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shed­
ding becomes a stimulant” (10; §5).14 The rise of the Enlightenment ideals
of reason, of humanity “for itself,” finally destroyed its own creator—the
Christian moral of truthfulness. The Christian desire for absolute truth had
turned on Christianity and found it lacking. Christianity, which secured
humanity against nihilism, eventually exacerbated its rise. Thus, those earlier
commentators such as Jacobi and Cortes, who found that rationality and
religion were staunchly opposed, were indeed correct, but sought to lay the
blame on individuals such as Fichte, not upon Christianity itself.
In Nietzsches view, nihilism is therefore quite literally the void left by
Christianity’s absence. The reaction to the distrust of Christian morality, the
lack of faith in faith itself, leads not to a position of compromise, but to an
extreme reaction: “Thus the belief of the absolute immorality of nature, in
aim- and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary affect, once the
belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable. Nihilism
appears at this point, not that the displeasure at existence has become greater
than before but because one has come to mistrust any meaning’ in suffering,
indeed, in existence” (35; §55). The gap left in morality harks back to Niet­
zsche’s idea that the “untenability of one interpretation of the world [ . . . ]
awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false” (7; §1).
This reaction is further explained when Nietzsche argues that, “One inter­
pretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation, it
now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything
were in vain” (35; §55).15 Thus, for Nietzsche, nihilism is fundamentally
thwarted idealism: when the belief fails, only the nihilistic void is left. Where
18 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

perspectivism, or at least relativism, would seem the most obvious recourse,

there is rather an extreme reaction to the belief that all interpretations must
be false.
Nihilism, for Nietzsche, stemmed from humanity’s inability to accept
that what it could not see, what it could not discover, could still exist: “The
immodesty of man: to deny meaning where he sees none” (325; §599). This
is a direct indictment of humanity’s search for meaning, in that if meaning
does not become immediately apparent, humanity assumes that there must
be none: “Our will requires an aim; it would sooner have the void for its pur­
pose than be void of purpose” (Genealogy o f Morals 231; §111.1, and 299;
§111.28). This led Nietzsche to deny any philosophical truth in nihilism, for
it originates only in humanity’s inability to accept the “truth” that truth is
fabricated:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and

anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a peo­
ple: truths are illusions which one has forgotten that this is what they
are; metaphors which are worn out and without serious power; coins
which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer
as coins. (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” 46-47)

Nietzsche’s solution to the resulting nihilism is a Dionysian will-to-power

which eternally makes and unmakes the world (opposed to an Apollonian
will which seeks to stratify and codify the world), a world in which man is
the centre:

This, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally

self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight,
my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is
itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself—do
you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for
you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly
men?—This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you
yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides! (Will to
Power 550; §1067)

This is, for Nietzsche, the overcoming of nihilism, the solution to its problem­
atic. Although nihilism devalues itself, it does not rebuild, whereas Nietzsche
Ex Nihilo 19

proposes a dualistic creative and destructive process, which Gillespie argues “is
to its very core a world in opposition to itself, a world of constant and univer­
sal war in which every being seeks to conquer and subdue every other being”
(Nihilism Before Nietzsche 239). This sense of eternal conflict as the solution to
social nihilism gave rise, in the early-twentieth century to some of the most
horrific experiences humanity had yet experienced. At this stage, nihilism
gained the meaning with which we are most familiar: mass destruction.

AUTHORITARIAN NIHILISM: THE RISE OF TOTALITARIANISM

In the twentieth century nihilism emerged as the defining factor of Western

culture. This assertion indicates a certain perception in the historical forma­
tion of the twentieth century; that modernity, in the guise of the develop­
ment of Enlightenment ideals, gave rise to the traumas that that century
witnessed. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe notes: “if it is true that the age is
that of the accomplishment of nihilism, then it is at Auschwitz that that
accomplishment took place in its purest formless form” (Heidegger; Art, and
Politics 37). This association of nihilism with modernity is a fundamental
stage in the appropriation of nihilism and a number of critics who perceive
nihilism to be the dominant factor in twentieth-century culture argue this
point, including Nietzsche (albeit with foresight), Heidegger, Karl Löwith,
and Theodor Adorno. On one side of the argument, Heidegger and Niet­
zsche oppose nihilism by straining against it, leading to the creation of a
philosophical backbone for National Socialism. National Socialism (mis)read
Nietzsche as advocating the supremacy of one race above all others and
sought to destroy everything that was other to this ideal. The Nietzschean
übermensch became a symbol, not of the active overcoming of passive
nihilism, but of an active, state-authorised nihilism attempting to eradicate
all traces of otherness. Likewise, Heideggers proposal for the recuperation of
being, of Dasein [the process of being], led towards the active affirmation of
an ideal over humanity. On the other side of the argument, seen in Adorno
and Löwith, the Holocaust itself is the epitome of negation, of nihilism. The
“European sickness” noted by Nietzsche was no longer passive, but actively
concerned with total destruction. In both cases, because of the Holocaust,
modernity always turns towards nihilism to explain itself.
That Nietzschean philosophy should come to this end is not solely a
result of Elisabeth Nietzsches treatment of his works (editing her brothers
works to remove anything anti-nationalist or anti-fascist and emphasising
anti-Semitic sentiments), or the Heideggerian reading that dominates the
era. Certain problems exist within Nietzschean philosophy that make this
20 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

reading possible. Although Nietzsche was staunchly anti-nationalist, the

removal of certain mitigating characteristics of his philosophical frame­
work recreates the will-to-power as the will-to-destruction. Löwith
argued, paraphrasing Nietzsches position on morality, that “Morality
becomes replaced by the will to an end and hence by the will to the means
toward that end” (208).16 The world as will-to-power (and nothing
besides!) relies strongly, perhaps too strongly, on the notion of conflict
and destruction at the expense of morality. For Löwith, this also appears
in Heideggers philosophy:

The “spirit” of National Socialism has to do not so much with the

national and the social as with the kind of radical resoluteness and
dynamic which rejects all discussion and genuine communication
because it relies exclusively on itself—on the (German) capacity-for-
Being which is always one’s own. Without exception, it is expressions of
power and resoluteness which characterize the vocabulary of National
Socialist politics and Heideggers philosophy. (Martin Heidegger &Euro­
pean Nihilism 219)

In Löwith’s view, Heideggers political and philosophical association with

National Socialism was not a plan for survival in a hostile regime, but a
meeting between two similar philosophies (see M artin H eidegger & European
Nihilism 216—25). Heideggers concept of Dasein is identical to that ideal
state, proposed by National Socialist philosophy, of lebensraum [living-
space] , where the individuals and nations exist in conflict with one another
over available resources. Only the strong survive this conflict, and therefore
the “capacity-for-Being” is always from ones self.
Heideggers works on the construction of Being frequently refer to
nihilism and nothingness, but the two most explicit are “What is Meta­
physics?” and “The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead,’” which encapsulate
Heideggers approach to nihilism. Heideggers work on Being and nihilism
was involved with the association of nihilism and metaphysics: he argued
that you could not explore “that which is” without recourse to “that which is
not.” In his attempts to “take explicit possession” of Dasein, he notes: “What
should be examined are beings only, and besides that—nothing; beings
alone, and further—nothing; solely beings, and beyond that—nothing.
What about this nothing? Is it an accident that we talk this way so automati­
cally? Is it only a manner of speaking—and nothing besides?” (“What is
Metaphysics?” 95). His conclusion is that nothing is an integral aspect of
Being, as without nothingness there is no Being. Furthermore, Heidegger
Ex Nihilo 21

argued that Being and nothingness co-exist in a continual tension not unlike
Nietzsches concept of a Dionysian will-to-power:

The word “nihilism” indicates that nihil (Nothing) is, and is essentially,
in that which it names. Nihilism means: Nothing is befalling everything
and in every respect. “Everything” means what is, in its entirety. And
whatever stands there in every respect proper to it when it is experienced
as that which is. Hence, nihilism means that Nothing is befalling what­
ever is as such, in its entirety. But whatever is, what it is and how it is
from out of Being. Assuming that every “is” lies in Being, the essence of
nihilism consists of the fact that Nothing is befalling Being itself.
(“Word of Nietzsche” 110-11)

If nothing functions as a negation, it is a negation fundamentally at odds

with itself. Nothing is not part of a straightforward opposition between
Being and nothing, but an implicit player in the creation of Being: “The
nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather, it
originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such” (“What is Meta­
physics?” 104). However, in this “essential unfolding,” nihilism must also act
upon itself:

This wholly repelling gesture towards beings that are in retreat as a

whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxi­
ety, is the essence of nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of
beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to
calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself
nihilates. (“What is Metaphysics?” 103)

“The nothing itself nihilates” is a translation of Das Nicht nichtet, more com­
monly translated as “the nothing nots.” However, whilst the verb “nots” conveys
the original “nichtet” in the sense that this word is a neologism, Krell's transla­
tion allows the reader to see a two-fold process. “The nothing itself nihilates”
shows that nothing has an action of nihilation (“The nothing nihilates”) and
that this action refers back to itself (“The nothing nihilates itself).
If Being and nothing are fundamentally related, then metaphysics (the
study of Being) is fundamentally related to nihilism (the study of nothing)
and nihilism is elevated to a “world-historical movement”:

If the essence of nihilism lies in history, so that the truth of Being

remains wanting in the appearing of whatever is as such, in its entirety,
22 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

and if, accordingly, Nothing is befalling Being and its truth, then meta­
physics as the history of the truth of what is such, is, in its essence,
nihilism. If, finally, metaphysics is the historical ground of the world
history that is being determined by Europe and the West, then that
world history is, in an entirely different sense, nihilistic. (“Word of
Nietzsche” 109)

Following Heideggers argument to its logical conclusion, if nihilism is

implicitly located within metaphysics and metaphysics traces the movement
of thought from Platonism to Nietzsche and Heidegger, then nihilism is an
implicit aspect of European history Asking about the condition of nihilistic
history, Heidegger wrote at the end of “What is Metaphysics?”: “Why are
there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” (110). (Nihilistic) history
must then ask the questions: Why is what is is, as opposed to what is not?
Why does what happen happen, as opposed to what does not? Nihilism is
thus an implicit part of history and the history of modernity
Both Löwith and Adorno support this view of nihilism as an implicit
aspect of modernity, although their arguments indict both Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Löwith argued that the decline of Christianity led to the realisa­
tion of nihilism because, after humankind became the measure of things, it
then proceeded to negate itself:

At the same time as Marx and Kierkegaard, all the other radical follow­
ers of Hegel made the negation of what exists into the principle of their
thinking. Marx destroys the capitalist world; Kierkegaard intensifies the
“absolute negativity” of romantic irony up to the point of leaping into
faith; Stirner places himself upon “Nothing;” Feuerbach says that we
must be “absolutely negative” in order to create something new; and
Bauer demands “heroic deeds from out of Nothing” as the presupposi­
tion of new worlds. (203)

The history of modernity is summarised here by the movement of negativity,

presupposing a Hegelian dialectic of the destruction (antithesis) of what
exists (thesis) in order to bring change (synthesis). Nietzsche and Heidegger,
as players in this Hegelian game, did not bar the doors to nihilism but actu­
ally opened them wider and issued an invitation: not an Ü berwindung [over­
coming] of nihilism, but a Verwindung [resigned acceptance] of it.17 Rosen
argues that whilst Heideggers intent “was to overcome European nihilism by
setting the stage for a new understanding of the question of Being,'” this was
“transformed into a profound resignation in the face of nihilism” (101—102)
Ex Nihilo 23

as a very result of the history that was unfolding around him. Heidegger, in
trying to overcome Nietzschean nihilism, eventually succumbed to the ill­
ness. Löwith, in perceiving modernity to be the result of the decline of
Christian morality and the rise of totalitarianism, blamed both Nietzsche
and Heidegger for the fact that nihilism was squarely at the forefront of
modernity and argued that it is through these attempts to overcome nihilism
that nihilism came to be realised.
The expression of this thought is seen clearly in Adornos works, where
modernity proceeds through the recuperation of nihilism. He writes that,
“Acts of overcoming, even that of nihilism, together with the Nietzschean
one that was otherwise intended but which still provided fascism with slo­
gans, are always worse than what they overcome” (Negative Dialectics 380).
As the abstract expression of thought, nihilism leads to destruction because
“Nothingness is the acme of abstraction, and the abstract is the abominable”
(380). This does not fully explain, however, the association of nihilism with
the Holocaust, because the Holocaust is anything but abstract to Adorno.
Nihilism, as the spectre of abstract thought, is likened to the Holocaust
because, “If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the con­
cept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with
which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims” (365). That is, if
thought is only satisfied with itself and its own identity, then the Holocaust
is only one step away. According to Adorno therefore, nihilism is to be
understood as intellectual Onanism, thoughts desire to think in blank circles
around itself.
Like Löwith, Adorno argues that nihilism is not connected with Nicht
[nothing] but with Vernichtung [destruction], a shift from nothing to the
process of making nothing, from absence to the extermination of presence.
Adornos response to nihilism illustrates the way in which the dialectical
game, which occurs so frequently in twentieth-century discussions of
nihilism, is played with loaded dice: “The true nihilists are the ones who
oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities, the ones who
are thus conspiring with all existant malice, and eventually with the destruc­
tive principle itself. Thought honors itself by defending what is damned as
nihilism” (381). This distinction between “the true nihilists” and “nihilism”
is due to the difference between those who strive against nothingness, no
matter what the cost, believing at all times in their own truth, and a nihilism
that rejects these petty truths. “Thought honors itself by defending what is
damned as nihilism” does not mean that thought should defend nihilism,
“honour” here being given a positive implication, but that thought honours
itself at the expense o f the Other by defending what is damned as “nihilism.”
24 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

The desire for thought to associate “what is damned” with “nihilism” occurs
because thought needs something against which to strive or, as Critchley
phrases it, “a straw man of meaninglessness that can easily be knocked down
so that meaning can be restored” (20).
Clearly, the emergence and subsequent development of nihilism is an
integral aspect of European history, whether or not it could have been
avoided. Its oscillation between humanism and anti-humanism, and between
authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism, is a central component of the
rise of modernity, and its various commentators and critics remain some of
the most important figures in the process—rather than progress—of con­
structing our contemporary world. However, if nihilism is the philosophy of
negation, then there can surely be no reason for it to be, as Vattimo argues,
“our (only) chance” (End o f M odernity 23). As will become clear, however, a
postmodern formulation of nihilism indicates “the extremity that eludes the
concept” that Adorno desires, the result of the conflation of nihilism and the
sublime within the postmodern. This conflation occurs solely within the
postmodern, although throughout the history of modernity the connection
between the two concepts is implied. Thus, before showing the appearance
of nihilism within postmodernism, we must first uncover the connections
between nihilism and the sublime that exist before the postmodern era, in
relation to the sublime and Enlightenment modernity.
Chapter Two

Stylising the Sublime

Like nihilism, the sublime has a rich cultural heritage, although the sub­
lime extends historically to the concept of beauty, rather than negation.
This difference implies that nihilism and the sublime bear little resem­
blance to one another to the extent that they may be considered opposed
binary concepts. Such a perception is supported by the fact that nihilism
became an independent concept during the late-eighteenth and early-nine-
teenth centuries, whereas the sublime dominated aesthetics during the late-
seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, preceding nihilism by at least a
century. Although this seems to indicate two different concepts, the fact
that the sublime was central to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aes­
thetic discourse shows that there was an ideological motivation behind the
study of the sublime and that the construction of the sublime is implicated
with the dominant ideologies of this period. As this period marks the rise
of the Enlightenment Project, which has been hitherto been called “the
process of modernity,” it is clear that both nihilism and the sublime were
constructed within the same Enlightenment ideologies and were the result
of the same social catalysts. The sublime is therefore only arbitrarily made
distinct from nihilism; nihilism is actually a temporally-displaced formula­
tion of the sublime.
Since an ideology constructs the sublime, there is an intention to its
existence. It is as historically specific as nihilism, indicating the usefulness of
the concept of sublimity to a particular historical consciousness. This cul­
tural specificity means that cultural understandings of the sublime, like
nihilism, shift over time. This is not an extraneous observation, despite the
fact that all concepts exist diachronically, because it warns us of the dangers
of anachronism. As Martin Donougho argues, we must be wary of reading
meanings into the sublime that were not actually present during a given
period:

25
26 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

The sublime has by now come to form part of the furniture of our com­
mon world (artistic, philosophical, or everyday). Yet that should not
blind us to the attendant fact that—as with other categories of aesthet­
ics—the sublime is historically specific, and has been taken in a variety
of ways. We should be wary of reifying it, therefore, but equally wary of
reading one sense of the sublime backwards or forwards into another
time period, thus assimilating history to theory. For all its historical
contingency, we may nonetheless continue to speak of the sublime, or
more cautiously, of styles of the sublime. (“Stages of the Sublime in
North America” 909-10)

When reading formulations of the sublime we should always be aware that it

is only a reading and that, as such, it is heavily reliant upon our understand­
ing of the period at hand. Likewise, when we speak of “styles of the sublime,”
we must also understand that we are speaking of stylised forms of the sublime
within ideological constructions. If the sublime is an ideological construct,
then what one period considers sublime is not necessarily sublime in
another, and “the sublime, rightly understood, is not all things to all men”
(Wood The Word “Sublime” 210). This explains why a number of different
approaches to sublimity appeared after the initial resurgence of the concept
during the seventeenth century, including Burkes “psychological” sublime,
Immanuel Kants “noetic” sublime, and the Romantic “natural” sublime.
Each of these uses the sublime in a different way, emphasising particular for­
mulations of sublimity. These are therefore stylised forms of the sublime,
“styles” of sublimity that originate within a given ideological discourse.

SUBLIME TEXTS AND THEIR CONTEXTS

The “styles” of the sublime seen in Burke, Kant, and the Romantics originate
in the mid-seventeenth and late-eighteenth centuries, during the sudden
enthusiasm for “aesthetic theory.” This sudden proliferation of styles of the
sublime emerged from the rediscovery of one of the earliest works of literary
criticism, Peri Hupsous [On Sublimity], supposedly written by a Greek
rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus (circa 213-273 CE) although
it is more likely to be the work of a first-century philosopher now known as
“Pseudo-Longinus.”1 The reason for the popularity of this text is primarily
due to the translation by Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux in 1674, which fed
into the emergent discourse on the nature of art, and was popularised by
John Dryden and The Spectator (see Longinus xv-xvi).2 Longinus’s text is sig­
nificant because it gave a formal, classical structure to seventeenth-century
Stylising the Sublime 27

aesthetic discourse, defining a form of emotional “elevation” that is possible

through language and distinguishing between “beautiful” and “sublime”
forms. This marks the arrival of “the sublime” within English culture because
“elevation” or “height” is the English translation of hypsous (i)i(j0U9), which
through the Latin sublimis [lofty or elevated language], came to mean a sub­
lime feeling.3 Most of the structure of On Sublimity is concerned with
rhetorical strategies in order to produce this feeling of elevation, although it
frequently implies the ability of sublime art to free the mind from language.
This is an important debate in the classification of Longinus’s sublime, and is
worthy of some discussion.
Although it is a reductive assertion, there is a discursive shift from a
“rhetorical” sublime to a “natural” or “psychological” sublime during the sev­
enteenth and eighteenth centuries. Samuel Monk argues that the develop­
ment from Longinus’s rhetorical model to the Burkean model within this
period is of primary importance in establishing the development of the con­
cept of the sublime during the eighteenth century. This is a shift from “aes­
thetic” to “ethical” sublime, an observation that becomes important in
relation to Kant’s understanding of the sublime. Monk argues: “Once it was
seen that the sublime is a state of mind evoked by objects and ideas, the objec­
tive criteria of the rules were gradually invalidated” (Sublime 236). Other crit­
ics, however, have argued that this is too extreme. For example, T. E. B. Wood
argues that he “cannot really agree with any of this unless qualified to the
extent of removing its impact” (21), because Longinus’s sublime is “a phe­
nomenon that exists where the demands of form, appropriate subject matter,
and artistic inspiration are fused” (36) and is thus not purely rhetorical.
Indeed, Monk argues that the definition of a rhetorical sublime is “wrong”
and a natural sublime is “right,” a construction far too blindly asserted. Nev­
ertheless, the argument, even when qualified, does retain enough impact to
bear scrutiny. The eighteenth-century sublime is, however, not purely natural
or psychological but a mix of classical and romantic definitions, and the inter­
pretation of On Sublimity is an integral part of this debate.
Without entering into the debate over where sublimity of art resides,
whether in the artist’s formal conception or the audience’s response, the struc­
ture of On Sublimity is generally more concerned with rhetoric (form) than
nature (response), whereas the Burkean formulation of the sublime is generally
more about nature than rhetoric. On Sublimity is primarily concerned with
rhetorical strategies in producing “sublime” writing. Its structure follows the
“five sources of sublimity” listed in Longinus’s preface to the text: “the power to
conceive great thoughts,” “strong and inspired emotion,” “certain kinds of fig­
ures,” “noble diction,” and “dignified and elevated word-arrangement” (8; §8).
28 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

Of these five sections, only one is intrinsically related to the “natural” sub­
lime—“strong and inspired emotion”—although even this has only two sub­
sections of its five concerned with nature. However, it is impossible to argue
that On Sublimity is concerned solely with rhetoric, as seen when Longinus
writes: “Experience in invention and ability to order and arrange material
cannot be detected in single passages; we begin to appreciate them only
when we see the whole context. Sublimity, on the other hand, produced at
the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the ora­
tor’s whole power at a single blow” (2; §1). Without the “whirlwind” of emo­
tion there can be no sublime; “experience in invention” is not enough. This
implies that rhetorical strategy alone is not enough to produce sublimity.
Furthermore, the passage conflates rhetorical and natural constructions of
the sublime because rhetoric is subsumed by natural metaphor and nature is
reconstructed as an aspect of rhetoric: speech is a “whirlwind,” although it is
“produced at the right moment” and “exhibits the orators whole power.”
This is seen clearly in Longinus’s comparison of Hyperides and Demos­
thenes, where although Hyperides “reproduces all the good features of
Demosthenes,” he does not excite the emotions of his audience, unlike
Demosthenes’s powerful rhetoric: “The crash of his thunder, the brilliance of
his lightning” (40-41; §34). The message is that technique is not enough,
and that there must be some stroke of genius—Boileau’s ineffable j e ne sais
quoi—in order to impart an artwork with sublime feeling: this genius is not
bred but born and is therefore akin to a natural, not rhetorical, formulation
of the sublime.
Wood disagrees with Monk because he feels that Monk “essentialises”
eighteenth-century formulations of the sublime that are “a complicated blend,
if you will, of the traditional [Wood defines this as “form, genre, and deco­
rum”] and psychological conceptions of what the artistic process and the art
work are” (Wood 17-18n2). This is due to the proliferation of aesthetic the­
ory within the eighteenth century that ranges, as Peter de Bolla argues, “from
general works’ through architecture and gardening, pictorial and plastic arts,
literature and drama, to music” (Discourse o f the Sublime 29). Although de
Bolla calls it a reductive description, he defines aesthetic theory as “the rela­
tionship between a theory and the objects it describes and analyses” (29). This
proliferation of aesthetic theory reveals a historical context that gestures
towards an explanation of both Longinus’s text and his popularity during the
neoclassical period. As Russell argues, the conception of On Sublimity
occurred during a period when rhetoric was the doctrinal core of civilisation
and art, and had been since the height of Attic art (see Longinus xi). Longinus
was arguably seeking to incorporate the idea of genius, of artistic creativity,
Stylising the Sublime

into this stagnant doctrine, an interpretation of the sublime mode in which

“Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings” (42;
§35). Likewise, the neoclassical era was attempting to assert a style that was
both independent and classical, fusing classical forms with new rhetorical
strategies. The translation of Longinus during this period gave credence to
the idea of a creative rhetoric, not a m im etic one.
This discursive and ideological shift of sublimity is an integral part of
demonstrating the link between nihilism and the sublime. Given Monks
proposition of the rhetorical form of Longinus’s sublime and Wood’s subse­
quent qualification, it is clear that the Burkean and Kantian formulations of
the sublime both move towards a psychological or rational approach to the
sublime. One of the most important ways in which we see this shift occur is
in the “Contexts” that Wood gives the reader. Wood summarises a number of
different sources to demonstrate the uses seventeenth- and eighteenth-cen-
tury writers made of the sublime. Wood’s survey is important because of the
idea of “elevation” that recurs throughout his sources: “Defining 'hupsous’
[sic] as elevation,’ it is immediately apparent that, if anything, its interpreta­
tion widens during the century, because in addition to the retention of older
meanings [ . . . ] there is the addition of the psychological school’s usage of
the word” (209). Wood also argues that “There is no doubt that the eigh­
teenth century yoked Longinus, Christianity, and the Bible together in order
to serve its purposes” (29, emphasis added). These two statements reveal that
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is an ideological
shift in the use of the sublime, a move from the idea of divine elevation
towards a more natural or psychological elevation of the human. Although
Wood argues this to be a “widening,” it is possible to see this as a shift in the
dominant paradigm of the sublime from the elevation of the divine to the
elevation of the human. In order to “widen” the sublime, divinity would
have to retain its importance. However, the sublime elevates humanity over
divinity to replicate the dominant ideology of Enlightenment humanism,
signifying the alteration, not extension, of the parameters of the sublime.
These arguments parallel the movement presented in the previous
chapter, where the rise of nihilism was the result of the decline of religious
authority. This is what Gillespie calls “a new concept of divine omnipotence
and a corresponding concept of human power” (Nihilism Before Nietzsche
vii), where the religious makes way for the secular and the human replaces
the divine. Where this was understood in the previous chapter as a nihilistic
moment, it is clear that it is also a fundamental component of the sublime,
since the sublime began as a predominantly classical or religious model of
“elevation” and shifted towards a psychological and natural phenomenon—a
30 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

movement from religion to empiricism, from faith to rationality. This shift

occurs in the development of the concept under Enlightenment rationality,
most notably exemplified in the formulations of Burke and Kant.

THE BURKEAN FORMULATION OF THE SUBLIME

Burkes A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin o f our Ideas o f the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) presented the sublime as a phenomenon that transcended
the empirical world but not the imagination. From this foundation, we see
that Burkes notion of the sublime is predicated upon terror; the sublime, for
Burke, exists primarily as an immediate emotional response to dangerous
objects before reason can engage itself. This creates two different approaches
to understanding the Burkean sublime: one that immediately affects the
observer with a sense of danger and one that relies upon the imagination of
the individual in the face of possible danger. An example might be a person
standing at the foot of a mountain imagining an avalanche. In the first
instance, it is sublime because his emotions are ruling his reason, causing
him to imagine something that he cannot sense and, in the second, were an
avalanche to actually fall down on him, it would so overwhelm his senses that
his reason would temporally be overwhelmed. This is obviously an artificial
scenario, however, because the body must not be actually harmed, just feel
itself to be under threat. The Burkean sublime haunts reason—it is when
imagination and the irrational have temporary control over the rational—
and is an emotional response to a possible, although not present, danger.
That the sublime is an emotional response is an important aspect of
Burkes Philosophical Enquiry, for he does not direct his studies towards an
aesthetic representation (a rhetorical analysis) of the sublime except in part.
Burkes main objective is to classify the mechanisms by which the sublime
manifests itself:

I am afraid it is a practice much too common in inquiries of this nature,

to attribute the cause of feelings which merely arise from the mechanical
structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of
our minds, to certain conclusions of the reasoning faculty on the objects
presented to us; for I should imagine, that the influence of reason in
producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly
believed. (41; §1.13)

This passage demonstrates the disdain that Burke feels towards a sublime
produced by the rational mind (an aesthetic sublime). This implies, as we
Stylising the Sublime 31

have seen, a movement away from a rhetorical form of the sublime towards a
more empirical representation of the sublime originating from “being in the
world.” For Burke, the sublime is a primal response that occurs within the
body before the rational mind can attempt to grasp the dangerous object:
there is an unremitting immediacy within the Burkean sublime that comes
from the inability of reason to respond to such objects.
The definition of dangerous objects is qualified by Burke and can be
characterised as those connected with power, magnitude, and infinity. Each
of these, to some degree, produces a feeling of terror in the observer due to
the inability of the rational mind to comprehend them. Indeed, Burke writes
that “obscurity” aids the creation of sublimity: “To make any thing very terri­
ble, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full
extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the
apprehension vanishes” (Philosophical Enquiry 54; §11.3). As reason begins to
classify the sublime object, it ceases to be sublime precisely because we have
become accustomed to it. Wordsworth evidently agrees, as seen in The Pre­
lude when he writes:

That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive,

And cannot choose but feel. The power, which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits. (XIV.85-8 8)4

Here, we see the way in which the Burkean sublime affects the observer of
nature—he “cannot choose but feel” and feels it “bodily.” Without the initial
apprehension of the object, there would be no sublime. Consider, for exam­
ple, Burkes discussion of the nature of power in connection with the sub­
lime. He writes:

Pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we

never submit willingly. So that strength, violence, pain and terror, are
ideas that rush in upon the mind together. Look at a man, or any other
animal of prodigious strength, and what is your idea before reflection? Is
it that this strength will be subservient to you, to your ease, to your
pleasure, to your interest in any sense? No; the emotion you feel is, lest
this enormous strength should be employed to the purposes of rapine
and destruction. That power derives all its sublimity from the terror
with which it is generally accompanied, will appear evidently from its
effect in the very few cases, in which it may be possible to strip a consid­
erable degree of strength of its ability to hurt. When you do this, you
32 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

spoil it of every thing sublime, and it immediately becomes con­

temptible. (60; §11.5)

The appearance of something powerful is sublime because of that objects

intrinsic undecidability. Were we to accept that it was “under” us, to be
rationally aware of its limitations and uses, it would not be sublime. The three
wanderers that Wordsworth encounters on Snowdon are examples of this,
because of their “majestic intellect”: “There I beheld an emblem of a mind /
That feeds upon infinity, that broods / Over the dark abyss, intent to hear”
(Prelude XIV.70-72). These wanderers may be rational, but they “feed” on
nature and “brood” on concepts. They are too “intent to hear” to ever hear
anything, as Wordsworth later writes: “moral judgements which from this
pure source / Must come, or will by man be sought in vain” (XIV. 128-29).
The mind must be open to Nature, not searching for a sublime experience.
Obscurity is why, according to Burke, power is sublime. It is precisely
because we do not know how power will affect us that the initial terror
causes a sublime feeling: its origins and intent are obscured and we are faced
with potential harm. The same mechanism creates sublimity in relation to
magnitude and infinity. Burke writes that “Greatness of dimension, is a pow­
erful cause of the sublime” (Philosophical Enquiry 67; §11.7) and that “Infin­
ity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which
is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime” (67; §11.8). Both of
these come from immediate, not mediated sources, and the terror originates
from the fact that the rational mind has yet to come to terms with them. It is
for this reason that the Burkean mode of sublimity is both affective (and thus
pre-rational) and a “moment” (being produced and dissipating simultane­
ously). Although Burke argues that some terror remains with us after the
sublime experience, this is a sublime aftershock and not the sublime experi­
ence itself.
The concept of magnitude is of interest here as it marks a point of diver­
gence away from Longinus’s idea of “elevation” and later becomes significant in
the development of the postmodern sublime. In On Sublimity, Longinus at
one point defines the difference between hypsous [elevation] and megethos
[size]: “The difference lies, in my opinion, on the fact that sublimity depends
on elevation [hypsous], whereas amplification [megethos] involves extension;
sublimity exists often in a single thought, amplification cannot exist without a
certain quantity and superfluity” (17; §12: see also xvi-xvii). Burke, in contrast,
writes “extension is either in length, height, or depth,” devaluing the concept
of elevation, and adds that “height is less grand than depth” (Philosophical
Enquiry 66; §11.7), implying the alternate Latinate etymology of “sublime” as
Stylising the Sublime 33

sub-limen [under the threshold], not sublimis. Thomas Weiskel observes, how­
ever, that “Height and depth are of course merely two perspectives for the
same dimension of verticality; what is ‘lofty’ for the idealist will be profound’
for the naturalizing mind” (Romantic Sublime 24).5 This point also marks an
extension of the Burkean sublime into the Kantian in the sense that an object
is sublime in relation to magnitude only if it is a unitary object that is per­
ceived, not a quantity of objects (and thus demonstrating the Kantian
requirement of a “totality” to be present in the sublime, discussed later in this
chapter). This is because “The sum total of things of various kinds, though it
should equal the number of uniform parts composing some one entire object,
is not equal in its effect upon the organs of our bodies.” Burke qualifies this
requirement for “unity” later in the passage, although it is not entirely clear:
“So that every thing great by its quantity must necessarily be, one, simple, and
entire” (Philosophical Enquiry 126; §IV.10). Where Longinus declares that it
is the quantity of objects that creates a feeling of amplification distinct from
sublimity, and Kant argues that only a totality (a unified object) can be sub­
lime, Burke argues that a quantity of uniform objects can lead to sublimity
providing they seem to be an undifferentiated whole.
If the Burkean sublime is based upon the immediate apprehension of
an apparent object, then the relation between Burke and nihilism initially
seems tenuous. However, nothingness can, under these conditions, produce
a mode of the sublime similar to that which Burke proposed. Several aspects
of the Burkean sublime lead us to the conclusion that nothingness is sublime
because it is unfathomable. In his discussion of “obscurity,” for example,
Burke quotes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667):

The other shape,

If shape it might be call’d that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be call’d that shadow seemed,
For each seem’d either; black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head
The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on. (11.666-73)

Burke states that in this passage “All is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible,
and sublime to the last degree” (Philosophical Enquiry 55; §11.3). Other
examples of this obscure “sublime void” abound in Book Two of Paradise
Lost: “the dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss” (11.405), “the void profound / of
unessential night” (11.438-39), “with lonely steps to tread / Th’unfounded
34 Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

deep, and through the void immense / to search” (11.828-30). It is this very
uncertainty and confusion—the inability of the rational mind to compre­
hend—that makes nihilism a candidate for sublimity. To find a pun in one of
Burkes descriptions, he writes: “The ideas of eternity, and infinity, are among
the most affecting we have, and yet there is nothing o f which we really under­
stand so little, as of infinity and eternity” (Philosophical Enquiry 57; §11.4,
emphasis added). The notion of understanding brings to the fore the concept
of nihilism. “There is nothing of which we understand so little” exceptfo r p er­
haps nothingness itself Although we cannot understand infinity, or eternity (an
extension of the infinite into time), neither can we understand nothingness,
standing as we do on the side of Being. That is, we do not understand noth­
ingness and yet it can produce a strong emotional response within us precisely
because of the inability of the rational to comprehend the essentially irra­
tional. If the sublime is pre-rational and we cannot rationalise nothingness,
then nothingness when presented can be considered a sublime form.
There are, of course, counter-arguments to this production of the
Burkean sublime through nihilism. One of the most important of these is the
requirement of immediate danger. Although nihilism can threaten our sense of
Being, and does indeed correspond to a “threat to Being,” it is not enough to
justify a sense of danger merely from the thought of nihilism. The Burkean sub­
lime is connected with physically existing objects—the presentation of the
object—and although nihilism may be the most terrifying of all possibilities and
objects, it can never be considered physically existent. When Burke defines the
difference between pain and terror we see that nihilism, whilst producing a
response, can never actually produce the type of sublime that Burke discusses:

The only difference between pain and terror, is, that things which cause
pain operate on the mind, by the intervention of the body; whereas
things that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the opera­
tion of the mind suggesting the danger; but both agreeing, either prima­
rily, or secondarily, in producing a tension, contraction, or violent
emotion of the nerves. (Philosophical Enquiry 120; §IV.3)

That nihilism and a sense of nothingness can produce terror in the reader is
indeed arguable. However, the problem is that the emotional response to
nihilism tends to be existential despair or fear of meaninglessness; despair
does not produce the sublime mode, and the fear provoked by nothingness
does not entail a further physical response. Although conceiving absence
may be terrifying, it is not “present enough” to threaten the viewers sense of
being.
Stylising the Sublime 35

This does not mean to say, however, that the production of a nihilistic
sublime is impossible, only that, as Donougho implies, any readings of a
“nihilistic sublime” must finally occur on the terms of the sublime itself and
the historical period in which it comes forth, and should not merely be con­
flated because of similarities. It only implies that attempting to conflate a
nihilistic moment with a sublime moment is problematic under the Burkean
mode of sublimity. In the final analysis, Burkes comments about darkness
may be crucial to understanding a nihilistic sublime, and demonstrate why
other conceptions of the sublime are necessary before we can finally see a
nihilistic sublime emerge:

Such a tension it seems there certainly is, whilst we are involved in dark­
ness; for in such a state whilst the eye remains open, there is a continual
nisus to receive light; this is manifest from the flashes, and luminous
appearances which often seem in these circumstances to play before it,
and which can be nothing but spasms, produced by its own efforts in
pursuit of its object. (132; §IV.16)

In a struggle to find meaning in nihilism, the critic frequently sees flashes of

inspiration that are, in fact, no more than illusory mechanisms of the mind
itself. In darkness, nothing can be seen (but we cannot see nothing) and in
response to this darkness, the mind creates objects to fill the void. The prob­
lem is not with illuminating nihilism, but with our very seeking of illumina­
tion, that euphemism for “understanding.” Rather, it is in our very inability
to understand nihilism that we see the nihilistic sublime, and why this argu­
ment must move forward towards the Kantian formulation of the sublime.

THE KANTIAN FORMULATION OF THE SUBLIME

The Kantian sublime appears primarily within two of Kant's works, The
Critique o f Judgem ent (1790) and Observations on the Feeling o f the Beautiful
an d the Sublime (1764), both of which are heavily influenced by the debate
on the nature of the sublime written by Burke, as well as other eighteenth-
century aesthetic theorists. There are number of initial similarities between
the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, such as the comparisons between beauty
and sublimity, the concern with what can be apprehended not compre­
hended, and thus the invocation of the sublime through feelings of terror.6
Kant's texts are problematic from the perspective of a study of the sublime
because in the interim period between publications there are a number of
significant alterations to Kant's formulation of the sublime, not least of
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Women. Out of Machir came down the governors
—
Men. And out of Zubulum they that handle the
marshal's staff—
Women. And the princes of Issachar were with
Deborah—
Men. So was Issachar, so was Barak:
All. Into the valley they rushed forth at his feet.
Men. By the water courses of Reuben
There were great resolves of heart.
Women. Why satest thou among the sheepfolds,
To hear the pipings for the flocks?
Men. At the watercourses of Reuben
There were great searchings of heart!
Women. Gilead abode beyond Jordan—
Men. And Dan, why did he remain in ships?
Women. Ashur sat still at the haven of the sea,
And abode by his creeks.
Men. Zubulum was a people that jeoparded their
lives unto the death,
And Naphtali upon the high places of the field.
III. The Battle and the Rout.

Men. The kings came and fought;

Then fought the kings of Canaan,
In Taanach by the waters of Megiddo:—
They took no gain of money.
Women. They fought from heaven,
The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
The river Kishon swept them away,—
That ancient river, the river Kishon!
Men. O my soul, march on with strength!
Then did the horsehoofs stamp
By reason of the prancings,
The prancings of their strong ones.
Women. Curse ye, Meroz, said the angel of the
Lord,
Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof;
Because they came not to the help of the Lord,
To the help of the Lord against the mighty!
IV. The Retribution.

Men. Blessed above women shall Jael be the wife

of Heber the Kenite,
Blessed shall she be above women in the tent!
He asked water, and she gave him milk;
She brought him butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail,
And her right hand to the workman's hammer;
And with the hammer she smote Sisera.
She smote through his head,
Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay:
At her feet he bowed, he fell:
When he bowed, there he fell down dead!
Women. Through the window she looked forth,
and cried,
The mother of Sisera, through the lattice,
"Why is his chariot so long coming?
Why tarry the wheels of his chariots?"
Her wise ladies answered her,
Yea, she returned answer to herself,
"Have they not found,
Have they not divided the spoils?
A damsel, two damsels to every man;
To Sisera a spoil of divers colors,
A spoil of divers colors of embroidery,
Of divers colors of embroidery on both sides,
on the necks of the spoil!"
All. So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord:
 But let them that love him be as the sun when
he goeth forth in his might!
Having overcome the Canaanites, the Israelites were not destined
to long enjoy peace. Their own kinsmen, the Ammonites and Moabites
looked with envy upon their good fortune in winning such desirable
land and tried now to rob them of it. Notwithstanding the fact that the
Israelites, Moabites and Ammonites had all a common ancestry, they
were never on that account restrained from plundering one another's
territories. Forced to take a definite stand against them, the Hebrews
cast about for a leader. Jephthah was named. He was an outlaw, a bold
border man, who belonged to the Hebrew race, and his bravery was
unquestioned. When besought, he agreed to drive out the Ammonites
on one condition only: that he be acknowledged chieftain after the
battle. This being conceded, he led the Hebrew forces. It was in
keeping with his rough, reckless nature that he should vow to sacrifice
the first living thing he met upon his return were he victorious. The
Ammonites were defeated and to Jephthah's utter consternation, his
daughter, his only child, rushed forth to meet him. We are told that his
vow was kept, and thus we know that human sacrifices were
sometimes offered to Jahweh.
During the era of the Judges, the Philistines on the southwest
began to expand, upon land already settled by the Israelites. They
overran the Plain of Sharon, and the Hebrews who had peopled the
plain were driven into the hills. This crisis brought forth Samson, one of
the chiefs who essayed to stay the power of these new enemies. He
was a simple child of nature—a giant in strength, a weakling in
steadfast purpose. He lacked the capacity to plan a campaign and
execute it. The stories of his prodigious power, his feats pf physical
endurance, are too well known to require repetition. They were lauded
by his admirers and delighted in by the Israelites when directed against
their enemies, but his blows were invariably given to avenge personal
wrongs, and he left his people no farther on their way against the
Philistines than he found them.
The great difficulty during this period was that there was no
tendency to hold long together. "Israel had within itself the worst of
enemies and a germ of destruction. This was the proud sense of
independence and the strongly-developed family feeling of the nomad,
which did not immediately vanish from the national character with the
surrender of the nomadic fashion of life. After the united effort under
Joshua had but barely laid the foundation, the people again broke up
into tribes and clans, which now aimlessly sought new places of
settlement, each on its own account and unmindful of its neighbors."[1]
This tendency to fall apart was the most dangerous sign of Israel's
progress, and we shall see how it lasted through her history.
Nevertheless, for the time being the lesson was learned that only by
uniting against the enemy could victory be won. The era of the Judges
so far impressed this truth upon the minds of the Hebrews that we
note the beginnings of Hebrew unity.

[1] Hist. of People of Israel, 47.

CHAPTER X.

The Morality of the Hebrews Prior to the Kingdom.

It is a mistake to suppose that the lofty conceptions of Israel's later

seers and prophets were manifest among the people from the earliest
times. Quite the reverse was true. Like all primitive people, the
Hebrews passed through the usual stages of development, religiously
and morally. Sufficient evidence goes to show that they worshipped
many gods in the beginning, as did other Semitics. Joshua once
reminded them of their earlier faith:
"Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even
Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they
served other gods."[1]
 "In many respects doubtless their religion was closely akin to that of
neighboring Semitic people. They had their sacred pillars, trees, and
other emblems of the divine power and presence; they carried with
them teraphim, which were apparently images venerated as household
gods. In many of their beliefs and practices they did not rise above the
general level of their age."[2]
During their long sojourn in Egypt, as might have been expected,
they grew to worship Egyptian gods. "Cast ye away every man the
abominations of his eyes, and defile not yourselves with the idols of
Egypt."[3]
The explanation which has seemed to make clear the unique
development of the Hebrew above other Semitics, is this one—only
recently offered. It is well-known that the Israelites were originally
henotheists—that is, they believed in many gods—believed that many
divinities were powerful, but they gave allegiance to one, the god of
their tribe. This god belonged to their tribe, and shared its successes
and failures. Now when Moses accepted Jahweh, God of the Midianites,
he persuaded the Israelites to forsake the gods they were worshipping
and give their homage to Jahweh. At the foot of Sinai he caused them
to make a covenant with Jahweh: the God was to give them protection,
and they were to worship him alone. Because he was an adopted God
and not a member of their tribe, he was bound to protect them only
when they served him faithfully. The adopted God could cast off his
adopted people if they failed to fulfill their part of the contract. The
Hebrews always said that they were a peculiar people. They repeatedly
referred to the fact that God could cast them off if they were unloyal to
him. Such a thing is unknown among other nations. No other God
could cast off his people; he was one of them. This explains also why
the Hebrews were always so ready to abandon their God and take on
the gods of their neighbors.
"In any case it is clear that Jahweh was not originally the god of
Israel, but only became such in consequence of the work of Moses and
of the events of the exodus....
"Israel's relation to Jahweh was unique.... He was not an ancestral
god who stood in a natural and necessary relation to his people, like
the gods of other Semitic tribes; but he was the god of Sinai and of
Midian, who had come into connection with Israel only through his own
free, moral choice. Israel belonged to him, not by birth, but by election.
Its existence and its continuance were dependent upon his sovereign
good pleasure, and he might cast it off as easily as he had adopted it.
Under these circumstances he had the right to make conditions upon
which his favour should depend such as other gods could not make.
This fact does not explain the ethical character of the Mosaic religion; it
explains only why an ethical religion was promulgated at this particular
time."[4]
It is the custom of all primitive people to ascribe their early laws
and government to divine origin. This rule is seldom varied, and was
adhered to by the ancient Hebrews. Instead of conceiving the God-
Spirit as having endowed Moses with true insight, wise judgments, and
high ideals, the Israelites believed that their Covenant had been
dictated, word by word, by Jahweh, while it was further claimed that
tablets with words inscribed upon them were given Moses by God
himself. As a matter of fact, the earliest decalogue differed widely from
the one best known. The commandments first given the people after
they were led forth from Egypt were probably the ones recorded in the
twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus, and were something like these:

1. Thou shalt worship no other god.

2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
3. The feast of unleaven bread shalt thou keep.
4. Every firstling is mine.
5. Thou shalt keep the feast of the weeks.
6. Thou shalt keep the feast of the ingathering at
the end of the year.
7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice
with leaven.
8. The fat of my feast shall not be left over until
the morning.
9. Thou shalt bring the best of the first fruits of
thy land to the house of Jehovah thy God.
10. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's
milk.
 Because Moses was known to the Israelites as a law-giver, laws
passed long after his death were attributed to him, quite as laws which
came into being years after the death of Hammurabit in Babylon were
probably attributed to this great national law-giver.
A company of slaves, escaping from servitude after serving for two
or three generations, and having possessed but a crude civilization
previous to that experience, would require only the simplest laws, and
any one reading the various rules and regulations attributed to this
period will easily see how crude was the stage of development which
made such instruction necessary. As time went on, and the people
advanced and became more enlightened, new laws were possible.
These continued to be known as the "Laws of Moses," as laws in all
early countries have been attributed to some renowned personage, to
give them added force.
In these early periods which we have been studying, the religion of
the Hebrews possessed many features in common with those of
surrounding nations. We read that the "Children of Israel walked
through the fire," which means that they sacrificed their first-born in
flames as offerings to their God. Jahweh was believed to be a jealous
God, vindictive, demanding cruel treatment of captives, and fierce and
relentless in battle. A man cannot get a higher ideal of God than that of
a perfect human being, and this was an age when all ideas and ideals
were crude.
When the Hebrews settled Canaan, they learned much from the
earlier inhabitants of the land. Becoming farmers, they quite naturally
fell into the way of worshipping the god of harvests, and other
agricultural deities of the Canaanites. The "high places" are repeatedly
spoken of, these being places where other gods were worshipped.
When roused by danger, they renewed their covenant with Jahweh and
returned to more careful performance of their part of the early
agreement.
The system of polygamy was well established. Several of the
patriarchs took two or more wives. If a man died childless, it was not
only customary but a duty that the next in line should marry the widow
and raise up seed to his memory. This is expressly shown by the story
of Ruth, most attractive in its early simplicity. We learn more of the
every day life of the Israelites in the period following Hebrew
occupancy of Canaan from this little idyl than from any other source, or
from all other sources combined.
So far as germs of government and judicial administration of the
people thus far discernible are concerned, they had seemingly not
progressed farther than the instruction of Moses led them. The years
spent in the wilderness after the exodus were very essential to the
future welfare of the Hebrew nation. Their government—to whatever
extent they possessed one—was closely allied to their religion. There
were many experiences met with in these forty years which seemed to
prove Jahweh's care and protection over them, and Moses was
regarded as his representative on earth, who received his instructions
from Jahweh and delivered them to his people.
"His words were Jehovah's message to them. As he led them in
their wilderness wandering, they felt themselves under the direct
guidance of their God; he attended to the simple ritual of the desert
sanctuary at Kadesh; to him, as the representative of Jehovah, were
referred the more difficult cases of dispute which arose; his decisions
had all the weight of Jehovah's authority. In this way he laid down by
practical illustration the principles of that civil and religious law which
bears his name. As these cases multiplied, he was led to constitute a
rude patriarchal tribunal composed of the elders of the tribes. In this
simple organization is found the germ of the Hebrew judicial and
executive system.
"Thus Moses was the man who under divine direction 'hewed Israel
from the rock.' Subsequent prophets and circumstances chiselled the
rough boulder into symmetrical form, but the glory of the creative act
is rightly attributed to the first great Hebrew prophet. As a leader, he
not only created a nation, but guided them through infinite vicissitudes
to a land where they might have a settled abode and develop into a
stable power; in so doing, he left upon his race the imprint of his own
personality. As a judge, he set in motion forces which ultimately led to
the incorporation of the principles of right in objective laws. As a priest,
he first gave form to the worship of Jehovah. As a prophet, he
gathered together all that was best in the faith of his age and race,
and, fusing them, gave to his people a living religion."[5]
 Before the time of the monarchy, their darkest years were those
wherein the Israelites departed from this Mosaic teaching; their best
periods, those in which they assimilated it and attempted to carry it
out. To whatever extent they developed strength and stability for their
future nation before the birth of their kingdom, such strength came as
a result of the Mosaic religious and moral teaching.

[1] Joshua, 24, 2.

[2] Short Hist. of the Hebrews: Ottley, 26.
[3] Ezekiel, 20, 7.
[4] Early Hist. of Syria and Palestine: Paton, 139, 141.
[5] Hist. of the Hebrew People: Kent Vol. I 44.

CHAPTER XI.

Causes Leading to the Kingdom.

1250 B.C. has been taken as an approximate date for the exodus of
the Israelites from Egypt, some placing the event still earlier. After the
wandering in the desert, considerable time was spent winning Canaan
from its earlier possessors before any settlement was possible. The
twelfth century and first part of the eleventh before Christ were years
of re-adjustment, the Israelites losing the habits of desert nomads and
becoming tillers of the soil.
In rocky districts they still raised sheep and cattle but acquired fixed
homes. Warfare had been constant, but in later years had been carried
on wholly by individual tribes, there being no concerted action. The
tendency to divide and seek each its own peculiar interests had been
apparent from the first, and the beginning of the eleventh century B.C.
found the tribes prostrated as a result. The Canaanites no longer
threatened them but the Philistines constantly grew bolder. When they
pressed into the plain of Jezreel, the Israelites were forced to fight
them, but lacking an able leader and sufficient numbers, they lost the
day. Surviving instincts of earlier superstitious practices led them to
bring the ark containing their covenant with Jehovah from its sanctuary
at Shiloh, thinking this might aid them in a second struggle. "Let us
fetch the ark of the covenant of Jehovah out of Shiloh unto us, that it
may come among us, and save us out of the hand of our enemies." But
instead of leading to victory, 30,000 Israelites fell upon the battle field
and the sacred ark itself fell into the hands of the Philistines.
"The Philistines burned and destroyed the temple at Shiloh, carried
the captured sacred ark to the temple of their chief god, Dagon, and
subjected the land, even to the Jordan; the people were disarmed and
held in check by Philistine prefects and strongholds. And from all
evidence this Philistine domination must have lasted a considerable
time. Israel seemed paralyzed and submitted, though with gnashing of
teeth."[1]
When Israel lay stricken and at the mercy of her enemies on the
west, the Ammonites thought the time favorable to lead a new attack
for the purpose of recovering their earlier territories on the east. The
town of Jabesh was first afflicted, and when its inhabitants offered to
surrender, feeling helpless to overpower their ancient foes, the king of
the Ammonites insolently replied that he would cause the right eye of
each citizen of the town to be cast out, as a reproach to Israel. In the
quaint expression of Josephus: "The king of the Ammonites sent
ambassadors to them, commanding them either to deliver themselves
up, on condition to have their right eyes plucked out, or to undergo a
siege, and have their cities overthrown. He gave them their choice,
whether they would cut off a small number of their body, or universally
perish." Implored to grant them a few days respite, the king of the
Ammonites scornfully conceded it, sure of his ultimate triumph.
In Ephraim dwelt a seer, Samuel by name. He was a godly man,
having rare purity of character and intense religious fervor. Dedicated
when a child to the service of Jehovah, the course of his life had led
him to catch the spirit of the great founder of the Hebrew nation and
beyond him, to gain a broader conception of the great God-Spirit. He
understood why his people were a prey to every neighbor, and knew
better than most how much a firm leadership was needed by them.
With eyes that saw far into the future, Samuel realized that the crying
need was unity and concerted action. Now in these ancient days, unity
meant kingship. Under strong kings, contemporary nations flourished,
and a king was apparently necessary in Canaan.
Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin, seeking his father's asses,
approached the seer, whose prophetic powers were well known in his
vicinity. The youth thought simply to invoke his aid in his private
interests, but Samuel recognized in the broad-shouldered, well-
proportioned Benjaminite one who might come to the rescue of
stricken Israel. With prophetic vision, Samuel foretold coming events
and anointed Saul as one chosen of Jehovah to rule the nation of His
special care. Since he was not called immediately to action, Saul
returned to his father's house, where he went about his ordinary
duties. But the words of the seer had sunk deep into his heart.
Indications of Israel's stricken condition were not wanting on every
hand, and Saul brooded over her helplessness and his call to save his
people. At length, when the citizens from mourning Jabesh visited his
vicinity, vainly trying to rouse their kinsmen to action, Saul saw that his
opportunity had come. Sympathy had been everywhere expressed by
the Israelites, but they had suffered too many recent defeats to feel
confidence in their ability to win.
Saul hastily cut up a yoke of oxen, and sending these bloody tokens
to the various tribes, he notified them that such treatment would be
meted out to their flocks and herds unless they came to the relief of
the trans-Jordan cities. Recognizing a leader at last, men quickly
gathered. The desert tribe was surprised, defeated and pursued into its
desert strongholds. Thereupon Saul was popularly proclaimed king, as
it was now believed that he alone could save the Hebrews from the
Philistines, who were heavily oppressing them.
A king is ordinarily one who rules a kingdom, but in the case of
Saul, a kingdom had first to be won. His encounters with the Philistines
were successful, but his reign proved to be a continual campaign
against them. Gradually Saul became estranged from Samuel, who
represented the best element in Israel. Priests of a later period
assigned the difference between them as having arisen over Saul's
leniency toward his captives, but it is believed that instead it came
naturally between two men whose ideals were wide apart. Saul was
incapable of taking an exalted view of his people's mission, as did his
priest and prophet.
Beset on all sides by the enemy, estranged from Samuel and in
general from the priesthood, Saul became moody and subject to fits of
melancholia. To dispel these, David, son of Jesse, was brought from his
father's flocks on the mountainside, to gladden the king's idle hours.
David was accomplished upon the harp, and his music had power to
quiet the restless king, who heaped favors and honors upon him—after
the nature of his impulsive disposition. As armour-bearer to the king,
David had frequent opportunities to distinguish himself, while he and
the king's son Jonathan became fast friends. However, as David grew
in favor with the people, Saul became intensely jealous of him. Where
the kingship was but an experiment, popularity was important to a
ruler. In his disordered brain, Saul conceived that a plot was being laid
by his son and David, and as a result, David was obliged to flee for his
life. He raised his standard as an outlaw chief, and all the dissatisfied
element of the land flocked to his side. Yet even here David favored the
people of Israel whenever he could; for protection he went into the
service of the Philistine king of Gath, but we are told that when he was
supposed to be fighting against the Hebrews, he was in reality fighting
off their desert enemies.
The division within the ranks of Israel once more gave opportunity
to the watchful Philistines. They made ready for a final assault, and the
moody and disheartened Saul prepared to fight them back. He was no
longer able to rouse his kinsmen as at first. Many were discontented
with his rule, and many favored David. Before the battle, Saul, grown
more superstitious with the pressure of circumstance, visited the witch
of Endor to learn by her art the issue of the battle. Never does the
king, tall in stature and once confident, but now broken in spirit,
appear more tragic. When she predicted defeat—and small art was
needed to foretell such an apparent outcome—Saul felt that all was
lost. One feels as when the voice of Cæsar spake unto Brutus in the
great play: "Thou shalt see me at Philippi"—the battle is lost before it is
begun.
When all was lost, Saul gave his sword to his armour-bearer to stab
him lest he fall into the hands of the enemy. When he lacked courage,
he plunged it into his own breast. Both he and his noble son Jonathan
went down on that fateful field, and so ended the first reign in Israel.
David is believed to have composed his beautiful elegy "How are the
Mighty Fallen" upon this occasion.

David's Lament.
 Thy glory, O Israel,
Is slain upon thy high places!
How are the mighty—
Fallen!

Tell it not in Gath,

Publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon;
Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised
triumph.

Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew nor

rain upon you,
Neither fields of offerings:
For the shield of the mighty was vilely cast
away,
The shield of Saul, as of one not anointed
with oil.

From the blood of the slain,

From the fat of the mighty,
The bow of Jonathan turned not back,
And the sword of Saul returned not empty.

Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in

their lives,
And in their death they were not divided;
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions.

Ye daughters of Israel,
Weep over Saul,
Who clothed you in scarlet,
Who put ornaments of gold upon your
apparel.
 How are the mighty—
Fallen in the midst of the battle!
O Jonathan,
Slain upon thy high places.

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan:

Very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.

How are the mighty—

Fallen!
And the weapons of war—
Perished!

—
M
o
d
e
r
n
R
e
a
d
e
r
'
s
B
i
b
l
e
.
 In the Old Testament itself are two contradictory estimates of the
character of Saul. One was written by those who favored and cared
for him; the other, by the faction which favored David. Later
compilers have thrown the two together, and the result is that we
must once more disentangle the two narratives and then judge
between them. The following characterizations of him differ
considerably, and yet have certain ideas in common:
"Saul is one of the most tragic figures in history. A great and
nobly endowed nature, heroic and chivalrous, inspired with fiery
zeal, he finally accomplished nothing.... He lacked appreciation of
the true character of Israel; in this regard tradition has given a
wholly correct picture of him. He was exclusively a soldier, and was
in a fair way to exchange Israel into a secular military state and thus
divert it from its religious function in universal history. Saul may
claim our deepest compassion and our heartiest sympathy, but the
fall of his power was a blessing for Israel."[2]
The second criticism upon the fallen king seems more fair and
sympathetic:
"Saul was a simple-minded, impulsive, courageous warrior; he
was a loyal patriot who loved his people and was ready to give his
life for them; his physical pre-eminence, combined with energy and
enthusiasm, fitted him to lead a sudden attack and to awaken loyal
support, while his intrepid courage kindled the same in others. But
Saul was a son of that rude age whose roots were found in the
period of the Judges. In a sense he was a child grown big. The
position which he occupied demanded executive ability, tact, the
power of organization, and, above all, patience and persistency. In
these maturer qualities he was deficient; they are rarely the
possession of fiery, impetuous natures. In addition, Saul was unable
to understand and appreciate the higher religious experiences and
ideals which were already becoming the possession of the more
enlightened souls of seers like Samuel. As is frequently true with
such a nature, Saul was superstitious. Circumstances tended to
develop the darker rather than the brighter side of his character. The
constant trials and cares of the court and battle-field daunted his
enthusiasm, and induced those attacks of melancholia which
obscured the nobler Saul and led him to commit acts which
constantly increased the density of the clouds that gathered about
his latter days.
"When he fell at Gilboa, and the Philistines again became
masters of northern and central Canaan, Saul's work seemed to be
completely undone; but its foundations were laid too deeply to be
undermined by political changes. Saul found the Hebrews ground
down under Philistine dominance, broken in spirit, undisciplined, and
little more than cowards. He united and aroused them to strike for
independence. By his successes he inspired in them confidence and
courage. In the severe training-school of Philistine warfare, he
developed out of the cowards who had fled before the Philistine
army to hide themselves in caves and cisterns, the hardy, brave
warriors with whom David made his conquests. Above all, he taught
the Hebrews by practical illustration, more clearly than ever before,
that by union and union alone they could be free, and enjoy peace
and prosperity. As is often the case, the pioneer perished amidst
seeming failure before he saw the ripe fruits of his labors; but his
work was absolutely necessary. David reaped the fruits of Saul's
sowing, but the harvest would never have been so glorious without
the pioneer's toils."[3]

Reign of David.

Saul is supposed to have ruled not longer than eight or ten years.
His youngest son, Eshbaal, was recognized as his natural successor.
Abner, Saul's commander-in-chief, gave Eshbaal the support of
whatever army survived, and he was established on the east side of
the Jordan, while all the territory west of the river receded to the
Philistines.
David realized that he was in no position to assume control of the
Hebrews at this juncture, for he had but a few hundred followers
and he was sure to be welcomed by all the tribes only when his
services were required for the common safety. Judah was deeply
attached to him at this time, and he allowed himself to be made king
of the tribe of Judah, and established himself at Hebron.
As soon as Eshbaal felt sufficiently secure on the east of Jordan
Abner was sent to overcome David and his followers, who had thus
failed to recognize the kingship of Eshbaal. They suffered defeat and
had to retreat across the river. The times were troublous and before
eight years had passed, both Eshbaal and Abner were murdered.
This left the way open for David, to whom the subjects of Eshbaal
sent homage.
The Philistines had considered the little kingdom of Saul's son
unworthy of attention, but a kingdom on the west side of the river
might prove a menace to their power, so they hastened to attack the
newly crowned king. David marched against them and broke forever
their strength. They retired into their earlier possessions and
harassed Israel no more.
One by one the old enemies of the Hebrews had to be reckoned
with. The Moabites attacked the territory of David and were
overcome and made vassals. On the north the Ammonites made a
raid and were so completely defeated that we hear of them no
more. On the south the Edomites made war, and their lands also
became a Hebrew province. In all these wars, David was the
defender of his people—never the aggressor, yet he left each tribe
with no further desire to make war upon Israel.
David was a statesman, and he saw at once that as king of the
Hebrews, he must no longer remain isolated with his native tribe, in
the vicinity to him most familiar. He saw that the site of Jerusalem
was capable of excellent defense, and this he made his capital.
"Jerusalem is situated pretty near the central part of the entire
country, and belonging to none of the tribes it stood on neutral
ground above them and their rivalries. When it is called the City of
David this is no mere phrase, for Jerusalem is altogether the creation
of David; and when we consider what Jerusalem was to the people
of Israel, and through the people of Israel to all mankind, we shall
recognize in the foundation of this City of David an event of world-
wide importance."
Israel had reached the highest pinnacle of its political power.
David's kingdom was the most powerful one between the valley of
the Euphrates and the Nile. While disturbances extended throughout
the reign until within the last ten of David's forty years, yet the
nation was saved from impending danger and was placed on a sure
basis. Now it was that David allowed his personal desires to lead him
into difficulties which followed him many years and which darkened
the reign which had promised so much. An infatuation for Bath-
sheba, wife of one of his officers, took possession of him, and
caused him to make way with her husband who stood in his way.
Like other Semitic and Oriental nations, the Hebrews were
accustomed to take more than one wife, but the religion of Jehovah
had been from the beginning a moral religion, and the more earnest
among Israel's people could but be shocked by this action on the
part of the king. Much has been made of David's remorse, but it was
not so great but that he allowed the unscrupulous woman who had
aided him in his wrongdoing to exercise a strong influence over him
throughout his life. His sons seemed to feel no restraint upon them
and added crimes to their house. Absalom, David's favorite son, took
advantage of his father's loss of popularity to raise a revolt against
him. This was easily put down, but the death of Absalom quite
unnerved the king. Bath-sheba rested not until she had settled the
succession upon her son, Solomon. Shortly after this decision was
made known, David died, having reigned forty years. In realizing
what all these years meant for Israel, we can never lose sight of the
pioneer work of Saul which alone made possible the more brilliant
one of his successor.
"It is not possible to overestimate what David did for Israel:
Israel as a people, as a representative of political life, as a concrete
quantity in the development of universal history, as a nation in the
fullest sense of the word, is exclusively his work. With this he
completed what Moses had begun in quiet and inconspicuous labors
on Sinai and at Kadesh. And all of this David created as it were out
of nothing, under the most difficult conditions conceivable, with no
other means than his own all-inspiring and all-compelling
personality....
"David created Israel and at the same time raised it to its highest
eminence; what Israel was under and through David it never again
became. And so we can easily understand how the eyes of Israel
rested in grateful reverence upon this figure, and how a second
David became the dream of Israel's future.
"True, the picture of David does not lack the traits of human
frailty, which Israelitish tradition, with a truly admirable sincerity has
neither suppressed nor palliated; but the charm which this
personality exercised over all contemporaries without exception has
not yet faded for us of later day; whoever devoted himself without
prejudice to the contemplation of David's history and character
cannot fail to like him. A saint and psalm-singer, as later tradition
has represented him, he certainly was not; but we find in him, a
truly noble human figure, which, in spite of all, preserved the
tenderest and most fragrant bloom of its nature, perfect directness
and simplicity; nowhere any posing, nothing theatrical, such as is
always found in sham greatness; he always acts out what he is, but
his unspoiled nature, noble at heart, generally comes very near to
the right and good. At the same time the whole personality is
touched with a breath of genuine piety and childlike trust in God, so
that we can wholly comprehend how he appears to tradition as the
ideal ruler, the king after God's own heart.
"This king, who did more for the worldly greatness and earthly
power of Israel than any one else, was a genuine Israelite in that he
appreciated also Israel's religious destiny: he was no soldier-king, no
conqueror and warrior of common stamp, no ruler like any one of a
hundred others, but he is the truest incorporation of the unique
character of Israel, a unique personality in the history of the world,
and we understand how he could become the impersonation of an
idea—how the highest and holiest that Israel hoped for and longed
for appears at the Son of David."[4]
 We are shocked as we read of David's cruelty to captives, but in
his ferocious treatment he was but following an instinct common to
the Semitic race. It is to be remembered that he was but a brief time
removed from the era of the Judges, when even Samuel, the far-
seeing seer, and God-fearing man, hacked an enemy to pieces
before the altar of Jehovah, to the supposed gratification of his God.
David's faults were common to his age, and they were not looked
upon by his contemporaries as we look upon them today, but his
virtues and redeeming characteristics raised him far above the
majority of Israel's people, and his reign was harked back to as most
worthy in Hebrew annals.

Solomon.

Solomon was the son of David's fourth wife—Bathsheba. Selfish,

devoid of principle and fond of intrigue, she influenced David to
recognize her son as his successor, setting aside the right of an older
son. It is not unlikely that David believed Solomon the more capable
of serving Israel.
Solomon had inherited his mother's selfishness and love of
display. He soon caused the death of his brother, in order to make
his crown secure. Having neither aptitude nor ability for war,
fortifications took the place of active armies. The vassal-kingdoms
which David had won were soon lost. Forts were erected at
important border places, and the city of Jerusalem was strongly
fortified.
Oriental display and absolutism were emulated by the young
king. He desired to set his kingdom on a footing with other
kingdoms of his time, and, ignoring the early aims and mission of
the Israelites, he made everything else subordinate to the exaltation
of the court and king. Commercial alliances were made with
neighboring peoples; wives were taken from many states—petty and
great. Most flattering was thought to be the marriage alliance
between the Hebrew king and a daughter of the pharaoh of Egypt,
and elaborate apartments were provided her. In early times a king
added materially to his property and prestige by making numerous
alliances of this sort. David had deemed it best to do so and
Solomon followed the principle on a much wider scale.
Naturally ample funds were now required to meet the expenses
of the court, and various means were provided to secure the
necessary income. The whole kingdom was divided into twelve
districts and each was required to defray the court's expenses for
one month. Moreover, commercial enterprises were entered upon;
toll was collected from the overland trade, and the king himself dealt
heavily in horses, which he imported from Egypt and sold to the
neighboring peoples at a good profit. Suddenly the little nation of
Israelites, so long isolated and remote from the influences of wealth,
was thrown open to outside contact on every hand.
 Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Roses of Sharon.
"Hitherto struggles within and hostility without had rendered the
Hebrew peasants almost impervious to foreign influences; now, all at
once, the bars were thrown down, and these came rushing in like a
tidal wave. The horse took the place of the ass; metal weapons and
tools supplanted the rude ones of flint and wood; walled cities arose
on the sites of the primitive towns with their mud and stone hovels;
the rude barracks of David grew into a palace; the simple gathering
of followers about Saul, as he sat under his tamarisk-tree in Ramah,
developed into a great Oriental court; luxuries undreamed of before
came to be regarded as necessities; foreign spices, apes, peacocks,
ivory, precious stones and woods aroused the curiosity and delighted
the senses of the inhabitants of the gay capital."[5]
Nations entering into commercial relations with Solomon
expected as a matter of course that their gods would be welcomed
in the land of the Hebrews. Many of the commercial treaties were
cemented by marriage alliances, and the princesses who came into
the king's harem brought their own forms of worship with them.
Places of worship had to be provided for them, and the idolatry of
later years may be traced back in a large measure to the laxity of
this period.
The adornment of Jerusalem demanded much of the king's
attention. In place of the simple quarters which had sufficed for
David, a noble palace arose. Apartments for the queens were
needed. It has recently been insisted that instead of the three
hundred and sixty wives credited to Solomon, he had but seventy,
but a few more or less seem of little moment. The harem rivaled
that of Persia, and the cost of maintaining so elaborate a court was
out of all proportion to the resources of the kingdom. The people
were taxed to the utmost. The Canaanites, who had long been
permitted to live in peace by the side of the Hebrews, were now
reduced to slavery and put at forced labor, quite as the Hebrews had
been in Egypt.
Notwithstanding, many ties bound the people to their king. They
took great pride in the splendor of their capital, and especially were
they gratified by the erection of the temple in Jerusalem. Hither
David had brought the ark of the covenant, which had been
recovered from the Philistines, and here with due ceremony the
center of the kingdom had already been made the religious center as
well. It seems probable that to Solomon the temple was but a
necessary adjunct to his court buildings. Among most ancient
peoples temples were erected in connection with the king's palace.
It gave added dignity and inspired wonder. To the masses it probably
meant much more. Certainly it grew later to be the center for their
religious enthusiasm and spirit.
 Nor was Solomon's popularity based alone upon his
achievements. He had a way of awakening personal popularity. He
attained a wide reputation for his so-called "wisdom." As we follow
his reckless policy of plunging his country on to ruin, this far-famed
wisdom is not at once apparent. It consisted in subtlety, quick wit,
ready answers and apt sayings, so much in favor among all oriental
peoples. His wisdom is well exemplified by the stories told of the
visit of the Queen of Sheba to his court, and her tests as to the truth
of his famed gift. It is probable that this Arabian queen came to
negotiate commercial advantages-for her subjects, but we are told
only the ostensible reason for her coming: to test the wisdom of
Solomon, whose fame had reached her kingdom. The dusky queen
of renowned beauty brought costly presents to the Hebrew king, and
received high honor and attention at his court. Stories have survived
of questions put to his majesty by this queen. Two bouquets were
held out before him, apparently alike, yet one was just gathered
from his garden, and the other had been fashioned by the maidens
of the queen. The simple tale is told in a little poem entitled "King
Solomon and the Bees," and we leave the verses to complete it.

King Solomon and the Bees.

A Tale of the Talmud.

When Solomon was reigning in his glory,

Unto his throne the Queen of Sheba came,
(So in the Talmud you may read the story)
Drawn by the magic of the monarch's fame,
To see the splendors of his court, and bring
Some fitting tribute to the mighty king.

Nor this alone; much had her Highness heard

What flowers of learning graced the royal
speech;
What gems of wisdom dropped with every
word;
What wholesome lessons he was wont to
teach
In pleasing proverbs, and she wished, in sooth,
To know if Rumor spoke the simple truth.

Besides, the queen had heard (which piqued

her most)
How through the deepest riddles he could
spy;
How all the curious arts that women boast
Were quite transparent to his piercing eye;
And so the queen had come—a royal guest—
To put the sage's cunning to the test.

And straight she held before the monarch's

view,
In either hand, a radiant wreath of flowers;
The one, bedecked with every charming hue,
Was newly culled from Nature's choicest
bowers;
The other, no less fair in every part,
Was the rare product of divinest art.

"Which is the true, and which the false?" she

said.
Great Solomon was silent. All-amazed,
Each wondering courtier shook his puzzled
head,
While at the garlands long the monarch
gazed,
As one who sees a miracle, and fain,
For very rapture, ne'er would speak again.
"Which is the true?" once more the woman
asked,
Pleased at the fond amazement of the king,
"So wise a head should not be hardly tasked,
Most learned liege, with such a trivial thing!"
But still the sage was silent; it was plain
A deepening doubt perplexed the royal brain.

While thus he pondered, presently he sees,

Hard by the casement,—so the story goes,—
A little band of busy, bustling bees,
Hunting for honey in a withered rose.
The monarch smiled, and raised his royal head;
"Open the window!"—that was all he said.

The window opened, at the king's command;

Within the room the eager insects flew,
And sought the flowers in Sheba's dexter hand!
And so the king and all the courtiers knew
That wreath was Nature's; and the baffled
queen
Returned to tell the wonders she had seen.

My story teaches (every tale should bear

A fitting moral) that the wise may find
In trifles light as atoms in the air,
Some useful lesson to enrich the mind,
Some truth designed to profit or to please,—
As Israel's king learned wisdom from the bees!

—
S
a
x
e
.
 Six little boys and six little girls, all dressed alike, with cropped
heads, were led into the king's presence, and he was asked to tell
which were girls and which boys. "Bring in basins of water," he
commanded, "and bid them wash their hands." Now in that land the
girls wore short sleeves and the boys long ones. Unthinking, the girls
washed their arms as well, but the boys washed their hands alone.
So were the spectators silently told which were which.
Such ingenious answers as these established for Solomon his
reputation for wisdom, and many of the wise sayings imputed to him
are known now to have been the sayings of others.
Before the king's death, murmurings were not uncommon
because of the oppressive administration, and the high-minded of
the religious body looked with grave misgivings upon the influx of
foreign gods. Even to them the whole danger was not apparent.
That was left for a period more remote to understand.
When Solomon died, his son came forward as his successor. The
usual custom among Semitics was for the crown to descend to the
eldest son, but the kingship was a new institution in Israel and the
people had held to the right of electing their king. They now
gathered around Rehoboam, clamoring for promises. They recalled
that his father had taxed them heavily and asked that he deal with
them more leniently. Instead of answering such reasonable demands
at once, the king told them he would make reply three days later.
Meanwhile he counselled with his ministers—how should he meet
the popular demand. The older men immediately pointed out the
safer policy, but the younger ones held that he should resent the
liberty the people had taken in making any demands whatever, and
should assure them that his demands would be even greater than
those of his father. Their folly prevailed. When the people heard his
reply, they were momentarily grieved. Then all the tribes save two—
Judah and Benjamin—withdrew and vowed they would no longer
support the house of David. Solomon's son received the support of
two tribes, and his kingdom was henceforth known by the name of
Judaea, while the northern kingdom was called by the name of
Israel.
 Having seen the dangers assailing the united kingdom, we realize
at once the recklessness of the policy that divided it and set two
kingdoms with lessened strength to hold their own among their
neighbors.

[1] Hist. of the People of Israel: Cornill, 75.

[2] Hist. of the People of Israel: Cornill, 83.
[3] Hist. of the Hebrew People: Kent, Vol. I, 180.
[4] Cornill: Hist. of People of Israel, 83.
[5] Kent: Hist. of Hebrew People, 180.

CHAPTER XII.

After the Division of the Kingdom.

While the arrogance of Rehoboam and the extravagances of

Solomon were the direct causes of the disunion, yet other agencies
had long been at work to bring it about. In the first place, natural
land features divided the ridge on the west side of the Jordan into
two distinct parts. Any permanent union was not probable. Again,
the northern tribes inhabited the more prosperous district. Their
resources were greater; and with the jealousies that always
manifested themselves among the tribes, it was hardly to have been
expected that they would indefinitely consent to be ruled by Judean
kings. Moreover, during the reign of Solomon, Judah had been
exempt from taxation. Into a Judean city had poured the wealth of
the kingdom, while the hand of oppression, so heavy elsewhere, was
unfelt alone in this province. Indignation had apparently reached a
high pitch before Solomon's death, yet spokesmen for the northern
tribes met with the new king and made a simple and reasonable
demand for reduced taxes in turn for allegiance. A statesman might
have held the kingdom intact, yet it is scarcely probable that union
would have indefinitely endured. The royal messenger sent to
reconcile the northern tribes after their withdrawal was so speedily
stoned to death that the king fled for safety to Jerusalem. Jeroboam,
an experienced general, was elected king of Israel—the northern
kingdom, and hostilities between the two kingdoms were inevitable.
Judah was somewhat protected—on the north by the new-
formed state, on the east by the river and Dead Sea, on the south
by the desert. On the other hand, Israel, with her traversable plains,
lay open to approach from every side, and she it was who had to
bear the brunt of outside attack for the next two centuries.
A comparison of the two states at the outset shows Israel to
have been first in natural resources, size and population; to have
been second in unity and centralized government. Judah, with her
limited area, scarcity of water, absence of fertile soil and scanty
population, had marked advantage in her unity and hereditary
kingship. There were ten tribes to be pacified in the north—only two
in the south. In Israel the jealousies were so strong that it was the
work of a moment for an influential prince to assassinate the
reigning king and usurp the crown.
Judah was crippled shortly after the division by an invasion of
Egyptian forces. They penetrated into Israel as well, but treasure
was greatest in Jerusalem. Three hundred golden shields, made by
Solomon for his guards, were taken, together with the rich
decoration of the temple. Rehoboam soon after had the ornaments
of gold replaced by others of bronze, so the splendor of the temple
was not greatly changed.
For some time hostilities continued between the Hebrew
kingdoms. Then danger from Syria, a rising state with Damascus at
its head, made an alliance desirable to both kings.
After the disunion, Jeroboam felt that it would be manifestly
unsafe to allow the people of Israel to go to Jerusalem to celebrate
their national festivals, lest they might be led to return to Judah's
king. Consequently he established two sanctuaries, one at Bethel
and one at Dan, instructing people to worship at the one nearest
them. He caused a golden bull to be placed before the altar of each,
thus violating the commandment forbidding graven images. Perhaps
in so doing the king was merely symbolizing the strength of
Jehovah. At an earlier period this would have been less
objectionable, but the people had grown somewhat accustomed to
worship without symbols, and this was plainly a retrogression. The
imageless worship of Jehovah was one of its distinctive features,
lifting it above that of surrounding peoples.
While prophets of a later day denounced the act of Jeroboam,
the priests of his own day were too near the change to discern its
grave dangers.
The kingdoms which centered at Damascus began to reach out
for territory, and harassed Israel until the imperial growth of Assyria
caused the withdrawal of Syrian troops to protect their own land.
Left alone, the northern kingdom developed her own resources and
attained a prosperity rivaling the time of Solomon. Meanwhile, Judah
had been sheltered from outside wars and less affected by religious
orders.
The period intervening between the fall of Damascus and the
wars of Tiglath-Pileser III. has been aptly called "Israel's Indian
Summer." The outlying territories of David came once more under
Hebrew rule, divided between the kingdoms of the north and south.
Commerce, long abandoned, sprang up and rivaled its tide in
Solomon's reign. Unfortunately, the social life of the people lacked its
earlier simplicity, and there were tendencies within the kingdom
itself which pointed to the disintegration of the state as surely as did
the forces that were soon to approach its walled cities.
First, recent wars had fallen most heavily upon the middle class.
Small farmers, returning from campaigns of defense of Hebrew
borders, found their estates run down, sometimes dismantled.
Having no means of building them up again, they frequently sank
into the peasantry. In periods of reaction, when property and
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