This essay is a general comparison of four elements within the philosophizing aesthetic^[1] of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy,^[2] and a selection from Pavel Florenskii's lectures on the philosophy of cult, published under the title "Mysteries and Rites."^[3] Both thinkers, in an attempt to address the modern question of how the human individual is to make sense of his world without an integrated communal identity, share four similar components in their aesthetics: (1) the assumption of an essential human principle asserting rebellion against restraint, (2) a call for return to communal human identity, (3) the importance of human encounter with the tragic,^[4] and (4) the role of rite in providing a field of unity and resolution for each of the other themes. This essay shall show that Nietzsche and Florenskii share a general schematic^[5] wherein rite gives expression to human encounter with the tragic, while simultaneously providing a means for the exhaustion of an essential human "force" defined by its compulsion to overcome restraint. For both, rite is a communal event. One's participation within that event provides for an association with other human participants. Hence, rite acts as a unifying medium wherein the inner impulse against restraint is given a context for expression; the modern predicament of human "individuality" is overcome, as is human encounter with the tragic.

Although these two thinkers share the same basic constituents in their schemata, they draw radically different existential conclusions due to the respective paradigmatic mythoi in which each is constituted. As "Mysteries and Rites" illustrates, Nietzsche's ideas are periodically reflected upon in Florenskii's work; an asymmetrical encounter that was fostered by Florenskii's involvement with the Symbolist thinkers of his day, particularly Viacheslav Ivanov.^[6] In contrast to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, who wrongly opposes Florenskii and Ivanov,^[7] this essay will assume their mutual commensurability by employing Ivanov's critique of Nietzsche to justify the aesthetic superiority of Florenskii's position.

The final section of this essay thus presents a case for the superiority of Florenskii's Orthodoxy over Nietzsche's Dionysianism by affirming three points within Ivanov's critique and complementing those points with three additional criticisms of my own. The argument will assume an aesthetic sensitivity that considers the inclusion of our ethical intuitions to be compelling grounds for the superiority of one account over another.^[8] Upon considering (a) the three elements of Ivanov's critique of Nietzsche, (b) whether one should affirm some notion of perduring^[9] personal identity, (c) whether one should affirm the tragic in life as unconquerable, and (d) whether human existence excludes the possibility for a symbolic affirmation of the transcendent, it becomes apparent that the ethical bankruptcy of Nietzsche's Dionysianism allows for an inclusion of its most insightful aspects within Florenskii's Orthodoxy while simultaneously being surpassed aesthetically.

I.

In constructing a new framework in which to understand aesthetics and culture, Nietzsche introduces Apollo and Dionysus as emblems of the "opposition" which gives rise to aesthetic expression in Western culture. These gods signify "two drives" within the human being that exhibit "measured limitation" (the Apollonian), in which we distinguish ourselves from the apparent empirical events/entities that confront us in our day-to-day ordered and controllable experience, and the corresponding demise of that limitation (the Dionysian), wherein the recognition between self and world (or other) dissolves. In the Dionysian, there is "freedom." It exhibits a force that erupts from nature itself, in which "nature's artistic drives attain their first, immediate satisfaction."^[10] The Dionysian re-unites humanity with nature by destroying excessive inhibitions of restraint and regulation, allowing the human being productive contact with its unbridled desires. Such utopian expressions of amoral ecstasy define the young Nietzsche's ideal.

In Dionysus, one finds the disordered flux and excess of human revelry, best illustrated in intoxication. Dionysus is the god of music and merriment, that quintessential non-discursive, non-representational artistic expression. When united with myth-as it is in the chorus of Attic Greek tragedy or revelry of Bacchic dithyramb- the Dionysian leads to the dissolution of individual identity within a mystical community of humanity and cosmos Nietzsche terms "primordial unity." Neither the Apollonian nor the Dionysian has "regard for the individual," for both are powers arising from nature with, or without, the "mediation of any human artist."^[11] As a part of nature, of an immanently closed being, the human being gives a determinate form to the Dionysian and Apollonian states of nature. Nietzsche invokes a pseudo-historical account of when the Apollonian Greek first confronted the Dionysian Greek (the evolved product of the Dionysian barbarian) as a way of legitimizing the Dionysian's natural and inherent reality. Here, the Apollonian Greek felt the nagging familiarity of the Dionysian through "an astonishment enlarged by the added horror...that [the Dionysian] was not so foreign to [him] after all, indeed that [his] Apollonian consciousness only hid [the] Dionysian world from [him] like a veil."^[12] Despite his distaste for Euripides, this account relays Nietzsche's close relation to the account set forth in the Bacchae, thereby lending support to the claim that the particular Dionysian revelry of this tragedy (intoxication, orgies, feasting, violence), is illustrative of the unbridled activity leading one to primordial unity.

In this early Nietzschean text^[13] (which contrasts his later assessment of the exclusive superiority of the Dionysian), the Dionysian and Apollonian forces are not antagonistic to one another, but rather, complementary. The tug and pull of their relationship is the creative process in which Greek tragedy is produced. Without the one to keep the other in balance, each drive manifests in an extreme aberration.^[14] Since the Apollonian is necessary for the Dionysian, and vice versa, each drive is not the enemy of the other. Rather, it is "Socratic Reason," the enemy of the Dionysian, that Nietzsche considers the basis of modernity's scientific worldview: "Our whole modern world is caught in the net of...the highest ideal it knows [as] theoretical man, equipped with the powers of understanding and working in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates."^[15] For Nietzsche, Socratic culture is the demise of myth and rite in the name of reason and science.

Nietzsche frequently relies on the Dionysian-Apollonian structure to distinguish between the worlds of individuation (our everyday world where the distinctness of "things" function in conjunction with the Principle of Sufficient Reason) and of primordial unity (the realm "outside" individuation which is the condition for our apparent everyday world). For Nietzsche, it is only through one's aesthetic immersion in the Dionysian essence of primordial unity, that redemption from the suffering of the world can be achieved. In Dionysian ecstatic revelry, one forgets any difference between oneself and another, bringing about the only authentic human communal experience: "Singing and dancing, man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community."^[16] It is in the context of festivity, carnality, and celebration of sense-gratification-in a word, carnival-that one loses oneself in the common experience of the crowd and transcends universal suffering.^[17] The human being discovers that his existence is not limited to his individual experience of "release" alone, but that all human beings experience this need for release. In this, there is a way in which to escape the sting of all human beings' inevitability: death and dissolution. One who loses himself within Dionysian revelry finds a new wellspring of life and desire, justifying the continuation of life that the inevitability of death and dissolution reveals to be unjustified. The plunging into the primordial unity is a participation in some sort of cosmic one-ness wherein modernity's fragmented human atom "sees himself transformed by magic into a satyr."^[18]

For Nietzsche, the natural existential lot of humans is pessimism and despair, due to tragic grievance. Oedipus' fate is the human fate-my own fate. To witness the tragic in drama, to watch the ritual of self-destruction, is pleasurable because I gain insight into the fundamental human condition (which Nietzsche sees as the fundamental ontological condition of reality). In taking pleasure in seeing the destruction of another, I paradoxically remain unable to do anything about the inevitability of my own death and dissolution while yet (somehow) celebrating the demise of the hero: I existentially apprehend that my own dissolution is exhilarating in its terror. Nietzsche's references to intoxication, orgies, and other such activities are meant to communicate a degree of exhilaration in genuine self-dissolution for in these carnal acts our separate(d), individuated self is absent.^[19]

The tragic is what finds expression in the Dionysian myth and music of Greek tragedy and the hymnic dithyramb.^[20] For Nietzsche, the dramatic performance of Attic tragedy, the amalgam of its music and myths, gives expression to the unbridled Dionysian tension with Apollonian order. Through participation in the performance, we behold the tragic, feel it, embrace it. It provides some determinate form of the hidden primordial unity wherein the tragic whispers: a form for the formless. When this rite is polluted with the presence of Socratic Reason, as in Euripides, the disintegration of its profundity is secured for, "it is certain that the first effect which the Socratic drive aimed to achieve was the disintegration of Dionysian tragedy."^[21] Socratic logic cannot allow for the paradoxical nature of the tragic that Nietzsche presents.

Nietzsche sees in the Dionysian anthropological (even cosmological) impulse human salvation from modernity. The Dionysian is meant to free humanity from modernity's rational scientific-Socratic-essence, allowing it to experience ecstatic union with the primordially common experience of the tragic. This freedom is both brought about by, and exhibited in, the performance of dramatic rite-Greek tragedy and (more specifically and applicably) Bacchic dithyramb. In this way, the impulse within humanity that rebels against restraint liberates the human person in granting him a kind of cosmic cultic identity, defines (even if paradoxically so) the tragic, and manifests itself in the non-discursive ritual performance.

II.

In "Mysteries and Rites," Florenskii presents an anthropology that is, like Nietzsche's, composed of two forces. In contrast with Nietzsche, however, Florenskii considers this anthropology to be meaningless apart from the "basic concepts of patristic theology."^[22] He speaks of certain "elemental principles" in the human being; one of which, the Titanic, dominates the attention of "Mysteries and Rites:"

[This principle] is the beginning of dissolution. It has been called a Dionysian principle. I prefer to call it more precisely, or at least less ambiguously, a titanic principle. "Titanic" meaning that which has grown from the earth; the Titans were the offspring of Gaea, the earth. What has grown from the earth is an emanation, an outpouring of its essence. Hence it is impersonal. It hungers eternally, presses eternally, rebels eternally.^[23]

Nietzsche shares this allusion to the Titans in his discussion of the Dionysian. If the Apollonian Greek is to receive Dionysus, he must "overthrow the realm of the Titans...and, by employing powerful delusions and intensely pleasurable illusions, gain victory over a terrifyingly profound view of the world and the most acute sensitivity to suffering."^[24] Indeed, the Apollonian Greek feels "the effect aroused by the Dionysian to be 'Titanic' and 'barbaric';...[unable to] conceal from himself the fact that he too [is] related inwardly to those overthrown Titans and heroes."^[25] Given these allusions, Nietzsche would seemingly condone Florenskii's use of "titanic" when referring to the anthropological force of defiance.

Against an apparent (post-Nietzschean?) intuition to the contrary, Florenskii is clear that "the titanic in itself is not sinful but good: it is the power of life, it is being itself."^[26] The Titanic can lead one to sin, but not always. Goodness is realized by the same impulse because the Titanic is "the potential of all activity...beyond good and evil." Any attempt to save humanity from the Titanic is an attempt to separate humanity from its very being. Since it is not only the force of sin but the force of human life itself, it is problematic to seek its dissolution.^[27]

In this way, the force of defiance is couched in a Pauline context concerned with overcoming the law that imposes a necessity-the seemingly unconquerable demands of the law of sin and death (Rom 7:23; Gal 3:23). Florenskii's Titanic is imbedded within the greater dualistic scheme that he locates in patristic theology. In its essence, the Titanic "is pressure and struggle against limits," in particular, the limits of Nomos.^[28] In similarity with Nietzsche's Apollonian, the principle of Nomos counteracts the Titanic which in turn intensifies a yearning for the boundless as it is manifested in aesthetic ritual expression. In contrast with Nietzsche, however, Florenskii's dual principles are analogously related to a host of other anthropological dualities,^[29] the totality of which spans anthropological, epistemological, metaphysical, and theological dimensions. While in God there is harmony between these polarities,^[30] fallen finite humanity lacks such fortune. Both principles require an infinite manifestation, and so their harmony cannot be realized in any mutual restriction. Rather, it is through a "mutual acknowledgment of their unconditional truth" that is only realizable when "they have exhausted their infinite potential within their own absolute limits."^[31] In an aesthetic magnificence that dims Nietzsche's paradigm (wherein the Apollonian and Dionysian only have their mutual struggle to look forward to in a cosmos of immanent closure), Florenskii affords the Titanic and Nomos their respective teloi in the transcendent God.^[32]

In his attempt to address the fragmented individual of modernity, Florenskii posits cult as the necessary condition for self-awareness; what an individual takes to be the truth of being is apparent in the network of meaning bestowed to the individual via the cult from which he derives his existence. Modernity has forgotten that cult-ure always already has its basis in cult. For Florenskii, "every culture is a purposeful and strongly bound system of means for realizing and disclosing certain values taken as basic and unconditional; that is, it serves a certain object of faith."^[33] The primordial sphere of cult is where mere conditions are elevated to norms, for it is only in this sphere that the individual possesses originary meaning. Like Nietzschean primordial unity, Florenskiian cult is the realm of true and potential transfiguration. Yet, whereas for Nietzsche order is transfigured into disorder, self identity into no-self identity, and sacred into profane, Florenskii's cult transfigures profane into sacred, accidental into purposeful, subjective into objective, and human into Divine.^[34] In this way, cult nurtures the Titanic force, just as Nietzsche's primordial unity fosters Dionysian experience (despite their aesthetically significant ethical polarity).

To correctly understand Florenskii's notion of the tragic, one must properly understand his overarching dualistic framework mentioned above and that framework's relationship to cult. Whenever there is antagonism between any of the two poles of Florenskii's antinomies, the tragic occurs: "tragedy in human existence comes from the conflict between these two truths [i.e. the truth of being and the truth of meaning], and can be resolved only when the two coincide in the 'absolute concreteness of cult'."^[35] Florenskii chooses an apt example for his lecture that specifically addresses the tragic: a hymnic phrase from the Orthodox funeral service-Making our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia. In contrast with Nietzsche's claim that Dionysian satiation comes with the exhilaration of one's own dissolution, Florenskii claims that the "utter, inhuman, untransformed darkness of despair becomes human when it is illumined and transformed, when it becomes bursts of praise for the Most High."^[36] If Nietzsche contributes a response to the tragic from the point of view of the abase person, Florenskii provides a response that raises humanity from abasement to glorious hope. Instead of affirming the burden of the tragic, Florenskii seeks to "unburden us as individuals," freeing us, healing us, lightening our load; for "cult raises grief in us, and thereby it raises us in our grief, to the level of ideal humanity, to that very human nature created in the likeness of Christ, and thus it transfers our grief to Pure Humanity, to the Son of Man." The mythos of the Orthodox cult is inextricably tied to its rites, both of which address the tragic more creatively and simply more tastefully than the narrative produced by Nietzsche.^[37] The tale of immoral Dionysian revelry as a redemptive shattering of the law-abiding illusion we call "reality" is challenged by a tale of Incarnation wherein death is "trampled down" by death and dialectic is overcome: conflict is here transcended by antinomic unity. Ironically, although their stories relay the greatest contrast in ethical appropriation, both Nietzsche and Florenskii show that personal grief in the tragic is alleviated and raised to objectivity in communal identity, whereby the individual is compelled to "push onward."

It is in rite that Florenskii sees the transcendent content of cult made tangible. Florenskii considers Orthodox liturgical praxis to be the conduit through which cult manifests the entire spectrum of human experience. In rite, the "tools" of cult manifest themselves in their antinomic essence, as simultaneously both sacred and profane.^[38] The very essence of symbol is revealed in cultic rite. Rite provides the field in which symbol is fully manifest; where one discovers a givenness that is greater than itself, presencing in itself that which is not itself, that which is greater than itself while yet antinomically remaining itself. The symbol is an essence, the energy of which is commingled with the energy of another essence more worthy in a given respect, and which thereby carries this other essence in itself.^[39] The symbolic nature of rite is perceived aesthetically, since formal logic and pure inductive reasoning fail to appropriate the depth of antinomic apprehension. Whereas the Dionysian flight of sensual revelry leads "up and away into the air above," where one "feels himself to be a god" moving in the ecstasy and sublimity of the heathen standard,^[40] liturgical flight leads yet further: to the transcendent world of antinomic resolution symbolically made manifest in the rite of cult. Such rite informs human everydayness with an aesthetic sensitivity that is re-inforced by Truth (a-letheia as disclosed through nous) and Goodness.^[41] It is here that Florenskii's Orthodoxy succinctly surpasses Nietzsche's Dionysianism. For while Nietzsche must convince us that Truth and Goodness are illusions brought on by a Socratic culture, Florenskii secures their givenness by delineating their equi-primordiality in the cult's network of meaning and practice.

In sum, Florenskii sees salvation from modernity in Orthodox cult as it expresses itself in liturgical rite. Like Nietzsche's scheme, it frees us from modernity's rational scientific bias, but does so, in contrast to Nietzsche, by locating the exhaustion of the impulses of the Titanic and Nomos in Divine "is-ness" and meaning. In this way, cult provides the living expression of meaning which informs the givenness of the tragic and the Titanic impulse. For Florenskii, it is Orthodox liturgical praxis that not only best reveals, but best instantiates, the aesthetic experience of symbol in human existence where both immanent and transcendent existence is affirmed through the means of antinomic symbol.

III.

Ivanov's analysis of Nietzsche's Dionysianism is a critique from within: Nietzsche is here considered to have misunderstood his own Dionysian tenets. For Ivanov extracts the essence of Nietzsche's data, wherein Dionysus tills the soil for Orthodoxy, the two being fundamentally akin in a way that makes Nietzsche appropriable to Christianity despite himself.^[42] While rightly discovering liberation in Dionysus, Nietzsche nevertheless recoils from the full appropriation of what Dionysus reveals, ignoring the fullness of what cosmic cultic identity entails and how it ultimately makes sense of the tragic through participation in the rite. Ivanov thus provides the first element of this essay's critique against Nietzsche and support for Florenskii: "Nietzsche's tragic guilt lies in his not having believed in the god whom he himself revealed to the [modern] world."^[43]

The ethical substance of Ivanov's critique obtains motivation for favoring Florenskii's Orthodoxy over Nietzsche's Dionysianism. When evaluating the Nietzschean and Florenskiian schemes according to the criterion of how the force against restraint is exhausted, the three constituents within both of their schemes become ethically pertinent. First, when addressing the issue of modern identity as "individual," Nietzsche's primordial unity and Florenskii's cult expose a correlative evaluation of the notion of personal identity; i.e., a self. Florenskii assumes what he considers to be the traditional patristic position that the importance of a perduring self before God is imperative for ethical agency, even if that finite self remains displaced and exceeded by its desire to be transfigured in the image of the infinite God. Second, when addressing the issue of the tragic in human existence, Nietzsche and Florenskii differ with regard to whether or not the tragic should be affirmed as liberative. Florenskii's presentation asserts that the tragic must necessarily be transfigured, not encouraged through intoxicated revelry; only the transfigured life, which has overcome, and is therefore free of any tragic vestige, is liberative. Finally, in proposing some form of rite as a field of unity and resolution for each of the other themes presented, both thinkers differ with regard to whether human existence excludes the possibility of affirming the transcendent. This issue, in essence, involves Florenskii's claim that the givenness of reality constitutes a symbolic encounter with transcendence, which contrasts Nietzsche's appeal to a nature that is closed in immanence.^[44]

In each of the aforementioned respects, it becomes apparent that the ethical bankruptcy of Nietzsche's Dionysianism allows for an inclusion of its most significant insights within Florenskii's Orthodoxy while at the same time being surpassed by it aesthetically. In the end, Florenskii's presentation is more aesthetically appealing due to its incorporation of the ethical givenness of human existence.^[45]

Three arguments within Ivanov's critique of Nietzsche support the superiority of Florenskii's Orthodox paradigm. First, Ivanov points out that Nietzsche would eventually (in the years following Tragedy) emphasize the pure subjectivity of all truth, that "the autonomy of subjective truth, the truth of inner willing, can negate whatever is affirmed as an objectively obligatory truth."^[46] Such a view, however, is far from the anti-religious position Nietzsche is seeking. The only means upon affirming personal identity beyond the mere "I" is faith, a concretely religious dimension of human existence. Participation in cultic rite provides the conditions for experiencing the loss of self. In maintaining that all truth is the result of willing, Nietzsche preserves the trace of the cultic non-self as some form of self (i.e., as the express locus of the will). Such an act of preservation is the manifestation of faith which Nietzsche would later characterize as the product of slave mentality. Florenskii's Orthodoxy accepts the necessity of the cultically transfigured self's perdurance, incorporating such necessity into its mythos as the self henceforth accountable before God. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is left with the inexhaustible task of perspectivism, where the self of faith (which fails to be acknowledged as a presupposition in the Nietzschean Dionysian mythos) must retain its de-centered dissolution in leaping from perspective to perspective within the closure of immanence.

The notion of accountability leads to a second point. Nietzsche's Dionysianism would consequently lead to the (axiological) call for a life beyond good and evil. Ivanov responds that this "coincides with the principle of sanctity and mystical freedom, as Christian ethics expressed it by transferring the moral criterion from the empirical world into the realm of noetic willing."^[47] Christian ethics is here (rightly) understood as quite different from the reified ethics of laws and directives pursued by abstract metaphysicians (á la Kant or Mill). Noetic willing is the product of cultic encounter with transcendence, whereby the self determines its perduring ethical identity by deference to the transcendence which is both prior to reflective reasoning and existentially mediated through cult. Again, Nietzsche's "arbitrary application and interpretation" of "essentially mystical" existential encounters with imposed "anti-religious" categories turns Nietzsche into a "theomachist" who "rejects the Dionysian how in favor of a definite and non-Dionysian what."^[48] Hence, if Nietzsche considers Dionysian dissolution of the self to be a form of the formless, from whence does his call come "for the formulas 'beyond objective truth' and 'beyond good and evil' [which he considers to be] 'in accordance with whatever augments the life of the species'"?^[49]

Ivanov's reference to Nietzsche's infatuation with the human "species" (a term conveying immanent closure, thereby disclosing Nietzsche's privileging of modern scientism and humanism, i.e. the Socratic reason he supposedly abhors) leads to the final argument this essay wants to extract from Ivanov's critique: "Nietzsche has hardly freed the will from the chains of outer duty when he again subordinates it to the supremacy of a certain general norm: the biological imperative." In seeking to retain modernity's metaphysics of immanent closure, Nietzsche fails to obtain the liberation which Dionysian cult contains in its essential potentiality. The transcendent seed within Dionysian rite that comes to fruition in the Orthodox Liturgy must be nurtured, rather than intentionally obscured and hidden due to anti-religious arbitrariness, if the problem of modern individuality is to truly be overcome.^[50] If, as Nietzsche will claim in The Genealogy of Morality, the Dionysian impulse is co-extensive with the ethical existence of the "bird of prey," then the shackles of modern individuality have simply been replaced by those of biological necessity. The passions of biological immanence necessarily reign and the will is left to merely feign itself free.

All three of these Ivanovian critiques can be summarized as such:

Nietzsche makes us quarrel with self-evident truths, not in order to replace them with others that are even more evident to the spiritual gaze but in order to create within us hearths of blind resistance to the powers that oppress us, a resistance that he sees as a factor conducive to the evolution of the human race. This cerebral and calculating quality radically undermines his original intuition and inspired impulse.^[51]

While rightly discovering the seed of liberation in Dionysus, Nietzsche fails to accentuate the role of transcendence that pre-modern rite conveys. In this way, Nietzsche misses the full appropriation of what Dionysian rite could reveal (in leading one to its telos in Orthodox rite) and ignores the fullness of what cosmic cultic identity entails (an ethically perduring identity). In doing so, he fails to establish a convincing preparatory framework in which to make sense of the tragic through the rite of cult.

Additional claims can supplement those derived from Ivanov thus far, thereby continuing the case for Florenskii's scheme. Nietzsche's absorption of personal identity into a primordial unity devoid of selves exacerbates the ethical deficiency of his scheme. The loss of self that is experienced through drunken revelry and unclean festivities is an explicit loss of an ethical self. Nietzsche's ostensible amorality is clearly a call for immorality. He conflates this kind of loss of self into a critique of the notion of self simpliciter. As a critic of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche attacks the notion of the theoretical self by bringing to light the experience of intoxication. In such a state, the theoretically posited "self" (the objectified "I think" of scientific modernity) is not retained but rather replaced by a ready-to-hand participation in immoral ecstasy. Nietzsche's attempt is to exhibit the self as event as opposed to substance.

Florenskii, however, would agree with the Nietzschean critique of the objectified theoretical (i.e., philosophically constructed) self. Yet, he would do so while maintaining the intuition that something perdures-a hypostatic identity which always already discloses ethical responsibility. Florenskii ends "Mysteries and Rites" in an antinomic manner, claiming that once the self (composed of the forces of both the Titanic and Nomos) recognizes its exhaustion in "the Meaning of all meanings" through the cultic activity of rite, it is given at once simultaneous victory and defeat. We arrive at the understanding that the self which we assume to be some kind of substance grounding the identity of one self, my self, is in reality only the shell of something much more complex.

Florenskii's scheme presents a self that conceals more than it reveals and points us toward a more abundant reality. As Ivanov notes, Orthodoxy produces a soul "that has lost itself in order to gain itself outside of the self."^[52] The forces of both the Titanic and Nomos convey the multitudinous and contradictory nature of the self which remains scattered when these impulses are polarized but coalesced in rest when it is unified through the cultic mediation of transcendence. In cult, the human being is seen within the context of a multifaceted engagement of self and transcendence. Here, hypostatic identity is disclosed as a cultic symbol through which transcendence presences-we are the "channels of cult." The self is the image and likeness of God, displaced and exceeded by its desire to be pulled toward its Prototype. Explicit within its description as "image and likeness," as self-before-God, is its ethical accountability, thereby presenting an account of the self that is at once resplendent and scrupulous. The self, as it is disclosed in cult, is an openness before transcendent Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. While Florenskii's scheme affirms a perduring identity that is both beautiful and ethical, Nietzsche's negates any identity (except, possibly, for the will to power which he would develop later), seeing it as an illusion to which can consequently be attributed neither beauty nor goodness.

For both Nietzsche and Florenskii, the tragic pain of human existence cannot be interpreted as a reason for hating that existence. Both are intent on affirming life, not denying it.^[53] With Nietzsche, however, the tragic must not be evaluated negatively. To celebrate that one is paradoxically unable to do anything about the inevitability of one's death and dissolution is, indeed, a strange affirmation of the tragic. Florenskii's scheme allows for a critique of the tragic so as to affirm the greatest potential of life. Such potentiality is made actual in Orthodox cultic activity. Life, as redeemed through Christ in the Resurrection, is a life which the Divine Liturgy proclaims to have overcome the tragic, to which Nietzsche's life of sordid Dionysian festivities pales in comparison. For Florenskii, Orthodoxy is the fabric in which his scheme of cult-tragic-rite is sewn: the tragic element of life, the fear of one's dissolution and death, is transfigured by the claim that Death is "trampled down" by Christ's death. As Florenskii repetitively notes, our funeral dirge is herein transfigured into the song Alleluia. In this way, any affirmation of the Dionysian "life" is nothing short of a vexation on life itself, all under the guise of redemptive freedom.

Nietzsche's standard for evaluating his scheme is its consonance with "nature." If there is an aspect of truth or goodness in Nietzsche's Dionysianism, it must be measured against this standard.^[54] As Ivanov has already been show to affirm, Nietzsche's definition of nature is ironically informed by the very scientific post-Enlightenment mentality that he ridicules. It is a nature defined solely by its immanence; its totality is open to the investigation of human beings. Nietzsche's scheme is closed: a rending of the "natural" order and consequent restructuring of those same pieces into a whole again, modeled after Dionysus himself. For Nietzsche, we can only tear apart what is given in nature and reconstruct it within the limits of that nature. In this way, any symbol feigned to be of transcendence is an imaginary construct, solely put together with the input supplied in immanence.

Such an account fails to support one of Nietzsche's most cherished assumptions: that nature is incapable of providing any meaning without a human agent to impose such meaning. Hence, nature presents itself as neither a purely immanent phenomenon nor an immanent-transcendent amalgam (symbol). Any account of nature will always be informed by and formulated within some paradigmatic mythos and it is rite that establishes this mythos in human performance. Again, even if (one might assert, especially if) Nietzsche's positivistic paradigm is granted, the question arises: why choose Nietzsche's scheme over Florenskii's? Why perform a rite that maintains a less ethical, and therefore less comprehensive, account of human reality? Nietzsche's scheme emphasizes the value of Dionysian rite in affirming a pagan paradigm of (im)morality whereby the tragic is affirmed. Florenskii values Orthodox liturgical rite as a counter-paradigm to such disorder where life is ethically evaluated in its transfigured, i.e. redeemed, mode of agape. Instead of merely rending and reconstructing the immanent order, Florenskii proclaims the Orthodox kerygma which rends the immanent order (as modernity understands it) so as to infuse it with transcendence-an account of what it was intended to be, not by some apparent and cold necessity is. The Incarnation of Christ reveals nature to be symbolic-phenomenality henceforth points us toward He who brings forth all phenomenality while consubstantially uniting Himself to it through kenosis. As is apparent in each scheme, both Nietzsche and Florenskii would agree that existence and nature are only eternally justified in their aesthetic givenness.^[55] But while Nietzsche seeks to separate beauty from truth and goodness, Florenskii assumes all three to be co-extensive and capable of drawing us toward Him in Whom all three are unified, i.e. toward "the Absolute point of religious life, the absolute concreteness of cult"-God as revealed in Christ Jesus.

Notes:

[1] "Aesthetic" will assume a slightly idiosyncratic use in this essay, denoting that non-inductive mode of human appropriation that chooses before reflectively choosing. The assumption is that humans seemingly determine the content of truth, goodness, and beauty in a way akin to their apodictic experience of taste (see Hume's "On the Standard of Taste," Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 242, for just such an example of taste as a criterion for meta-philosophical reflection). Aesthetics is here given an epistemological hue, but in a way that characterizes Heideggerian fundamental ontology or Levinasian original ethics as somehow epistemic (to which both would dissent). Such an idiosyncratic usage entails that Nietzsche's emphasis on the autonomy of subjective truth ("of inner willing") is nothing more than a co-opted form of the first principle of faith that founds human religious existence.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Raymond Geuss & Ronald Speirs, Eds.; Ronald Speirs, Trans., (Cambridge University Press, 1999). I have replaced any use of "the Dionysiac" with "the Dionysian."

[3] Pavel Florenskii, "Mysteries and Rites," Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 30 (1986). Originally found in Theological Studies (Bogoslovskije Trudy), Vol. XVII, pp. 135-142; Moscow Patriarchy, 1977.

[4] To avoid any equivocations between "tragedy' as the human experience characterized by or involving calamity, suffering, or death from "tragedy" as descriptive of those Greek dramatic compositions characterized by their expression of the human experience, I will refer to tragedy in the former sense as "the tragic" and tragedy in the latter sense as "Greek tragedy" or "Attic tragedy."

[5] The use of "scheme" will be limited throughout this essay to the two thinkers' arrangement of the four common components aforementioned.

[6] Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal addresses every reference Florenskii makes to Nietzsche in her article "Florenskii's Russifications of Nietzsche," Pavel Florenskij - Tradition und Moderne. Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposium an der Universität Potsdam, 5. - 9. April 2000, Eds. Franz, Hegemeister, Haney (Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Bern; Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Wien: Lang, 2001), 247-258. Rosenthal sees Nietzsche's influence on Florenskii as fundamental to Florenskii's work: she goes so far as to label him to be a "Nietzschean Christian" (see her New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism, Penn State University Press, 2002, 51-67). In addition, Robert Bird points out that upon Ivanov's return to Russia in 1913, he lived in Moscow where he associated with the likes of Scriabin, Bulgakov, and Florenskii. Ivanov's established familiarity with Nietzsche by this point was no doubt of influence on Florenskii's appropriation of Nietzsche. See Viacheslav Ivanov, Selected Essays, Trans. Bird, Ed. and Intro. Wachtel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), x, xii-xiii.

[7] Glatzer sees Ivanov's call for a new myth (which would spawn a new cult, which in turn a new culture, which in turn a new society) as opposite Florenskii, who supposedly "believed that myth is already a secularization" antagonistic to the existential encounter with Orthodoxy as a non-abstract way of life ("Russifications," 248). Glatzer unfortunately equivocates her use of myth here, for Florenskii already recognized the bedrock of myth in his later attention to cult. "Myth" is not a mere abstract concept in Ivanov which Florenskii consequently considers to be lacking in concrete existence. Myth is the instantiation of symbol in both thinkers, who likewise both consider symbol in its concreteness (i.e., in its living givenness). If Florenskii considered the use of the rubric "myth" to be an instantiation of abstract metaphysics opposed to his lifelong project, then why would he purposively employ an apparently equally abstract category, i.e. "cult," so comfortably?

[8] Such a trajectory is influenced by the temperament of David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 2003), 92 - 125. "It is taste, rather than historical evidence, that must dictate whether one elects to see Christ as a creator of values or as an impotent decadent...The most potent reply a Christian can make to Nietzsche's critique is to accuse him of a defect in sensibility-of bad taste" (124-125). I am indebted to Hart's, as well as Ivanov's and John Milbank's critiques of Nietzsche, in that each, like Florenskii, respect (even accept) significant claims fundamental to Nietzsche's project, while maintaining their Christianity in light of Nietzsche's infantile and uninformed tirade against it.

[9] I follow David Lewis in the use of 'perdurance' here: "Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts, or stages, at different times, though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time..." See his "Counterparts or Double Lives" in Metaphysics: An Anthology, Ed. by J. Kim and E. Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 160-161, 168; itself taken from chapter four of his book On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). I use the notion in this essay so as to agree that a new term needs to be utilized which recognizes the complexity of the endurance of a self. However, the framework in which Lewis uses the word grossly misunderstands the deeper ontological problems of treating human beings as merely a being similar in kind to all other beings: "of ordinary things such as people or puddles..." (160). In this, Lewis' overall metaphysical project falls under Heidegger's justified critique. Hence, my use of 'perdurance' is idiosyncratic to say the least; on the one hand is confirms the attempt at delineating the complexities of a persisting self within time-on the other hand, it does not recognize the obsolete nature of its ontological framework.

[10] Nietzsche, Tragedy, 19.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 21.

[13] See especially §25.

[14] Nietzsche sees the militaristic culture of the Roman imperium, concerned purely with the imposition of discipline and form, as the Apollonian extreme inadequately checked by the Dionysian. Similarly, when allowing the Dionysian to flourish beyond Apollonian control, the "indescribably apathy" of Indian Buddhism results, convinced of the ultimate futility of individual existence and dependent on "those rare, ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual" (Ibid., 98-99).

[15] Ibid., 86.

[16] Ibid., 18.

[17] For a time...

[18] Ibid., 42.

[19] In addition, Nietzsche finds this exhilaration in one's death and dissolution to be anamnetic: it reveals to one not only his original primordial state, but the awareness that he has always metaphysically been in that state.

[20] In Attic tragedy, one finds "the enormous power...to stimulate, purify, and discharge the entire life of a people; [its] supreme value [is discovered when] we experience it as the essence of all prophylactic healing energies, as a mediator between the strongest and inherently most fateful qualities of humanity" (ibid., 99). And in the dithyramb, "something that [one] has never felt before urgently demands to be expressed: the destruction of the veil of Maya, one-ness as the genius of humankind, indeed of nature itself" (Ibid., 21).

[21] Ibid., 71.

[22] Florenskii, "Mysteries," 348.

[23] Ibid., 343. Florenskii's direct reference to a "Dionysian principle" was what initially led me to investigate the similarities between Nietzsche and Florenskii, i.e. to construct this paper. He calls to mind here the Greek myths concerning the conflict between the Titans and Olympians, wherein the new Olympian gods usurp the power of the Titans. As the Romantics were apt to remind us, certain Titans, such as Prometheus, continued to defy their authority and eventually forced a compromise (see §§ 3, 4, 9 of Tragedy for Nietzsche's rendition).

[24] Nietzsche, Tragedy, 24.

[25] Ibid., 27. It is also worth noting that in the Foreword to Tragedy Nietzsche considers himself to be an "unbound Prometheus" revolting against the Olympian Apollo.

[26] Florenskii, "Mysteries," 346.

[27] "The truth of the titanic is in power, in the primordial and insuperable truth of the Earth, of being itself, of givenness. All that comes with it must accept it, for if it rejects power, it will in turn be rejected by power" (Ibid., 347).

[28] Ibid., 344-345, 347-348.

[29] ??s?a/essence ó ?p?stas??/person; Image (of God) ó Likeness (of God); Givenness of Knowledge ó Provenness of Knowledge; Truth of Being ó Truth of Meaning

[30] E.g., "God's Person fully expresses His Essence, and His Essence is fully expressed in His Person" (Ibid., 348).

[31] Ibid., 349.

[32] Ibid., 349.

[33] Florenskii, "Mysteries," 337.

[34] "The purpose of cult is precisely to transform natural weeping, natural shouts of joy, natural exultation, natural pity and lamentation, into a sacred song, a sacred word, a sacred gesture. Not to forbid natural movements, not to restrain them, not to cut back on the wealth of inner life, but, on the contrary, to affirm this wealth in its fullness, to consolidate it, to nurture it. In cult, the accidental is elevated to the proper, the subjective is illumined into objectivity. Cult makes the naturally given into the ideal." (Ibid., 339)

[35] Ibid., 337.

[36] Ibid., 338.

[37] Again, I am indebted to the argument made by David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite.

[38] Florenskii, "Mysteries," 343.

[39] Paraphrased from Pavel Florenskii's "Onomatodoxy as a Philosophical Premise" in Materialy k sporu o pochitanii Imeni Bozhiya, Moscow, 1913; as presented in Victor Bychkov, The Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florenskii, Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, Trans. Robert Slesinski, Preface (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993), 70.

[40] Nietzsche, Tragedy, 18.

[41] Florenskii, "Mysteries," 345-6.

[42] Bird, Editor's Introduction, Ivanov's Selected Essays, xiii. "Orthodoxy," in this claim, takes into account that Ivanov "converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926, which he viewed as an extension rather than a rejection of Russian Orthodoxy" (xi).

[43] Ivanov, "Nietzsche and Dionysus," Selected Essays, 187.

[44] "Immanence" is here used as a catch-all term characterizing the ontological presuppositions of the vast majority of Western philosophical thinking after the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution; in a word, after the onset of modernity. An ontology of "immanent closure" entails that science, morality, and reality in general may be separated from (what pre-modern thinking understood as) the "transcendent," and understood solely as unavoidable practices for finite persons. Human existence is thus "closed off" from any access to the transcendent. Immanence implies that the coherence of any discourse is only found in our human character as knowers and agents; a character that, despite recognizing its finitude, nevertheless determines the very structure of existence: "The conditions for the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience" (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A158/B197).

[45] For additional argumentation concerning the religious dimension of rite as an extension of ethical value, see A. S. Cua, "The Ethical and the Religious Dimensions of Li (Rites)," Review of Metaphysics 55 (March 2002): 471-519, particularly section III.

[46] Ivanov, "Nietzsche and Dionysus," 183.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid.

[50] To accomplish this move in his argument, Ivanov employs a reading that separates the specific cultic expression of immoral revelry that Nietzsche ties to Dionysianism from the essential and ancient understanding of ek-stasis qua union. It is akin to a Heideggerian reading where the essence is pursued in spite of its particular instantiation.

[51] Ibid., 184.

[52] Ibid.

[53] The later Nietzsche, of course, brings these sorts of categories to light. In doing so, he always constructs a Christianity which is more Manichaean than Orthodox in its "denying life" through a judicial, non-ontological, framework.

[54] Much of the appeal in Nietzsche's project is in its drab affirmation of human immorality (passions) as a means of attaining an existence beyond good and evil.

[55] Nietzsche, Tragedy, 33.