happening in Iron Law). Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Moralsis in effect a
rewriting of Hegel’s Phenomenology. He adopts Hegel’s interpretation
of history in terms of the master-slave dialectic, but reverses Hegel’s
evaluation of the results. Whereas Hegel sees the slaves’ eventual turn-
ing of the tables on the masters as progress, Nietzsche views it as a
falling off. He celebrates the world of the masters (for Nietzsche, essen-
tially the heroic world of Homeric epic). By asserting their aristocratic
superiority over the plebeian slaves, the masters define what is good and
bad. Basically, strength and power are good; weakness and submissive-
ness are bad (in the sense of base and contemptible). For Nietzsche, the
values of master morality become inverted when slave morality tri-
umphs (chiefly in the form of Christianity, as he sees it). What the mas-
ters regard as good becomes reinterpreted as evil in Christianity
(aristocratic superiority is viewed negatively as sinful pride and arro-
gance), while what the masters regard as bad becomes reinterpreted as
good (submissiveness is viewed positively as humility and self-sacri-
fice—“turning the other cheek”).
Nietzsche’s scheme goes a long way toward explaining the contrast
between the two worlds Nerdrum portrays in his paintings. The world of
the early paintings is not a Christian world, but it is distinctly post-
Christian (an apt way of describing modern Scandinavia). That is to say,
Nerdrum’s characters no longer seem to have a religious faith, but their
world is shaped by the lingering effects of Christianity on their morality.
The early paintings present a world in which love and compassion are
held up as the true virtues, and any signs of aggressiveness or individ-
ual rebelliousness against the communal spirit are punished and
repressed—in short, the world of the modern welfare state. Nerdrum
seems to find this world stifling and untrue to human nature. In order to
escape it, he turns in Nietzschean fashion to the pre-Christian, pagan
past of Scandinavia, the world of Norse saga and myth. There he finds a
land where strength is the only true virtue and aggressiveness can come
out in the open. In this world power reveals itself in all its nakedness (see
Iron Law), whereas in the modern world it tends to hide behind the mask
of benevolent institutions, showing its true colors only in secret, in the
shadow world of the prison system, for example, as Andreas Baader dis-
covered. The modern world is one of concealed weapons, whereas
Nerdrum’s primitive nomads carry their weapons out in the open for all
to see. In short, what is repressed in the modern world is freely
expressed in the world Nerdrum imagines on the model of Norse pagan-
ism. Nerdrum appears to be talking about this kind of Nietzschean reval-
uation of values when he comments: “The most important thing is to32 Paul A. Cantor