47.
—The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find
God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature—but that
we regard what has been honoured as God, not as “divine,” but as
pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime
against life. . . We deny that God is God . . . If any one were to
show us this Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe
in him.—In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit,
dei negatio.— Such a religion as Christianity, which does
not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality
asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the
“wisdom of this world,” which is to say, of science—and
it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and
cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in
matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the
mind. ”Faith,” as an imperative, vetoes science— in praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well
knew that lying—that “faith”—was necessary; later
on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.—The God that Paul invented for
himself, a God who “reduced to absurdity” “the wisdom of this
world” (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and
medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination
to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God,
thora—that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose
of the “wisdom of this world”. his enemies are the good
philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school—on them he makes his
war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without
being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees
behind the “holy books,” and as a physician he sees behind
the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician
says “incurable”. the philologian says “fraud.”. . .
