48.
—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible—of God's mortal terror of science? . . .
No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence
opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest:
he faces only one great danger; ergo, ”God”
faces only one great danger.—
The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly
perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time.
Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[1] What
does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining. . . But then he notices
that man is also bored. God's pity for the only form of distress that invades
all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's
first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he
sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal”
himself.—So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an
end—and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake
of God.—”Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”—every
priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”—every
priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.
. . . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of
knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man
himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to
himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and
gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden per
se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the
germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of
morality.—”Thou shalt not know”—:the
rest follows from that.—God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder
him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one's self against
science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise
with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad
thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so the priest invents
distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old
age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing but devices for
making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow him to
think. . . Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edifice of knowledge
begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be
done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes
men destroy one another (—the priests have always had need of war. . . .
).War—among other things, a great disturber of science !—Incredible!
Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of
war.—So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become
scientific—there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”. . . .
Footnotes
[1]
. A paraphrase of Schiller's “Against stupidity even
gods struggle in vain.”