No station was too noble for his aspirations, no detail too insignificant for his attention. His life and work assumed grandiose proportions, an architectonic amplitude and majesty, for in both his life and his work there was the same organic foundation.
He is the nearest, with the exception of da Vinci, to the god-man ideal of the Greeks. In him soil and climate were at their most favorable. He had blood, race, culture, time—everything with him. Everything nourished him!
At this lofty point when Goethe appears, when man and culture are both at peak, the whole of past and future spreads out. The end is now in sight, the road henceforth is downward.
After the Olympian Goethe the Dionysian race of artists sets in, the men of the “tragic age” which Nietzsche prophesied and of which he himself was a superb example. The tragic age, when all that which is forever denied us makes itself felt with nostalgic force. Once again the cult of Mystery is revived.
Once again man must re-enact the mystery of the god, the god whose fertilizing death is to redeem and to purify man from guilt and sin, to free him from the wheel of birth and becoming. Sin, guilt, neurosis—they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
The tree of life now becomes the tree of death. But it is always the same tree. And it is from this tree of death that life must spring forth again, that life must be reborn. Which, as all the myths of the tree testify, is precisely what happens.
“At the moment of the destruction of the world,” says Jung, referring to Ygdrasil, the world-ash, “this tree becomes the guardian mother, the tree of death and life, one ‘pregnant.’ ”
It is at this point in the cultural cycle of history that the “transvaluation of all values” must set in. It is the reversal of the spiritual values, of a whole complex of reigning ideological values. The tree of life now knows its death.
The Dionysian art of ecstasies now reasserts its claims. The drama intervenes. The tragic reappears. Through madness and ecstasy the mystery of the god is enacted and the drunken revellers acquire the will to die—to die creatively.
It is the conversion of that same life instinct which urged the tree of man to fullest expression. It is to save man from the fear of death, so that he may be able to die!
To go forward into death! Not backward into the womb. Out of the quicksands, out of the stagnant flux!
This is the winter of life, and our drama is to secure a foothold so that life may go forward once again.
But this foothold can only be gained on the dead bodies of those who are willing to die.*
- Fragment from an unfinished book; The World of Lawrence.
The end
