Apollonianism refers 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?
You may have entered this article thinking the subject is the famous heresy Appolinarianism. You can learn more about that in the Christianity.com article “What Is Apollinarianism and Why Is It Still a Problem Today?”
Apollonianism is a little 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 in the hero of ancient Greek tragedies.
Apollonianism as a way of analyzing stories comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of nihilism. Before he declared that “God is dead and we have killed him,” he was an accomplished 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 desire for hedonistic pleasure. The names are derived from the Greek God of the son, Apollo, and the Greek God of wine and parties, Dionysius.
Apollonianism’s complement and opposite is known as Dionysianism, which represents the emotional, passionate, and chaotic. Nietzsche desired a return to Dionysian hedonism and to be set free from the Apollonian impulses of the hyper-rational enlightenment.
These ideas were later incorporated into theories of personality, such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator. Apollonian corresponds to the thinking types, and Dionysian to the feeling types. This makes sense because the originator of the personality theory, Carl Jung, was an avid reader of Nietzsche.
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 brought to continental philosophy. The Enlightenment was very systematic and structured and desired everything to be categorized into a box. Carl Linaeus is a great example: he developed the field of taxonomy to categorize the natural world. He’s the reason 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 at the forefront. His quote at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra echoes to this day. “A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.” We can see the resurgence in Dionysian philosophy through critical theory, whose primary goal is to help us see the world as it is in 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.
Jesus represents the perfect balance of Apollonian and Dionysian traits. Jesus was unafraid of showing his emotions, but also created order out of chaos more than anyone else, by making the world around us out of nothing. Jesus reasoned with religious leaders, but also helped those who were facing emotional problems. Both of these together represent the Apollonian and Dionysian categories perfectly, and Jesus embodies both in the best way possible.
A perfect example of this is when Jesus was at his lowest moment, on the cross. He was simultaneously experiencing the greatest suffering. His emotions are raw and on full display. Yet his mind and heart joined perfectly together to make one of his final statements straight out of the Psalms. “My God, My God, why have you 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 came 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 strive to know and feel the Bible well so it comes out of us in times of difficulty.
4 Maccabees focuses on following God with reason over emotion. Written around the time Paul wrote his Epistles, 4 Maccabees’ anonymous author sets forth the example of martyrs as people whose reason dominates over their emotion. The author views emotions as the basic desire for pleasure and freedom from pain. These would then be the Dionysian impulses as outlined by Nietzsche. The author then goes on to give numerous examples from the intertestamental period of how people’s reason prevailed over their natural impulses. People were willing to die for their beliefs because they held them to be true. This book proved to be influential in the Christian ideas of martyrdom that were so prevalent in the early Church.
This passage, about what happened when Seleucids executed the priest Eleazar by fire in the days of the Maccabeean revolt.
“When he was now burned to his very bones and about to expire, [Eleazar]he lifted up his eyes to God and said, ‘You know, O God, that though I might have saved myself, I am 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 in 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 would have testified to their domination. But now that reason has conquered the emotions, we properly attribute to it the power to govern. It is right for us to acknowledge the dominance of reason when it masters even external agonies. It would be ridiculous to deny it. I have proved not only that reason has mastered agonies, but also 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 found in Judaism around Jesus’ time. The purpose of the passage is to show that reason can prevail over emotions if the believer’s convictions are strong enough.
Early Christians preserved 4 Maccabees as an example of hope in the face of martyrdom. Polycarp, an early Christian martyr, was willing to die for his faith because he, like the subject above, believed in what he died for. However, emotions and reason are a both/and, not an either/or. Both need to be integrated into our faith for a robust experiential understanding of who God is.
Peter Leithart offers a good reminder that reason alone is not enough to form a robust theology. A true picture of God must also incorporate his emotions and reason. God demonstrates emotions and passions because he loves his creation so much. This makes him simultaneously 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 based 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 heart and the gut than other denominations. They represent Christianity’s “Dionysian” impulse—highly expressive worship.
Some congregations can combine the two and often find success when they do. Tim Keller’s church, for example, was founded on both 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’ intellectual reverence with charismatic passion. Emotion and reason are not polarized extremes but two things to be embraced.
As sinful humans, we are always drawn toward the extreme ends, but 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 both 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 when we are satisfied in God, so we should 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 passionate about church history, theology, and having people walk with Jesus. When not working or writing you can find him running or hiking in the beautiful New Zealand Bush.
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