What Did Nietzsche Do on Capri?
Foto: Peter de Ru
Melberg writes:
Why did he go there? What did he want to see? What did he see? It is definitely one of the lesser riddles in Nietzsche’s biography, but it is still a good starting point for taking up some larger problems:
The visit to Capri coincided with the great turning point in his life and thinking, a turning point that can be described geographically, from north to south, from Nordic to Southern. And who knows, perhaps it was the visit to Capri that gave content to this transformation.
Nietzsche spent half year during the winter of 1876-1877 in Sorrento south of Naples. He was accompanied by his older friend Malwida von Meysenbug and the philosopher Paul Rée, who several years later would become his rival for the young Russian Lou Salomé. They read and wrote, and of course visited the area’s attractions. The trip to Capri, in March 1877, was one such excursion.
Nietzsche Resigns His Position and Becomes and Independent Philosopher
We are at what I have already called a turning point in Nietszche’s life. He was 32 years old, but had been a professor of Classical Philology for nearly ten years, and was approaching the decision he would make a few years later to resign his increasingly strenuous professorship. Instead he embarked on the last period in his life as a thinking person, an epoch which would last until January 1889. He became a philosopher instead of a philologist, a “free philosopher” and “fugitives errans” in his own words: a stateless and wandering exile, in the world of ideas as well as the geographical world. Sorrento was the first visit, and the first winter, in the South.
Discover the South! It was something that northerners had been doing to enrich their learning for at least one hundred years before Nietzsche made his discovery.
Nietzsche admired Goethe and Goethe had provided an example for this discovery with his Italian journey, which was undertaken over several years from 1786. The goal was to discover classical culture in Rome, but then in Naples to find the true South, sensual, spontaneous, physical, and dangerous. Did Nietzsche’s discovery of the South mean that he, like his predecessor, was aroused to sensuality? The answer is yes, from this point on the body is the centre of his philosophy. Or better expressed, the connections between the body and the mind, between the body and language and expression and ideas: The body’s philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.Capri was not just the South, it was South of the South
Which means that that which northerners regarded as a sensual, dangerous, and lawless natural existence in Naples was still relatively controlled and normal compared to the anti-civilised preserve expected to be found on the islands. Perhaps the prosaic truth in this was that the islands were poor, much poorer than the mainland. And that southern Italy was generally poorer and thus less expensive for the traveling northerner.
It isn’t easy to get a clear picture of what it meant, but it is still hard to avoid the impression that Italy, at least in its periphery, especially Sicily and Capri, could until the beginning of the Twentieth Century be compared to Thailand today. That is, for along time Capri had a reputation of inviting all kinds of sex at a cheap price. It was far from today’s exclusive Capri, where a cup of coffee at the famous piazza, the classic meeting place, costs as much as in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, and where the streets are not lined by prostitutes, but rather by Armani and Gucci stores.
From Sorrento Nietzsche could see Capri’s rugged profile hulking over the water and he was surely attracted, as so many before and after, to compare the profile with a dragon or a bird of prey…which of course strengthens the myth of something dangerous. And Nietzsche, who was a well-trained Latinist, surely remembered the terrible things Tacitus and Suetonius had written about Tiberius.
A Cult of Mithras in the Wedding Cave?
We can assume that Nietzsche wandered off to see the ruins of Villa Jovis. It also seems that Nietzsche took the spectacular hike, winding along the island’s north side, past the monumental cliffs of Arco Naturale, down into a deep valley and up again to a view of the famous Faraglioni offshore rock formations, just before returning to the city of Capri. Farthest down in the valley you pass a large cave, around which there are may tales.
Melberg writes:
A relief has been found here which is believed to portray a sacrifice to Mithras, the Persian sun good preparing to kill a bull.
The cave could be called Magnum Mithrae Antrum, Italianized to Mitromania or Matromania, sometimes popularly transformed into Grotta di Matriomonio (“the wedding cave”). These components, the cave, wedding, sacrifice, have fed fantasies of sex and violence, often linked to Tiberius. The chances that the emperor would have gone to the inaccessible grotto are not great, any more than the Persian sun god Mithas being worshipped in rituals in a cave on Capri (even if there are examples of a Romanised Mithras cult). Experts are apparently unanimous that the cave was used ritually, but lean towards this being a Roman “nymphaeum” consecrated to nymphs or goddesses.
The cave appears in Nietzsche’s notes for the spring of 1878, the year after Sorrento. From volume 28 (no. 17, 22, 25, 34):
1. Mitromania – Wait for the light from the first sunrays, finally see it and, mock it and obliterate
2. Mithras – Hope
Mithras madness!
3. Grotta di Matrimonio, idyllic picture of the unconscious life.
4. Tiberius: the madness of action. The opposite: the madness of knowledge
5. Imagine life as a feast with starting point in Mitromania,
In addition a note, no. 33, seems relevant. Nietzsche recalls the period in Sorrento as liberating: “In Sorrento I shook off 9 years of moss.”
Melberg writes:
The professorial and German moss was shaken off. What kind of Friedrich is left? Did the new Friedrich emerge in the South, in Sorrento, on Capri, in the cave?
The name plays in his memory: Mithras, Mitromania, Matrimonio. The three lead from the mythical past to the historical past to the utopian future. From darkness to light. “Wait for the light from the first sunrays” – had he visited the cave at night, or imagined visiting it at night, to await the morning sun? Or was it a sacrificial feast he had in mind, orgies that ended when the mythic troll was cracked by the light of the rising run? Or was it the sun god that waited?
“Mithras” signals both “hope” and “madness”. The cave means both darkness and light. Tiberius is just as two-sided: he is capable of actio, but his acts are “madness”. His “counterpart” must be the thinking Friedrich himself: Friedrich is he who is capable of knowing. Does madness threaten he who is capable?
Sex orgies in the Wedding Cave?
The grotto is about the “unconscious life”: a utopian “idyll” where the sacrifice is presented as a wedding. The cave could be about a “feast”. But the cave’s feast, Friedrich’s feast, is no idyll. Friedrich stand in the middle of his own history and his “feast” must include both myth and utopia: it is a Dionysian orgy that aims for “self-extinction”, to forget itself, to throw off the moss, to become that man is through forgetting everything that man became.
Some years later the grotto appears again, in Aphorism 55 in “Beyond Good and Evil”. Nietzsche is here as religion critic, along with knowledge critic, and with a “nihilistic” fascination for “nothingness”. In just a few lines he condenses humanity’s religious history with three sacrifices, once again from myth to history: first you sacrifice the best of your fellow humans, then you sacrifice your own strongest instincts, your “nature”, finally you sacrifice God. “To sacrifice God for nothingness…We all know something about this.” As an example of earlier religions’ human sacrifices Nietzsche gives as an example “the sacrifice of Emperor Tiberius in the grotto to Mithras on the island of Capri, that most terrible of all Roman anachronisms”. The cave has found its place in an ideological and historical construction: Nietzsche has no doubts that Tiberius would have carried out human sacrifice in the “grotto of Mithras”. (Another variant, following Suetonius, is of course: sex orgies. This can naturally be connected to sacrifices with violence as the common denominator.) But what really is this “most terrible”? The sacrifice? Tiberius? The grotto? Capri?
The ambiguity reflected in the notes Nietzsche saves now for the end of the Aphorism, where we “all” are said to know something about the sacrifice of God to “nothingness”.
Do we also know something about human sacrifice?
How do you sacrifice yourself in the moment of the feast, shake off the moss to become that which you are, to leave behind that which you had become?
Thus read Nietzsche’s final words on the grotto on Capri. There is no longer future, feast, and utopia, just the nightmare of history. In a concentrated form this is in fact that which all of his furious thinking from his years as a “free philosopher” has revolved around: all the sacrifices that are necessary so that I can become that which I really am.
Arne Melberg
Professor of Literature, University of Oslo