Forgetfulness

Discussing Nietzsche's view of nobility, Alphonso Lingis emphasizes the role of forgetfulness. Though he's not writing theology, this is (making necessary allowances) one of the best descriptions of the existential effects of justification by faith that I've run across. I'm sure it's been studied by someone, but it makes me wonder about Luther's influence on Nietzsche.

"What, then, is characteristically noble in the ability to forget: not merely forgive one's hurts and humiliations, one's impotencies, but what is more to forget them, to be able to pass over the past to welcome the rushes of what comes in the present. That is the secret of the power of the noble life: the life that arises innocent before each moment, each event, each person, as though the past had no claim and no law, as though all the ghosts and phantoms of the past had dissipated before the light of the present. . . .

"Each one of us began by being weak, impotent, infantile. . . . For each one our past is a succession of impotencies, humiliations, mortifications, ignorance, baseness. We cannot be strong sexually now, we cannot love strongly now, unless we forget the narcissism, the sordid groping infantile sexuality, the homosexuality, the incestuous cravings each has indulged in. No one would be capable of a moment of pride now if he remembered all the humiliations, the abjections, the degenerate cravings, the wretched pettinesses of which the twenty years of his life until now consisted in. No one could be capable of real abandon, of innocent happiness, of pure pleasure, unless he could liberate himself from remorse and regret over stupidities and vicious desires he basked in in the past.

"The weak, morbid life, remembering twenty years of stupidities, degenerate and hopeless sexual indulgence, disgraces, shames, cowardices, asks: however could human life be noble?

"The condition for the possibility of nobility in a man is the strong power to forget, to let the past pass, let the weakness of one's being dissipate, let one's dying self die, to break the chains of memory, of remorse, of regret, to face the man or the woman you have wronged as though you are meeting him or her for the first time. . . . to enter into each day as thought a new response will have to be invented for each event, to enter into each landscape as though everything is unexpected, full of promises, dreams, surprises."

In short: There is no condemnation.

One alternative to the strength of a justified life is a life of rancor and revenge directed against the world and other people because of prior humiliations and weaknesses. Nietzsche says that sick men, weak men, are the greatest danger to human life: "Where does one not encounter that veiled glance which burdens one with a profound sadness, that inward-turned glance of the born failure which betrays how such a one speaks to himself - that glance which is a sigh! 'If only I were someone else,' sighs this glance: 'but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I ever get free of myself. And yet - I am sick of myself!'"

But once again: There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

A related alternative is a self-indulgent, nostalgic, wallowing in weakness. I justify my present impotence by reference to past impotences. Expectations are lowered; the day won't be full of surprises and challenges, and if it is I'll fail anyway because I always have. Impotence has its comforts.

And again: There is no condemnation.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at 03:40 PM

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