Apollonianism refers back to the logical side of the human spirit. It is contrasted with Dionysianism, which is raucous emotionalism. These concepts were originally related to literary critique, but what can they teach us about our faith?
What Is Apollonianism?
You could have entered this text considering the topic is the famous heresy Appolinarianism. You can learn more about that within the Christianity.com article “What Is Apollinarianism and Why Is It Still a Problem Today?”
Apollonianism is slightly different. It refers to logi and takes its name from Apollo, the Greek God of logic and reason. Apollonian traits represent the logical, self-disciplined, orderly traits within the hero of ancient Greek tragedies.
Apollonianism as a way of analyzing stories comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, the daddy of nihilism. Before he declared that “God is dead and now we have killed him,” he was an achieved art critic who created the categories of Apollonian and Dionysian to represent the struggle between order and chaos, which in light of the enlightenment’s hyper-rationality, meant that emotion and logic were also at odds. The Dionysian impulse was the will for hedonistic pleasure. The names are derived from the Greek God of the son, Apollo, and the Greek God of wine and parties, Dionysius.
What Is Apollonianism’s Counterpart?
Apollonianism’s complement and opposite is referred to as Dionysianism, which represents the emotional, passionate, and chaotic. Nietzsche desired a return to Dionysian hedonism and to be let loose from the Apollonian impulses of the hyper-rational enlightenment.
These ideas were later incorporated into theories of personality, corresponding to the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator. Apollonian corresponds to the considering types, and Dionysian to the sensation types. This is sensible since the originator of the personality theory, Carl Jung, was an avid reader of Nietzsche.
How Did Apollonianism Come To Be Popular?
Around the turn of the century (1890-1910), two major streams ran through the culture of Europe. One was the Dionysian appeal of Pagan Spirituality, which Nietzsche saw and responded to in his later works on culture. The other was the logical rigor that the Enlightenment dropped at continental philosophy. The Enlightenment was very systematic and structured and desired all the things to be categorized right into a box. Carl Linaeus is an incredible example: he developed the sphere of taxonomy to categorize the natural world. He’s the explanation humans are called Homo sapiens.
Nietzsche was a Dionysian, who desired everyone to return to a chaotic and random view of the world. He desired a world where the chaos and subjectivity of life are on the forefront. His quote at the top of Thus Spoke Zarathustra echoes to this present day. “A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one in all its first essentials is doubtless the enjoyment to be found even in destruction.” We can see the resurgence in Dionysian philosophy through critical theory, whose primary goal is to assist us see the world because it is of their view. Apart from our lenses of bias and objective truth. Therefore, it lends itself to the destruction of previously held worldviews.
This is the negative side of the Dionysian. But Jesus gives us a helpful model for making a redemptive shift: to healthily incorporate our emotions into our faith.
How Did Jesus Practice Apollonianism and Dionysianism?
Jesus represents the proper balance of Apollonian and Dionysian traits. Jesus was unafraid of showing his emotions, but additionally created order out of chaos greater than anyone else, by making the world around us out of nothing. Jesus reasoned with religious leaders, but additionally helped those that were facing emotional problems. Both of those together represent the Apollonian and Dionysian categories perfectly, and Jesus embodies each in the easiest way possible.
An ideal example of that is when Jesus was at his lowest moment, on the cross. He was concurrently experiencing the best suffering. His emotions are raw and on full display. Yet his mind and heart joined perfectly together to make one in all his final statements straight out of the Psalms. “My God, My God, why have you ever forsaken me,” is a quote from Psalm 22:1. Jesus’ reason and emotions were so intertwined in God’s word that even at his lowest point only scripture got here out of him. Jesus had a human mind and thought as we did. His spirit enables us to perfect our minds. As Christians, we should always strive to know and feel the Bible well so it comes out of us in times of difficulty.
How Did Apollonianism Influence the Early Church?
4 Maccabees focuses on following God with reason over emotion. Written across the time Paul wrote his Epistles, 4 Maccabees’ anonymous creator sets forth the instance of martyrs as people whose reason dominates over their emotion. The creator views emotions as the essential desire for pleasure and freedom from pain. These would then be the Dionysian impulses as outlined by Nietzsche. The creator then goes on to offer quite a few examples from the intertestamental period of how people’s reason prevailed over their natural impulses. People were willing to die for his or her beliefs because they held them to be true. This book proved to be influential within the Christian ideas of martyrdom that were so prevalent within the early Church.
This passage, about what happened when Seleucids executed the priest Eleazar by fire in the times of the Maccabeean revolt.
“When he was now burned to his very bones and about to run out, [Eleazar]he lifted up his eyes to God and said, ‘You know, O God, that though I might need saved myself, I’m dying in burning torments for the sake of the law. Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs.’
After he said this, the holy man died nobly in his tortures; even within the tortures of death he resisted, by virtue of reason, for the sake of the law. Admittedly, then, devout reason is sovereign over the emotions. For if the emotions had prevailed over reason, we’d have testified to their domination. But now that reason has conquered the emotions, we properly attribute to it the facility to control. It is true for us to acknowledge the dominance of reason when it masters even external agonies. It could be ridiculous to disclaim it. I even have proved not only that reason has mastered agonies, but additionally that it masters pleasures and in no respect yields to them.”
There are some striking similarities to Jesus’ sacrifice, which shows that the ideas of substitutionary atonement were present in Judaism around Jesus’ time. The purpose of the passage is to point out that reason can prevail over emotions if the believer’s convictions are strong enough.
Early Christians preserved 4 Maccabees for instance of hope within the face of martyrdom. Polycarp, an early Christian martyr, was willing to die for his faith because he, just like the subject above, believed in what he died for. However, emotions and reason are a each/and, not an either/or. Both should be integrated into our faith for a strong experiential understanding of who God is.
How Can We Use Apollonianism and Dionysianism within the Church?
Peter Leithart offers a great reminder that reason alone isn’t enough to form a strong theology. A real picture of God must also incorporate his emotions and reason. God demonstrates emotions and passions because he loves his creation a lot. This makes him concurrently Apollonian and Dionysian.
The church exists as a spectrum of Apollonian and Dionysian denominations. We might say that Pentecostals are the more “Dionysian believers” and Reformed Christians represent the more “Apollonian believers.”
Reformed theology is predicated upon a series of logical propositions derived from scripture, appealing to those with a more rational bent.
Pentecostal and charismatic Churches focus more on the guts and the gut than other denominations. They represent Christianity’s “Dionysian” impulse—highly expressive worship.
Some congregations can mix the 2 and sometimes find success after they do. Tim Keller’s church, for instance, was founded on each doctrinal distinctives and musical excellence, showing how God can use Apollonian and Dionysian impulses effectively. The Eucharismatic model, which Andrew Wilson discusses in his book Spirit and Sacrament, also does this well: it combines the Anglican sacraments’ mental reverence with charismatic passion. Emotion and reason usually are not polarized extremes but two things to be embraced.
As sinful humans, we’re at all times drawn toward the intense ends, however the true way of Jesus should put us on neither end but focused on him with all our minds and our whole hearts (Mark 12:2).
God desires our whole being to be conformed to his image. He can handle each our emotional highs and our logical questioning. This has led John Piper to coin the term Christian hedonism, which represents a melding of Apollonian logic, and the pleasure of Dionysian impulses. We experience pleasure once we are satisfied in God, so we should always desire to know him more and glorify him by doing that.
Photo Credit:©GettyImages/tadamichi
Ben Reichert works with college students in New Zealand. He graduated from Iowa State in 2019 with degrees in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and agronomy. He is obsessed with church history, theology, and having people walk with Jesus. When not working or writing you’ll find him running or climbing in the attractive New Zealand Bush.
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