22.
When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest
orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking
power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted
men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self
torture—in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case
of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through
self, is not merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain,
but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others,
a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas.
Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in
order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are
the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament,
the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms,
whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion
for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have become
kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (—Europe is not yet ripe for it—):
it is a summons 'that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful
rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims
at mastering beasts of prey; its modus
operandi is to make them ill—to make feeble is
the Christian recipe for taming, for “civilizing.” Buddhism is a
religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity
appears before civilization has so much as begun—under certain circumstances
it lays the very foundations thereof.