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It's an old tradition in Christianity to make people face the off-putting and shocking. Initially it was scandalous to depict Christ on the cross and his passion, but over time it became integrated and accepted and in a way sanitized and defanged. One could also say, and indeed Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories and victors and sing self-celebratory songs that uplift people to move forward to even more winning.
I'm not sure that Angelus Novus is intended to "demoralize", but even those things that are intended so are understood by their creators to actually point at some deeper morality. (I'm sure there are also some that are simply perverted and enjoy the destruction of all that is good and want everything to rot and decay and die and suffer and squirm and so on - but I don't think the entire art world was like this). Instead they saw their role as warning society and awakening in them a desire for change and to realize that what they were sold previously, packaged in superficial beauty, was in fact rotten and corrupt in the core, that ornament and beauty was used to hide crimes and oppression. These kinds of impulses are not unprecedented and they are similar to iconoclasm (whether the Protestant Christian or the Muslim kind) and other cases of new movements destroying the icons and totems of the old one, which they deem broken and false prophecy packaged in deceptively appealing packaging.
For one or another reason, around the turn of the century artists got saturated with all the straightforward beauty, and they longed for something fresh and not stale. The old aesthetic values felt disconnected from the modern world, dishonest even, just an anachronistic show. Instead they looked for motifs from other cultures, from the east in Art Nouveau, or from other untainted sources, such as several then-rediscovered ancient cultures, or from natural childish innocent instinct. This is also connected to accurate representation being devalued due to photography. In Angelus Novus I mainly see this celebration of childish innocence and clumsiness and honesty, as well as an echo of cave paintings or other primitive art from non-Western cultures, along the lines of Le Taureau by Picasso.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church. This is not an impossible task. But you have to actually do it. You can't shortcut to it by saying that the paintings look better aesthetically, hence they should be the moral examples. What exactly is this part: "his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble"? This is where the crux of the thing lies. Go on with social reality and values as it was in the late 1800s? You can defend that. But you have to actually do it.
Beauty is hard to fake. Ugliness is easy to fake. (Well, it's easy to do for real, but you know what I mean.) Because of this, I'm going to have some heightened level of skepticism about claims of "this art is ugly for a reason".
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Everything in traditional Western art served a Point, a Good, which promoted individual and collective health (or wellbeing). They portrayed the horrors of the crucifixion because this is necessary for your ultimate felicity and beatitude. Art featuring the aversive stimuli of the Cross was made and consumed exclusively by people who understood the image within a cohesive and strict narrative involving a combination of dogmas:
that the pains and horrors shown are the consequence of your own bad behavior (sin), which led to this event;
that Jesus, innocent and blameless, suffered and died in order to redeem you from these evils and their consequence, out of an interest in your wellbeing and desire to see you in paradise
that Jesus, as an example for the whole human race, endured all injury and injustice with righteousness, obedience, faith, virtue, compassion, and obtained the ultimate reward in doing so
that you are in a lifelong and eternal bond with Jesus, and thus have a perfect moral influence exerted upon you continually
The off-putting and shocking nature of it is instrumental according to a complicated list of givens. There would be no point in expressing it otherwise. And importantly, an angel would never be depicted as so weak, miserable, and ugly. Either they are awe-inspiring and powerful, or they are innocent and beautiful. That’s also part of the cultural package of traditional western art.
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity. I agree with his critique of a hypothetical strawman Christianity believed by a hypothetical race of strawpeople.
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
Not sure if this should be the criterion though. If the art students are correctly disillusioned about seeing reality as it is, and the Catholics are just placated and blindfolded to the injustices and whatnot.. Just trying to be devil's advocate. Monks self-flagellating and extreme ascetism also doesn't seem to be the most wholesome and conducive to well-being, but it's also derived from the same source.
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How so?
He failed to grasp that the Cross is a superior path to Selbst-Überwindung (self-overcoming) than what he describes, in that it more accurately models the phenomenological experience of struggle and suffering in pursuit of a superhuman aim. Nietzsche hazardly circumambulates around an idol of someone who overcomes his social values to achieve a greater value, while missing that this has been painted better within the Christian story. Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it. What is the Zarathustra model? To yap in self-pity about how pity is bad. His whole heroic description is woefully cloudy and nonsensical.
The thing is that the Cross Model already proved itself successful for the things Nietzsche claims to love: glory, creativity, greatness, nobility, experimentation, science. The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue). He sired 20 children. He wasn’t afraid of getting into a knife fight or harshly rebuking his students. He synthesized a new style. This is the musical ubermensch! His music expresses glory better than anyone before or after him.
Yet Bach, the ubermensch of note, did this while writing “Jesus, help” at the start of every work, and ending with “To God alone the Glory”. This is because He internalized a better social model. The suffering of Bach’s mind at work was a crown of thorns, not a Zarathustrian self-obsession. His doubts were the leers of the crowd. His obstacles were the heavy beam of the Cross. His work, a taste of the heavenly banquet. It’s all there, Nietzsche missed it and ruined a generation of men. To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans. And even the demise and humiliation of Germany in world history was influenced by the social model of Nietzsche! (While, ironically, the “slave morality” Mennonites will continue hymning in Low German until they become half of North America). It is not Zarathustra who successfully “sweetens the dregs and the bitter shame of suffering”.
Part of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (and Buddhism, and stoicism, and etc) is that a lot of things that appear to be or are alleged to be examples of "self-denial" or "self-overcoming", actually aren't. In the majority of cases on Nietzsche's view, followers of various religious and philosophical traditions are just doing what they were naturally going to do anyway, just with some elaborate post-hoc rationalizations to make it sound more impressive. You need to look at each individual action in each individual case to determine whether it's actually coming from a place of strength or weakness.
For example, a guy who's already having no luck with women, and who then proudly declares himself to be MGTOW because he wants to "focus on himself", inspires no confidence. It's not an accomplishment, he's not "denying" himself anything, because he already had no ability to procure the thing he's allegedly denying himself in the first place. Similarly, showing mercy and love to your enemies is only impressive if you actually had any other options available to you. Refraining from crushing your enemies is only a display of strength if it's actually difficult for you; that is, if it's more difficult for you than simply crushing your enemies would be.
He never said that it was impossible for Christian civilization to produce great individuals, or that there were no great individuals who were Christian. Otherwise, he would have had to fully discount ~2,000 years of European history, which he plainly didn't. He did think though that by the time he arrived on the scene, Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming, and it was time for it to be transcended (at least as far as higher individuals were concerned).
Nietzsche produced the most beautiful prose writing in history (and it's barely even a contest). That's already a pretty staggering accomplishment, even before you get to the actual content of his thought.
But Nietzsche is the one who provides the subjectively-created value schema here. His advice is to create your own values and be autonomously self-governed, and to feel the most “power” which he defines circularly as successfully overcoming a subjectively-defined “resistance”. At no point does one actually have to measure against some objective standard. If someone is simply placing an arbitrary resistance in their week, so that they can feel the pleasure of dominance or “power” over their own devised lifestyle, then there is no self-overcoming. At least in Christianity, there are objective standards to measure against, and actual fears and fixations which require a man overcome himself, plus the external role model to enable this activity.
If Christianity were already the most adaptive system for a man to overcome himself, then why would we depart from the system that works and trust Frederich Nietzsche to guide us on our journey? Where is the proof in the form of successful Nietzschean households and organizations? I can at least drive to a monastery and witness a boomer living in a cell owning nothing, and without complaint (a miracle unto itself).
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