57.
One catches the unholiness of Christian means
in flagranti by the simple process of putting the ends sought by
Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manu—by putting these
enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity
cannot evade the necessity of making Christianitycontemptible.—
A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other
good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical
experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no
longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is
recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a
slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different
from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never
recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law:
for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shalt.”
on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain
point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest
insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares
that the series of experiences determining how all shall live—or can
live—has come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as
complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard
experience. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything
is further experimentation—the continuation of the state in which values
are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad
infinitum. Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand,
revelation, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the
laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow
process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came
into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a
miracle . . . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the
assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is
impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question.
The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and
the fathers lived it.—The higher motive of such procedure lies in
the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with
notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved
to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that
instinct attains to a perfect automatism—a primary necessity to every
sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw
up such a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility
of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to
the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be
made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.—The order of
castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of
an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which
no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In
every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating
toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of
these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery
and feeling of perfection. It isnot Manu but nature that sets off
in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are
marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are
distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the
last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The
superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most
perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for
everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right
to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness.
Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:[30] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more
unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that
sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of
things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism.
”The world is perfect”—so prompts the instinct
of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life.
“Imperfection, what ever is inferior to us, distance, the
pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this perfection.
“The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness
where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with
themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery;
in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They
regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation
to play with burdens that would crush all others. . . . Knowledge—a
form of asceticism.—They are the most honourable kind of men: but that
does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule,
not because they want to, but because they are; they are not at
liberty to play second.—The second caste: to this belong the
guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble
warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and
preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of
the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is
rough in the business of ruling-their followers, their right hand,
their most apt disciples.—In all this, I repeat, there is nothing
arbitrary, nothing “made up”. whatever is to the contrary
is made up—by it nature is brought to shame. . . The order of castes,
the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life
itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance
of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest
types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence
of any rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the
privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate
the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts
the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A
high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary
prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts,
commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the
whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre
ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men;
the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to
anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function,
is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the
only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them
intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness;
they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization.
It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything
objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first
prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition
to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre
man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this
is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty. . . . Whom
do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists,
the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his
pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make
him envious and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights;
it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights. . . . What is bad?
But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .
Footnotes
[[30]]
. Few men are noble.