it no longer knows how to employ the past as a nourishing food
. . . [O]ne must not be surprised to find that it is called by the names of poisons--the antidote to the historical is called--the unhistorical and the suprahistorical . . . With the word "the unhistorical" I designate the art and power of forgetting and of enclosing oneself within a bounded horizon; I call "suprahistorical" the powers which lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and stable, towards art and religion (Nietzsche 120; emphasis in original).
Now Nietzsche is not talking about institutional religion, still less about a conventional concept of God. He does appear to be talking about glimpses of an all-encompassing, self-scrutinizing, self-critical consciousness of greatness and resonant clarity, a species of truth implied, as Nietzsche subsequently says, by the dictum of the Delphic oracle to know yourself (122). Such knowledge is a function of irrevocable tension between history and the experience of life per se, a
...