52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual
well-being,—sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use
as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it
pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the
superbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent
in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of
“faith” must be a form of sickness too, and that all straight,
straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must be banned by the
church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start. . . . The
complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest—revealed by a glance
at him—is a phenomenon resulting from
décadence,—one may observe in
hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of
instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for
looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of décadence.
”Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist,
the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct
demands that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point.
“Whatever makes for illness is good; whatever issues from abundance,
from super-abundance, from power, is evil” so argues the believer.
The impulse to lie—it is by this that I recognize every foreordained
theologian.—Another characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness for
philology. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of
reading with profit—the capacity for absorbing facts without
interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and
subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as
ephexis[1] in interpretation: whether
one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or
with weather statistics—not to mention the “salvation of the
soul.” . . . The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome,
is ready to explain, say, a “passage of Scripture,” or an experience,
or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of
the Psalms of David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a
philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows
from Suabia[2] use the “finger of God” to
convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle
of “grace,” a “providence” and an “experience of
salvation”. The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of
decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the
perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital
dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always
cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our
carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd
a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic
servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac—man—at bottom, he is a
mere name for the stupidest sort of chance. . . . “Divine Providence,”
which every third man in “educated Germany” still believes in, is so
strong an argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a
stronger. And in any case it is an argument against Germans! . . .
Footnotes
[1]
. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks
scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism.
[2]
. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its
famous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C.
Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet
abomination, David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian.
Vide§ 10 and § 28.