The Madness of Meaning

Poe, Nietzsche, Christ, and Paul on a Halloween Night

By Brenton L. Delp

The house is almost unchanged. A coat hangs behind the door. A book lies open beside a chair. There are appointments on a calendar that no longer concerns the person who made them. The objects have outlived the world in which they belonged together. Someone else will eventually close the book.

Halloween usually offers a more agreeable arrangement. The corpse rises. The skeleton dances. The ghost returns with something to say. However malicious its intentions, a ghost would concede the point about which grief is most desperate: somebody has survived. A haunted house would be a considerable improvement on a house in which the dead are simply absent.

The empty chair promises nothing.

We should state the difficulty carefully, because an easy mistake can conceal its full cruelty. Death does not prove that a life was meaningless. A kindness need not last forever to have been kind; a love need not survive the destruction of its lovers to have been real. Nothing about mortality logically cancels what happened. But this defense of finite value leaves another possibility untouched: something can matter beyond replacement and nevertheless be destroyed beyond recovery. The world might contain real value without containing any power committed to its preservation.

That possibility is more disturbing than the familiar declaration that nothing matters. If nothing mattered, there would be little to lose. The horror is that someone mattered, suffered, wanted to live, and may now be gone without remainder. Existence continues. Its continuation supplies no evidence that the loss has been answered.

Here the question of meaning becomes a question of redemption. An explanation could tell us why the person died. A judgment could establish that the death was unjust. A memory could preserve something of the life among those who remain. Each might be necessary. None, by itself, returns anything to the person who has been lost. The distinction is merciless: the survivors can make something of a death while the dead receive nothing.

Edgar Allan Poe gives this distinction rooms to inhabit. His most frightening effects begin when an interpretation arrives and proves incapable of helping anyone. Prince Prospero, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” has assembled a civilization small enough to fit behind a locked gate:

“The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’”1

Security enters the inventory beside the wine. The guests have bought the conditions under which their own invulnerability can appear plausible. Their exclusion of the dying is also an exclusion of the thought that they belong to the same world. When the clock interrupts the music, they pause; when the music resumes, they mistake their recovered composure for recovered safety.

The intruder finally gives them something to confront. They pursue a figure, seize a costume, and discover no tangible body beneath it. There is nobody to expose, punish, or remove. Their mistake has become intelligible just as every practical consequence of understanding disappears:

“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”1
We can extract a moral about vanity or denial. The dead guests cannot benefit from our improved interpretation. Poe has allowed us to understand the ending without permitting understanding to alter it. The reader possesses a finished story; the people inside it possess nothing.

“The Raven” moves the catastrophe into a room where someone is still alive to demand an answer. Lenore has died. The speaker wants to know whether death has ended their relation absolutely:

“‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.’
Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”2

He asks whether he will hold her. An account of love’s continuing influence would answer a question he has not asked. His demand is precise enough to expose how much consolation depends on changing the subject.

The raven, however, has no demonstrated knowledge of the dead. The speaker has already offered a natural explanation for its vocabulary: a word learned from an unhappy master. He understands the possible mechanism and nevertheless organizes his questions around it. A repetition becomes an oracle because he makes it answer the question that matters most. Poe shows a consciousness manufacturing an absolute verdict from a voice inadequate to pronounce one.

This is a darker achievement than the exposure of superstition. The verdict being manufactured is hopelessness. The need for certainty can make denial as intoxicating as promise: at least the torture of waiting would end if the answer were finally no. Yet the speaker’s participation in his torment does not make Lenore’s death an error in his thinking. He could dismiss the bird, correct the inference, and remain bereaved. Insight into the production of a verdict leaves the loss itself intact.

Poe’s room is therefore more difficult to leave than a room full of irrational beliefs. We can explain the haunting without restoring the person whose absence made it possible.
Nietzsche enters this territory by asking whether the demand for an ultimate answer has already falsified the terms on which life is judged. His challenge begins before modern unbelief. In The Birth of Tragedy, Silenus tells King Midas:
“The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.”3

Nietzsche presents this as the terrible wisdom with which Greek culture had to contend. Tragic art answers the threat of paralysis by giving horror a form through which life can still be borne. The early argument includes a metaphysical consolation that Nietzsche later subjects to criticism. Even at its beginning, however, the problem is severe: greater knowledge does not necessarily produce a more livable world. We might understand existence more adequately and find it harder to endure. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche makes the danger explicit:

“Something could be true even if it is harmful and dangerous to the highest degree. It could even be part of the fundamental character of existence that people with complete knowledge get destroyed.”4

Truth has signed no agreement to preserve us. The world’s intelligibility, where we achieve it, offers no guarantee of its goodness. A body may be explicable in every detail of its dissolution while the person who loved that body remains inconsolable. Knowledge could complete the explanation and leave the protest exactly where it was.

The madman in The Gay Science understands the death of God as the collapse of a horizon within which truth, goodness, and the ultimate fate of persons had been held together. He feels the loss as a change in the world’s atmosphere:
“Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again?”5

His audience already disbelieves. Its laughter belongs to people who suppose that removing a belief has finished the work of understanding its disappearance. The madman recognizes a consequence that may arrive much later: human beings can continue making absolute demands on a world they no longer believe is ordered to fulfill them.
But Nietzsche also turns against the conclusion that everything must therefore be worthless. In his notes on European nihilism, he writes:

“One interpretation has collapsed, but because it was considered the interpretation, it appears as though there is no sense in existence whatsoever, as though everything is in vain.”6

The nihilist may retain the old measure after abandoning the God who guaranteed it. Life must be eternally justified; otherwise it counts as nothing. Under that judgment, unbelief remains governed by the demand it imagines itself to have overcome. Nietzsche asks whether earthly life has been condemned for failing a test whose authority should itself be questioned.

That objection prevents grief from becoming a proof of universal meaninglessness. It does not dissolve every protest against destruction. The demand that a murdered person should have been allowed to live need not originate in a doctrine of immortality. One can recognize the good of a finite life and therefore recognize its violent interruption as a wrong. To discover the history of a demand is not yet to settle whether it deserves an answer. Nietzsche puts the court of ultimate justification on trial; the injured person remains outside, waiting.

Into this dispute comes the crucified Christ. He arrives at the point where an intelligible account of suffering would be least capable of helping the sufferer. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus cries:
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”7

The words address God in the act of protesting abandonment. They are drawn from Psalm 22, which eventually moves into praise; they cannot simply be appropriated as Jesus’s confession of atheism. Yet the psalm’s ending does not take him down from the cross. Mark gives us a dying man whose prayer is followed by death. Reading the lament only as a coded assurance of victory can become a way of refusing to hear what is actually being cried.

The crucifixion forces a difficulty into Christian meaning itself. If God is identified with this abandoned figure, then divine presence can no longer be recognized simply by successful rescue, visible power, or protection from catastrophe. What looks like the absence of God becomes the place where God is proclaimed. The reversal is immense. Its danger is equally immense: an interpretation can become capable of absorbing any defeat as confirmation of a victory no one can yet see.

There is an ethical danger as well. Once a catastrophe becomes necessary to a saving design, the account that promises to overcome suffering may begin to justify its occurrence. The victim risks becoming indispensable material for somebody else’s revelation. We must distinguish the vindication of a sufferer from the vindication of what was done to the sufferer. A redemption that required us finally to agree that the cruelty was good would have made peace with the wrong it claimed to overcome.

The cross makes that distinction unavoidable. To say that God shares abandonment gives abandonment a witness of extraordinary significance. It does not yet establish that the abandoned will be delivered. Someone may be fully accompanied into death and still die. Solidarity reaches the sufferer; whether it overcomes the sufferer’s destruction remains another question.

Luke’s Gospel places a promise beside the execution. A condemned man asks to be remembered, and Jesus replies:
“Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.”8

The decisive words are personal: thou and with me. The promise concerns the man who is dying. He is offered a future in which he will be present, rather than merely a place in someone else’s memory. Poe’s speaker asks about reunion in Aidenn; Luke’s condemned man hears that paradise awaits. The need connecting these scenes is plain. Whether the promise answers that need in reality cannot be decided by the intensity of either scene.

Paul takes responsibility for the scandal. He makes the crucifixion central to the proclamation:
“But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”9

An executed man is announced as the disclosure of divine power. The judgment that appeared to dispose of him is itself declared to have been judged. Paul’s foolishness is therefore a reversal of recognizable expectations about power, wisdom, and divine favor. It is no general permission to treat an assertion as true because it is offensive to reason. The difficulty of believing a claim supplies no evidence for it.

His argument about resurrection makes the claim answerable to something beyond its spiritual usefulness. He states the consequence if the event proclaimed has not occurred:

“And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”10
“Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.”10

These sentences prevent the promise from retreating without cost into metaphor. If the dead remain dead, the effect of Christian faith on the living cannot by itself fulfill what has been proclaimed about them. Paul stakes his message on a divine action; he also appeals to reported appearances of the risen Christ. His willingness to state what would follow if the proclamation were false clarifies the claim without establishing its truth.

We should preserve the severity of that distinction. A belief may change a civilization, sustain a community, reconcile enemies, or enable someone to endure agony. Those effects concern what belief accomplishes among the living. Resurrection concerns what God is claimed to accomplish for the dead. Moving from one to the other requires more than admiration for Christianity’s historical power.

Paul calls death an enemy. He announces its destruction as something still to be accomplished:
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”10

The designation matters. Death is not simply congratulated for making life poignant or accepted as a convenient passage into a better condition. It is something that must be overcome. Within Paul’s argument, the promise of redemption preserves the protest against the grave rather than explaining why the grave should cease to trouble us.

Nor would mere persistence fulfill the promise. Paul distinguishes the body sown in corruption from the body raised in incorruption, the natural body from the spiritual body. His language concerns transformed embodiment; it cannot be reduced to a dead person surviving as an idea in someone else’s mind:

“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”10
The transformation is as essential as the continuation. An eternity of what has already broken us would multiply the difficulty. To promise redemption is to promise that existence will be changed sufficiently for its continuation to be deliverance.

But Paul places the general defeat of death in a future that the present has not yet reached. Christ is proclaimed as the firstfruits; the dead still await the consummation. Christianity therefore inhabits a dangerous interval between an announced victory and a world in which the enemy continues to prevail. Its triumphant question can be spoken beside an occupied grave:

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”10

The mourner could point. Faith answers that the verdict is not final. That answer may sustain fidelity through the delay; it can also make the delay indefinitely absorbable. The theological account explains why the promise need not already be fulfilled. Whether it will be fulfilled remains the weight the promise has to carry.

Nietzsche’s suspicion settles precisely on the need to make a devastating death mean something. In The Anti-Christ, he writes:

“Everything really needed to be necessary, sensible, rational, supremely rational here; a disciple’s love is not left to chance.”11

Someone has been loved and followed. His execution threatens the world that formed around him. Under Nietzsche’s interpretation, devotion cannot accept that this could be the ending, so it makes the ending into the means of fulfillment. The catastrophe becomes indispensable. Death itself is recruited into the production of a meaning that its occurrence appeared to destroy.

Nietzsche’s reconstruction of Jesus and Paul is a polemical interpretation, not demonstrated access to their motives. But the psychological possibility he exposes is formidable. We know how readily love can become a demand that reality possess a structure adequate to its own intensity. This cannot have been all there was can express fidelity to the dead. It can also become the premise from which an entire invisible world is deduced.

The need does not prove the promised world false. Hunger does not show that food is imaginary. Yet hunger can produce a mirage, and the strength of the hunger cannot tell us whether we are looking at one. A genealogy of consolation leaves the claim’s truth to be assessed; consolation’s necessity cannot settle that assessment in its own favor.

The two positions do not, however, acquire equal evidential standing merely because both answer an existential need. The ordinary finality of death is continually encountered; resurrection requires a further claim about what can overcome it. Equally, the destruction we encounter does not establish a comprehensive verdict that nothing has ever mattered. We can acknowledge the force of the evidence without pretending it answers every question we bring to the grave.

Poe makes the difficulty still worse. In “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” he grants, within the fiction, the return of a voice from the condition that should have silenced it. A mesmeric experiment arrests the passage into death, and the patient declares:

“Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.”12

The first person remains, imprisoned in the fact that should make speaking impossible. Continuation has delivered no restored world. Months later, Valdemar begs:

“For God’s sake!—quick!—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken me!—quick!—I say to you that I am dead!”12
When the experiment ends, what remains is “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence.”12 The return of the voice has provided neither release nor salvation. Poe permits the impossible and gives us another reason to be afraid.

The distinction bears directly on the hope with which we began. A ghost would establish survival within its story. It would not establish that survival was good. The terror of extinction cannot, by itself, make every alternative desirable. Even the defeat of final silence would leave us asking what kind of life had been returned, and to what.
Nietzsche explores an equally dreadful possibility in his notes on eternal recurrence. He imagines an existence that offers no final release:

“Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without sense or aim, but inevitably returning, without a finale in nothingness: ‘the eternal return.’”13

These are exploratory notes, and recurrence also becomes, in Nietzsche’s published work, a test of one’s capacity to affirm life. We need not settle its status as a cosmological claim to register its existential demand. Imagine that the life cannot be edited, compensated elsewhere, or finally left behind. Could one will its return?

The question exposes how much ordinary acceptance depends on the expectation that what hurts will eventually be over. It also exposes a limit in the passage from personal affirmation to a justification of existence. Someone may come to will the return of a life that includes their own suffering. That achievement does not authorize them to consent on behalf of another person to the return of that person’s torture. An affirmative relation to one’s own fate cannot automatically become an acquittal of everything that happens.

A life beyond resentment might be an extraordinary achievement. The pressure falls on what we ask that achievement to accomplish. It concerns a living person’s relation to existence; restitution to those existence has destroyed remains another matter. Neither the believer’s confidence nor the philosopher’s courage can be transferred to the dead as a benefit they receive.

The possibility of absurdity survives here in a more exact form. It need not mean that love is unreal, duty a fraud, or every act of care worthless. It can mean that there is no final correspondence between the claims awakened within a life and the world in which that life must end. We can recognize what ought to have happened without possessing any reason to believe it will ever happen. The demand remains intelligible; fulfillment remains absent.

That possibility cannot be refuted by observing that human beings can live with it. Endurance establishes that someone has endured. It does not establish that the conditions endured were justified.

“The Conqueror Worm” gives this predicament an audience in heaven. Angels watch the human drama and weep as its performers become food. The ending is announced with all the authority of a completed revelation:

“Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”14

The horror is that heaven is present. The suffering has been seen, recognized, and mourned. Witness does not become rescue. The poem separates what religious hope wants joined: perfect recognition and effective deliverance. A universe with weeping angels could remain a universe in which the worm wins.

Yet Poe has given the disaster a form, and form offers the reader a satisfaction unavailable to its victims. The poem ends with a terrible completeness. Its rhythm holds together a world whose people have been torn apart. Even an art that refuses consolation can console at this second level: we possess an achieved expression of what defeats us. That achievement is real. It must not be confused with a victory over the thing expressed.

The same danger belongs to an essay such as this one. To arrange death, abandonment, resurrection, and nihilism into an argument is already to produce a kind of order. The order can sharpen our understanding. It cannot serve as evidence that the suffering ordered by the argument has thereby been redeemed. A beautifully finished account can leave every person it discusses exactly where it found them.

The madness of meaning begins when the demand for an answer tries to cross that distance by force. Suffering must belong to a plan. The catastrophe must become necessary. The life must be affirmed in its entirety. Or the opposite decree is issued: nothing can matter because no final answer has arrived. Each verdict promises relief from an unresolved relation between what we can recognize and what we can recover.

We may have to remain in that relation. The dying person’s need does not wait for our conclusions about immortality. We can stay, bring water, answer a frightened voice, refuse abandonment where refusal is still possible. Those acts matter to the person who receives them. Their value gives us no warrant to describe the person’s eventual destruction as acceptable. Obligation may continue after the promise of rescue has become uncertain; it does not acquire the power to perform the rescue by continuing.

Paul’s promise reaches further. That is its grandeur and its exposure. It claims that the dead themselves will be answered, and therefore makes a claim that the living cannot fulfill on its behalf. Poe’s extinguished lights leave that promise under a pressure no interpretation can remove. Nietzsche asks whether we can live without demanding that existence be acquitted. The question returns from the person we have lost: even if we can, what has that done for them?

By morning, the Halloween ghosts have been taken down. Someone puts the skeleton in a box. The house resumes its ordinary appearance, which was always the more terrible one. The coat is still behind the door. The book is closed now. Another day has passed in which the world has found no need to bring its owner back.

We are still capable of wanting an answer. We have not established that anything is listening.

Notes

Biblical quotations follow the King James Version; Poe quotations follow the linked texts. Spacing and quotation marks are regularized, and verse line breaks are retained. Nietzsche quotations retain the translations cited in the original essay, with references by work and section. “Madness” is a literary and philosophical term here, rather than a clinical designation.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”, Broadway Journal, July 19, 1845. The inventory of pleasures and the closing sentence are quoted.

2. Poe, “The Raven”, Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, September 25, 1849, stanzas 11 and 16. The learned-vocabulary explanation precedes the question about reunion in “Aidenn,” or Paradise.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §3, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 1999). For tragic knowledge and art, see §7; for Nietzsche’s later criticism of metaphysical consolation, see the 1886 “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §7. Silenus’s verdict is distinguished from Nietzsche’s response to it.

4. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §39, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Compare §343 on the horizon opened for free spirits by the death of God.

6. Nietzsche, “European Nihilism,” notebook N VII 3, June 10, 1887, 5[71], paragraph 4, translated by Duncan Large in The Nietzsche Reader, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Blackwell, 2006). This is a posthumous notebook entry, distinguished from Nietzsche’s published books.

7. Mark 15:33–39, especially v. 34; compare Psalm 22, especially vv. 1–2 and 22–31. The discussion interprets the narrative rather than reconstructing Jesus’s private psychological state.

8. Luke 23:39–43, especially v. 43.

9. 1 Corinthians 1:18–25, especially v. 23.

10. 1 Corinthians 15: vv. 3–8 on proclamation and appearances; vv. 12–19 on the consequences if Christ is not raised; vv. 20–26 on firstfruits and death’s defeat; vv. 35–55 on transformed embodiment.

11. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, §40, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005); compare §§41–43. Nietzsche’s account of Jesus and Paul is treated as a polemical interpretation.

12. Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (1850), pp. 121–130. This reprint retains “putrescence”; another textual state reads “putridity.”

13. Nietzsche, “European Nihilism,” 5[71], paragraph 6, in The Nietzsche Reader; compare paragraphs 7–8 on affirmation and The Gay Science, §341. The objection concerning consent to another person’s suffering is the essay’s argument, rather than Nietzsche’s.

14. Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2 (1850), pp. 31–32. The account of aesthetic form as consolation is the essay’s interpretation.