17.
Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is
always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence.
The divinity of this décadence, shorn of its masculine virtues
and passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded,
of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call
themselves “the good.” . . . No hint is needed to indicate the moments
in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first became
possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce their own god to
“goodness-in-itself” also prompts them to eliminate all good qualities
from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a
devil of the latter's god.—The good god, and the devil
like him—both are abortions of
décadence.—How can we be so tolerant of the
naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that
the evolution of the concept of god from “the god of Israel,” the
god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be
described as progress?—But even Renan does this. As if Renan had
a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in the face.
When everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is
strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the
concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff
for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he be comes the poor
man's god, the sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and
the attribute of “saviour” or “redeemer” remains as
the one essential attribute of divinity—just what is the
significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of
the godhead imply?—To be sure, the “kingdom of God” has thus
grown larger. Formerly he had only his own people, his “chose.”
people. But since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves,
into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he
has come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan—until
now he has the “great majority” on his side, and half the earth.
But this god of the “great majority,” this democrat among gods,
has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he
remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all
the noisesome quarters of the world! . . His earthly kingdom, now as always,
is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain
kingdom, a ghetto kingdom. . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so
décadent. . . . Even the palest
of the pale are able to master him—messieurs the metaphysicians, those
albinos of the intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that finally
he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another metaphysician.
Thereafter he resumed once more his old business of spinning the world out of
his inmost being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter
he be came ever thinner and paler—became the “ideal,” became
“pure spirit,” became “the absolute,” became “the
thing-in-itself.” . . . The collapse of a god: he became a
“thing-in-itself.”