7.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.— Pity stands
in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the
feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he
pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is
multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under
certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living
energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the
case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there
is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of
pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace
to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of
evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is
ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and
condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all
kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured
to call pity a virtue (—in every superior moral system it
appears as a weakness—); going still further, it has been called the
virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues—but let us
always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that
was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was
inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is
denied, and made worthy of denial—pity is the technic of
nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands
against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement
of life: in the rôle of protector of the miserable, it is a
prime agent in the promotion of décadence—pity persuades
to extinction. . . . Of course, one doesn't say “extinction”: one
says “the other world,” or “God,” or “the
true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness. . . . This
innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a
good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it
conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer
was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue. . . .
Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of
mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded
tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek
some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation
of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also, alack, in that
of our whole literary décadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris,
from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged. . . Nothing
is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity.
To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield
the knife here—all this is our business, all this is our
sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans !—