Nietzsche, the Decadents, and the end of Humanism

During the last period of the nineteenth century the goal of the Liberal Enlightenment and revolution had been reached, and Europe at last possessed a completely secularised culture.  The old religion had not been destroyed;  in fact throughout Protestant Europe the churches still possessed a position of established privilege.  But they held this position only on the condition that they did not interfere with the reign of Mammon.   In reality they had been pushed aside into a backwater where they were free to stagnate in peace and to brood over the memory of dead controversies which had moved the mind of Europe three centuries before.

On the other hand the intellectuals who had contributed so much to the victory of the new order of things were in a somewhat similar plight.  They found themselves powerless to influence the movement of civilisation, which

had cut itself free, not only from tradition, but also from art and thought.  The spiritual leadership that was possessed by Voltaire and Rousseau, by Goethe and Fichte, was now a thing of the past.  
The men of letters were expected to follow society, not to lead it.  And this is what many of them did, whether with the professional servility of the journalist or with the disinterested fanaticism of the realist, who affirmed his artistic integrity by the creation of an imaginary world no less devoid of spiritual significance than was the social world in which he lived.

A large number found neither of these alternatives satisfactory.  They turned to literature and art as a means of escape from reality.  That was the meaning to many of the catchwords  "Art for Art's sake"  Symbolism and aestheticism, the Ivory Tower and the Celtic Twilight, Satanism and the cult of "Evil", hashish and absinthe ; all of them were ways by which the last survivors of Romanticism made their escape, leaving the enemy in possession of the field.

There was, however, one exception, one man who refused to surrender.  Whatever his weaknesses Friedrich Nietzsche was neither a time-server nor a coward.  He at least stood for the supremacy of spirit, when so many of those whose office it was to defend it had fallen asleep or had gone over to the enemy.  He remained faithful to the old ideals of the Renaissance culture, the ideals of creative genius and of the self-affirmation of the free personality, and he revolted against the blasphemies of an age which degraded the personality and denied the power of the spirit in the name of humanity and liberty.

The tragedy of Nietzsche is the tragedy of the end of humanism.


- Christopher Dawson.  "Christianity & the New Age", 1931