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I suppose that what I clumsily misinterpret as a desire for bony-arsed youths is actually a desire for - for what? Union with the Godhead? Yes, that would be correct. What is sensitivity to beauty other than a natural and perfectly human love of Beauty Itself? But I think I have made it quite clear that I am, when all is said and done, an irredeemable Platonist. So let's talk about the opposition. One of the things I love about Nietzsche (and I do love Nietzsche, our great sweet enemy) is how he argues so irresistably against himself. Nietzsche is the great aesthete, the master rhetorician, always trying to warn us to be on our guard against the charms of beauty and persuasion. I think he is wrong (ostensibly) and right (deeply). If there is a beauty in the bony arses of boys, then we should be alert to it - but not satisfied with it. Such an object of desire is fascinating, but ultimately wanting, as all such objects are. Augustine was far more alert to the problems of desire and beauty than any other thinker of our age, not excluding those great neo-Nietzscheans Fr Jacques Lacan and St Michel Foucault. Nietzsche is a wonderful purgative for the complacent, and Christianity has had the great advantage of imbibing him in gradually-increasing concentrations over a century or so. I am not sure that materialists are so fortunate: the notion that the Wille zur Macht is easily compatible with a liberal or genially left-wing atheism seems unlikely to me. At the very least, such a project requires serious philosphical work, of the kind that Christianity's best minds have been devoting to Nietzsche at least since the Second World War (and even before that in the Germanistik tradition). I would suggest - and I apologise for being so indelicate - that any person who is morally outraged by what is currently going on in the benighted corners of this Earth would be much more confident in Christian Platonism (albeit of a sort chastened in due measure by the Nietzschean Antichrist) than in atheistic materialism attempting hopefully to chase the Will To Power towards some kind of vindication of their deep moral intuitions. Nietzsche's concept of nature is not yours, and - however salutary it may be as a laxitive or an emetic - the Wille zur Macht is not a good basis for attempting to argue against the savagery of the strong nor the oppression of the weak. That will require something else entirely. Probably metaphysical, maybe Chrisatian and definitely damnably woolly-minded. |