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Philosophical Review

La Mystique du Surhomme by Michel Carrouges


Review by: Karl Löwith
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), pp. 111-112
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2181918 .
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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

a falling off from medieval philosophy. It is more difficult, even


with the help of the introductions, to catch intimations of modern
philosophy.
It might have been supposed that the search for the renaissance
philosophy of man would take in anatomists, physicians, historians,
jurists, and political theorists; but there is little in the texts or intro-
ductions to remind us, for instance, that Leonardo's lifetime fell within
the period covered, and that Machiavelli's Discourses and Prince were
written at the end of it.
The scholarship of the editors is such as to assure us, however, that
the limitations of the volume were intended, and for good reasons. We
thank them for what they have given us and join them in hoping that
other aspects of renaissance thought will be treated in further volumes
in the series of Chicago Translations.
MAX H. Fiscn
University of Illinois

LA MYSTIQUE DU SURHOMME. By MICHEL CARROUGES. Par-


is,*Librairie Gallimard, I948. Pp. 436. No price given.
This remarkable study of modern literature in the light of its reli-
gious or rather irreligious motivation and aspiration supplements ad-
mirably the theological interpretation of such thinkers as Proudhon
and Comte, Nietzsche, Dostoevski and Kierkegaard by Henri de Lu-
bac, Urs von Balthasar, and Walther Rehm. If its purpose is apolo-
getic, it is certainly a very able and audacious one, for it suggests the
juncture, if not coincidence, of the imitation of Christ with Promethe-
an defiance. What binds them together is the passionate aspiration
toward deification, the transcendence toward man's transfiguration
without obliterating the fundamental difference between self-redemp-
tion and salvation. The book has three parts: (I) the Eschatology of
Mystic Atheism; (2) the Atheistic Process of Deification; (3) the
Significance of Mystic Atheism, in comparison with Christian mysti-
cism and oriental religions. The subject matter of the book is the
prophetic and apocalyptic literature, i.e., literature which is not con-
cerned with depicturing certain facets of everyday life but is, in the
literal sense of the word, inspired and therefore revelatory for the
ultimate aspiration of total human life. The prophetic literature, as
conceived by Carrouges, embraces, besides the prophets of the Old
Testament, such diverse creations as the Prometheus of Aeschylos,
the Oedipus of Sophocles, the Faust of Goethe, Jean Paul's Titan,
Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the prophetic poems of W. Blake, the writ-
ings of E. A. Poe, Dostoevski, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Lau-
treamont, Kafka, and some of the existentialists. All of them reveal,
III

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

if rightly interpreted, one eternal and fundamental theme: the rivalry


and gigantic struggle between God and man. They re-enact more or
less consciously the drama of Christian experience, the temptation of
Jesus by Satan in the desert. To make this rivalry transparent in man's
attempt at the conquest of earth and heaven is the aim of Carrouges'
interpretation of innumerable literary documents, in particular from
the period of Romanticism to that of Surrealism.
When professing radical atheism, the vision of these writers is
religiously not indifferent but inspired by an eschatological impulse
and translatable into a theological language. The whole prophetic
literature can be interpreted by Nietzsche's thesis that the "death of
God" is the birth of the "superman." These writers may be "pos-
sessed" ones, like Kirilof in Dostoevski's novel, but the possessed ones
too bear witness to the Son of God (Matt. 8: 29), and Carrouges has
a special mastery in discovering beneath the most diverse forms of
demonic and luciferic visions in oriental and occidental, classic and
romantic literature the operations of the Holy Spirit. "The world,"
says Carrouges, "has been delivered up to man by God and, in spite
of the fall, God did not take back his promise. Man has dragged the
world into his fall but the world remains for him a field of conquest.
There is no limit to the mastery of the physical, physiological and even
mental world. In that respect the promises of the superman are no
lies and it would be foolish to reject them as phantastic. From the
dream of Ikarus to Captain Nemo many improbable designs of hu-
manity have been realized." Within the presuppositions of Prome-
thean mystical atheism, man's superhuman victory over the whole of
creation may indeed become an equivalent of his deification. But will
this really ever be an equivalent, which satisfies the deepest desire and
ambition of man? There is in man as such an insatiable dissatisfaction
which increases in the same proportion as his ambitions achieve their
aims. His thirst for ever more power and freedom must eventually
defeat its own purpose. Even the dominion over the cosmos by a global
society would not prevent the self-destruction of this superhuman so-
ciety, but make it more easy and probable. The essential cause of the
downfall of the tower of Babel is not that it was too high or poorly
constructed but that a "confusion of languages" occurred because it is
impossible to unite humanity in an enterprise without a more than
human authority and directive. There is at the bottom of the human
situation a temptation to hybris which no achievement can ever ap-
pease. The superman of Promethean atheism forgets that it was the
very paradise in its perfection which Adam could not endure. He
wanted to become like God, in spite of God.
KARL L6WITH
Newt School for Social Research
I12

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