It was remarked to us that the conferences of the philosophical society
last year were too abstract for the public.  I attempted to show how the
great problems of speculative philosophy arose in ambiguity.  Now,
speculative philosophy is easier than moral philosophy, than practical
philosophy.  Yet, we admit freely that our choice was not the happiest.  We
forgot the great Aristotelian principle according to which things that are
the most knowable in themselves, are the least knowable in relation to us. 
Ethical problems are of all problems the most difficult. Aristotle and St.
Thomas put moral philosophy at the very end of philosophy:  a study of
which only mature intelligences were capable.

However, as we will see in time, during periods of intellectual decadence,
of intellectual fatigue, during periods in which intelligences are too
exhausted to give themselves to disinterested speculation which in reality
conditions all ethical philosophy, during these periods one does nothing
but morality.

(page 2)

One would say, therefore, that the problems which are in themselves the
most difficult seem to us to be the easiest for us.  Confirmation:  Do you
know many people who do not have very firm political convictions , or even
very loud?  And yet, ideas of applied politics must be conditioned by a
political ethics, which must be conditioned by a general ethics, which is
in its turn conditioned by a speculative vision of the world, at once
metaphysical and natural.

This year, we will take account of this Aristotelian principle, and of
these undeniable facts, and I will treat of a problem most obscure, and
which will oblige us often to make moral considerations of an order so
opaque that all opinions that are more than vague and timid will verge on
the ridiculous.  And yet, I will present these opinions with all the rowdy
and headstrong emphasis necessary as a condition of their probability.
(page 3)

The fact of treating here certain questions which are apparently of the
domain of opinion could scandalize those among you who have received a very
classical philosophical formation, who have been perfectly satisfied, and
who have a taste for the definitive:  who interest themselves always in
philosophy either to hear once again what they have already heard, or to
establish that youth is lost.  There are men all speculative opinion seems
dreamy and dangerous:  for whom philosophy is essentially a dictionary (a
manual) in which is only found what is definitely established and confirmed
by the weight of the ages.  They do not know how to opine, because jolts of
opinion are evidently disastrous for a calcined mind.  

But we will speak of this phenomenon there where it will be a question of
intellectual decadence.  We say here that with Aristotle and St. Thomas, we
believe that the philosophical life is above all a life:  that it advances
by groping, often very ambiguous, and that in many cases, the domain of
opinion is for us the most interesting:  "Magis concupiscimus scire modicum
de rebus honorabilissimi(?) et altissimi, etiam si topice et probabiliter
illud sciamus, quam scire multum, et per certitudinem, de rebus minus
nobilibus."  (De An. I,)  (page 4)

I have chosen as subject of these conferences the philosopher of the
superman:  philosopher who has become synonymous with the system of German
philosophy of the 19th Century, Nietzsche.  Although for Nietzsche
philosophy was essentially (?) a system of the superman, the problem of the
superman is for us a simple question of applied philosophy.

Even when we make abstraction from the Nietzschean system, the idea itself
of the superman is an idea of uneasiness:  for the simple reason that the
superman is a human type that is only acceptable in a very abstract way. 
The supermen that we appreciate today are dead.  They do not become
acceptable until after having suffered a certain cooking process which must
be extended over several years.  The mass of contemporaries of the superman
regard him always with a certain mistrust.  I say the mass, because the
superman will always have some disciples.  The mas has a horror of great
men.  They worry it.  It is not that this mass recognizes their
transcendence.  Do not believe that the Archbishop of Oxford -- who
condemned St. Thomas, who has today become acceptable, thanks to his
commentaries, his manuals, etc. -- in forbidding his students to follow the
Thomist courses of philosophy and of theology under pain of
excommunication, do not believe that
(page 5) that these authorities recognized in St. Thomas a genius.  No, he
was for them a dangerous sophist, who carried out "idolis domus Dei,  . . .
. quantum inde futuris temporibus poterit ecclesiae periculum imminere."

St. Thomas was the founder of a school that worked for the destruction of
the Church - the genius was always considered as stricken by a demonic
madness which will upset the established order:  to such a point that a
study of social phenomena surrounding him could serve as a criterion of his
genius.  And if our superman is accepted in his time, it would be necessary
to seek the reasons for this success in a phenomenon extrinsic to his
genius.  This idea is historically true, and we will soon give philosophic
reasons for it.  For the moment it suffices to remember that when God
Himself was made man - perfect man presenting manifest signs  of divinity -
we mocked him, we spat in his face, and we crucified him.

I know that the idea of amorphous egalitarianism leads many men to question
even the type itself of the superman; and if they don't question the
existence of superior types, (page 6)  refuse them all truly transcendent
propriety, and all transcendent right:  they refuse to consider them as
heterogeneous types in which nature attains an end entirely specific, to
the point of meriting a totally specific mention in ethics.

And yet, there are in Aristotelian ethics two virtues which are grafted on
innate natural dispositions, which characterize the superman:  magnanimity
and magnificence:  dispositions of which it is said that they are not
natural (we will see at the proper time how this term "natural" must be
understood)  And these conceptions were not indissolubly tied to those
according to which men are naturally divided into masters and slaves: 
because these dispositions are not characteristic of masters.  St. Thomas
has incorporated the conditions of the superman in his Summa Theologiae: 
he elaborated and completed it.  I know that today one does not speak any
more of these virtues:  but would this not be a sign of degeneracy of
morals, rather than of the objective value of this idea?  We will
demonstrate at the proper time that this idea must disappear from moral
treatises, as necessary consequence of post-medieval intellectual
decadence.  (page 7)

The very idea of the superman is a disturbing subject.  But the question
becomes again more grave when one proposes to study it in the work of
Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is without the least doubt a very dangerous man.  The
world has never known a greater blasphemer than the author of the Anti-
Christ (?).  There are in his work texts that one would not know how to
read without trembling.  But we have grounds to console ourselves:  during
his life he manifested signs of madness, and he ended his life in complete
madness. 

But then, why take account of his work?  Because the work, whether it be
that of a reasonable man or a crazy one, has intrinsic merits:  as that of
Flemish painter Van der Goes, or that of Dutch painter Van Gogh.  If nature
has recourse to crazy men, it is perhaps because, in the absence of normal
competent men, circumstances do not permit it otherwise to achieve its
mission:  "My ways are not your ways," said the Lord.  Nature has a
mission, and an end to attain despite us.  Its end transcends us, and it
disposes truly wonderful means which escape us. 

Any consideration of the philosophy of Nietzsche could still be dangerous,
because it is especially libertines who have exploited it in favor of their
perverse idea of liberty.  The superman of Nietzsche lives beyond good and
good (evil?)  He puts himself above the law.  But these authors forget that
man cannot attain this superiority but by a very rigorous ascesis, because
it concerns a liberty which is given to us by the fact that we know how to
do the good without constraint, and to avoid the evil without bitterness: 
liberty which makes us master of ourselves.  Do not forget the word of St.
Paul:  "The just man is a law unto himself."

If Audre Gide and Henry Mencken have seen in the liberty of the superman a
liberty of the vulgar libertine, too bad for Gide and Mencken.(page 8)
Because the system of Nietzsche was before all a brutal reaction against
this degenerate idea of liberty which was in vogue for centuries, and which
is today still that of most men. 

It is necessary not to judge a system by the abuse that is made of it.

Most orthodox philosophical authors have considered Nietzsche as a pure
decadent, his system, by its absurdity itself, was an experimental proof of
the bankruptcy of modern philosophy.  The work of Nietzsche was a work to
downgrade.

This interpretation of the historic Nietzsche appears to me a little too
simplistic.  In truth, it is Nietzsche who has demonstrated the complete
bankruptcy of modern philosophy by his very insurrection.  His work was far
from being exclusively destructive, because, as I will attempt to
demonstrate, in can consider his system as a positive point of departure to
a new historical era of philosophy, and of culture in general. 

I want to demonstrate in a topical manner that the philosophic system which
was a logical consequence of a dialectical process which commanded the
philosophical current from the XIVth to the XIXth centuries, had to be
determinately a philosophy of the superman, and no other thing.  (page 9)

And this philosophy must be for us an occasion from which we must profit to
resume and elaborate a fundamental aspect of OUR philosophy, an aspect
which was left in the shadow by our immediate scholastic predecessors.  It
is not a matter of following Nietzsche, it is a matter of us using him as a
providential phenomenon.

Because we forget too easily the practical consequences of our metaphysical
theory of the absolute transcendence of Providence, from which nothing
escapes, not even the purest contingent.

It was St. Thomas who said that it is necessary never to study a
philosophic system for the system.  The opinions of philosophers considered
as themselves, and outside of the universal order of things, do not have
any transcendent importance: "Studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod
sciatur quid homines senserint, sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum."  (De
Caelo I 22 n 8)

But in the same lesson St. Thomas stood with vehemence against those who
want to reject a philosophical system because it contained many errors. 
(page 10)  Philosophy must exploit all, even the errors of others:  the
errors are not ever purely negative:  in the universal order error, as
evil, plays an essential role.

St. Albert the Great seems to have lost his good humor when he wrote in his
commentary on the Politics of Aristotle:  "There are men, he said, who
produce nothing in scientific material, who retard their century, and who
to console themselves for their own incapacity, do (ne font rien?) nothing
but seek the errors of others.  It is men of this temper (Srempe?) who put
Socrates to death and exiled Plato . . . .Just as bile poisons the entire
body, so there are in the scientific life sour and bilious men, who fill
the existence of others with bitterness and render it impossible for them
to seek the truth."  "There are stupid beasts who blaspheme what they don't
know."  "Tanquam bruta animalia blasphemantur in iis quae ignorant." 
(citation illegible - Sertill. & Deonyne?)  (page 11)

Let us turn to Nietzsche, this man who, after all, has propogated, or at
least occasioned, so many errors.  The work of one who is dead becomes
something sacred.  We fight with our enemy until death.  But once dead, his
work acquires a definitive sense to which it is necessary to be resigned. 
It calls for respect, as the body of an enemy.  The petrified past,
definitively immobilized and unwavering, becomes an observable sign of
Providence:  and this sign has a meaning, and it has a lesson, a positive
lesson that only those impious minds who boast always of their orthodoxy
can deny.

"Quidquid fit in mundo, says St. Thomas, etiamsi malum sit, cedit in bonum
universi, quia Deus est adeo bonus, quod nihil mali esse permitteret, nisi
essent adeo potens quod ex quolibet malo posset elicere aliquod bonum . . .
. Etiam mala peccatorum in bonum justorum cedunt."  Rom. c8 l4, p. 120

Nietzsche did not escape from the providential plan.  This is what we will
attempt to establish in detail.  And we will see that his role was of an
invaluable importance.

(page 12)Before passing to the study of the philosophical (and even
theological) current which engendered the system of Nietzsche, (et ce
courant comme par Luther?) I would like to justify this a priori
dialectical framework which I am imposing onto the historic phenomena.  We
know how to discover in nature a hierarchical and fundamental rhythm which
is a true law of nature:  which is an a priori condition of evolution and
of progress.

Natural history, in so far as it is a body constituted by the passive
enumeration of facts, is not a science.  History does not become scientific
until the moment when we observe in the current of things a certain
regularity, of recurrences, in brief of laws, which suggests to us a theory
from which we know how to deduce the observed regularities as a conclusion.

The philosophy of history is a sapiential role of the philosophy of nature,
in which we attempt to deduce, from the concept itself of nature, the
necessary paths nature must follow in its flowing and in its progression. 
This analysis permits us to construct a dialectical framework.

The historical critique, in the philosophical sense of the word, is one of
the functions of the philosophy of history, by which we attempt to make a
synthesis between the experimental theory and the dialectical theory.  this
synthesis must furnish us with a probable knowledge of the profound rhythm
that history must follow in its flowing.

In the properly dialectical part we will establish that the concept itself
of nature - principle of movement, principle which is at the same time form
and matter - that this idea of nature itself implies the idea of progress. 
Indeed, what is the end of nature?  What is, in sum, the finality of the
cosmos?  What is its immediate reason for being? 

For the cosmos poses a problem of finality entirely specific.  In the
purely spiritual universe, all beings are persons, who by their
intelligence and their will are capable (page 14)of a return to God, their
immediate principle.  But in the cosmos, one finds beings lacking
intelligence:  the irrationals, who are not able to realize this return. 
What is then their reason for being?  It is necessary to seek it in the
very origin of the cosmos:  in what is first in intention. 

Now, this must be a person, because only a person is capable of a formal
return to its principle.  And this person must be of a cosmic order: 
composed of matter and of form.  It is man who must be the reason for being
of the cosmos.  It is man who is the first in intention, and who will be
the last in execution.  The inferior beings (a' lui) are not able to be but
in function of man.  In such a way that if on makes abstraction from man,
these beings become contradictory.  In other words, they entail a
transcendental relation to man.  It is man that first matter desires: 
"quanto aliquis actus est posterior et magis perfectior, tanto principalius
in idipsum appetitus materiae fertur . . . . .ultimus igitur generationis
totius gradus est anima humana (page 15) et in hanc tendit materia sicut in
ultimam forman."

All the stages that the naturalist observes, all this flow to which we
assist, are essentially a path toward man.  This ascendant movement is
natural.  The inferior forms are essentially destined to be surpassed.

In the physical study of indeterminism we are able to demonstrate that this
ascendant path cannot follow ways rigorously continuous and determined, as
certain evolutionists of the 19th century wished.  Nature advances by
abrupt transformations under an irresistible force.

When a biological species attains a relatively uniform statistical
equilibrium, the equilibrium is abruptly broken, it splinters:  this
rupture gives birth to a superior species realized by rare exceptions.

If you will, nature has a horror of flat uniformity:  it tends toward a
term more and more elevated.  (page 16)

The evolution in nature (whether one conceives this evolution in a dynamic
fashion or a static fashion) is realized by revolutions:  revolutions
worked by the rare cases which are detached from the majority.

But nature has not attained its end when it has disposed matter for the
reception of the created spiritual form.  The human species, spatio-
temporal, is essentially multiple.  Now, nature is not able to aim at a
perfectly homogeneous multitude of men.  It does not have recourse to the
multitude as multitude.  The purely quantitative multiplication has nothing
of the end (n'a pas di fin?).  It is necessary to find even among men a
hierarchy:  and it is the superior ones who are truly aimed at:  all cosmic
revolutions are "propter implendum numerum electorum."  The amorphous mass
of men come to be in function of them:  not, no doubt, in the manner of
irrational beings, because every man is a person, but in the manner in
which every inferior being is subjected to the superior:  which happens
even in the spiritual universe.  (page 17)

We now apply this idea to men such as they are given in experience.

When one studies the distribution of a statistical ensemble, one finds out
that there are two categories of extreme case which arise from the limits
(cadre) of the majority; there are, if you wish, two species of exception.

If we consider a grand ensemble of men as a statistical ensemble, we
observe that this ensemble is separated into three categories:

    1.  The majority:  constituted by reasonable men.

    2.  A first minority constituted by imbeciles.

    3.   A second minority yet much smaller, constituted by supermen.

The supermen as well as the imbeciles are the exceptions in relation to the
majority.  Therefore, if the most probable cases (the reasonable men)
constitute the law, it is understood (entendu) that the supermen and the
imbeciles are the exceptions. 

But a statistical law includes not only the majority. (page 18) The
exceptional cases as well are included in the law:  it is precisely the
extreme cases who constitute the statistical character of a law. 

But, since we do not confound the imbecile and the genius, it is necessary
to distinguish two species of exceptions - negative and positive.  The
imbeciles are monstrous, but the supermen are not, although the majority
thinks so. 

The superman is a new qualitative acquisition for humanity:  he is a
success.  If humanity tends to produce great men, and if great men are
successes, and if the successes are the exceptions, it is that nature tends
to produce exceptions in humanity.  Nature tends always, and it must from
its own very nature, to surpass the majority.  This tendency succeeds
(aboutit) exceptionally.  Habitually it only succeeds in making reasonable
men (ut in pluribus).  Sometimes even that does not succeed - then we have
imbeciles.  The majority and the negative exceptions must be considered as
a series of gaffes.  (page 19)

However, the majority of cases and the negative exceptions are not absolute
gaffes.  Because the gaffes play a necessary role in nature.  They exercise
a certain braking (freinage) necessary for the accumulation of force - one
would say that nature practices at first a parsimony for preparing its act
of liberality - the equilibrium swells up to the point of exploding.  This
explosion includes debris, but it equally has successes.

Important thing:  it is that the disequilibrium provoked by the positive
exceptions arises from the equilibrium of the majority.  The great men are
produced by the mass.  The people agonize unconsciously to put its supermen
into the world.  Its superior ordination takes it above. 

Between the mass and the superman arises a conflict:  the conflict has as
consequence an elevation of the cultural level of the mass.  When
equilibrium is reintroduced at this acquired level:  when the mass is at
rest (because the struggle is followed by a great fatigue), (page 20) a new
rupture has place, and so it goes.  In the domain of music, for example, at
the time of Beethoven, the reviews attacked in the name of previous
composers; one finishes, all the same, by digesting it; but when Wagner
arrives, he is criticized in the name of Beethoven; and today Stravinsky is
criticized in the name of those who were criticized in their turn, etc.

Now, this is the synthesis underlying historical phenomena, and which seems
to command their ascension in a spiral, which I have called the dialectical
rhythm of history.

And if you hesitate even an instant to believe in the conflict which exists
between the mass and the superman, between the ideal of platitude of the
majority and the transcendent ideal of the superman, it would suffice to
recall for the moment that when God himself was made man - perfect man
presenting the most manifest signs of divinity - we mocked him, we spat in
his face, and we crucified him.

Now it is a matter of studying the pre-Nietzschean philosophical currents
by an application of this dialectical progression:  where, if you will, we
go to see how this rhythm has been physically realized in this history. 
(page 21)

This study, I have claimed, is extremely topical (and if utopian can please
you more, think it).  Especially because we are going to isolate one
cultural factor alone from all the others from which it is in reality
inseparable:  the philosophical factor.  But for this very reason, because
this factor is so infinitely tied to the others, everything that we are
able to recognize and connect would be able to have a certain value:  even
if other more important factors control that one.

It seems to us that the historical evolution of philosophy describes a
series of statistical curves:  or, if you will, a series of waves.

If we take as limits of the systems the most salient, the most elevated
summit that has been attained in antiquity is represented by Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle.  The following summit was attained by another trinity
several centuries later by Plotinus, St. Augustine, and the Areopagite. 
The third by St. Thomas in the middle ages. (page 22)

It is understood that in the interior of each of these bell curves one can
trace other curves, and those indefinitely.  It is not a matter of denying
all preparatory and conditioning work which was made between the summits of
the most marked curves.

A Thomist cannot view history the history of philosophy otherwise.  With
St. Thomas we assist in an immense intellectual effort of humanity.  St.
Thomas was a superman of formidable proportion:  and one can say that the
difficulties that he encountered in his milieu were proportional to his
greatness.  Human ignorance has something of the brutal.  Although it is
not more cruel than weakness.  Today we are spoken to always of the
persecution of Galileo, when in reality, the difficulties which this man
encountered were childishness compared to those of St. Thomas.  The middle
ages finished by digesting St. Thomas a little.  The regional
excommunications of his doctrine were lifted, and the Dominican Order set
to the work.

But the intelligence of humanity was extremely fatigued by this immense
effort.  (page 23)  The curve descends.  Scholastic quarrels became more
and more verbal.  Dogmatic theology would soon cede precedence to moral
theology, moral theology also decapitated into theology of sin:  the
essence of virtue soon became the pure absence of sin.  During periods of
intellectual decadence, theologians speak only of sin.  In order to justify
it, they fall into a vicious circle:  We speak a great deal (about?) sin,
because there is a great deal of it, they say.

The descent of the curve lead us to Luther, who has exercised so profound
and quasi-determinating on all modern spirituality.

Luther succumbed to fatigue.  He allowed himself to this current of
degradation.  Here are his own words:  "I am no more than a man apt to let
myself enter the company ( by mass ) drunkenness, movement of the flesh,
negligence, and other importunities. (page 24) Ego otiosus et crapulosus
sedeo tota die."  I am here from morning to evening and get drunk.

Matter avenges itself.  It wants determination.  But when it does not
attain this goal, it swallows us in the gulf of its pure indetermination.

Man cannot do without intellectual and moral virtues.  Luther wants to be
Christian without the effort which is essential to the development of man. 
Luther abandoned himself to indetermination.

How is habit defined?  Habit, says St. Thomas, "est dispositio quaedam
determinans potentiam relate ad aliquid."  Here we take habit in the
specific sense of a habit acquired and operative.  This habit is a
determination acquired in exercise, either of abstract or practical thought
or of the voluntary or sensible appetite.  It must therefore not be
confounded with natural disposition, (page 25) the natural penchants that
we have before having posed acts.  Habit superimposes itself on this
natural disposition, imprinting on it a form more determinate and which, in
sum, disposes us in a more immediate fashion to think, act or make well or
badly.  Bad habit is acquired by indulgence, while positive habit elevates
us by an incessant effort to a quasi-immobile state of determination.  This
determination "difficulter mobilis", FREES us from indetermination, either
of matter in the passions, or of our spiritual faculties.  "Habitus est id
quo quis agit cum voluerit."  It is the positive habits (and in what
follows I intend it always in this sense) - it is the positive habits which
free us from ourselves:  it is in following the law that we put ourselves
above the law.

Liberty is not the faculty of choosing between the good and the evil: 
infinitely superior is the liberty of him who always chooses the good (page
26) and the most pure liberty implies the impossibility of choosing evil. 

Luther wanted to free himself from this liberty.  He permitted himself to
do it (?).  He wanted salvation without effort, without virtue. 

Notice, indeed:  He wanted salvation.  He attempted to flatter his God:  it
is the grace of Christ which will save men despite men.  Nature is so
corrupt that plays no role in the work of salvation.  Pecca fortiter sed
fortius fide:  sin strongly, but believe more. 

But he did not convince himself of the real value of his negative
speculations.  He spread his doctrine in the mass of men who surrounded
him:  it spread like fire in straw.  It is that the mass suffered as he: 
Luther knew an immediate success with the mob.  (page 27)

Recently the protestants have made a desperate effort to save their Luther
from the revelations made by Father Deruifle (?) and others.  They have
pretended that Luther was a superman, and that because of that he was above
the law of good and evil like the superman of Nietzsche:  when it is
Nietzsche himself who rigorously condemned this monstrous notion of liberty
which ruled during the centuries which separated Luther from Nietzsche. 
What characterizes Nietzsche is his re-introduction of habit, urged by one
knows not what power:  in Nietzsche nature avenges itself on Luther and on
his destructive work.  Nietzsche wanted to determine himself, to free
himself from indetermination;  it is Nietzsche who wanted - to use his own
words:  "to become hard, slowly, slowly, as a precious stone - and finally
to remain there tranquilly, for the joy of eternity."  (page 28)

For Luther had no joy in the world.  His lack of intellectual and aesthetic
taste is known.

And precisely, it will be the aesthetic sense of Nietzsche which will
revolt against his predecessors.  The first work of which we will speak
next week, entitled "The Birth of Tragedy among the Greeks," is a profound
essay concerning philosophy and art. (end of first lecture).

If we rely on hylomorphism, according to which the whole cosmos is in a
state of flowing toward man, and according to which humanity itself tends
to establish a hierarchy of men, a hierarchy at the summit of which are
found the supermen; and in basing ourselves on the indeterminism which is
only a consequence of hylomorphic composition of spatio-temporal beings, we
know how to demonstrate that the unfolding (decoulement?) of the cosmos
follows a rhythmic and spiral movement. 

This ascendant movement can be schematically represented by a series of
curves, of which the summits designate the successes.  The success is
followed by an exhaustion. 

For the Thomist, placing himself at the point of view of the history of
metaphysics, this spiral progression attains in antiquity three
transcendent summits:  1st:  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; 2nd: Plotinus,
Augustine, Areopagite; 3rd: Albert the Great and St. Thomas.

The immense effort of speculative thought in the middle ages was followed
by an exhaustion of the same order of greatness. 

(un-numbered page to translate between 1 and 2?)

(page 2)

Scholastic quarrels become more and more verbal; dogmatic theology gives
way to moral theology - incontestable sign of metaphysical decadence - ;
moral theology, thus decapitated, degenerates into theology of sin:  the
essence of virtue becomes pure absence of sin.  During periods of
decadence.  During periods of decadence theologians do not speak any more
(of?  than?) sin:  evil becomes a good to defend.

The descent of the curve brings us to Luther, who has exercised a quasi-
determinating influence on all modern philosophy until Nietzsche, who will
revolt against protestant and jansenist christianism. 

Luther succumbs to fatigue, and is carried away by this current of
degredation.  But he wants to justify this surrender, in saying that nature
is entirely corrupted.

Nature is so corrupt that it plays no more role in the work of salvation. 
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide.  It dispenses us from the formation of
habits which determine us and liberate us from the indetermination of
matter and the unformed plasticity of our spiritual faculties.

But matter is made for determination, determination is its reason for
being:  it avenges itself. (page 3) This vengeance is manifest in
Nietzsche:  and especially in his will for power:  in his affirmation of
the necessity of fortitude (force).  It is in this affirmation of fortitude
that he meets Aristotle and St. Thomas: magnanimity and magnificence are
integral virtues of fortitude:  they are an overflow of fortitude:  they
are characteristics of the superman.  Nature is made to be surpassed:  it
has a horror of leveling, it has a horror of cosmic tranquility.  Nature is
intoxicated:  it is fundamentally unstable:  it is inquietude by very
definition.  All stable points that are encountered in its evolutive
progression are provisional:  they are by very definition points of
departure.  Nature is youth:  but youth is youth by its possibilities, and
not by its acquisitions.  A nature which does not overflow is a dead
nature.

We can say that with Nietzsche we decidedly remount the slope.  But the
system of Nietzsche is not intelligible and important except as a phase of
this propensity of thought and of human life.  The person of Nietzsche does
not interest us:  persons always escape us:  it is Nietzsche as function of
history who occupies us.  It is Nietzsche who played a role in the body
that is humanity whom we want to study.  (page 4)

In another domain, the affair of Galileo is another sign of decadence.  I
say the affair of Galileo, and not his physics.  The opposition that he
encountered in the philosophical and theological milieux, shows in a very
clear manner that at this moment metaphysical thought no longer existed: 
only the letter of it remained.  Philosophy was drowned in an expired
physics.  Philosophy treats of the necessary:  physical theories are
essentially variable.  This confession therefore sterilized physics and
philosophy at the same time. 

Imagine:  philosophy had become geo-centric!  Galileo truly reversed
philosophy of his time in making the earth revolve about the sun.  The
entire importance of man was based on his spatio-temporal position in the
universe.

(help on this paragraph)  But it was not only the enemies who were wrong.  
The philosophers (?) of the opposed camp rejoiced.  Man seemed to have lost
his importance:  he is only that this:  therefore on cannot demand a great
thing from him.  All at once his ideal became inferior:  one cannot any
more demand a great thing from him.

To understand it we must show how the history of human thought engendered
it.

Luther had put the Christian world in disarray.  The protestant who lived
theology in a consequent manner was a menace for all human life.  Although
being Lutheran, one could deny Lutheranism:  there was nothing for us to
defend.  Lutheranism, in destroying the human person by its negation of
habit, implicitly destroyed society.

In the Protestant camp a reaction arose.  Calvin attempted to re-establish
order in doctrine, in the human soul, and in society.  But while doing
this, he committed the fundamental error of Luther:  he abstracted from
habit, from the virtue that emanates from the subject.  He attempted to re-
establish order by extrinsic and violent constraint.  Because if the
calvinist speaks of virtue, it is not a question of virtue in the sense of
habit.  He imposes a framework on the faithful:  he imprisons him.  One is
attached to the dead letter of the bible.  His theology leads necessarily
to a theology of prohibition.  Despite its rigor, and the terror it
inspires in us, it is easy.  It is easy to say what one is unable to do. 
It is easy to say that everything is contained in the letter of the Bible. 
All that dispenses us from thinking, from searching:  (page 5) All that
draws the life from the person.  When potatoes are discovered, the scottish
theologians forbid the faithful to eat them, beacuse they are not mentioned
in the holy scriptures. 

(It is understood, it is (not) always easy to know exactly what one can do,
and what one cannot do.  Now, it is habit which gives us what is called the
judgment by connaturality.)

The country where the prohibitive consequences of puritanism, the child of
calvinism, are most manifest, is the United States:  paradise of puritans. 
As I said the other day, prohibition in the United States was the work of
puritains.  By prohibition, one wants to dispense oneself from the practice
of the virtue of temperance:  from the formation of this habit.  Now, it
isn't the impossibility of drinking because of the lack of drink that gives
us the virtue of temperance!  It is true that by prohibition, one wanted to
destroy the immoderate desire to drink:  one wanted to sterilize
sensibility:  Now, for St. Thomas, sterilization of sensibility is yet
again against the virtue of temperance.

A doctrine which to dispense itself from positive virtue, and which wants
nonetheless to keep its exterior advantages, must have recourse to
violence:  to a categorical imperative that crushes the human person.

The goal of morality is not to avoid sin:  but to acquire strength:  habits
which elevate to the level of an ultimate destiny.

In this protestantism, humility is purely negative:  nature is
fundamentally vicious:  man is nothing.  Before the law, man must bow:  he
must aim at the destruction of his passions:  the destruction of himself: 
he must be malleable (page 6) as first matter.

But the humility which excludes magnanimity, which excludes the greatness
of man, is a vice.

(notes to be inserted here, from separate page)

X  We are all tempted to be severe towards others, and to multiply the
number of mortal sins for others:  and to choose among the virtues those
that are more agreeable for us:  and of thus constituting a small chapel
all to ourselves.

XX  And when the saints fail to prevent humanity from walking, and
drowsing, Providence sends us a heretic to shake us, and to make us
understand that we are in the church militant.  Oportet haeres esse, says
St. Paul.  "Haereticorum callida inquietudo."

(resume page 6)

With Descartes, we are present at an effort to construct a philosophical
system which abstracts from the formation of intellectual habits.  The
disappearance of truly scientific thought, and the disarray made in the
world by protestantism, led necessarily to scepticism.

Descartes attempted to construct a system that abstracted from everything
that had been thought before him; and a system that the whole world would
be able to understand:  a philosophy of common sense.  He wanted to make a
synthesis of human learning "that even those who have not studied would be
able to understand,"  he said.  Leibnitz also wanted to construct such a
system:  "ut animus a rebus ipsis distincte cogitandis dispensetur, nec
ideo minus omnia recte provenient."

Descartes sought a clear and easy system:  a philosophy within reach of the
whole world.  In order to do this, he found himself dispensing with this
laborious formation of intellectual habit which always includes a great
measure of erudition.  And if we abstract from everything that has been
thought before, (page 7) there remains for us to know only our me.  We are
condemned to collapse upon our very selves:  "I think": the cogito, the
history of philosophy has demonstrated, was in reality an auto-phagic
introversion.

As a result, philosophy becomes a work of the individual:  and a philosophy
for the common of men cannot be any other thing.  In that it is separated
from the tradition of the great philosohers who considered philosophy as a
work of humanity:  a work to which the collaboration of spirits is
essential.  He forgot the profound sense of humanity which is one united
species which is achieved in the creation and the collaboration of
individuals in space and time.  Paradoxically, it is only by this
collaboration that the individual human person can be achieved.  Society
has need of individuals, but individuals equally have need of society.

The fact of wanting to begin from an empty thought is quite significant of
this effort to think without habit.

Rousseau attempted the same thing in the domain of morality.  He had a
horror of Calvinism:  but he fell into the opposite excess:  nature is
fundamentally good:  it is necessary to realize a return to pure nature. 
But this return to nature is perfectly negative.  He wants to realize a
morality without virtue.  (page 8)

With Rousseau, the dogma of original sin becomes a blasphemy. 
Fundamentally good nature is vitiated by virtuous habits as well as by bad
habits.  Rousseau is in ecstasy before the indetermination of matter.  His
system is essentially an optimism about prime matter.

But this conception is essentially contrary to nature.  Nature is
essentially dynamic and progressive:  it calls for determination.  Those
who give themselves to nature without determination are in contradiction
with nature.  Even man must not give himself to nature:  it is nature that
must and wants to give itself to man.  Nature wants to be always exceeded.

Rousseau, in giving himself to prime matter, was in contradiction with
nature: since the reason for being of the latter is form: and a form more
and more superior: a form which finishes by liberating itself from matter: 
the spiritual form.

This obsession with prime matter is manifest in his ideas of the infinite
and of equality.  Already in Pascal we find a profound decadence of the
idea of the infinite:  the infinite of Pascal is purely spatial. (page 9)

The abyss of Pascal is the gulf of prime matter.  The whole idea of the
metaphysical infinite is lost.

But the infinite of matter is an amorphous infinite.  And wherever on finds
the uniform, one finds matter.  The unity of the material order is composed
of homogeneous parts.  Rousseauist egalitarianism is a logical consequence
of his idealization of prime matter.  This conception is a negation of the
spiritual order, which is essentially hierarchical.  And thus, it destroys
all philosophy of the superman.

His conception of justice and liberty is equally penetrated with prime
matter.  This fraternity, this equality, and this liberty are contrary to
nature, which tends toward hierarchy, hierarchy in right and in liberty. 
The theory of Rousseau is essentially a zoocratic tyranny.  His liberty
makes a convict-slave of man. (forcat)

Man is a being wedged between two infinites:  that of spirit and that of
matter:  since the two are dark (sombre), it is very easy to lose himelf,
and to take the one for the other.  It is the spiritual infinite that is
liberating: a liberation which cannot be made except by strength, and not
by desertion (abandon).  (page 10)

Once again ("encore une fois"?), Nietzsche revolted against this
rousseauist idea of equality or of liberty, and of justice.  It is matter
that takes vengeance:  because it is for spirit.

The historical idea of evolution, ("nisvue?") of the XIXth century, must be
connected to this perverse idealization of matter.  One wants to extract
everything from matter, and that by the power of nature.  Non being
suffices to do all. 

The role of Kant in all this historical process of philosophical(?) thought
is to have destroyed all possibility of a speculative philosophy, once one
has adopted the cartesian point of view.  Kant systematically decapitated
philosophy: there remained only morality: a morality blind and irrational. 
He said, to use his own words, "to suppress learning to make place for
morality."  It is with Kant that the transcendence of duty makes its solemn
entry in the world: this child was baptized "categorical imperative." 
(page 11)

But there is nothing new here except the formula.  Theologians spoke of
duty for centuries.  "It is your duty!  Do not ask why!"  Especially not
now (Surtout pas ca):  because the why calls for a metaphysic, or a
speculative philosophy.

The work of Kant was purely destructive:  he has left us only a monstrous
morality.  He wanted to demonstrate that our metaphysical worries are
vain.  There is no place for being worried:  do your duty, that suffices. 
In fact, Kant succeeded in giving a smug repose to much of the world.

But when a philosophy permits us to make peace with ourselves, when it
gives us tranquility of spirit, you never have a graver reason to worry. 
Peace is found for us at a level which always exceeds us:  it shows us
greater and greater needs:  and a true philosophy shows itself more and
more insufficient.

The destructive philosophy of Kant engendered the pessimistic system of
Schopenhauer.  (page 12) 

The essence of the world, said Schopenhauer, is will.  The classic
definition of man, "animal rational," is a monumental farce.  It is not
reason that commands:  it is the will which commands the reason.  Reason is
a posteriori in relation to the will.  Man takes his actions (pose se
acter), pushed by the will.  He justifies them afterward in order to
justify them. (Il les justifi par apres pour les justifier?).  It is
impossible to convince someone of what he does not want to understand: 
because the will is deeper than the intelligence.  Political opinions are
just so much stronger as they are irrational:  it is the blind will that
engenders them. 

The will manifests itself in the desire for reproduction:  sexual passion
is the most powerful passion.

Conscience constitutes only the surface of the self (du moi):  every being
is desire:  desire of what it is not or desire of what it does not have,
all desire is hard and painful (penible et douloureux).  When a desire is
satisfied, one is bored:  one desires another thing, one desires more.  The
laws of the world are essentially bad.  (side note) And everything that is
a vehicle of reproduction is bad.  From there his anti-feminism.  Men
deceive themselves in saying that they are making court.  This language is
superficial, and the women know it! 

The destruction of the will is the condition of happiness.  Now,
destruction of the will is not possible but by the destruction of the
self.  Therefore, only suicide can open the doors of happiness.  But this
happiness is rather doubtful, since we don't exist to enjoy it. (page 13)
 
Schopenhauer indeed knew it:  and the man who occasioned a wave of suicide
in Germany, was not a suicide.

In sum, he will say suicide is useless:  because the will of the world is
indestructible.  Even if the entire human race killed itself, nature would
produce another.  Let us resign ourselves, and rather make philosophy, and
be especially determinists.  A man who knows to contemplate the world as a
succession of inevitable and fated events:  this man is detached by that
very fact from the world and its painful events.  "Disinterested
intelligence is elevated as a fragrance above the defects and follies of
this world of the will," he said.

Therefore, the more a man is intelligent, the more he is capable of also
commanding the will of the world.  A man has genius, he said, in the
measure that his cognoscitive faculties are always more developed than his
appetitive faculties.  The appetitive faculties are caught in the
concrete.  One does not desire an abstract beefsteak.  The man of genius
lives in a abstract world detached from the concrete: a world of universal
and essential ideas.  And it is just that which makes him so maladroit in
the familiar world.  (page 14)

In contemplating the stars, he falls in a well.  In saying the truth he
injures his vision.  In speaking reasonably, he shocks political men.  "A
man is sociable," he said, "in the measure that he is destitute of
intelligence and vulgar.  His faith is aesthetic, art consoles him in his
solitude.  But this solitude is near to folly.  And it gives reason to
Aristotle who said that those who are distinguished in philosophy,
politics, in poetry, and in art, have a melancholic temperament."

And yet, it is these half-fools, these geniuses, who constitute the true
human aristocracy.

On this conception of genius-intelligence which commands the will,
Schopenhauer constructed an entire theory of art.  Artistic activity is an
exteriorization and particularization of the universal.  The
exteriorization of the work of intelligence by opposition to natural and
concrete things which are the work of the blind will of the world.  The
artist creates a world of platonic ideas.  (page 14)

In the vision of the Schopenhauerien world, art occupies the summit.  The
world of beauty is transcendent and liberating.  One can see the setting of
the sun as well from the window of a prison as from the window of a palace.

And among the arts, it is music that occupies the first place.  Because
music is the exteriorization of the will of the idealized world:  in music
the artist creates a will deprived of its pessimistic character:  in music
we attain the living essence of life.  We grasp it in its profound
dynamism.  Music follows the rhythm of the cosmos on a spiritualized plan. 
Architecture is a frozen music, as Goethe said, but music is life itself. 
(page 16)

We have found in Schopenhauer a conception of the superman, and a
conception of art.  Nietzsche was first struck by this theory of art. 
Since the philosophy of Nietzsche is the subject of this course, we should
hold ourselves to the chronological order of his philosophical thought. 
Now, his philosophy of superman is only a consequence of his philosophy of
art.  We will pause ourselves first of all on that.

Friederich Wilhelm Nietzsche, born October 15, 1844 at Rocken near
Leipzig.  He was the son of the pastor of this small town, and later
followed his father to Naumburg, where the latter had been born.  It was
there that he began his studies.  Desiring to dedicate himself to classical
philology, he then went to the University of Bonn, where he received the
teaching of the celebrated teacher of his time, Ritschl, and in 1865 he
followed him to Leipzig.  It was in the course of these latter years passed
at the University of Leipzig that he encountered Richard Wagner, certain of
whose works he had already known.

Without waiting for Nietzsche to have passed his promotion exam, the
University of Basel appointed him to the chair of classical philology. 
(page 17)  He was then 24 years old.  The University of Leipzig conferred
on him the doctorate, without making him take the preliminary exam.  He had
the gift of attracting young minds to himself.   The celebrated Burckhardt
said of him, "Basel has never possessed a professor like him."

In 1872 he published his work, both philosophical and philological (for
Nietzsche indissoluble) entitled The Origin of Tragedy Among the Greeks.

In this study, Nietzsche strove to take all development of art back to the
opposition of two aesthetic instincts of nature:  two instincts which are
symbolized by two Greek divinities:  Apollo and Dionysus. 

Dionysus represents the orgiastic element as it was manifested in antique
Bacchanalia.  It is a mixture of ecstatic voluptuousness, of joy and
terror, and has for effect to dissolve the limits of the soul, and to melt
the individual in the ensemble of nature.  It dissolves - he said - the
principle of individuation.  (page 18)

The nature of this instinct is rendered accessible for us by the
physiological appearance of intoxication.  Art which corresponds to it is
music.

In opposition is found the modeling instinct of perfect form represented by
Apollo.  In it are harmonized equilibrium and measure, wisdom and
serenity:  it maintains the individual within the interior of its limits,
and defends it from all excess.  The power of this instinct is manifested
physiologically by the beautiful illusion which is born from the world of
dreams.  Aesthetic forms which result are sculpture and the plastic arts.

For Nietzsche, the origin and essence of attic tragedy reside in the
reconciliation and fusion of these two antagonistic forces:  it is a form
of art which participates at once in Dionysus and Apollo.  (page 19)

Born of the archaic dithyramb, which celebrated the sufferings of Dionysus,
tragedy was furnished at its origin only with a chorus, whose participants,
transfigured by the dionysian intoxication, ended by considering themselves
the servants of the divinity, as satyrs.  In exteriorizing this vision,
which it has itself engendered, the chorus reaches a state of Apollonian
perfection.

Drama is accomplished, therefore, under the form of an Apollonian
demonstration of Dionysian revelation."  The parts chanted by the choir,
with which the tragedy is intermingled, are in a certain measure, the womb
of the tragedy.  They constitute the Dionysian element properly speaking,
while the dialogue represents the eternal Apollonian.

The conjunction of these two elements gives us the "tragic optimism" of
Greek drama.  Pessimism is a sign of decadence, while optimism is a sign of
superficiality.  (page 20)

Joy is the daughter of sorrow.  True optimism is essentially tragic.

We have remarked on the influence of Schopenhauer on this thesis:  Dionysus
- this is the cosmic will; Apollo - this is philosophic and artistic
intelligence.

but Nietzsche went further.  Cosmic will is a condition of progress.  No
Apollonian form can be considered as definitive.  Forms are only stepping
stones.  Matter and form are innovating principles.  All stages are
provisional.  Every stop is a sacrifice to form, and the sterilized; every
return, every retreat is a fall into indeterminism.  Life must be a
constant struggle between form and matter.  Form must overcome matter,
determine its power which cries out for (vers) liberation.

Nietzsche attributes the decadence of Greek philosophy (page 21) to the
excessive predominance of the Apollonian element.  Philosophy is detached
from life, and most particularly from art.

Even philosophy must respect Dionysus, and even the mathematician.  Does
not mathematics advance by unreasonable goods? (bons?)  There were poets in
this world before philosophers.  The philosopher has need of these
intoxicated men who are propelled by demonic powers.  Yes, poets choose
means:  but from whence come the things they desire to express?

Nietzsche does not wish that the angel be fashioned on earth.  We are in a
universe that passes.  But where does this current take it?:  "Alles ist im
Fluss, es ist wahr; aber alles ist auch im Strom:  nach einem Ziele hin." 
Nature is an appeal to which it is necessary to respond by Apollo:  by
determination. 

What Nietzsche has equally made to stand out, in this study, is the fecund
power of pain (douleur).  It is not any more a matter of this passive
attitude with regard to suffering; Nietzsche seizes it, to extract life
from it, to extract joy from it.  The whole of nature tears itself apart,
to give birth to the supermen.

And to finish, it would perhaps be fitting to cite a text of Paul:  (text
omitted)  (Romans 8:22? DQ)
 
Lecture 3

The God Dionysus is the translation of the obscure, brutal, and irrational
flux of the cosmos toward its transcendent term:  it is the translation of
this cosmic ecstasy which overthrows all established forms.  Apollo, on the
contrary, tends toward the possession of self, toward equilibrium, toward
the domination of form.  He is the god of contemplation:  the god of
immobility:  the god of the plastic arts.  Dionysus is the god of music. 
The plastic draws us from the outside; but music installs itself in us and
carries us along:  it translates flow, the dynamism of the universe. 

Apollo is without doubt the ideal, but the ideal finds itself always beyond
the term attained.  Dionysus is a transitive phase:  but the transition,
the path of mobility (le cheminement la mobilite?) is essential to the
cosmos:  cosmic beings are form and matter:  matter is there to make up for
the imperfection of form.

The conflict between acquired forms, and the transcendent ideal of the
cosmos, inserted in matter, gives birth to this dramatic and tragic
character of nature.  Nature is tragic, because all generation requires a
corruption, a destruction.  Tragedy which is dominated by an optimism,
since to the destruction of one being corresponds the generation of
another. (page 2)

The lion who (lu? hu?) and devours the deer is an image of the conflict
between Apollo and Dionysus.  the deer is an Apollonian form: it is an
acquisition:  but this acquisition is provisional.  the lion tears it
apart:  because nature must progress:  the deer must be assimilated in a
superior form.  (Note: "cf Ia q 96, a 1, ad 2nd:  All that is natural, and
existed in the state of innocence)  Nature thus continues toward its term
by alternative predominances of the Dionysian and Apollonian elements. 
Apollo establishes an equilibrium; Dionysus introduces a rupture.  Nature
advances thus by a series of successive explosions, like a gun (fusil?)

Dionysian excess casts (rejetter?) us into barbarism; Apollonian excess is
a sign of decadence.  Rousseau is a barbarian; Descartes is a decadent.  It
is necessary to reconcile the two elements:  it is necessary to
equilibriate them:  it is necessary to establish between them an
equilibrium which will be unstable by definition.  This equilibrium cannot
be maintained except by power, by force (la force).  Force maintains us in
the right mean which is the summit between the two opposed terms.  To
dominate them, an excess of force is necessary:  a power which transcends
them without destroying them:  and here is what characterizes the
superman:  he is at once Apollonian and Dionysian.  The common man is one
of the two to the exclusion of the other. (page 3)

The Apollonian looks behind himself:  he is a praiser of past time.  He is
presumptuous:  he is satisfied with himself.  But the angel of God has
said:  "Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the
valley; flee to the hills, lest you be consumed." And the wife of Lot who
looked back became a pillar of salt.  The Dionysian says:  let us eat,
drink and dance, because tomorrow we will be dead.  And tomorrow he will be
dead.

The great man is the one who flees to the hills.  "When Zarathustra was
thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into
the mountains."

For Nietzsche, there exist in fact two moralities:  the morality of the
flock which vegetates in the plain: the zoocratic morality; and the
morality of the superman who inhabits the mountains:  the morality of the
aristocrat.  Zoocratic morality is rationalizing, or libertine.  The
morality of the superman, who cultivates force, a morality which elevates
us outside ourselves.  The zoocrat wants to justify his mediocrity:  he is
egalitarian.  He flees effort, he detests the difficult, and he wants all
men to detest it.  "Ye higher men," says Zarathustra,  "learn THIS from me:
On the market-place no one believeth in higher men. But if ye will speak
there, very well!" The populace, however, blinketh: "We are all equal."
"Ye higher men,"-so blinketh the populace-"there are no higher men, we are
all equal; man is man, before God-we are all equal!" (page 4)

The morality of the populace is a morality of negative humility, and
morality of feebleness, a morality of pure pity.  The populace has horror
of all that makes them quiver, of all that is terrible.  It does not avow
itself incapable of heroism:  it is ignorant of the heroic.  Its life is a
passive attempt.  It seeks rest at its level.  It says:  "we are a brave
people, the good God loves us.  It tends to do away with hell by love for
mankind.  But God did not say:  "this poor humanity"; He did not say: 
"they are all the same a brave people, and I will pardon them."

No, he descended from heaven, he was made man in order to make himself
tortured and assassinated by them.  They killed him because he was
superior, because he was not at their level.  The zoocrat wants to be with
him in the world, although we are not made to be with him.  Vulgar man
seeks to reconcile things with himself; he wants to be approved.  While the
superman seeks to adapt himself to things.  (page 5)

The populace defends itself by perverse notions of charity, of prudence,
and of justice.  Its charity is an indulgence which puts the subject on the
level of the object, although it is supposed to raise it.  Its prudence is
a justification of mediocrity by rationalizing reason.  Its right mean is
not a summit, it is found on the level of the extremes.  Its justice is
based on a materialistic conception of order.

In this morality, there is no place for greatness.  It can always give
reasons for not being magnanimous or magnificent.  It is a morality without
virtue.

But Zarathrusta says, "man is a thing which must be surmounted, this is why
you must love the virtues, - because it is by them that you will perish.  I
love that which the soul unloads, to the point that it forgets itself . . .
., because thus all things will contribute to his decline."  We must kill
in ourselves the old man:  we must overcome indetermination:  "become
hard."

Nietzsche, the philologist, aspires to establish this distinction between
the morality of slaves and the morality of masters:  on philological
considerations.
(page 6)
It is necessary to say that there are in German two terms to express the
bad:   schlecht, and bose (umlaut "o"), which we will translate
provisionally by "bad" (mauvais - schlecht), and "evil" (mechant - bose). 
The term "bad" was attributed by the superior classes to the inferior
classes.  Originally, this term designated simply the ordinary, the common,
and then, vulgar, bad.  The inferior classes applied the term "evil" to
superior classes:  it signified originally "irregular, incalculable,
unfamiliar, dangerous, cruel."  Inferior classes fear the superior man as a
disintegrating force.  "The great man," says a Chinese proverb, "is a
public disaster."

"Good" has equally two significations:  for the masters, it designates the
powerful, the courageous, the warrior, the divine.  ("gut" = "gott");  in
the mouth of the people, "good" signifies "familiar, peaceful, innocent,
kind."

These two moralities represent two diametrically opposed currents.  Opposed
as the current of degradation of energy of physics; and the current going
toward forms more and more organized, more and more perfect, of biology. 
(page 7)

The morality of slaves wants to realize a return to the amorphous
indetermination of matter.  The morality masters wants to create an
armature of habit which elevates us above ourselves:  which renders us
divine.  Hence the emphasis on force.

The morality of slaves is essentially impious.  It tends to the destruction
of all spontaneity.  It codifies.  It formalizes.  It destroys reason.  It
tends towards independence: it becomes the categorical imperative.  It
erects itself above metaphysics.  It has a horror of metaphysics, because
the latter opens horizons too vast:  it gives us vertigo.  Vertigo must be
ruled by force:  but force is terrible; arduous, requires a positive and
constructive asceticism.  This morality is impious, because it uses God as
an instrument.  Having exiled reason, having banished metaphysics, it
(fouch? bonct?) (thinks? wishes?) that it justifies itself.  To do this, it
declares all laws divine after having turned them? (le des?) from God
toward whom morality should elevate us, after having demolished reason,
which is the very essence of morality.  Laws become extrinsic constraints
which destroy us.  They (eisent? crisent?) the destruction of the passions,
although the passions are the triumph of nature, and although they are
essential to morality.  (page 8)  They establish feebleness as an ideal. 

It is not the populace as such that has invented this morality.  Its author
is found in the populace, but he is distinguished from his brothers in this
that he seeks to legalize the contradictory requirements of the mass.  This
man is called the Philistine.  He affects greatness:  he says that he is
the friend of men.  He claims to have assimilated the wisdom of the ages. 
He is of an impudence quite discouraging.  He is divinized human
foolishness.  He is the mediocre type who makes himself normal.  He wants
to realize happiness systematically in platitude.  He sees anarchy in
everything superior to himself.  He is the one who says to the populace: 
do you see this man?  He is the enemy of humanity, because he wants to
impose an ideal of pride.  He is a disturber of public order.  He is an
anarchist.  And the populace listens to it, it exiles him or kills him. 
And ten years later the Philistine returns.  And he claims to have
assimilated the wisdom of the assassinated man.  And another great man
comes.  And he is killed, and thus it goes on.  And the Philistine thus
always looks to the past, and he vegetates on his skeleton:  and he
transforms life into a column of salt. (page 8)

In him is manifested the bitterness of the small, which has a horror of
greatness, and which wants to take revenge on it.  And it is only capable
of sadistic joys.  

The Scribes and the Pharisees have not disappeared from the face of the
earth.  They live among us, and they will crucify until the end of time: 
and the populace will always be his instrument:  and he will always be the
hero of the populace:  because he tells it:  you are a brave people, defend
yourselves.  He says that he believes in God, but he is perversely
agnostic:  because he does not want God to mingle himself in the life of
men:  and when God himself comes among us, he killed him in the name of
God:  because his morality is a morality of the slave.  Now God did not
come that we might be slaves:  but free children. 

The good and the evil of the Philistine, the moral norms that he imposes on
the mass, norms which the mass accepts from him (de que?), must be exceeded
by the superman: they are perverted notions:  in reality this easy good is
an evil, and this hard evil is a good.  Ever since (Des lors), Nietzsche
will say, the superman must elevate himself beyond good and evil.  (page
10)  It is necessary that he become wicked, and terrible, powerful and
magnanimous.

This distinction which Nietzsche establishes between the morality of slaves
which erects feebleness into supreme right, and the morality of masters
which divinizes force, this distinction, is it well founded and justified?

Without a shadow of a doubt.  And these two moralities exist today in the
interior of Christendom.  If we consider them on a very grand scale, we
would be able to say that the morality of slaves is represented by
Protestantism and Jansenism, to which is opposed the heroic morality of
authentic Catholicism, which we recover in authentic Thomism.

Protestant morality, when it is not a proclamation of the rights of
feebleness, of which we find today the vestiges, among others, in the
criminal limitation of legalized births - and that is quite in its logic: 
one wants to free humanity from its sufferings by a softening anesthetic -
when it is not a proclamation of rights of feebleness of pecca fortiter, it
has recourse to extrinsic constraint without virtue, without personal
effort, without the real force (page 11) of Puritanism and of Jansenism,
which formalizes the law and which imposes on us a perverse doctrine of
force.

Nietzsche knew only Protestant and Jansenist Christianity, and this is what
it is necessary never to forget.  Because all these vociferations against
Christianity are in fact directed against decadent Christianity,
Christianity which is subject to the law of rhythmic and spiral evolution
of history.

Nietzsche set himself up against this morality of feebleness.  How was he
to do it if not in opposing force to it?  And yet it would be necessary to
affirm the necessity of force in what it has of the more powerful:  in its
excess, in its realized greater extension in magnanimity and magnificence
which characterize the Aristotelian and Thomistic superman.

In the first lecture, I said that the philosophy which (page 12) will
reclimb the slope toward a new summit, the philosophy to which must lead
the dialectical current of post-medieval philosophic thought, must be a
philosophy of the superman:  a philosophy which will be before all a moral
philosophy, and which will reintroduce the necessity of force; the force
which is essential to all virtue.

Why must this reactionary philosophy come?  Because nature is defeatist. 
Because nature will infallibly attain its term; because Dionysus is
immortal; because vengeance is essential to nature.  One can abuse it up to
a certain limit, but one cannot destroy it.  When men become incapable of
affirming it, it is affirmed by its very self, and it affirms itself in the
strangely absurd system of Nietzsche.  Because Nietzsche is not someone: 
he is a will for power without reason.  His affirmation is blind.  It
manifests itself as a need:  it is not the product of modern philosophic
reason.  (page 13)

It is a revolt against Apollonian rationalism, by opposition to authentic
intellectualism.  It is equally a revolt against morality without reason: 
in other terms, an irrational revolt, irrational in relation to us, since
it is not in the reason of modern philosophy, against irrational morality. 
But this revolt, irrational in relation to us, manifests a reason indeed
more profound than ours:  that which nature works and acts before all human
reason.

This revolt breaks out with Nietzsche, but it was already prepared, not by
modern philosophers, but by those who are called men of letters.  It is in
literature that it is necessary to seek its roots; among the a-
philosophical moralists and the German poets.  Which demonstrates in an
experiential manner the role of Dionysian ecstasy in philosophy. (page 14) 
And after all, the philosophers cannot do without the poets.  The
historical fact that the poets preceded the philosophers is entirely
significant.

Let us speak now of the French influence on Nietzsche.  In Nietzsche's own
opinion (De l'avis? meme de Nietzsche?) it is the old Montaigne which
inspires his critique of the herd spirit which grounds the morality of
slaves.  "It is believable that there are natural laws, Montaigne said, as
they are seen in other cultures; but among us they have perished."  "Laws
of conscience, which we call born of nature, are born of custum; each,
having in internal veneration the opinions and customs approved and
received by him, is not able to depend on himself without remorse."  "It is
necessary to get rid of this violent prejudice of custom."  "One senses his
judgment all overthrown and (remis pourtant en bien plus sur etat?)"  This
"overthrown judgment," here is everything that distinguishes the free
spirit from the vulgar.  "For the vulgar, the laws are maintained in belief
not because they are just, but because they are laws.  (page 15)  No
legislation, says Montaigne, when "it (attacherfait?) ten thousand laws,
knows "the infinite diversity of human actions.  All these laws attached to
us make us play a role, "as role of an borrowed personage, and they are
causes that most of our vocations are farcical."

Montaigne had reason:  because he makes appeal to habit, which furnishes us
judgments by connaturality:  which permit us to judge in this infinite
diversity of human actions; while Puritanism and Jansenism impose on us
from without and by constraint this infinity of moral rules, throw us
outside of ourselves, and make us play the impersonal role of an borrowed
personage.  On the contrary, Montaigne sees nothing in the philosophy of
pity but an effect of the "facility, affable and indolent."  Montaigne
wants an education "which changes us into better men."  It is necessary to
attach it not to the soul, he says, by the surface; it must be in the
body. 

It is necessary to free man from his state of impotence, not by
annihilation, but by an elevation.

It is the philosophers who must liberate humanity from its state of
slavery.  "Someone," he wrote, "who asked Socrates (Crates?) how long it
was necessary to philosophize received this reply:  until there are no
longer (asniers?) who conduct our armies"  Nietzsche had more hope.  For
political and military tasks, the (aniers?) always suffice; but it is for
the philosophers to find the means of conducting, unwittingly (a leur
insu?), the (aniers?)"

For Pascal, writes Nietzsche, I almost have affection, because he (mu
infiniment inbruit?????):  he is therefore the only Christian.  And what he
loves in Pascal, is his revolt against the philosophy of his time, which by
its superficiality and its artificial character, were against nature.  It
is the courage that he admired in Pascal, and not his Jansenism.  (page 17)

The influence of the great poet Goethe is more important.  "It is
necessary," Goethe had said, "that every perfect thing in its genus surpass
this genus; it is necessary that it become something different,
incomparable."  Everything that is great and intelligent exists only in the
minority.  Goethe had already spoken with a contemptuous pity of this more
prudent and enlightened humanity, but denuded of energy, which is being
prepared; and he saw coming the time when God, in disgust, would be obliged
to tear the universe in pieces for a new (rejeunie?) creation."

The hero of The Brigands of Schiller is already an imperfect image of the
superman of Nietzsche.  But he is still too humanitarian, and even too
Dionysiac.  He suffers too much contempt of the mas.  He is not
sufficiently fatalistic -- he perishes in vengeance, (page 18) although the
work of the superman must be essentially constructive.  

But all these influences are purely extrinsic.  They never give reasons. 
They present only aspirations.  While Nietzsche wanted to make realities of
them.  But he did not overtake the will of the superman.

I said just now that the system of Nietzsche is an absurd and fundamentally
contradictory system.  He creates a superman, but he has absolutely nothing
to give him.  He must exceed himself indefinitely.  This is very well, but
to what is this going to lead?  Does there exist an ideal?  The superman
must slowly become a precious stone for the joy of eternity.  But what is
this eternity that he promises to us?  He answers us by the doctrine of
eternal recurrence.  The universe grows in the Dionysian and Apollonian
conflict:  it produces the supermen who are the ultimate ends; it arrives
at the point of saturation, the whole process (page 19)  begins anew, and
thus to infinity.  We will listen an infinity of times again in this same
room.  Frightful conception, it must be admitted.  And Nietzsche himself
admitted it.

How to explain this illogism so brutal and sterile?  At the time of
Nietzsche there existed nothing of metaphysics.  All philosophical systems
were essentially and exclusively cosmologies.  The metaphysics of which
Kant spoke, his notions of substance, of causality, etc., were not
metaphysical notions.  The philosophy of Hegel never surpassed the first
degree of abstraction:  he never came to know the implications of the
principle of contradiction.  His non-being is something of the very real,
his non-being is first matter.  The universe of Schopenhauer is an
exclusively cosmic universe, and his will of the world is again first
matter.  (20) 

Postmedieval philosophy has no metaphysics.  Even in Christendom, Molina is
an irrefutable proof of it.  In order to explain human liberty he is
obliged to reverse all of metaphysics:  he did it without knowing it, and
without admitting it.  But he did it all the same.  With Suarez, we are
present at the solemn inauguration of the supremacy of the imagination in
the domain of philosophy.  Each time that he abandons St. Thomas, whom he
read attentively, he does it by reason of the order of the imagination.

Beginning with Wolfe, philosophy of nature is called metaphysics.  And here
again an experiential proof of the rhythmic current which rules the history
of human thought.  In it one was returned to the presocratic state of
philosophy.  And Nietzsche himself has not surpassed it.  He never
understood Plato and Aristotle.  (page 21)  Metaphysics was not in the
air.  This was fatal.  He affirmed the necessity of going beyond the
cosmos, but he did not succeed in detaching himself from it.  He would,
moreover, fall into the void.

We have remarked that his theory of art is essentially cosmic:  his works
of art are always given birth by Dionysus.  And he affirms the superiority
of music because it is Dionysiac.  Nietzsche has seen Greek culture only
through Heraclitean glasses:  reality is universally becoming.  Henceforth,
the artistic exteriorization of reality in its most intimate depths will be
a dynamic exteriorization, an art which arises in time:  a cosmic music as
that of the young Wagner:  and that of Beethoven may already be.  In this
music time is essential, as in all romantic music.  (page 22)

But there is a music which transcends the cosmic flux.  There is the music
of a Johan Sebastian Bach, which arises in time, it is true, but here, time
is purely accidental even in being necessary.  Bach has said things which
will be true even when time exists no more.  His music is an insinuation of
this spiritual immobility which has no need of pursuing existence, which
possesses it in an instant.  Bach's music is a narration in time of a meta-
temporal life.

Nietzsche has an obscure knowledge of the insufficiency of the cosmic in
art, of which one can see a preview in his revolt against Wagner.  But
instead of an appeal to Bach, he turned toward Bizet:  an absolutely
inexplicable deviation if not by his lack of metaphysics:  by his lack of
lived spirituality.  (page 23)

But this absence of lived spirituality removes nothing of the importance
and the historic depth of his philosophy.

Nietzsche said at just the right moment:  I want the superman: man must
surpass himeslf:  I want force.  He felt the need of it.  He said to us
that the morality of masters is not that of slaves:  but he did not tell us
in what consists this morality of masters.

I say that Nietzsche is, in a certain point of view, the most important of
the modern philosophers:  I do not say this because it is said (?) - that
is to me absolutely indiferent -- it is that I attempt to demonstrate it: 
and if I attempt it, it is because it is not said.  I say it.

And that Nietzsche is of an inestimable importance, this is what is proved
by the attacks of which he has been the object (page 24)
(missing line?)
orthodox which are very often synonyms of Philistines.

We want the superman:  it is not what there is of the arduous and terrible
in Nietzsche which frightens us.  If we do not stop at Nietzsche, it is
because we want a superman infinitely greater:  because we are more
demanding than he.  Because we required by God.
It is this man that I will attempt to describe in the following lecture.
Lecture 4

Nietzsche part 4  (throughout, the word "force" is here taken as
"fortitude" - perhaps "strength would be better?  Toward the end, CDK calls
"force" a "cardinal virtue" DQ)

"A people, says Nietzsche, is the detour of nature to achieve six or seven
great men.  Yes:  and then to leave them by the side of the road."  (Read
P. Ch. 342-3 ?)

All modern thought since Luther was against Nietzsche, and Nietzsche knew
it.  In the Gay Science, he defended the Church against Luther.  Read pages
357-9. 

Also read page 361

Can one thus distribute humanity into two categories?  Can one justify
Nietzsche?  Are we not all equal before God?  And is not the Christian
religion accordingly an essentially egalitarian religion?  Before
responding to this very complex question, we will study humanity from the
very beginning, from a strictly philosophical point of view.  This manner
of proceeding is legitimate, for grace does not destroy nature.

What is the absolute origin of humanity, and what is its absolute end?  To
comprehend this, it is necessary to attend to the very birth of humanity. 
Man, says St. Thomas, is found at the lower limit of the hierarchy of
intellectual beings.  The pure spirits constitute a hierarchy of species
absolutely distinct, which subsist outside of the entire natural genus. 
(page 2)

Their essence constitutes a degree of achieved perfection.  Each individual
realizes a pure species.  These species, hierarchised according to their
degree of perfection, constitute an ensemble which is so much the more one,
in that it is constituted by beings fundamentally different.  A
hierarchical ensemble, that is to say, composed of heterogeneous parts,
constitutes a unity of order, a unity of essential order when the parts are
of heterogeneous essences.  An ensemble of homogeneous  beings, such as
men, constitutes only  a unity of accidental order.  Accordingly, one must
say that two angels, which are essentially different, are more one than two
men, who however entail the same definition.

With Aristotle and St. Thomas we make a distinction between unity,
transcendental property of being, and unity, principle of number.  There is
a transcendental unity in the measure that there is of being.  Therefor,
pure spirits A and B, just in being more distant in perfection than B and
C, are more one than B and C.  A man and dog are more one than two dogs,
and so on.

These considerations allow us to comprehend how the cosmic universe of
space-time takes birth. 

Pure spirits A and B are more distant in perfection than spirits B and C. 
That is to say, that in descending the scale, spirits resemble each other
more and more.  If now we descend this scale to the bottom, we finish by
finding two spirits which resemble each other indeed (de faite?); two
spirits who are essentially equal:  two spirits who entail the same
definition.  But these two spirits themselves will be more than pure
spirits. While the pure spirits entail a simple essence, it is necessary
here to decompose the essence, since it must be realized in several
individuals.  This decomposition of essence cannot be realized except by a
composition of the individual essences:  it is necessary to posit in the
interior of the individual essence a principle of opposition, a principle
of individuation, that we call first matter.  Where there is a multiplicity
of individuals in the same species, there are composed essences:  composed
of matter and (on?) form(s?).

Multiplicity of homogeneous individuals implies homogeneous opposition: 
the parts of an ensemble, since they are similar, are exterior to one
another:  they constitute a homogeneous exteriority:  they constitute a
spatial order.  A complex essence calls for a complex existence:  it cannot
have a simple existential act.  It is not able to have a complex
simultaneous existence, because the essence, despite its composition, is
one.  Therefore, it can only have an existential act in a successive
manner:  it exists successively.  And this succession must be continuous,
because the essence cannot lose its identity in the succession:  it must
always be the same being that exists successively.  Therefore, a being of
complex essence is a being which endures successively and continuously,
that is to say, that it is spatio-temporal.

And here is the absolute origin and foundation of this universe of mobility
which goes on, which pursues its perfection.  Spatio-temporal species
cannot be completed in one individual alone.  They effect a compensation in
multiplication:  humanity is a species which enriches itself by
multiplication.

And now we are going to understand why I have made these rather abstract
reflections:  this multiplication cannot be the goal of the human species. 
The goal of this multiplication is the unity of the species.  Not an
accidental unity, but an essential unity:  essential in the measure
possible.  The accidental is never the end. 

Now, essential unity cannot be realized except by heterogeneous parts. 
Therefore, humanity tends to constitute itself in a hierarchical ensemble. 
This ensemble cannot be composed of different essences, but this does not
prevent that in reason of the infinite plasticity of matter, men can differ
substantially, because substance is the root of accidents in which we can
establish a difference between men.  (page 5)

This hierarchical unity of humanity is constituted by the different degrees
of perfection of its individuals.  There will be the superior men, and the
inferior men.  Humanity imitates in its own manner, in the interior of the
same species, the angelic hierarchy.  Egalitarianism is manifestly based on
a materialist conception of unity:  on a confusion of transcendental unity
with the unity which is the principle of number:  unity which implies an
homogeneous matter, and which is of an infra-spiritual order.    One sees
also how the abandonment of metaphysics entails equally the abandonment of
transcendental unity, for which will be substituted unity by confusion and
shapelessness (amorphe?) of first matter.  Monism will be a logical outcome
of this materialist conception of the one and the many.(page 6)

Although for a Thomist, the universe is, in its great variety, infinitely
more une than the universe of the monists.  The Thomist universe is so
profoundly one that it blossoms (eclot?) in specific and substantial
differences.  The unity of hierarchical humanity is infinitely more
profound than the unity of an egalitarian humanity.

Up to this point, we are in agreement with Nietzsche.  But Nietzsche says
equally that the mass is in function of the great man.  That a people
exists in order to produce some rare superman.  In Thomism, we make a
distinction.  As persons, intellectual beings are directly subordinated
only to God.  But no finite intellectual being is "pure person."  By (?)
their degree of perfection, they are hierarchically subordinated:  and in
this measure, every inferior is in function of the superior (translation
help?)  And if this idea is essential to Thomist (surgeology? sounds like a
pretty cool study, eh?) it is it to the advantage of the individuals of a
species (help!!!!!!!??????)  If men are persons, they are far from being
substantial species:  they are only parts of the human species.  But men
are not purely functional (useful?) in the manner of the infra-human
species, of which man is the entire reason for being.  (page 7) 
Egalitarianism is therefore a divinisation of man.

I said the other day that the theory of eternal recurrence of Nietzsche is
the image of the bankruptcy of his system.  He has established a hierarchy
in the interior of each historical cycle, in its path toward the superman. 
But the cycles are in their turn equal.  He thus seeks for the achievement
of things in their pure multiplicity.  He falls, on this superior plan into
the error which he condemned concerning the structure of individual
cycles.  And that is understood.  He did not have metaphysics.  He cried
out for metaphysics, but he did not find it.  We have seen that he only
knew dramatic and comic art.  This art is true:  it is, in the domain of
the music Beethoven and Wagner (?).  But this art, as this philosophy is
not able to end.  It can be only a phase - I do not say a phase an
exclusively historical phase, because there is something of the eternal in
the truth of the cosmos -- ; it is a phase of the life of the individual
himself:  it is necessary to surpass these men.  But it cannot close
itself, it cannot complete itself:  this art cannot close up on itself. 
There is nothing more profoundly sad than the IXth symphony of Beethoven,
which is (page 8)an ode to joy.  And the triumph of the Vth only conducts
us to the end of the symphony.

We also, we have a doctrine of recurrence:  but our recurrence is not
homogeneous and linear:  it is spiroidal.  The historic rhythm follows an
ascensional movement:  that is to say that the summet of each cycle is more
and more elevated.  This rhythm is essential to nature, one finds it again
in the doctrine of generation and corruption.  There are generation and
corruption in the concrete life of human culture.  And grace does not
destroy this rhythm.  This rhythm serves the integral order.  It attains
even the theologians.

Most christians have a monstrous idea of history.  The summit of history
would be in the past, and the world would be henceforth in a state of
degeneracy.  We descend henceforth to hell.  But the mass of the old have
said this since the beginning of humanity.  This lazy idea, defeatist and
morbid, is, for a Thomist, Manichean and subtly blasphemous.  Corruptions
are for generation, and when there are no more generations, there will be
no more corruption.  And this world here below will be assumed in the
resurrection.(page 9)  The world only achieves itself at the summit, and
its achievement will be an assumption.

---------------------------------------

The superman of Nietzsche is characterized by his will for power. 
Nietzsche makes appeal to fortitude, and even to an excess of fortitude. 
In the last lecture we traced the degeneracy of the idea of habit.  Man
took revenge on the effort that was required of him:  and Nietzsche took
revenge on this vengeance.  By his appeals, he wanted to reinstall habit. 
His cry had an impact, and the Thomist is able to recognize it. 

In Thomist ethics, the word fortitude can have two senses.  (II II q. 123
/a.2)  Following the first, fortitude is nothing but a certain firmness of
soul; thus understood, it is a general virtue, or to say it better, a
condition of all virtue, since, as Aristotle says, it is essential to
virtue to act in a firm and unshakable manner.  Following the second,
fortitude is a 'firmness,' whose unique function is to support and push
these assaults, these extreme perils in which it is most difficult to stand
firm.  "Fortitudo est circa terribilia."  It is in this sense that (page
10) fortitude is called a special virtue, provided that it has a
determinate matter. 

But fortitude is needed by all men.  How is it able to be characteristic of
the supermen?  And if all men are called to fortitude, it is that all men
are called to be supermen, which destroys the idea of the superman, as we
have presented (exposee) it.

Yes, but the particular virtue of fortitude includes several parts, of
which two are explicitly reserved for great souls, for those who are
naturally great, who are born great:  magnanimity and magnificence:  "actus
magnanimitatis non competit cuilibet virtuoso, sed solum magnis."  (q. 29,
a 3, 2nd)  The act of magnanimity is therefore not given to all, but
reserved to great souls.  And the fact that these virtues need an innate
greatness, and (qui tient a?) physical complexion of the individual -
nobilitas animae sequitur bonam complexionem corporis -, this innate
greatness which is just a disposition, does not impede magnanimity being a
virtue:  "Nec tamen est contra rationem virtutis quod ex naturali
complexione aliquis habeat naturalem inclinationem ad virtutem."  q 123, 1,
3rd.  (page 11)

Before treating of these virtues, we will speak first of their subject, and
of the presupposed natural disposition:  because one can be a great man,
without being magnanimous, since magnanimity designates the virtue, the
habit grafted onto the disposition.  This subject is a necessity of
nature.  It is this subject who is the superman in the Nietzschean sense. 
He is an angel, but it is not decided if he will be white or black:  it is
habit that will give him his color.

But this man is already a superman in relation to the mass.  And the
superman is already here in his absolute sense:  that is to say, as truly
opposed to the mass.  Because the requirements of magnanimity are so
transcendent, that they cannot be realized but by exceptional men.

If we take the qualifying (qualificatif?) superman in this sense, then men
of great genius, whether they be virtuous or vicious, fit into this
category.  These men are great in life (vie?) or in virtue.  And the bad
men can have an enormous destructive power:  the bad habit will correspond
(page 12) to the natural disposition.

We have returned, therefore, to a question of definition.  This definition
is however very demanding.  If we define the superman by his capacity of
magnanimity: the capacity will correspond to the requirements of the virtue
of magnanimity.  And by this very fact, the one-sided genius could not
return into this category.  But if one wants to call any genius whatever a
superman, as Schopenhauer meant it, - that is a question of definition. 
One can be a physicist of genius without being an integral superman.  In
many cases, a certain distance can be very helpful in certain domains. 
Thus, no metaphysician has been a good physicist (I would like to have been
able to say the contrary!).  This example is typical.  Because if the
metaphysician contributes nothing to physics, he knows how to assimilate
the work of others, while the physicist can be ignorant of the existence of
metaphysics without damage for his science to himself -- and history
teaches us that the metaphysics of physicists has delayed the progress of
this science.  (page 13)

Henceforth, we must leave the superman of Nietzsche, in order to surpass
him - in order to construct a greater superman.  That is not to say that we
deny the historic meaning of the Nietzschean supermen who are of all
colors.  Because even the bad geniuses play an essential role in history. 
"Etiam mala peccatorum in bonum justorum cedunt."  (Rom. Comm. p 120.) 
They serve, without willing it, the just ones

The philosophy of Nietzsche is an anthropocentric philosophy, while Thomist
philosophy is theocentric.  The Thomist philosophy is not a philosophy of
the superman.  For it, the question of the superman is a question of
applied philosophy.  But that is not to say  that man is less great than in
an anthropocentric philosophy.  Just the contrary.  An anthropocentric
philosophy sins by exclusion.  The man of the anthropocentric philosophy is
not very great.  In a sense, man is too small to occupy the center of the
universe; and if he occupied it, the universe would be in its turn too
small:  and if we want an infinitely more vast universe, we want implicitly
a man infinitely more vast.  (page 14)

It is especially this last point that we must accentuate when we argue ad
hominem.  Absolutely speaking, it is false to say that the romantic
philosophers have divinized man too much.  No, their manner of divinizing
him is not only a lowering of the idea of divinity, but equally a lowering
of man.  They did not known how to divinize him except by imposing limits
which are contrary to his nature:  because man is by his nature capacity
for God:  that is to say that he is naturally capable of a gratuitous
elevation (surelivation) which makes him participate in the intimate life
of the most pure absolute. 

It is completely (tout?) the Thomist system that we oppose to the
philosophy of Nietzsche.  And it is completely (tout) the metaphysical and
Christian ideal that we oppose to the limited and undefined ideal of the
superman of Nietzsche.

Because, in sum, Nietzsche has left us only a description of the exterior
signs of the psychological character of the superman:  his ideal and his
historic role are without doubt infinitely superior to those of the mass,
which tends always toward disintegration, but this ideal has not been
defined by him.  (page 15)

And this ideal wasn't even definable, since he had no metaphysics,
necessarily this ideal was blurred, and if he had not given as solution his
theory of eternal recurrence, he would have found (bored?  trouer?) at the
level of the cosmos only another theory equally despairing and amorphous. 

But Nietzsche has left us a phenomenal description of the superman, of his
observable greatness.  And it is this that will permit us to establish a
strict comparison between the superman that Aristotle and St. Thomas have
equally described in this manner.  And this comparison I will here make for
ourselves, so that we do not (sangons?) too impressed (?  empresse? 
engresse?) to despise the psychological type of the superman of Nietzsche. 


The approach (demarche?) of the IVth Book of the Nichomachean Ethics, which
treats of fortitude, is an extremely difficult approach (demarche). 
Aristotle in it defends a superior human type which is accused by the mass
of prodigality, of pride, of idleness, of irony, of disdain for the mass,
of cruelty, of indifference, of indelicacy, etc. . . . in one word, the
"bose" (German?) - villain. 

(pages "a" and "b" - inserted between 15 and 16)

There was much debris fallen along the way.  Christian life advances itself
by necessary explosions:  and each explosion of Christian culture entails
its waste.  The waste purifies the Christian world, the mystical body of
Christ in state of growth.  But do not forget that this waste has arisen
from the bosom of the Church.   That protestantism and calvinism were
prepared, not by the Church, but in the Christendom adhering to the
Church.  Each of us carries in himself a little protestant or a little
calvinist, a little puritan.  We live in danger:  we are wayfarers.

Jansenism, this pestilential doctrine so little different from puritanism,
which was for centuries in the very bosom of the Church of Catholic
Christendom, and which is far from being extinct, is our nearest danger. 

Christendom must progress, and it, like mutations, proceeds by bounds.  It
brings about the new.  This new, brought about by circumstances, and
realized at the outset in certain superior types, dazes the very faithful
mass.  Remember what a revolutionary St. Thomas was, and how the most
sincere of the faithful attacked him as a destroyer of tradition, and a man
who worked for the destruction of the Church.

The ascendant movement is characterized by a certain intoxication:  a
disquieting intoxication for all those who don't know it:  it is the
intoxication of the genius, and of the Saint.

I would like to end by dwelling on two great virtues, two virtues integral
to the cardinal virtue of fortitude:  magnanimity and magnificence.  Two
virtues of which theologians, even Catholic ones, have not spoken for
centuries.

Aristotle, in the 4th book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and St. Thomas in the
Summa Theologica q. 129 & 134 of the IIa IIae, defend a superior human type
who is accused by the mass of prodigality, of pride, of idleness, of irony,
of disdain for the mass, of cruelty, of indifference, of indelicacy, of
brutality -- etc. etc. . .

(page 16)

The liberal man is accused of prodigality, which the mass considers as a
very grave vice, while parsimony would be a virtue.  And when he is praised
by the mass, it is always because of his utility.  (Ethics 665.)  But the
liberal man does not give for utility.  He gives in order to give.  It is
this which is found unreasonable.  He gives, he makes sacrifices without
pain.  And he does not want to receive from others, and when he receives,
he is embarrassed.  "Ad liberalem pertinet ut vehementer superabundet in
datione."  He gives to the point of having too little for himself.  And the
most liberal man, says Aristotle, is the one who receives his fortune as an
inheritance, because the man who earned it by work is separated from it
with difficulty:  and all men love their own works immoderately:  "parentes
filios, poetae sua poemata."  Since they have not known need, they disperse
all the more easily.  And when he has exaggerated, he is not sad:  and he
does not believe in the maxim of Simonides.

But then, how does this man differ from the prodigal?  The liberal man does
not waste.  He gives with measure.  But is it not simply just to give with
measure?  (page 17)  And if he is virtuous, why does he give more than is
necessary?  But, the liberal man does not want to stop at the necessary: 
he wants what he gives to be a gift, and not a debt.  And thus he is an
extremist.  But he is in the mean in this, that he does not waste:  he does
not throw pearls before the swine, as the prodigal.

The prodigal does not lack manliness, but measure.  The parsimonious man
stops at the useful, he only gives what he must, he stops at the
necessary.  And the parsimonious consider their parsimony as a virtue.  And
that explains, says Aristotle, why the believe that liberality is vicious: 
while parsimony is more vicious than prodigality:  "prodigum multo meliorem
illiberali," translated St. Thomas.  Because, parsimony is incurable, while
prodigality "de facile curatur."  With a little exercise and reflection,
the prodigal can attain the mean, while giving excessively.  The
parsimonious man, on the contrary, cannot ever give without being certain
of a return.  Not that the parsimonious man always desires the fortune of
others:  and he does not except gifts without hesitation (page 18); because
he thinks that the one who seems to give has ulterior motives, and he fears
for the security of his property.  And in certain cases, he adds, the
parsimonious men have a fear of fortune.

The parsimonious man is incurable.  He finds himself in a vicious circle: 
and the one who climbs out (up?  gravi?), is the one who (? c'est qu'il) is
able always to make appeal to prudence.  Read Ethics. p. 237 n. 697-8

The liberal man is therefore not natural, if by natural we intend what
happens in the majority of cases.  And nature, thus defined, tendit in
defectum.  The mass tends toward the defective.

This distinction remarked by St. Thomas is extremely important.  Because
the mass, by the very fact that it establishes parsimony as a virtue, and
that it is forced to justify itself, already makes the morality of slaves.

The liberal man is an exceptional man, but the magnificent man is more so. 
If the magnificent man is necessarily liberal, the liberal man is not
necessarily magnificent.  Magnificence superadds greatness to liberality,
quaedam magnitudo.  (page 19)

Magnificence concerns enormous expenses in view of great honorable works,
that is to say, disinterested ones, by opposition to useful works.  It
supposed an aesthetic taste, and is opposed thus to vulgar profusion, e.g.
that of the musical comedies of Hollywood, in which there is no proportion
between the expense and the intrinsic value of the work.  In giving this
example, I remain faithful to the taste of Aristotle, because he gave as
examples the comedies of Megara, in which the actors appeared in purple in
the first act.

In magnificence, there is all the same a certain disproportion between the
expenses and the work, in this that the expenses are greater than the work,
but that does not harm the work.  On great works he spends largely and with
joy.  If he calculated his expenses too much, he would be stingy:  "Quod
aliquis sit multum diligens in computatione expensorum, pertinet ad
parvificentiam:" the vice opposed to magnificence.

As example of magnificent works, Aristotle always cites works of art,
temples, monuments, (boeuss?), music, etc.

(note on reverse page)

Why does God, perfect, create?  Not having any need of the creature?  A
liberal man can understand it.  He wants to communicate without (sans?)
having any need of profit. A stingy man cannot comprehend it.

The same for parents.  Many of whom are parents by accident.  They do not
comprehend how on can choose to have children while knowing that these
children will give us pain, and that their existence calls for sacrifices.

(page 20)

A gift to the poor is not a gesture of magnificence, but of justice or
liberality.  In the eyes of the mass, magnificence is a waste, because it
is not useful.  And in the ethics of slaves, pure liberality, and
magnificence, while they do not deny their idealistic value, are always
inopportune. There was much poverty in Palestine at the time of Our Lord. 
But let us recall the passage of St. Mark the Evangelist:  14  X

What magnificence aims at are great disinterested works, and cultural: 
works of the spirit.  And what is characteristic here, is the overflowing,
the superabundance:  the spiritual richness gratuitously communicated.  And
this gratuitous overflowing is essential to the spiritual.  There is a
gratuitous diffusion of self, in the measure one has goodness, and there is
goodness in the measure that there is being.  The more a being is superior
and spiritual, the more its communication outside is gratuitous.  In the
angelic order, the more the angels are superior, the more their
communication of their knowledge and their love to their inferiors becomes
gratuitous.  And every gift of God is absolutely gratuitous:  creation and
elevation above (surelevation).

Magnificence is a true triumph of pure spirituality over (page 21) the
parsimonious poverty and stinginess of nature.

While magnificence essentially concerns diffusion outside, magnanimity
specially concerns the subject considered in itself:  it concerns above all
a title of nobility which has no need of exterior goods to be exercised. 
The poor man cannot make (poser) acts of magnificence; but he can be
magnanimous.

As magnificence, magnanimity seeks the honorable (l'honnete), the
disinterested, as opposed to the useful.  It has as objects honors.  And
there is a strange thing about virtue (Et voila une drole de vertu):  cf.
II II 129? c. (p. 116)

But, magnanimity, is it truly a virtue?  And here are the objections of the
morality of the slaves:  ibid. a 3 (p 124- 131)

All that (mein?) us very far from this purely negative humility that
Nietzsche disdained so in the Christianity of his time.  For St. Thomas,
humility is imperfect in the measure that it excludes magnanimity.  And
there is one of the difficult points about magnanimity:  One borders always
on the ridicule of pride and of vanity.(page 22)

It doesn't suffice to be what is called reasonable:  it is necessary to
have a judgment by connaturality; and this connaturality which judges
spontaneously, supposes a natural greatness of soul.

One cannot be magnanimous without being humble:  but humility is a part of
temperance, and "materia temperantiae non habet de se aliquam
magnitudinem," as fortitude (force).  One sees it, temperance is not
erected here into the supreme cardinal virtue, as it is in morality without
metaphysics.  And it is completely remarkable do see how these two parts of
fortitude have gradually disappeared from treatises on theology after St.
Thomas.  With Duns Scotus, if I (puis mu frir?) to the texts that I have in
hand, "patientia est nobilissima fortitudo," while for St. Thomas,
"patientia non est potissima virtutum, sed deficit non solum a virtutibus
theologicis, et prudentia, et justitia, quae directe statuunt hominem in
bono; sed etiam a fortitudine et termperantia, quae retrahunt a maioribus
impedimentis."  (II II 136 a2, c)

And I have sought in vain in moral theological treatises.  A rare author
would mention these virtues in a general division, but (page 23) without
commenting.  It was only in recent years that dominican theologians have
reintroduced them into their moral treatises.

And this fact is extremely significant.  If these virtues have disappeared
from the treatises, it is because they have not raised any interest, and
that is serious; and one can even ask oneself if they were not suspect!

These virtues are little practiced:  quantum difficilis, say Aristotle and
St. Thomas, as if they despaired, these great men. 

But that does not prevent them from being the crowning achievement of what
is greatest in humanity.  "Magnanimitas est ornatus quidam omnium
virtutum.  Quia per magnanimitatem omnes virtutes efficiuntur majores, eo
quod ad magnanimitatem pertinet operare magnum in omnibus virtutibus.  Et
iterum non fit magnanimitas sine aliis virtutibus . . . . Unde difficile
est hominem magnanimum esse."  (749)

Theologians have (can it be peut-etre?) seen the danger of vanity in
magnanimity.  And, as they have always more fear of vanity than of
pusillanimity, one understands their preference.  But that is still not
thomistic.  Because for St. Thomas (page 24) vanity is less grave than
pusillanimity, however the vulgaris multitudo things about it. 
"Pusillanimitas deterior est . . . Vitium quod magis accidit propter
majorem inclinationem naturae humanae in ipsum, magis opponitur virtuti, .
. . manifestum est autem, quod magis accidit aliquod esse pusillanimos . .
. Et sic patet pusillanimitatem magis opponitur virtuti."  (790)

Pusillanimity, says Aristotle, is not considered as a vice, but simply as a
defect.

After these considerations, it is difficult to see what Nietzsche has
brought to the idea of the superman from the doctrinal point of view.  It
is necessary even to add that his idea remained very inferior to that one. 
But from the historical point of view, Nietzsche constituted, so to say, a
dialectical moment in the evolution of cultural life.  He reacted against
egalitarianism which was and which still is in fact:  egalitarianism which
was achieved in communism:  egalitarianism pushed up to the destruction of
personality, to lose oneself in an ensemble one with the unity of first
matter.
(page 25)

In reacting, Nietzsche has implicitly affirmed the rights of spirituality,
spirituality which has a horror of uniformity, of what men call order.  He
has demonstrated the historical bankruptcy of the morality of slaves.  And
in doing this he has served us.

Theology must continue the study of this subject, but that surpasses my
competence.  I would like all the same to make allusion to certain points
that the theologian would be able to expose. 

It is true to say that all men are equal before the grace of God.  That is
to say that nature, although it be its degree of perfection, cannot posit
any demand with respect to grace, nor impose a measure:  God gives it
gratuitously, and in the measure that He wills.  And thus, a man very
inferior is able to be uplifted above the greatest genius.

But that is not to say that grace reverses the natural order.  It does all
that without doing violence to nature:  -- all that is realized suaviter. 
And it does not belong to us to pass judgment on the totally-new which
results from the uplifting.  But hierarchy must be maintained.
(page 26)

The mystical body of Christ which embraces the angelic hierarchies and the
human hierarchy is essentially hierarchical in its turn, and that without
violence to the natural hierarchies.  One understands why this idea is so
little supported, -- the idea of absolute egalitarianism being so easy, and
simplifying.  It is so easy to say that, with the supernatural order given,
nature no longer has any value.  But that is not so easy - it is a heresy.

One can yet add to this, that the saint is not necessarily a superman such
as we have described.  He is a superman, without doubt, but in a sense
infinitely more transcendent.  And here is a very important distinction. 
Because every man is called to sanctity, although not all men are the stuff
of genius. 

And now a final reflection to conclude this series of lectures.

(un-numbered page)

We have studied the idea of hierarchy in the entire creation:  the entire
universe is essentially hierarchical:  it is its way of imitating the Holy
Trinity.  But we have not stopped at the natural structure which philosophy
can detect.  Without doubt, this natural hierarchy was not troubled, nor
reversed -- however, elevation to the supernatural order has assumed this
universal hierarchy into a new hierarchy that one does not know how to
measure with natures:  a hierarchy which shows in a fashion absolutely
hidden for us that the Spirit of God is so suberabundant that he breathes
without measure and where he will.

Because it was not the first of the angels, nor some flashy human genius --
but a simple woman, a mother, a virgin who led a life so hidden, and of
whom the angel said that she was full of grace and that the Lord was with
here:  it is she who has been elevated, not only to the summit of the human
hierarchy, but to the summit of the universal hierarchy: -- the one we
invoke as "the queen of the angels."

(page 27)

We have presented the superman in a manner a little flashy.  We have paused
a great deal on humanly manifest signs of greatness.  And without doubt we
have always had in mind (en devant l'esprit?) un homme, while a simple
woman, a mother, of whom the angel said that she was full of grace, and
that the Lord was with her, a virgin who led a life very hidden, has been
(qui ete) elevated to the summit of the human and angelic hierarchy:  the
queen of the angels.