23.
Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest,
more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its
susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of
sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the
barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what
he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers.
(His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to
endure it in silence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man
had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy—there was no need to be
ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.
—At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that
belong to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very
little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed
to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct
worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds—the
road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand
that fact thoroughly—this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make
one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the
esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out
of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him
to be actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith
is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that
reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to
the truth becomes a forbidden road.—Hope, in its stronger forms, is a
great deal more powerful stimulans to
life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in
suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it—so
high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out
beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the
suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most
malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil.)[3]—In order that love may be possible, God
must become a person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the
matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint
must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin.
These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on
which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion
as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly
strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct—it
makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.—Love is the state
in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force
of illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening,
for transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any
other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which
would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer is
overcome—it is scarcely even noticed.—So much for the three Christian
virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian
ingenuities.—Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too
full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.—
Footnotes
[[3]]
. That is, in Pandora's box.