Reading Nietzsche

Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Sanctus Januarius: A New Year’s Wish and Its Tests

Optional full-text route · Station 20 of 35

Read: Book IV, Sanctus Januarius: the unnumbered opening verse, then §§276–289, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at the verse that follows the Book IV title and stop before §290.
Allow: About 60–80 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The verse and fourteen sections total about 2,700 words in the free edition; §§277, 283, and 279 are the longest. If you need two sittings, stop after §281.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at the Book IV verse · §276 · §280 · §283 · §289.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation of the prose, including his section titles. The verse follows the free edition’s poetry translation by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre, which does not credit individual poems. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here; this lesson has not been compared with Kaufmann’s text. Where a word drives the interpretation, this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text.

Before you read

Book IV has its own title, Sanctus Januarius, and opens with an unnumbered eight-line verse signed “Genoa, January 1882.” The verse belongs to the original 1882 book; it is not one of the prelude’s numbered poems. Then §276 makes a New Year’s wish, and the next thirteen sections test what that wish would require: providence and chance, death, a lost friendship, places for thinking, endings, and a call to live dangerously.

§276 is the first assignment of Reading 7, which reads it with §341 and asks what it would take to affirm a whole life. This station reads it as the opening of Book IV. The route’s checkpoint for Reading 7 comes later, after station 25, once §341 has been read.

The main question: Is the New Year’s wish an achievement or a task—and do the sections that follow keep it?

Keep using the marks: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only.

What to notice

  1. Necessity. The verse praises a saint who leaves the soul “Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint.” §276 wants to learn “to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful.” Compare constraint and necessity.
  2. Negation. §276 wants “Looking aside” to be its “sole negation.” Count what the following sections still reject.
  3. Ships. §§278, 279, 283, and 289 all turn to ships and seas. Compare station 14’s §124, where “we” had left the land.

Close reading

One way to group the passages

These groups are this guide’s, not Nietzsche’s.

The verse and the wish

The verse addresses January, “thou beauteous saint,” who with “cleaving fiery lances” frees the stream of the soul from its ice, so that it rushes toward the sea. One line prepares §276: “Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint.” The German is Frei im liebevollsten Muss, free in the most loving must: the necessity that §276 will ask to love. The verse is dated “Genoa, January 1882.” the Book IV verse

§276, “For the New Year,” begins: “I still live, I still think; I must still live, for I must still think.” It sets a reversal of Descartes’s formula beside the formula itself: “Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum.” Then comes the wish: “I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love!” §276, the wish

Two details in the German make the wish a task. First, Common omits a verb: Ich will immer mehr lernen, I want to learn more and more to see the necessary as beautiful. Second, the last sentence, “I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!,” renders ich will irgendwann einmal nur noch ein Ja-sagender sein: someday, at some point, I want to be only a Yes-sayer. The wish points to a future it has not reached. Mark it V. Reading 7 reads the section’s grammar of wishing closely; this station asks what happens to the wish in the pages that follow.

Chance, death, and a lost friendship

§277, “Personal Providence,” names a temptation that comes at “a certain climax in life.” When everything that happens seems to turn out for the best, “the thought of a personal Providence first presents itself before us with its most persuasive force.” The section refuses it: “we want to leave the Gods alone.” It credits the harmony to our own skill in interpreting and arranging events, and, now and then, to “beloved Chance.” Mark it P. Read it beside the verse and §276: loving necessity must not turn into believing that everything is arranged for us. §277, providence and chance

§278, “The Thought of Death,” finds “a melancholy happiness” in a crowded street where everyone lives for the near future, “as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant-ship.” Death is among “the only things certain and common to all,” yet it exercises “almost no influence on men.” Then the section reverses what you might expect: “It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.” The speaker does not want to preach death; he wants to make life worth more thought. §278, the thought of death

§279, “Stellar Friendship,” opens: “We were friends, and have become strangers to each other. But this is as it ought to be.” Two ships with different goals met in one harbour and were driven apart. Its hopes are hedged: “perhaps we shall never see one another again,—or perhaps we may see one another, but not know one another again” (German vielleicht), and “There is probably some immense, invisible curve and stellar orbit” (wahrscheinlich). Mark those ?. The section names no one. A biographical reading connects it with Nietzsche’s break with Wagner (station 11); nothing in the text depends on that identification. §279, stellar friendship

Places for thinking, endings, and gait

§280, “Architecture for Thinkers,” asks for “quiet, spacious, and widely extended places for reflection.” The churches will not do. Their buildings “speak a far too pathetic and too biassed speech … for us godless ones to be able to think our thoughts in them.” Compare the madman’s churches, “the tombs and monuments of God” (§125). The section ends: “We want to have ourselves translated into stone and plant.” §280, architecture for thinkers

§281 says that masters of the first rank know “how to find the end,” whether of a melody, a thought, or “the fifth act of a tragedy.” Set it beside station 16’s §153, whose poet did not know what to do with his fifth act. §282, “The Gait,” says that even great minds betray by the gait of their thoughts that they “originate from the populace, or from the semi-populace”; even Napoleon “could not walk ‘legitimately.’” Mark it V: a ranking of minds by social origin, stated plainly. It sits uneasily beside §276’s wish not to accuse.

A warlike age and its hopes

§283, “Pioneers,” is the station’s loudest section. “I greet all the signs indicating that a more manly and warlike age is commencing, which will, above all, bring heroism again into honour!” That age is to prepare “a yet higher age,” one “which will carry heroism into knowledge, and wage war for the sake of ideas and their consequences.” Then come imperatives: “Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, ye knowing ones, as long as ye cannot be rulers and possessor!” §283, living dangerously

Three German details sharpen it. The title is Vorbereitende Menschen, preparatory human beings. “The secret … is to live in danger!” renders gefährlich leben, live dangerously. And “spoilers” renders Eroberer, conquerors. The people addressed are “ye knowing ones” (ihr Erkennenden), seekers of knowledge. Mark it V. Do not soften its martial language. Do not assume that it is only literal either: the war it names is also war “for the sake of ideas.”

§§284–288 are quieter. §285, “Excelsior!,” is an accusation in quotation marks, addressed to “thou”: “Thou wilt never more pray, never more worship, never more repose in infinite trust.” Among its charges: “thou desirest the eternal recurrence of war and peace.” The German is die ewige Wiederkunft. In the German text used here, this is the only occurrence of the phrase in Books I–IV; §341 (station 25) presents its thought without it. The section answers with an image, not an argument: a lake that dammed its outflow and has risen ever since. “Perhaps the very renunciation will also furnish us with the strength with which the renunciation itself can be borne; perhaps man will ever rise higher and higher from that point onward, when he no longer flows out into a God.” Both clauses are hedged (Vielleicht … vielleicht); mark them ?. §285, Excelsior!

In §286 the speaker admits, “I can only suggest—I cannot do more!,” and tells readers who are “yet stones and animals” to “seek first your Orpheus!” §287 gives a line to the wanderer, speaking to his shadow: the pair who name Nietzsche’s The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880). §288 imagines future souls for whom a lofty mood would be the usual state, hedged with “Perhaps”; mark it ?.

Aboard ship

§289 imagines a philosophy for everyone who lacks one: “The evil man, also, the unfortunate man, and the exceptional man, shall each have his philosophy, his rights, and his sunshine!” What they need is not pity: “It is not sympathy with them that is necessary!” (German Mitleiden, pity). “It is a new justice, however, that is necessary!” The section ends with the book’s ship once more: “The moral earth also is round! The moral earth also has its antipodes! The antipodes also have their right to exist!” Then: “Aboard ship! ye philosophers!” (Auf die Schiffe, ihr Philosophen!). In §124 “we” had left the land; here philosophers are ordered to sea. §289, aboard ship

A difficulty

Does Book IV keep its New Year’s wish?

§276 says, “I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers,” and hopes that “Looking aside” will be its “sole negation.” Within a few pages, §282 ranks minds by their origin in “the populace,” §283 calls for war “with your equals and with yourselves,” and §289 demands “a new justice.”

Three readings are possible.

Decide which the text best supports. Name one sentence from §276 and one from §§282, 283, or 289.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

What does the German of §276’s last sentence add to Common’s “at any time hereafter”?

Irgendwann einmal, someday. The speaker wants to become only a Yes-sayer at some future time; he does not claim to be one now.

Why does §277 refuse a personal Providence?

Because the harmony of events can be explained by our own skill in interpreting and arranging them, and sometimes by “beloved Chance.” A Divinity who “knows personally every little hair on our heads” is a temptation, not a discovery.

What does §278 want to do about the thought of death?

Not to spread it. It is glad that people avoid the thought, and wants instead to make the idea of life “a hundred times more worthy” of their attention.

Where does the phrase “eternal recurrence” appear in this station, and in what voice?

In §285, inside a quoted accusation addressed to “thou”: “thou desirest the eternal recurrence of war and peace.” It names a wish attributed to someone, not a doctrine. §341 (station 25) develops the thought.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Choose one section from §§277–289. Does it carry out §276’s wish, postpone it, or contradict it?

A successful response states what the wish asks for, identifies the kind of claim the chosen section makes, and does not treat a wish as a report of something achieved.

Continue

Reading 7, later. §276 is the first of Reading 7’s two sections. The route’s optional checkpoint for it comes after station 25, once you have also read §341.

Continue to station 21: Style, Genoa, and the Poets of Life →

Read next: Book IV, §§290–301. Its question: how does giving style differ from an artist’s borrowed pose?

Previous station: station 19, §§242–275. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised .

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