______________________________________________________
Friedrich
Nietzsche
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
______________________________________________________
[This document, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright
restrictions. For information, please consult Copyright. Editorial comments and translations in
square brackets and italics are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets
are from Nietzsche’s text. Last revised in December 2013]
[Table of Contents for Beyond Good and Evil]
PART THREE
THE RELIGIOUS NATURE1
45
The human soul and its boundaries, the range of human inner
experiences so far attained, the heights, depths, and
extent of these experiences, the whole history of the soul up to this
point and its still undrained possibilities: for a born psychologist and
lover of the “great hunt” that is the predestined hunting ground. But how often
must such a man say to himself in despair: “I’m just one man! Alas, only one
man! And this is a huge wood, a primordial forest!” And so he wishes he could
have few hundred helpers in the hunt and finely trained tracking dogs which he
could drive into the history of the human soul in order to corner his wild
animal there. A vain hope. He experiences
over and over again, thoroughly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find
helpers and hounds for all things which appeal to his curiosity. The problem he
has in sending scholars out into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage,
intelligence, and refinement are necessary in every sense, is that that’s precisely
the place where scholars are no longer useful, where the “great hunt”
but also the great danger begins:—right there they lose their keen eyes and
noses for hunting. In order to ascertain and to establish, for example, what
sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience in the
soul of the hominess religiosi [religious
men] has had up to now, the individual would himself perhaps have to
be as profound, as wounded, and as monstrous as the intellectual conscience of
Pascal was:—and then it would still be necessary to have that expansive heaven
of bright, malicious spirituality capable of surveying from above this teeming mass of dangerous and painful experiences, of ordering it, and of
forcing it into formulas.2 But who would perform
this service for me? And who would have time to wait for such servants?—It’s
clear they arise too rarely. In all ages they are so unlikely! In the end, a
person must do everything himself in order to know a few
things himself: that means that one has much to do!—But at all
events a curiosity of the sort I have remains the most pleasant of all vices.—Forgive
me. I wanted to say this: the love of the truth has its reward in heaven and
even on earth.—
46
The faith demanded and not rarely attained by early Christianity
in the midst of a sceptical and southern world of
free spirits that had behind and within it a centuries-long battle among
philosophical schools, in addition to the education in tolerance provided by
the imperium romanum [Roman
empire]—this faith is not that naive and gruff faith of
the subordinate, something like the faith with which a Luther or a Cromwell
or some other northern barbarian of the spirit hung onto his god and his
Christianity.3 That
earlier faith is much more similar to Pascal’s belief, which looks, in a
terrifying way, something like a constant suicide of reason, a tenacious,
long-lived, worm-like reason, which cannot be killed once and for all with a
single blow. From the start Christian faith has been sacrifice: a sacrifice of
all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence about the spirit, and at the same
time slavery and self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and a
religious Phoenicianism in this faith,
which one expects in a crumbling, multilayered, and very spoilt conscience: its
assumption is that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful,
that the entire past and the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum [the most extreme absurdity],
which is how this “faith” confronts it. Modern people, with their insensitivity
to all Christian nomenclature, do not sense any more the ghastly superlative
that lay in the paradox of the formula “God on the cross” for the taste of
classical antiquity. To this point there has never yet been anywhere such an
audacious reversal—anything as dreadful, questioning, and questionable, as this
formula: it promised an inversion of all ancient values.—It is the Orient,
the deep Orient, it is the Oriental slave who in this way took
his revenge on Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance, on the Roman
“catholicity” of faith:—and what always enraged the slaves about their masters
and against their masters was not their faith but their freedom from faith,
that half-stoic, smiling lack of concern about the seriousness of belief.
“Enlightenment” fills people with rage, for the slave wants something absolute;
he understands only the tyrannical, even in morality; he loves as he hates,
without subtlety, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of
sickness. His many hidden sufferings grow incensed against the
noble taste that seems to deny suffering. The scepticism about suffering, basically only an attitude of
aristocratic morality, was also not the most insignificant factor in the origin
of the last great slave revolt, which began with the French Revolution.
47
Up to this point, wherever religious neurosis has appeared on
earth, we find it tied up with three dangerous dietary rules: isolation,
fasting, and sexual abstinence—although it would be impossible to determine
with certainty what in this may be cause and what may be effect and whether there
is, in fact, a relationship between cause and effect here. This final doubt is
justified by the fact that among the most regular symptoms of the religious
neurosis, both with savage and docile peoples, belongs also the most sudden and
most dissolute sensuality which then, just as suddenly, turns into spasms of
repentance and a denial of the world and the will. We could interpret both perhaps
as masked epilepsy? But nowhere should people resist interpretations more than
here. About no type up to this point has such a glut of absurdity and
superstition proliferated. No other type so far seems to have interested human
beings, even philosophers, more than this one. It’s high time to become a
little cool on this issue, to learn caution, or better yet, to look away, to
go away. Even in the background of the most recent philosophy, the work of
Schopenhauer, there stands, almost as the essential problem, this dreadful
question mark of the religious crisis and awakening. How is denial of the
will possible? How is the saint possible?—This seems,
in fact, to have been the question which prompted Schopenhauer to become a
philosopher and to begin. Hence, it was a result really worthy of Schopenhauer
that his most convinced follower (perhaps also his last, where Germany is
concerned), namely, Richard Wagner, brought his own life’s work to an end at
this very point and finally led out onto the stage the living physical
embodiment of that fearful and eternal type as Kundry, type vécu [a real-life type], at the very time when the
psychiatrists of almost all the countries of Europe had an opportunity to study
it up close, in every place where the religious neurosis—or as I call it, “the
religious nature”—had its most recent epidemic outbreak and
paraded around as the “Salvation Army.”4 But if we ask ourselves
what has really been so wildly interesting in the whole phenomenon of the saint
for people of all types and ages, even for philosophers, then undoubtedly it is
the appearance of a miracle associated with it, that is, the immediate succession
of opposites, of conditions of the soul that are valued in morally opposed
ways. People thought here they could get a grip on the fact that all of a
sudden a “bad man” became a “saint,” a good man. On this point, psychology so
far has suffered a shipwreck. Didn’t that happen primarily because psychology
subordinated itself to the control of morality, because it itself believed in
opposing moral evaluations and saw, read into, and interpreted these
opposites into the text and the facts? How’s that? The “miracle” is only a
failure of interpretation? A lack of philology?—
48
It seems that their Catholicism is much more inwardly bound up
with the Latin races than all of Christianity is in general for us northerners
and that, as a result, in Catholic countries unbelief means something entirely
different from what it means in Protestant countries—namely, a form of
rebellion against the spirit of the race; whereas, among us unbelief means
rather a turning back to the spirit (or non-spirit [Ungeist])
of the race. We northerners undoubtedly stem from races of barbarians, and this
also holds with respect to our talent for religion. We are badly equipped
for it. One can make the Celtic people an exception to that, and for this
reason they also provided the best soil for the start of the Christian
infection in the north:—in France the Christian ideal bloomed only as much as
the pale northern sun permitted. How strangely devout for our taste even these
recent French sceptics still are, to the extent they
have some Celtic blood in their ancestry! How Catholic, how un-German, August
Comte’s sociology smells to us, with its Roman logic of the instincts! How
Jesuitical that charming and clever cicerone [tour guide] from
Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his hostility to the Jesuits! And
then there’s Ernest Renan: how inaccessible to us northerners the language of
such a Renan sounds, in which at every moment some nothing of religious tension
destroys the equilibrium of his soul, which is, in a more refined sense,
sensual and reclining comfortably! One should repeat after him these beautiful
sentences—and how much malice and high spirits at once arise in response in our
probably less beautiful and harder, that is, more German souls: “Let us then
boldly assert that religion is a product of the normal man, that man is most in
touch with truth when he is most religious and most assured of an infinite
destiny . . . When he is good he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal
order; when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner he finds death revolting
and absurd. How can we not assume that it is in those moments like this that
man sees best? . . .” These sentences are so entirely antithetical to
my ears and habits that when I found them my initial rage wrote beside them “la niaiserie religieuse par
excellence!” [the finest example of religious
foolishness]—until my later anger really grew to like them, these sentences
which turn the truth on its head! It is so nice, so
distinguished, to have one’s very own antithesis!5
49
The thing that astonishes one about the religiosity of the ancient
Greeks is the unrestrained fullness of gratitude which streams out of it:—it is
a very noble kind of man who stands before nature and life in this way!
Later, as the rabble gained prominence in Greece, fear grew
all over religion as well, and preparations were made for Christianity.
50
The passion for God: there are sincere, peasant,
pushy types, like Luther’s—all Protestantism lacks southern delicatezza [delicacy]. In it there is
an oriental way of existing in an exalted state [Aussersichsein],
as with a slave who, without deserving it, has been pardoned or ennobled, for
example, Augustine, who lacks in an offensive way all nobility of gestures and
desires. There is some feminine tenderness and desire in it which pushes itself
bashfully and ignorantly towards a unio mystica et physica [a mystical and physical union], as with
Madame de Guyon.6 Strangely
enough, in many cases it appears as a disguise for puberty in a young woman or
man, and here and there even as the hysteria of an old spinster, also as her
last ambition:—in such cases the church has often already declared the woman a
saint.
51
Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently
before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final
sacrifice. Why did they bow? They sensed in him—and, so to speak, behind the
question mark of his frail and pathetic appearance—the superior power that
wished to test itself in such a victory, the strength of the will, in which
they knew how to recognize and honour their own strength and pleasure in
mastery once more. They were honouring something in
themselves when they revered the saint. It got to the point that the sight of a
saint aroused a suspicion in them: such a monster of denial, something so
contrary to nature, would not have been desired for no reason—that’s
what they said and questioned themselves about. Perhaps there is a reason for
that, a really great danger, about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret
comforters and visitors might provide more precise information? In short, the
powerful people of the earth learned from the saint a new fear; they sensed a
new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy:—it was the “will to power”
which compelled them to halt in front of the saint. They had to ask him—
52
In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there
are human beings, things, and speeches of such impressive style that the world
of Greek and Indian literature has nothing to place beside them. We stand with
fear and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what human beings once
were and will in the process suffer melancholy thoughts about old Asia and its
small protruding peninsula of Europe, which, in marked contrast to Asia, would
like to represent the “progress of man.” Naturally, whoever is, in himself,
only a weak, tame domestic animal and knows only the needs of domestic animals
(like our educated people nowadays, including the Christians of “educated”
Christianity), among these ruins such a man finds nothing astonishing or even
anything to be sad about—a taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with
respect to “great” and “small”:—perhaps he finds the New Testament, that book
of grace, still preferable to his heart (in it there is a good deal of the
really tender, stifling smell of sanctimonious and small-souled people).
To have glued together this New Testament, a sort of rococo of taste in all respects,
with the Old Testament into a single book, as the “Bible,” and “the essential
book,” that is perhaps the greatest act of daring and “sin against the spirit”
that literary Europe has on its conscience.
53
Why atheism today?—”The father” in God has been fundamentally
disproved, as well as “the judge,” “the rewarder.” Together with his “free will.” He is not listening—and
if he were to hear, he wouldn’t know how to help anyway. The worst thing is
this: he appears incapable of communicating clearly. Is he indistinct?—From a
number of different conversations, asking and listening, this is what I have unearthed
as the cause of the decline of European theism: it seems to me that the
religious instinct is, in fact, growing powerfully—but that it is rejecting,
with profound distrust, theistic satisfaction.
54
When you get down to it, what has all recent philosophy been
doing? Since Descartes—and, in fact, more in defiance of him than on the basis
of what he had done before—all philosophers have been trying to assassinate the
old idea of the soul, under the appearance of a critique of the idea of the
subject and predicate—that means an attempt to kill the basic assumption of
Christian teaching. More recent philosophy, as an epistemological scepticism, is, in a concealed or open manner, anti-Christian,
although (and this is said for more refined ears) in no way anti-religious.
Formerly, that is, people believed in “the soul,” as they believed in grammar
and the grammatical subject. They said “I” is the condition, “think”
is the predicate and conditioned—thinking is an activity for which a
subject must be thought of as cause. Now, people tried, with
an admirable tenacity and trickery, to see whether they could get out of this
net, whether perhaps the opposite might not be true: “think” as the condition,
“I” the conditioned—thus “I” is only a synthesis that is itself created by
thinking. Basically Kant wanted to show that if we started
with the subject we could not prove the subject—or the object. The possibility of
an apparent existence of the subject, hence “the soul,” might not
have always been alien to him—that thought which, as Vedanta
philosophy, was once before present with enormous power on earth.7
55
There is a huge ladder of religious atrocities, with many rungs.
But three of them are the most important. First people sacrificed human beings
to their gods, perhaps the very ones whom they loved best. Here belong the sacrifices
of the first-born in all prehistoric religions, as well as the sacrifice of Emperor
Tiberius in the grotto to Mithras on the island of Capri, that
most terrible of all Roman anachronisms.8 Then, in the moral
ages of humanity, people sacrificed to their gods the strongest instincts that
man possessed, his “nature.” This celebratory joy sparkles in
the cruel glance of the ascetic, of the enthusiastic “anti-natural man.”
Finally, what was still left to sacrifice? Did people not finally have to sacrifice
everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all
belief in a hidden harmony, in future blessedness and justice? Did people not
have to sacrifice God himself and, out of cruelty against themselves, worship
stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, and nothingness? To sacrifice God for
nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the last act of cruelty has been
reserved for the generation which is coming along right now. We all already
know something about this.
56
Anyone who, like me, has, with some enigmatic desire or other,
made an effort for a long time to think profoundly about pessimism and to
rescue it from the half-Christian, half-German restrictions and
simple-mindedness with which it has most recently appeared in this century,
that is, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; anyone who really has, with
an Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, looked into and down on the most
world-denying of all possible ways of thinking—beyond good and evil and no
longer as Buddha and Schopenhauer do, under the spell and delusion of
morality—such a man has perhaps in the process, without really wanting to do
so, opened his eyes for the reverse morality: for the ideal of the most
high-spirited, most lively, and most world-affirming human being, who has not
only learned to come to terms with and to accept what was and is but who wants
to have what was and is come back for all eternity, calling
out insatiably da capo [from
the beginning], not only to himself but to the entire play and spectacle,
and not only to a spectacle but basically to the one who needs this particular
spectacle and who makes the spectacle necessary, because over and over again he
needs himself—and makes himself necessary. How’s that? Wouldn’t this be circulus vitiosus deus [god as a vicious
circle]?
57
With the power of his spiritual glance and insight the distance
and, as it were, the space around man expand: his
world becomes deeper; new stars and new riddles and pictures always come into
his view. Perhaps everything on which the eye of his spirit has practised its astuteness and profundity was just an excuse
for exercise, a matter of play, something for children and childish heads.
Perhaps one day the most solemn ideas, the ones over which we have fought and
suffered the most, the ideas of “God” and “sin,” will seem to us no more
important than a children’s toy or childish pain appears to an old man—and perhaps
then “the old man” will need again another children’s toy and another
pain—still sufficiently a child, an eternal child!
58
Have people properly considered just how much a genuinely
religious life (both its favourite task of
microscopic self-examination and that tender calmness which is called “prayer”
and is a constant preparedness for the “coming of God”) requires an outward
leisure or half-leisure—I mean leisure with a good conscience, time-honoured, from blood, something not entirely foreign to the
aristocratic feeling that work is dishonourable (that
is, the feeling that work makes the soul and body coarse) and how, as a result,
the modern blaring, time-consuming industriousness, so proud of itself,
stupidly proud, trains and prepares people, better than anything else,
precisely for “unbelief”? For example, among the present inhabitants of Germany
who live without religion, I find people who hold to “free-thinking” of various
kinds and origins, but above all a majority of those whose industriousness,
from generation to generation, has dissolved the religious instincts, so that
these people no longer have any idea what purpose religions serve and take note
of their presence in the world with, as it were, only a kind of indifferent
wonder. They already feel that generous demands are made of them, these good
people, whether from their businesses or their pleasures, to say nothing of the
“Fatherland” and the newspapers and the “obligations to the family”: it seems
that they have no time at all left over for religion; it is especially unclear
to them whether religion involves a new business or a new pleasure—for it’s not
possible, they tell themselves, that people go to church merely to spoil their
own good moods. They are no enemies of religious customs. If, in certain
circumstances, people demand of them participation in such traditions
(something required by the state, for example), they do what is required, just
the way people do so many things—with a patient and modest seriousness and
without much curiosity and concern. They just live too much apart and on the
outside to find it necessary in such cases to conduct an argument with themselves for or against the matter. Among these
indifferent people nowadays belongs the majority of German Protestants in the
middle classes, particularly in the great industrious centres
of trade and business, including most of the hard-working scholars and all the
accessories of the university (with the exception of the theologians, whose
existence and possibility there constantly provide the psychologist with more
and ever more sophisticated riddles to sort out). Devout or merely church-going
people rarely imagine how much good will—one could say how
much arbitrary will—is involved nowadays when a German scholar takes the
problem of religion seriously. On the basis of his whole trade (and, as mentioned,
on the basis of the industriousness of the tradesman, which his modern
conscience requires of him) he inclines to a supercilious, almost kindly amusement
towards religion, mixed now and then with a slight contempt for the “uncleanliness” of the spirit which he assumes is present
wherever people still profess their faith in the church. The scholar succeeds
only with the help of history (hence not from his own personal
experience) in bringing to religion a reverent seriousness and a certain timid
consideration. But even if his feelings about religion have managed to rise all
the way to gratitude towards it, in his own person he has not yet come a step
closer to what still constitutes church and piety: perhaps the reverse is the
case. The practical indifference to religious matters in which he was born and
raised tends to sublimate itself in him to caution and cleanliness, things
which avoid contact with religious people and things. And it can well be the
very depth of his tolerance and humanity that tells him to stay out of the way
of complex difficulties which tolerance brings with it. Every period has its
own divine form of naiveté whose invention other ages may envy:—and how much
naiveté, respectful, childish, and boundlessly foolish naiveté lies in this
belief of the scholar in his own superiority, in the good conscience of his
toleration, in the unsuspecting, unsophisticated certainty with which his
instinct treats religious people as a less worthy and lower type, above whom he
himself has grown up, out, and above—the scholar, the small,
presumptuous dwarf and member of the rabble, the diligent and nimble
head-and-hand-worker of “ideas,” of “modern ideas”!
59
Whoever has looked deep into the world will readily guess what
wisdom exists in the fact that human beings are superficial. It is their
preserving instinct, which teaches them to be changeable, light, and false.
Here and there we find a passionate and exaggerated veneration of “pure forms,”
among philosophers as well as among artists. No one should doubt that whoever requires the
cult of surfaces that much has at some time or another grasped beneath those surfaces, with unhappy results. Perhaps with
respect to these scorched children, the born artists, who still find the good
things of life only in the intention to falsify its image (as
it were, in a prolonged revenge against life), there is even a rank ordering:
we could derive the degree to which life has been spoiled for them by the extent
to which they wish to see its image falsified, diluted, transcended, deified.
Among the artists we could count the homines religiosi [men of religion] as their highest rank.
It is the deep suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism which compels entire
millennia to sink their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence, the
fear arising from that instinct which has a premonition that people could grasp
the truth too early, before humans have become strong enough, hard
enough, artistic enough. . . . From this point of view, piety, the “life in
God,” could appear as the most refined and final spawn of the fear of
truth, as an artist’s worship and intoxication in the face of the most consequential
of all falsifications, as the will to the reversal of the truth, to untruth at
any price. Perhaps up to this point there has been no stronger way of making
human beings themselves look more beautiful than this very piety: through it
man can become so much art, surface, play of colours,
and goodness, that we no longer suffer at the sight of him.—
60
To love human beings for the sake of God—so far that
has been the most noble and most remote feeling that has been attained among
men. The fact that without some consecrating intention behind it the love of
human beings is one more stupidity and brutishness, that the
inclination to this love of humanity must first derive its extent, delicacy,
its grains of salt and specks of ambergris from some higher inclination—whatever
human being it happened to be who first felt and “experienced” this, no matter
how much his tongue may have stumbled as it tried to express such a delicacy,
let him remain for all time sanctified among us and worthy of reverence as the
man who so far has flown the highest and has lost his way most beautifully!
61
The philosopher the way we understand him, we free
spirits, as the man of the most all-encompassing responsibility, who has the
conscience for the collective development of human beings—this philosopher will
help himself to religions for use in his work of cultivation and education,
just as he will use contemporary political and economic conditions. The selective
and cultivating influence—that is to say always both the destructive as well as
the creative and shaping influence—which can be practised
with the help of religions is something multifaceted and different, according
to the type of people who are put under its spell and protection. For strong,
independent people, those prepared and predestined to command, those in whom
the reason and culture of a ruling race become something living, religion is one
more means of overcoming resistance, so that they will be able to rule; it is
like a bond which ties ruler and subjects together in common and betrays and
hands over to the former the consciences of the latter, something hidden in
their innermost selves which would like to evade obedience. And in the event a
few individual natures of such noble descent, because of their high mindedness,
feel drawn towards a more secluded and more peaceful life and reserve for
themselves only the most refined form of ruling (over chosen disciples or
brethren in an order), then religion itself can be used as a means to create
some peace for oneself from the noise and hardship of the cruder forms
of ruling and cleanliness from the dirt which necessarily comes
with all political action. That’s something the Brahmin, for example,
understood: with the help of a religious organization they arrogated to
themselves the power to appoint a king for the people, while they held
and felt themselves apart and outside, as men with higher purposes beyond
kingship.9 Meanwhile,
religion also provides instruction for some of the ruled and an opportunity to
prepare themselves for ruling and ordering in the future, those slowly
ascending classes and groups, that is, those in which, because of fortunate
marriage traditions, the force and desire of the will, the will to rule
oneself, is always rising:—to these people religion offers sufficient stimuli
and temptations to travel the route to a higher spirituality, to test the
feelings of great self-conquest, of silence and solitude:—asceticism
and Puritanism are almost indispensable means for educating and
ennobling people when a race wishes to become master of its origins from the
rabble and works its way up towards future ruling power. Finally, for ordinary
people, the vast majority, who are there to serve for common needs and are
permitted to exist only for that purpose, religion gives an invaluable
modest satisfaction with their situation and type, all sorts of peace at heart,
an ennoblement of obedience, one more source of joy and suffering with people
like them, and something of a transfiguration and beautification of and a
justification for the whole routine, the whole baseness, the whole half-animal
poverty of their souls. Religion and the religious significance of life bring
the brilliance of the sun onto such constantly troubled people and make them
capable of tolerating the sight of themselves. Religion works just as an
Epicurean philosophy usually works on suffering people of a higher
rank—refreshing and refining and, as it were, exploiting the
suffering, finally even blessing and justifying it.10 In
Christianity and Buddhism there is perhaps nothing so venerable as their art of
teaching even the most abject people to place themselves, through their piety,
into an illusory higher order of things and thus to hang onto their satisfaction
with the real order, in the middle of which their life is hard enough—and this
hardness is precisely what’s necessary!
62
Finally, of course, to evaluate the opposing bad effects of such
religions, as well, and to bring to light their sinister danger, there is
always an expensive and fearful price to pay when religions prevail, not as
a means of cultivation and education in the hand of philosophers, but as some
inherently sovereign power, when religions want themselves to
be the final purpose and not a means alongside other means. Among human beings,
as among all other animal species, there is an excess of failures, invalids, degenerates,
and infirm individuals, those who necessarily suffer. Successful examples are
always the exception, among human beings as well, and, given that man is
the as-yet-undetermined animal, the rare exception. But even worse:
the higher the type of human being a particular person represents, the more improbable
it becomes that he will be successful. The contingent, the law of absurdity
in the collective household of humanity, reveals itself in the most frightening
manner in its destructive effects on the higher people, whose conditions of
life are refined, multifaceted, and hard to estimate. Now, how do the two greatest
religions mentioned above stand in relation to this excess of
unsuccessful cases? They seek to preserve, to maintain alive, anything which
merely allows itself to be preserved. In fact, they side with these unsuccessful
cases, in principle, as religions for those who suffer; they agree
that all those who suffer from life as from some illness are right, and they
would like to see to it that every other feeling of life was judged false and
became impossible. Even if we still wish to fix a high value on this protecting
and preserving care, inasmuch as it is concerned and has been concerned with,
among all the other people, the highest type of human being as well, the one
who up to this point has almost always suffered the most, nonetheless in the
total reckoning, the religions so far, that is, the sovereign religions,
belong among the major causes which have kept the type “man” on a lower
rung—they have preserved too much of what should have perished. We
have to thank them for something invaluable, and who is rich enough in gratitude
not to become poor in the face of everything which, for example, the “spiritual
men” of Christianity have done for Europe up to this point? And yet, if they
gave consolation to sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff
and support to those who could not stand on their own, and enticed away from
society and into monasteries and spiritual penitentiaries those suffering from
inner destruction and those who had become wild, what must they have done in
addition, in order to work in this way in good conscience basically for the
preservation of everything sick and suffering, which amounts, in fact and
truth, for the deterioration of the European race? Turn all evaluations
of worth on their heads—that is what they had to do!
Break up the strong men, infect great hopes, bring joy in beauty under
suspicion, twist all self-mastery, everything manly, lofty, domineering, all
instincts characteristic of the highest and most successful of the type “man” into
uncertainty, distressed conscience, and self-destruction, in fact, to turn all
love for earthly things and for dominion over the earth into hated for the
earth and the earthly—that is the task the church gave itself and
had to give itself, until finally in its estimation “unworldliness,”
“lack of sensuality,” and “higher man” melted together into a single feeling.
Suppose we could survey with the mocking and disinterested eye of an Epicurean
god the strangely painful comedy of European Christianity, as crude as it is
refined, I believe we would find no end to our amazement and laughter. Does it
not seem that for eighteen centuries there has been ruling over Europe a will
to turn the human being into a sublime monstrosity? However, anyone
who, with the opposite needs, no longer Epicurean, but with some divine hammer
in his hand, were to approach this almost voluntary degeneration and decay of a
human being, like the Christian European (Pascal, for example), would he not
have to cry out with fury, pity, and horror, “You fools! You arrogant, pitying
fools, what have you done here? Was that a work for your hands? What a mess
you’ve made, ruining my most beautiful stone! What have you presumed?”
What I wanted to say was this: Christianity has been the most disastrous sort
of arrogance so far. Men not lofty and hard enough to be permitted to
shape men as artists; men not strong and far-sighted enough
to allow, with a sublime conquest of the self, the foreground law
of thousand-fold failure and destruction to prevail; men not noble enough to
see the abysmally different rank ordering, the gulfs separating ranks between
man and man:—such men have, with their “equal before God,” so far
ruled over the fate of Europe to the point where finally a diminished, almost
ridiculous type has been bred, a herd animal, something obliging, sickly, and
mediocre—the contemporary European. . . .
NOTES
1The title of this section
is “Das Religiöse Wesen”. Wesen has a number of meanings, including person, character, disposition, nature, soul, mind, essence, inclination. [Back to Text]
2Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662), a brilliant French mathematician known for the extreme strictness
and mortification of his religious beliefs. [Back to Text]
3Martin
Luther (1483-1546), German monk and theologian whose work launched the Reformation
and Protestantism; Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), English Protestant leader
against King Charles I and founder of the Commonwealth (the short-lived English
experiment with republican government). [Back to Text]
4Richard
Wagner (1813-1883), German composer and essayist, famous for his operas; Kundry: a character in Wagner’s opera Parsifal (1882), the
high messenger of the Holy Grail. [Back to Text]
5August
Comte (1798-1857), a French philosopher who founded positivism and is
considered the father of modern sociology; Port Royal: an important French
religious community in the seventeenth century which encouraged
self-renunciation; Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
(1804-1869), a prominent French poet and literary critic; Ernest Renan
(1823-1892), a well-known French writer on Christianity. Nietzsche
quotes the the French: “Disons donc hardiment que la religion est un produit de l’homme normal, que l’homme est
le plus dans le vrai quand il est
le plus religieux et le plus assure d’une destine infini . . . C’est quand il
est bon qu’il veut que la virtue corresponde á un ordre éternel, c’est quand il
contemple les choses d’une manière désintéressée
qu’il trouve la mort révoltante et absurd. Comment ne pas supposer
que c’est dans ces moments lá, que l’homme
voit le mieux? . . . [Back to Text]
6Saint
Augustine (345-430), Bishop of Hippo, a key figure in the development of early
Christianity; Madame de Guyon: a
sixteenth-century French mystic. [Back to Text]
7Vedanta:
a philosophical tradition within Hinduism. [Back to Text]
8Emperor
Tiberius: the Roman emperor after Augustus (from 14 AD to 37 AD). [Back to Text]
9Brahmin:
the elite priesthood in Hinduism. [Back to Text]
10Epicurean:
a follower of Epicurus (341 BC-270 BC), who taught that the highest good was
pleasure, especially contemplative pleasure. [Back to Text]
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