The Rebel in Seventeenth-Century Tragedy

Abstract

ONCLUDING his essay, Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that European man turns to ascetic idealism in order to rescue his will; that, paradoxically, his self-hate remains at least a form of volition; and that he would rather choose the void as his purpose than be void of purpose.' These remarks, closing full-circle the matter of evolution of bad conscience in place of vital pride, cast considerable light on Nietzsche's rather compact, but brilliant summary of a classical ideal in opposition to degenerative Christianity. He pays tribute to our race's golden age of heroism in Greece and Rome, and traces its decline over the intermediate conflict between the Renaissance, with its resurgence of ancient values, and the Reformation, a movement of resentment that restored the church. The last flickering of political nobleness then occurs in the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but is smothered by the tide of democratization with the advent of the French Revolution.2