03. CHAPTER III
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
45. The human soul and its limits, the range of man's inner
experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances
of these experiences, the entire history of the soul UP TO THE
PRESENT TIME, and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is
the preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover
of a "big hunt". But how often must he say despairingly to
himself: "A single individual! alas, only a single individual!
and this great forest, this virgin forest!" So he would like to
have some hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained
hounds, that he could send into the history of the human soul, to
drive HIS game together. In vain: again and again he experiences,
profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants
and dogs for all the things that directly excite his curiosity.
The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting-
domains, where courage, sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are
required, is that they are no longer serviceable just when the
"BIG hunt," and also the great danger commences,--it is precisely
then that they lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for
instance, to divine and determine what
sort of history the
problem of KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIENCE has hitherto had in the souls
of homines religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to
possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the
intellectual conscience of Pascal; and then he would still
require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality,
which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and
effectively formulize this mass of dangerous and painful
experiences.--But who could do me this service! And who would
have time to wait for such servants!--they evidently appear too
rarely, they are so improbable at all times! Eventually one must
do everything ONESELF in order to know something; which means
that one has MUCH to do!--But a curiosity like mine is once for
all the most agreeable of vices--pardon me! I mean to say that
the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon
earth.
46. Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not
infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly
free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between
philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the
education in tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave--this
faith is NOT that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a
Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the
spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much
rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner
a continuous suicide of reason--a
tough, long-lived, worm-like
reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow.
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the
sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of
spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and
self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in
this faith, which is adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very
fastidious conscience, it takes for granted that the subjection
of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL, that all the past and all
the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form
of which "faith" comes to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness
as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense
for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an
antique taste by the paradox of the formula, "God on the Cross".
Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in
inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and
questionable as this formula: it promised a transvaluation of all
ancient values--It was the Orient, the PROFOUND Orient, it was
the Oriental slave who thus took revenge on Rome and its noble,
light-minded toleration, on the Roman "Catholicism" of non-faith,
and it was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith,
the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of
the faith, which made the slaves indignant at their masters and
revolt against them. "Enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave
desires the unconditioned, he understands nothing but the
tyrannous, even in morals, he loves as he hates, without NUANCE,
to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of
sickness
--his many HIDDEN sufferings make him revolt against the
noble taste which seems to DENY suffering. The skepticism with
regard to suffering, fundamentally only an attitude of
aristocratic morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of
the last great slave-insurrection which began with the French
Revolution.
47. Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so
far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as
to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence--but without
its being possible to determine with certainty which is cause and
which is effect, or IF any relation at all of cause and effect
exists there. This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one
of the most regular symptoms among savage as well as among
civilized peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality,
which then with equal suddenness transforms into penitential
paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both
symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere
is it MORE obligatory to put aside explanations around no other
type has there grown such a mass of absurdity and superstition,
no other type seems to have been more interesting to men and even
to philosophers--perhaps it is time to become just a little
indifferent here, to learn caution, or, better still, to look
AWAY, TO GO AWAY--Yet in the background of the most recent
philosophy, that of Schopenhauer, we find almost as the problem
in itself, this terrible note of interrogation of the religious
crisis and
awakening. How is the negation of will POSSIBLE? how
is the saint possible?--that seems to have been the very question
with which Schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher.
And thus it was a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his
most convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as far as Germany
is concerned), namely, Richard Wagner, should bring his own life-
work to an end just here, and should finally put that terrible
and eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vecu, and as it
loved and lived, at the very time that the mad-doctors in almost
all European countries had an opportunity to study the type close
at hand, wherever the religious neurosis--or as I call it, "the
religious mood"--made its latest epidemical outbreak and display
as the "Salvation Army"--If it be a question, however, as to what
has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all
ages, and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the
saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous
therein--namely, the immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states
of the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed
here to be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned
into a "saint," a good man. The hitherto existing psychology was
wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened
principally because psychology had placed itself under the
dominion of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions of moral
values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions into the
text and facts of the case? What? "Miracle" only an error of
interpretation? A lack of philology?
48. It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply attached to
their Catholicism than we Northerners are to Christianity
generally, and that consequently unbelief in Catholic countries
means something quite different from what it does among
Protestants--namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the
race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit (or non-
spirit) of the race.
We Northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous
races, even as regards our talents for religion--we have POOR
talents for it. One may make an exception in the case of the
Celts, who have theretofore furnished also the best soil for
Christian infection in the North: the Christian ideal blossomed
forth in France as much as ever the pale sun of the north would
allow it. How strangely pious for our taste are still these later
French skeptics, whenever there is any Celtic blood in their
origin! How Catholic, how un-German does Auguste Comte's
Sociology seem to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts! How
Jesuitical, that amiable and shrewd cicerone of Port Royal,
Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his hostility to Jesuits! And even
Ernest Renan: how inaccessible to us Northerners does the
language of such a Renan appear, in whom every instant the merest
touch of religious thrill throws his refined voluptuous and
comfortably couching soul off its balance! Let us repeat after
him these fine sentences--and what wickedness and haughtiness is
immediately aroused by way of answer in our probably less
beautiful but harder souls, that is
to say, in our more German
souls!--"DISONS DONC HARDIMENT QUE LA RELIGION EST UN PRODUIT DE
L'HOMME NORMAL, QUE L'HOMME EST LE PLUS DANS LE VRAI QUANT IL EST
LE PLUS RELIGIEUX ET LE PLUS ASSURE D'UNE DESTINEE INFINIE. . . .
C'EST QUAND IL EST BON QU'IL VEUT QUE LA VIRTU CORRESPONDE A UN
ORDER ETERNAL, C'EST QUAND IL CONTEMPLE LES CHOSES D'UNE MANIERE
DESINTERESSEE QU'IL TROUVE LA MORT REVOLTANTE ET ABSURDE. COMMENT
NE PAS SUPPOSER QUE C'EST DANS CES MOMENTS-LA, QUE L'HOMME VOIT
LE MIEUX?" . . . These sentences are so extremely ANTIPODAL to my
ears and habits of thought, that in my first impulse of rage on
finding them, I wrote on the margin, "LA NIAISERIE RELIGIEUSE PAR
EXCELLENCE!"--until in my later rage I even took a fancy to them,
these sentences with their truth absolutely inverted! It is so
nice and such a distinction to have one's own antipodes!
49. That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the
ancient Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it
pours forth--it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an
attitude towards nature and life.--Later on, when the populace
got the upper hand in Greece, FEAR became rampant also in
religion; and Christianity was preparing itself.
50. The passion for God: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and
importunate kinds of it, like that of Luther--the whole of
Protestantism lacks the southern DELICATEZZA. There is an
Oriental exaltation
of the mind in it, like that of an
undeservedly favoured or elevated slave, as in the case of St.
Augustine, for instance, who lacks in an offensive manner, all
nobility in bearing and desires. There is a feminine tenderness
and sensuality in it, which modestly and unconsciously longs for
a UNIO MYSTICA ET PHYSICA, as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In
many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a
girl's or youth's puberty; here and there even as the hysteria of
an old maid, also as her last ambition. The Church has frequently
canonized the woman in such a case.
51. The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently
before the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter
voluntary privation--why did they thus bow? They divined in him--
and as it were behind the questionableness of his frail and
wretched appearance--the superior force which wished to test
itself by such a subjugation; the strength of will, in which they
recognized their own strength and love of power, and knew how to
honour it: they honoured something in themselves when they
honoured the saint. In addition to this, the contemplation of the
saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an enormity of self-
negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for
nothing--they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a reason
for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might
wish to be more accurately informed through his secret
interlocutors and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the
world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new
power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:--it was the "Will to
Power" which obliged them to halt before the saint. They had to
question him.
52. In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice,
there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that
Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One
stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of
what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old Asia
and its little out-pushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by
all means, to figure before Asia as the "Progress of Mankind." To
be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame house-animal, and
knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people
of today, including the Christians of "cultured" Christianity),
need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins--the taste
for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and
"small": perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of
grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the
odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in
it). To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of
taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one
book, as the "Bible," as "The Book in Itself," is perhaps the
greatest audacity and "sin against the Spirit" which literary
Europe has upon its conscience.
53. Why Atheism nowadays? "The father" in God is thoroughly
refuted; equally so "the judge," "the rewarder." Also his "free
will": he does not hear--and even if he did, he would not know
how to help. The worst is that he seems incapable of
communicating himself clearly; is he uncertain?--This is what I
have made out (by questioning and listening at a variety of
conversations) to be the cause of the decline of European theism;
it appears to me that though the religious instinct is in
vigorous growth,--it rejects the theistic satisfaction with
profound distrust.
54. What does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes--
and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his
procedure--an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all
philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise
of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception--that is
to say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental presupposition of
Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as epistemological
skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN, although (for
keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious. Formerly, in
effect, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in grammar and
the grammatical subject: one said, "I" is the condition, "think"
is the predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for
which one MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then
made, with marvelous tenacity
and subtlety, to see if one could
not get out of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps
true: "think" the condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I,"
therefore, only a synthesis which has been MADE by thinking
itself. KANT really wished to prove that, starting from the
subject, the subject could not be proved--nor the object either:
the possibility of an APPARENT EXISTENCE of the subject, and
therefore of "the soul," may not always have been strange to
him,--the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the
Vedanta philosophy.
55. There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many
rounds; but three of these are the most important. Once on a time
men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just those
they loved the best--to this category belong the firstling
sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of
the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri,
that most terrible of all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the
moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the
strongest instincts they possessed, their "nature"; THIS festal
joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and "anti-natural"
fanatics. Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed? Was it
not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything
comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden
harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was it not
necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of cruelty to
themselves to worship stone, stupidity,
gravity, fate,
nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness--this paradoxical
mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising
generation; we all know something thereof already.
56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire,
has long endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of
pessimism and free it from the half-Christian, half-German
narrowness and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself
to this century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's
philosophy; whoever, with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, has
actually looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all
possible modes of thought--beyond good and evil, and no longer
like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of
morality,--whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby,
without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the
opposite ideal: the ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant,
and vivacious man, who has not only learnt to compromise and
arrange with that which was and is, but wishes to have it again
AS IT WAS AND IS, for all eternity, insatiably calling out de
capo, not only to himself, but to the whole piece and play; and
not only the play, but actually to him who requires the play--and
makes it necessary; because he always requires himself anew--and
makes himself necessary.--What? And this would not be--circulus
vitiosus deus?
57. The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with
the strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world
becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever
coming into view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual
eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been an
occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for
children and childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn conceptions
that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions
"God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more importance
than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old man;--
and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be
necessary once more for "the old man"--always childish enough, an
eternal child!
58. Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or
semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for
its favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its
soft placidity called "prayer," the state of perpetual readiness
for the "coming of God"), I mean the idleness with a good
conscience, the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which
the aristocratic sentiment that work is DISHONOURING--that it
vulgarizes body and soul--is not quite unfamiliar? And that
consequently the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited,
foolishly proud laboriousness educates and prepares for
"unbelief" more than anything else?
Among these, for instance,
who are at present living apart from religion in Germany, I find
"free-thinkers" of diversified species and origin, but above all
a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to
generation has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no
longer know what purpose religions serve, and only note their
existence in the world with a kind of dull astonishment. They
feel themselves already fully occupied, these good people, be it
by their business or by their pleasures, not to mention the
"Fatherland," and the newspapers, and their "family duties"; it
seems that they have no time whatever left for religion; and
above all, it is not obvious to them whether it is a question of
a new business or a new pleasure--for it is impossible, they say
to themselves, that people should go to church merely to spoil
their tempers. They are by no means enemies of religious customs;
should certain circumstances, State affairs perhaps, require
their participation in such customs, they do what is required, as
so many things are done--with a patient and unassuming
seriousness, and without much curiosity or discomfort;--they live
too much apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a FOR
or AGAINST in such matters. Among those indifferent persons may
be reckoned nowadays the majority of German Protestants of the
middle classes, especially in the great laborious centres of
trade and commerce; also the majority of laborious scholars, and
the entire University personnel (with the exception of the
theologians, whose existence and possibility there always gives
psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to solve). On the part
of
pious, or merely church-going people, there is seldom any idea
of HOW MUCH good-will, one might say arbitrary will, is now
necessary for a German scholar to take the problem of religion
seriously; his whole profession (and as I have said, his whole
workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled by his modern
conscience) inclines him to a lofty and almost charitable
serenity as regards religion, with which is occasionally mingled
a slight disdain for the "uncleanliness" of spirit which he takes
for granted wherever any one still professes to belong to the
Church. It is only with the help of history (NOT through his own
personal experience, therefore) that the scholar succeeds in
bringing himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a certain
timid deference in presence of religions; but even when his
sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them, he
has not personally advanced one step nearer to that which still
maintains itself as Church or as piety; perhaps even the
contrary. The practical indifference to religious matters in the
midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually
sublimates itself in his case into circumspection and
cleanliness, which shuns contact with religious men and things;
and it may be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which
prompts him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself
brings with it.--Every age has its own divine type of naivete,
for the discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much
naivete--adorable, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naivete is
involved in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, in the
good conscience of his tolerance,
in the unsuspecting, simple
certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as a
lower and less valuable type, beyond, before, and ABOVE which he
himself has developed--he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man,
the sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of "ideas," of "modern
ideas"!
59. Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined
what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial. It is
their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty,
lightsome, and false. Here and there one finds a passionate and
exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as
in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the
cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or
another made an unlucky dive BENEATH it. Perhaps there is even an
order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born
artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to FALSIFY
its image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might guess
to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which
they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and
deified,--one might reckon the homines religiosi among the
artists, as their HIGHEST rank. It is the profound, suspicious
fear of an incurable pessimism which compels whole centuries to
fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence:
the fear of the instinct which divines that truth might be
attained TOO soon, before man has become strong enough, hard
enough, artist enough. . . . Piety, the "Life in
God," regarded in
this light, would appear as the most elaborate and ultimate
product of the FEAR of truth, as artist-adoration and artist-
intoxication in presence of the most logical of all
falsifications, as the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth
at any price. Perhaps there has hitherto been no more effective
means of beautifying man than piety, by means of it man can
become so artful, so superficial, so iridescent, and so good,
that his appearance no longer offends.
60. To love mankind FOR GOD'S SAKE--this has so far been the
noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained.
That love to mankind, without any redeeming intention in the
background, is only an ADDITIONAL folly and brutishness, that the
inclination to this love has first to get its proportion, its
delicacy, its gram of salt and sprinkling of ambergris from a
higher inclination--whoever first perceived and "experienced"
this, however his tongue may have stammered as it attempted to
express such a delicate matter, let him for all time be holy and
respected, as the man who has so far flown highest and gone
astray in the finest fashion!
61. The philosopher, as WE free spirits understand him--as the
man of the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for
the general development of mankind,--will use religion for his
disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the
contemporary political and economic conditions. The
selecting and
disciplining influence--destructive, as well as creative and
fashioning--which can be exercised by means of religion is
manifold and varied, according to the sort of people placed under
its spell and protection. For those who are strong and
independent, destined and trained to command, in whom the
judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated, religion is
an additional means for overcoming resistance in the exercise of
authority--as a bond which binds rulers and subjects in common,
betraying and surrendering to the former the conscience of the
latter, their inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience.
And in the case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by
virtue of superior spirituality they should incline to a more
retired and contemplative life, reserving to themselves only the
more refined forms of government (over chosen disciples or
members of an order), religion itself may be used as a means for
obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of managing GROSSER
affairs, and for securing immunity from the UNAVOIDABLE filth of
all political agitation. The Brahmins, for instance, understood
this fact. With the help of a religious organization, they
secured to themselves the power of nominating kings for the
people, while their sentiments prompted them to keep apart and
outside, as men with a higher and super-regal mission. At the
same time religion gives inducement and opportunity to some of
the subjects to qualify themselves for future ruling and
commanding the slowly ascending ranks and classes, in which,
through fortunate marriage customs, volitional power and
delight
in self-control are on the increase. To them religion offers
sufficient incentives and temptations to aspire to higher
intellectuality, and to experience the sentiments of
authoritative self-control, of silence, and of solitude.
Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of
educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its
hereditary baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy.
And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who
exist for service and general utility, and are only so far
entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable contentedness with
their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of
obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with
something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of
justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all
the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Religion, together with
the religious significance of life, sheds sunshine over such
perpetually harassed men, and makes even their own aspect
endurable to them, it operates upon them as the Epicurean
philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a higher order, in
a refreshing and refining manner, almost TURNING suffering TO
ACCOUNT, and in the end even hallowing and vindicating it. There
is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as
their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by
piety to a seemingly higher order of things, and thereby to
retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they
find it difficult enough to live--this very difficulty being
necessary.
62. To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against
such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the
cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT
operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of
the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they
wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means.
Among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of
defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily
suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are
always the exception; and in view of the fact that man is THE
ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare
exception. But worse still. The higher the type a man represents,
the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the
accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution
of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive
effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives
are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine. What, then, is
the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the
SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep
alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions FOR
SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle; they are
always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease,
and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false
and impossible. However highly we may esteem this indulgent and
preservative care (inasmuch
as in applying to others, it has
applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most
suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give
a general appreciation of them--are among the principal causes
which have kept the type of "man" upon a lower level--they have
preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE PERISHED. One has to
thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich
in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that
the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe
hitherto! But when they had given comfort to the sufferers,
courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to
the helpless, and when they had allured from society into
convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and
distracted: what else had they to do in order to work
systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for
the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in
deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN
RACE? To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they had to
do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast
suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything
autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which
are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"--
into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction;
forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over
the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things--THAT is
the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose,
until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness,"
"unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one sentiment. If
one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and
refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and
impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never
cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that
some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in
order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man? He, however, who, with
opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine
hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary
degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the
European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to
cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers,
presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a
work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest
stone! What have you presumed to do!"--I should say that
Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of
presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be
entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men, not
sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime self-
constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and
perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the
radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that
separate man from man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before
God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a
dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious
animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the
present day.