51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness,
but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe
by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith
actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there
were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a
lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt
him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic
asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek
spirit had need of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose
of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill.
And the church itself—doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the
ultimate ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?—The sort of religious
man that the church wants is a typical decadent; the moment
at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics
of nervous disorder; the inner world” of the religious man is so much
like the “inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is
difficult to distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind,
held up be fore mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually
epileptoid in form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics
or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem
. . . . Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of
training[1]in penance and salvation (now best
studied in England) as a method of producing a folie
circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say,
a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not
“converted” to Christianity—one must first be sick enough for
it. . . . We others, who have the courage for health and likewise for
contempt,—we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of
the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that
makes a “virtue” of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as
a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to
carry about a “perfect soul” in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this
end, had to devise for itself a new concept of “perfection,” a pale,
sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called “holiness”
—a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished,
enervated and incurably disordered body! . . . The Christian movement, as a European
movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast
and refuse elements (—who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to
power)— It does not represent the decay of a race; it represents,
on the contrary, a conglomeration of décadence
products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of noble
antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge
the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the
sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium
were Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached
its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with
its Christian instincts, triumphed . . . Christianity was not
“national,” it was not based on race—it appealed to all the
varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity
has the rancour of the sick at its very core—the instinct against the
healthy, against health. Everything that is well—constituted,
proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I
remind you of Paul's priceless saying: “And God hath chosen the weak
things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base
things of the world, and things which are despised”.[23] this was the formula; in hoc
signo the décadence
triumphed.—God on the cross—is man always to miss the frightful
inner significance of this symbol?—Everything that suffers, everything that
hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We all hang on the cross, consequently
we are divine. . . . We alone are divine. . . . Christianity was thus a
victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it—Christianity remains
to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.—
Footnotes
[1]
. The word training is in English in the text.
[[23]]
. I Corinthians i, 27, 28.