"The great cultivator...the Roman Caesar with Christ's Soul". [Nietzsche WM Bk.IV 983]

How are we to take this pronouncement? It is a challenge to Nietzscheans and Anti-Nietzscheans alike.What?--could it mean that Nietzsche has overcome you all?

Who can even think this formulation of the 'Christ-souled Roman Caesar' ?You may not be surprised to hear that I am thinking it right NOW!

ROMANORUM ULTIMI


" Education in those rulers' virtues that master even one's benevolence and pity: the great cultivator's virtues.., the affect of the creator must be elevated--no longer to work on marble!--The exceptional situation and powerful position of those beings..: the Roman Caesar with Christ's Soul ". [Nietzsche, 'The Will To Power',Bk IV, 983]

We stand back from such a quote just as we stand back from an old master painting at an art gallery; we gaze in wonder. How elevated must have been the mind that thought this...how able to look down on things from a great height, from a wide and lofty perspective!The context suggests that the Caesar masters his own 'benevolence and pity'.

So the first answer is that the 'Christ Soul' is one's benevolence and pity.

One must remember that Nietzsche is using 'Christ' and 'Caesar' as types.
Now we must assume that the Caesar is possessed of a Christ Soul [perhaps the greater the man, the greater his Christ Soul]; he doesn't reject it, he overcomes it. He masters it--it is his first conquest.This is the ruler's virtue, the great cultivator's virtue.

Of course Christianity will tell us that we must expand our Christ Soul; Nietzsche tells us we must master it.It may be the sort of mastery that allows one to perform ruthless tasks with a clinical touch, which if overmastered by the feeling of pity would cause our hands to shake.
This brings us on to Nietzsche's very apt sculptor metaphor,"no longer to work on marble! " he says. Does not the sculptor use a hard chisel to work on hard marble to create,in the case of a Michelangelo, the flowing contours of living flesh?
In other words, only by those harsh Nietzschean virtues can beauty be created; but first the cultivator must master his own softness, exercise his own constructive hardness.

I see Christ as the moralised Dionysos; it is with the aid of Caesarean hardness that Christ will be transformed back to Dionysos. But there is no antithesis here; Christ and Dionysos are polarities of the same sphere; Caesar is the star that guides us to the pole of Dionysos.
We can only be worldy if we have explored both poles.

But this is not enough; the profundity of the quote is barely touched;it is merely introduced. We need to know more of what it means to be a Caesar type and a Christ type. We all know of Caesar's military genius, his mastering of Rome; but listen to what Belloc says here;
"The Roman Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital experiment which has determined all future history--Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul--Gaul, the mass of which lay north, Continental, exterior to the Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic and the North Sea: Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be the foundation of things to come. It was this experiment--the Roman Conquest of Gaul--and its success which opened the ancient and immemmorial culture of the Mediterranean to the world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no parallel". [H.Belloc, 'Europe and the Faith']

Today we may not appreciate what Caesar's conquest means for world history.
It was a transformation in itself which made possible Christ's transformation of world religion. The Christ Souled Roman Caesar would then conquer the world both materially and spiritually; totally.