In the final paragraph of Nietzsche’s prolonged introducion of ressentiment in the Genealogy of Morals (1.10) stands the example of Honore Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791). Parenthetically, in the midst of this polemical work and in one of its key sections, we find a concrete example of what we can be on the other side of the ascetic ideal. Mirabeau’s defining quality is his ability to let things go. He does not hold grudges because he does not acknowledge the offending act:

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long — that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he — forgot). Such a man shakes of with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others… (GM 1.10, emphasis added)

Mirabeau stands as an example of how to deal with the inevitability of nihilism — the moral condition of a society that has exhausted the ascetic ideal and proclaimed, finally, the Death of God. As a sign of its dying, the ascetic ideal searches for alternative ways of reinvigorating itself. Scientific atheism is only the last gasp, but it is no way out. Scientific atheism simply expresses its nihilism by mocking and making fun of those who seek a source of higher values, but it is incapable of providing an alternative to the ascetic ideal and its denigration of the instincts. (See The Gay Science, Section 125.)

For Nietzsche, nihilism was the inevitable consequence of this flaming out of the ascetic ideal as a particular manifestation of the will to truth. This ideal produced a great deal of benefit for humanity — we gained a will and could see ourselves as individual beings with the power to effect the world around us and to shape it to our needs: “But all this notwithstanding — man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the ‘sense-less’ — he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved” (GM 3.28).

Without the will to truth motivated by the ascetic ideal, what is to become of this democratized will? This is the motivating question of the Genealogy and, arguably, all of Nietzsche’s life’s work. With the Death of God, we move headlong into nihilism as the will is untethered from any definitive source of higher values. Yet this will is unwilling to give itself up now that it has been bred into us by more than 2000 years of Western culture. Where will the will find its direction and meaning because it certainly is not going to give itself up?

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself — all this means — let us dare grasp it — a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presupposition of life; but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will. (GM 3.28)

To put my cards on the table: it seems to me that the will has found its direction for the time being in a reinvigoration of ressentiment as a source of meaning. This untethered ressentiment goes in search of new things to hate. Its pure energy can be harnessed by whatever new ascetic priest comes along to give it direction and meaning.

An example:

“There’s just not the hatred for Joe Biden that there is for Barak Obama and for the Clintons. There’s not a ‘hate Biden’ vote that is out there. You know when you go, there’s Trump on the ballot, there is a ‘hate Trump’ voter passion.”

This was Fox News’ Jesse Watters conducting a strategic retrospective of the 2022 mid-term elections that didn’t end in the “red wave” that so many predicted. Fox News, and they are not alone in this, has made the cultivation of ressentiment into a strategy. As such, they demonstrate how the media has become the new ascetic priest. But this ressentiment has only one motivation — total and permanent victory of the Republican party as the guardians of American Global Capitalism. If that victory doesn’t happen legitimately, it will happen illegitimately. But that illegitimacy must be made legitimate — the election was stolen. When that motivation proved ineffective, it was quickly dropped. All that they could do is turn back to hatred in search of an object. Here, in this quote from that night, we see laid bare the pure need to stoke hatred as the heart of a political strategy. But this hatred has lost its object — no stolen election, no Bill and Hilary, no Obama. Where will the ascetic priest find its object and therefore its power?

Another example: The simple gesture of Colin Kaepernick “taking a knee” during the National Athem to call attention to police brutality, particularly against African Americans, became the opportunity to utterly ignore his intent and to fuel hatred. The will to ressentiment had found, if only momentarily, a new object to hate. But this was short-lived. With Kaepernick fired and unable to find a home in the NFL, the ascetic priest’s objective was complete and new objects of hatred must be found.

To summarize: my contention is that ressentiment has become one of the most predominant ways in which a very large segment of us (Americans? the West?) are dealing with the Death of God. To be sure, God has always been on life support in the US, relegated merely to something to nominally believe in as an insurance policy for one’s personal salvation. As a source of higher values, God’s main job (everyone needs to have a job) has been to provided air cover for capitalism. As long as you profess your belief, you are saved. Go on about your business free of any “bad conscience.” In this way, belief in God is a kind of insurance policy for one’s salvation.

In this meditation, I want to continue looking at philosophical and spiritual practices (to continue to use Pierre Hadot’s now fashionable phrase) that help me find ways through and out of the impasse of ressentiment-fueled nihilism that I see all around me, including my own. I’m going to make the attempt to connect what Nietzsche saw in Mirabeau and what Evagrius of Pontus taught his monks as spiritual practices. This is not as far fetched a connection as it might sound. I do believe that Evagrius was the counter-example of Nietzsche’s ascetic priest who stokes anger and hatred into a permanent state of ressentiment. Evagrius’ exceedingly well-documented spiritual practices have a great deal to teach us about defusing our anger without completely denigrating our emotional motivations. This mediation will focus, in particular, on a couple of passages from On Thoughts 2 and 22. The connections back to Roman Stoicism will be palpable and explicit as this was, in part and filtered through neoplatonism, Evagrius’ philosophical lineage.

With those preliminaries in place, let me now get on with the substance of this meditation…

Nietzsche’s Mirabeau is a clue to they way through the flailing exhaustion of the ascetic ideal. What is the essence of Mirabeau’s health? His ability to forget. Forgetting is not, as Nietzsche will make abundantly clear in the Second Essay, a passive or defective power of the mind. The ability to forget is active. This is crucial to understand because it is easy for us to think of forgetfulness as a defect. If one forgets something, we feel like something has gone utterly wrong. To remember is the normal and healthy state of the human mind.

Nietzsche makes the compelling case that the healthy mind, like Mirabeau’s, has an active power of forgetting. This is a complex argument, but let me try to boil it down to its simplest terms. For Nietzsche, human physiology is a swirling mass of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that does not naturally hold onto any of these for very long. We see this in very small children when simple distractions can move them from emotional outbursts to a completely different state of being rarely seen in adulthood. Forgetting is a natural and normal capability that:

… close[s] the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy) — that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness. (GM 2.1)

Memory is the opponent of active forgetfulness. As its opponent, it must be called into being; it must be provoked, and it must have help sorting and choosing the thoughts and feelings that it wants to hold onto. In other words, if active forgetfulness is the healthy state of mind that keeps the consciousness clear for new experiences, memory comes to us from outside as certain “mnemotechnics” force us to remember certain things — debts that we owe, laws that we must obey, promises to keep, doctrinal truths. Memory must be seen as an active opposing force that overcomes the strength of forgetfulness. Thus the Second Essay begins with the provocation: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises— is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?”

This breeding is not an entirely bad thing. Through the external mechanisms of mnemotechnics, we are forced to remember debts owed and other promises made. Humanity becomes “calculable, regular, necessary… he is able to stand security for his own future”(GM 2.2). The will, memory, and a healthy conscience are bred into us as we seek to keep these promises. Again, this is not a completely bad thing. We are not yet at the end of the ascetic ideal as a flaming out of higher values. We are at a healthy state of memory and forgetfulness that are in balance where responsibility is born and bred as an “extraordinary privilege” and “rare freedom” and a “power over oneself and fate” (GM 2.2) These mnemotechnics are not without violence, however. “Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself” (GM 2.3). As always with a subtle intelligence such as Nietzsche’s, we must get comfortable with paradoxes and gray areas. Such is the demand that modern nihilism puts upon us.

Ressentiment arises from the intensification of memory-creating imperatives. To understand this, we must understand the difference Nietzsche makes between basic ressentiment and “the man of ressentiment.” The latter is a permanent state that has worked-over the active faculty of forgetfulness to as to make anger and hatred stick. This is the opposite of Mirabeau who “shakes off with a single shrug” all the seemingly bad things that happen to him. He forgets easily and healthily. To the contrary, the man of ressentiment “cannot have done with anything.” This is a recurring phrase for Nietzsche, and it emphasizes how the active power of forgetting is intentionally weakened so that normal negative feelings and instincts are forced to linger so as to become permanent states. We readers of Nietzsche must remember, as we go through this, that permanent ressentiment is not the natural evolution of internal psychological and physiological forces. External forces create permanent ressentiment — the man of ressentiment, ressentiment as core to one’s identity. Nietzsche encapsulates this external power in the concept of the ascetic priest.

What is the power of the ascetic priest? It is complex, but in the end it comes down to this: the ascetic priest whips up the crowd and makes it a herd driven by an “orgy of feeling” (GM 3.19) that disables the healthy forgetting. The result is “a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in suffering and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own presupposition, its physiological capacity for life, decreases” (GM 3.11). The man of ressentiment does not create himself. He needs an impresario. Today’s impresarios are the likes of Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left along with thousands of “echo chambers” that function as ways for us to get guidance on what we should think about certain things — immigration, global warming, school board candidates, religion, terrorism, et cetera. It all seems so overwhelming, not only as an orgy of feeling but an orgy of issues. All one has in the face of these twin orgies is self-validating ressentiment that does not seek productive answers but only more and more anger to feel more and more alive.

The starting point, which is not and cannot be a going back, is how we defuse ressentiment to regain what Nietzsche called our “intellectual conscience.” This is the example of Mirabeau. Today this means acknowledging the twin orgies of feeing and issues so as to redirect their energies in more productive ways. This means learning how to identify and defuse ressentiment in its tracks. This is tricky because defusing can easily be accomplished as a personal act of apathy as the flip-side of ressentiment. Evagrius called this “demon” of apathy acedia — a nihilistic giving up when the juice no longer seems worth the squeeze. This is just as nihilistic as ressentiment.

__________

Evagrius has much to tell us about dealing with ressentiment, and his advice, when put into practice, starts to look like Nietzsche’s Mirabeau — one who knows how to let things go not because he has given into a nihilistic acedia, but because he knows that stoking anger into a permanent sense of ressentiment is itself nihilistic. Nihilism as acedia is a passive giving up on the pursuit of higher values, while ressentiment-fueled nihilism is an active channeling of energy into an impotent but enthusiastic sense of being wronged. The former despises immigrants but doesn’t muster the energy to even care — he just cultivates a quiet disgust at the situation. The latter despises immigrants but musters the energy to care passionately about the wrongs done to the country but equally doesn’t do anything about it — he just yells at the TV and harangues anyone he thinks might have a sympathetic ear. For both, the orgy of feeling mixes with the orgy of issues to become a helplessness that manifests as acedia or ressentiment, and sometimes oscillates between both.

When Nietzsche writes about the “orgy of feeling” whipped up by the ascetic priest, we need to understand a couple of forces that work together to create permanent ressentiment. On the one hand, we have the force of memory as an active opposition to forgetfulness. Evagrius will call this “lingering” and it is well documented in the scholarship. Memory plays a key role in Evagrius’ spiritual practices. Mostly it represents the mind’s inability to forget. It is the holding on to concrete images that the “demons” of sinful thoughts (logismoi) invest with meaning and whip up the monk’s consciousness with all sorts of bad “passions.” On the other hand, we have the force of speed. This is a key mechanism of lingering. Images move quickly from one to the other to stoke our passions. The faster we allow them to move, the more the passions are stoked and the longer they are allowed to linger.

Against both forces — lingering and speed — the monk must be able to call on another force: “cutting off.” According to David Brakke, “Every thought that we have, good or bad, can be cut off by an opposing thought, and in fact Evagrius suggests that nearly every thought that we have does encounter its opposite. The question is whether we stick with the first thought despite the challenge of the second or whether the first thought is cut off and the second persists and sets us on a course of action” (Introduction to his translation of Evagrius’ Talking Back: Antirrhetikos). Actively cultivating this natural yet nascent quality of our minds is central to Evagrius’ spiritual practices, and it is the force of one of his most influential works — Antirrhetikos, which provides very specific instructions for recognizing and “talking back” (antirrhetikos) to our demonic thoughts using carefully chosen Biblical verses.

There is another crucial point to make for our own adoption of Evagrius’ spiritual practices and to see why he is the counter-force to Nietzsche’s ascetic priest. These are not purely internal psychological forces at work. Evagrius describes external forces that go to work on internal “mental representations” (noemata) that, by themselves, have no inherent meaning. The only thing that properly belongs to the human subject is the capacity to represent noemata to the mind. How those mental representations become meaningful is the work of angels or demons — external entities that we collaborate with to bring meaning to what we see in our minds. “Cutting off” becomes the cultivated power to slow down the speed at which the process happens and to decide which source of meaning — angel or demonic — we are going allow to linger and take hold. Of the “eight general and basic categories of thoughts” that Evagrius codified (gluttony, impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride), he tells us at the moment in which he introduces them in the Praktikos:

It is not in our power to determine whether we are disturbed by these thoughts, but it is up to us to decide if they are to linger within us or not and whether or not they are to stir up our passions. (Praktikos Chapter 6, emphasis added)

 Packed into this short chapter (kephalia) is the essence of Evagrius’ adoption of the ancient moral psychology of representations and passions. Just as with canonical Stoicism, whether or not we are provoked by external forces is not up to us. It is how we respond that matters. If we assent to those provocations, we allow them to linger and to become passions — out of control emotions that undermine our autonomy.

For Evagrius, he is much more emphatic that these provocations can be the intentional acts of demons trying to stoke our passions. So, while representation of mental images is a normal capacity of the mind, demons can be the ones that initiate the mental representations:

All the demonic thoughts import concepts of perceptible things into the soul. The mind, being imprinted by them, bears about in itself the shapes of these things and from the thing recognizes at length the demon that has drawn near. (On Thoughts 2)

Thus, the demons can set the whole process in motion by conjuring up these images (which are mainly memories for an anchorite) and encouraging us to move quickly from the image to the associated passion. The force of speed is essential to the force of lingering. When these forces work together, the experience is one of passion. Evagrius continues:

Thus if the face of one who has wronged or dishonored me should appear in my thinking, the thought of grudge-bearing is proven to be approaching. Or again, if recollection of wealth or glory should appear, what is afflicting us will be clearly recognized from the thing. It is likewise from the other thoughts: you will find who is present and suggesting them from the thing. (On Thoughts 2)

However, we must be careful. We are not inexorably fallen creatures. Sin is not embedded in our souls. Rather, sin is the result of allowing demonic thoughts to linger so as to become passions and permanent states of the soul: “grudge-bearing [ressentiment] is proven to be approaching” but we have the power to cut if off. If we don’t then we sin. Evagrius’ lessons consist in teaching not how to rid ourselves of an Original Sin, but how to keep ourselves from giving ourselves over to out of control emotions like grudge-bearing and greed. Thus, the mental capacity to generate images and memories is not inherently sinful: “But I do not mean that all memories of such things result from demons…. I refer only to such memories as unnaturally draw along one’s irascibility or desire” (On Thoughts 2).

The orgy of feeling that are the passions is the work of demons and not the natural state of the soul. Recognizing the approach of demons by the images that they conjure up is the first step. Learning how to slow down, “talk back,” and “cut off” the speed at which the demons move is the heart of Evagrius ascetic practices. To be sure, there is much more to his guidance. Ascetic practices are simply the starting point for a longer progression that I will need to cover in subsequent meditations. But to draw this to a close, On Thoughts 22 spells out the power of passions as the power of speed and lingering:

22. All the impure thoughts that endure in us through the passions make the mind descend “to ruin and destruction” [1 Tim 6.9]. Just as the concept of bread endures in one who is hungry because of the hunger, the concept of water endures in one who is thirsty because of the thirst, so, too, the concepts of wealth and possessions endure because of greediness, and the concepts of food and the shameful thoughts born from food endure because of the passions. And it is likewise evident in the case of the thoughts of vainglory and other concepts. It is not possible for the mind choked by such images to stand before God and win the “crown of righteousness” [2 Tim 4.8]. (On Thoughts 22)