50.
In this place I can't permit myself to omit
a psychology of "belief," of the "believer," for the special benefit of
'believers." If there remain any today who do not yet know how indecent
it
is to be "believing" — or how much a sign of
decadence, of a broken
will to live — then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches
even the deaf. — It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that
there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called
"proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore
it is true."
— It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated,
it is merely promised:
it hangs upon "faith" as a condition — one
shall
be
blessed
because
one believes .... But what of the thing that the
priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond" — how
is that to be demonstrated? — The "proof by power," thus assumed,
is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith
promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes
for blessedness — therefore, it is true." ... But this is
as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be
absurdum
itself as
a criterion of truth. — But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that
blessedness by faith may be demonstrated
( — not
merely hoped for,
and not
merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even
so, could
blessedness — in a technical term,
pleasure —
ever
be
a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against
truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question
"What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly
suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof
of "pleasure — nothing
more; why in the world should it be assumed that
true judgments
give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established
harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train? — The
experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches
the contrary.
Man
has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it
almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling
to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth
is the hardest of all services. — What, then, is the meaning of
integrity
in
things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart,
that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and
Nay a matter of conscience! — Faith makes blessed: therefore,
it
lies....
51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances,
may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée
fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith
actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there
were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through
a lunatic asylum. Not,
of course, to a priest: for his instincts
prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums
not lunatic asylums.
Christianity finds sickness
necessary,
just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health — the
actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church
is to make
people ill. And the church itself — doesn't it set up
a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal? — The whole earth as a
madhouse? — The sort of religious man that the church
wants
is a
typical decadent;
the moment at which a religious crisis dominates
a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner
world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung
and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest"
states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth,
are actually epileptoid in form — the church has granted the name of holy
only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem....
Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of
training22in
penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing
a folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it, which is
to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian:
one is not "converted" to Christianity — one must first be sick enough
for it .... We others, who have the courage for health and likewise
for contempt, — we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding
of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul!
that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health
as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is
possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that,
to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a
pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"
— a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished,
enervated and incurably disordered body! ... The Christian movement, as
a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising
of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements ( — who now, under cover of
Christianity, aspire to power) — It does not
represent the decay
of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of decadence
products
from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It
was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
noble
antiquity,
which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the
learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when
the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole
imperium
were
Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached its finest
and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its
Christian instincts, triumphed ... Christianity was not "national,"
it was not based on race — it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited
by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancor of the
sick at its very core — the instinct against the
healthy, against
health.
Everything
that is well — constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives
offense to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying:
"And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish
things
of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are
despised":23
this was the formula; in hoc signo the
decadence
triumphed.
— God on the cross — is man always to miss the frightful
inner significance of this symbol? — Everything that suffers, everything
that hangs on the cross, is divine .... We all hang on the cross,
consequently we
are divine .... We alone are divine .... Christianity
was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it — Christianity
remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity. —
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
decadence,
— 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
decadence.
"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
ephexis24
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 Suabia25
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! ...
53.
— It is so little true that
martyrs offer
any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any
martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone
in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the
world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility
to
the problem of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth
is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only
peasants, or peasant apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such
way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual
conscience the greater will be his modesty, his
discretion, on this
point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know
anything
further
... "Truth," as the word is understood by every
prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every
churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been
made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary
to the unearthing of even the smallest truth. — The deaths of the martyrs,
it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have
misled
...
The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there
must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which,
as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking) —
this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts,
upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have damaged
the
truth.... Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give
an honorable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism. — But why? Is
the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his
life for it? — An error that becomes honorable is simply an error that
has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians,
that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies? — One best
disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice — that is also the
best way to dispose of theologians .... This was precisely the world-historical
stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honor
to the cause they opposed — that they made it a present of the fascination
of martyrdom .... Women are still on their knees before an error because
they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. Is the cross,
then, an argument? — But about all these things there is one, and one
only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years — Zarathustra.
They made signs in blood along the way
that they went, and their folly taught them that the truth is proved by
blood. But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth
even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the
heart. And when one goeth through fire for his teaching — what doth
that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's
own burning!26
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects
are skeptical. Zarathustra is a skeptic. The strength, the freedom which
proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual
power, manifest
themselves as skepticism. Men of fixed convictions
do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values
and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far
enough, they do not see what is below
them: whereas a man who would
talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five
hundred convictions beneath him — and
behind
him.... A mind
that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto,
is necessarily skeptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction
belongs
to
strength, and to an independent point of view ... That grand passion which
is at once the foundation and the power of a skeptic's existence, and is
both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the
whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it
gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it
does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one
may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes
use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them — it knows itself
to be sovereign. — On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned
by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of
weakness.
The
man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man
— such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals
within himself. The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only
be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use
him up. His instinct gives the highest honors to an ethic of self-effacement;
he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience,
his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement,
of self-estrangement. . . When one reflects how necessary it is to
the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without
and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense,
slavery,
is
the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed
man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and
"faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid
seeing
many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and
through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly — these are conditions
necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are
antagonists
of
the truthful man — of the truth.... The believer is not free to answer
the question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own
conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall.
The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions
into a fanatic — Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon
— these types stand in opposition to the strong,
emancipated
spirit.
But the grandiose attitudes of these sick
intellects, these intellectual
epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses — fanatics are picturesque,
and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to
reasons....
55.
— One step further in the psychology of conviction,
of "faith." It is now a good while since I first proposed for consideration
the question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to
truth than lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)27
This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any actual
difference between a lie and a conviction? — All the world believes that
there is; but what is not believed by all the world! — Every conviction
has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error:
it becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long time,
not one, and then, for an even longer time, hardly
one. What if
falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction? — Sometimes
all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father
becomes a conviction in the son. — I call it lying to refuse to see what
one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered
before witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most
common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception
of others is a relatively rare offense. — Now, this will
not to
see what one sees, this will not to see it as it is, is almost the
first requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party
man becomes inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced
that Rome was synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought
the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this
conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including
the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality
upon their tongues — that morality almost owes its very
survival to
the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?
— "This is our conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we
live and die for it — let us respect all who have convictions!" — I have
actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the
contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more respectable
because he lies on principle ... The priests, who have more finesse in
such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies against the
notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a
matter of principle
because
it serves a purpose, have borrowed from
the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the will
of God" and "the revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his
categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was his practical
reason.28
There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not
for
man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation,
are beyond human reason .... To know the limits of reason — that
alone is genuine. philosophy. Why did God make a revelation to man? Would
God have done anything superfluous? Man could not find out for himself
what was good and what was evil, so God taught him His will. Moral: the
priest does not lie — the question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing
to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie
about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary to know
what
is true. But this is more than man can know; therefore,
the priest is simply the mouth-piece of God. — Such a priestly syllogism
is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewd
dodge
of "revelation" belong to the general priestly type — to the
priest of the
decadence
as well as to the priest of pagan times
( — Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God" is a word
signifying acquiescence in all things) — The "law," the "will of God,"
the "holy book," and "inspiration" — all these things are merely words
for the conditions under
which the priest comes to power and with
which he maintains his power, — these concepts are to be found at the
bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical
schemes of governments. The "holy lie" — common alike to Confucius, to
the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian church — is not even
wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this means, no matter where it is heard,
the priest lies ....
56.
— In the last analysis it comes to this: what
is the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends
are not visible is my
objection to the means it employs. Only bad
ends
appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising
of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept
of sin — therefore, its means are also bad. — I have a contrary
feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual
and superior work, which it would be a sin against the
intelligence
to
so much as name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to
see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an
evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition, — it gives even
the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And,
not
to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind
of Bible: by means of it the
nobles,
the philosophers and the warriors
keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it
shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling
toward self and life — the sun
shines upon the whole book. — All
the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity — for example,
procreation, women and marriage — are here handled earnestly, with reverence
and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands
of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this:
"to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman
have her own husband; ... it is better to marry than to burn"?29
And is it possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of man
is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by the doctrine of
the immaculata conceptio? ... I know of no book in which so many
delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these
old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it
would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says
in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke
of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there is nothing purer
than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and
the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still another place — perhaps this
is also a holy lie — : "all the orifices of the body above the navel are
pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."
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 Christianity contemptible.
— 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 is not 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 honorable 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 ....
58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies
makes a great difference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There
is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their
instinct, points only toward destruction. One need only turn to history
for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have
just studied a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert
the conditions which cause life to flourish into an "eternal" social
organization, — Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such
an organization, because life flourished under it. There the benefits
that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity
were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in
a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible;
here, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted
overnight .... That
which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the
most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has
ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after
it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilettantism —
those holy anarchists
made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world," which is to say,
the
imperium
Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another — and even
Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters .... The Christian
and the anarchist: both are decadents; both are incapable of any
act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating,
blood-sucking;
both
have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up,
and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future .... Christianity
was the vampire of the imperium Romanum, —
overnight it destroyed
the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great
culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not
yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the
history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better, —
this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely
the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its
worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub
specie aeterni
has been brought into being, or even dreamed of! — This
organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident
of personality has nothing to do with such things — the
first principle
of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand
up against the
corruptest
of all forms of corruption — against Christians
.... These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity,
crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in
real
things,
of all instinct for reality — this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated
gang gradually alienated all "souls," step by step, from that colossal
edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures
that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious
purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy
of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of
the innocent, the
unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all,
the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge — all that sort
of thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent
form, Epicurus had combated. One has but to read Lucretius to know what
Epicurus
made war upon — not paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say,
the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and
immortality. — He combated the subterranean
cults, the whole of
latent Christianity — to deny immortality was already a form of genuine
salvation.
— Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean
— when
Paul appeared ... Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the
world," in the flesh and inspired by genius — the Jew, the eternal Jew
par
excellence.... What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian
Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world conflagration"
might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on the cross," all secret
seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might
be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the Jews." — Christianity
is the formula for exceeding
and summing up the subterranean cults
of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras,
for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed
itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the
truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala
religion into the mouth of the "Savior" as his own inventions, and not
only into the mouth — he
made out of him something that even a priest
of Mithras could understand ... This was his revelation at Damascus: he
grasped the fact that he
needed
the belief in immortality in order
to rob "the world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master
Rome — that the notion of a "beyond" is the death of life. Nihilist
and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme.
59.
The whole labor of the ancient world gone
for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an
enormity arouses in me. — And, considering the fact that its labor was
merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only
the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning
of
antiquity disappears! . . To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?
— All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the
methods
of
science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable
art of reading profitably — that first necessity to the tradition of culture,
the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics
and mechanics, were on the right road, — the sense of fact, the
last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions
were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential
to
the beginning of the work was ready; — and the most
essential, it
cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop,
and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have to day reconquered,
with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves — for certain bad instincts,
certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies — that is to say,
the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in
the smallest things, the whole
integrity of knowledge — all these
things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years!
More,
there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste!
Not as
mere brain-drilling!
Not
as "German" culture, with its loutish manners!
But as body, as bearing, as instinct — in short, as reality ... All
gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory ! — The Greeks!
The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for
organization and administration, faith in and the will to secure
the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the imperium
Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond
mere art, but had become reality, truth, life . . — All overwhelmed
in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by
Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking,
invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered, — only sucked dry! ... Hidden
vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically
ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole
ghetto-world
of the
soul, was at once on top! — One
needs but read any of the
Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in
order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an error,
however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders
of the Christian movement: — ah, but they were clever, clever to the point
of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was something
quite different. Nature neglected — perhaps forgot — to give them even
the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly
instincts.
. . Between ourselves, they are not even men .... If Islam despises Christianity,
it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is
dealing with men ....
60.
Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest
of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest
of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in
Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses
and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down ( — I
do not say by what sort of feet — ) Why? Because it had to thank noble
and manly instincts for its origin — because it said yes to life, even
to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! ... The crusaders
later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting
for them to have groveled in the dust — a civilization beside which even
that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile." — What
they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich. ... Let us put
aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing
more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was
in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility
was to be won ... The German noble, always the "Swiss guard" of
the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church —
but
well paid ... Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German
swords and German blood and valor that has enabled the church to carry
through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point
a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands
outside
the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious ... Christianity,
alcohol — the two great
means of corruption .... Intrinsically there
should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between
an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty
to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not .... "War to the
knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling,
this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German
emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit,
before he can feel decently? I can't make out how a German could
ever feel
Christian....
61.
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory
that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have
destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe
was ever to reap — the Renaissance.
Is it understood at last, will
it
ever be understood, what
the Renaissance was? The transvaluation
of Christian values, — an
attempt with all available means,
all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph
of the opposite values, the more
noble
values .... This has
been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical
question than that of the Renaissance — it is
my question too —
; there has never been a form of attack
more fundamental, more direct,
or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy!
To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and
there enthrone the more noble values — that is to say, to
insinuate
them
into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those
sitting there ... I see before me the
possibility
of a perfectly
heavenly enchantment and spectacle : — it seems to me to scintillate with
all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is
an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for
thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich
in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that
it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter — Caesar
Borgia as pope!
... Am I understood? ... Well then, that would have
been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today — : by
it Christianity would have been swept away! — What happened? A German
monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts
of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion
against the
Renaissance in Rome .... Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving,
the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its
capital
— instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious
man thinks only of himself. — Luther saw only the
depravity of the
papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the
old corruption, the peccatum originale,
Christianity itself, no
longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there
was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful
and daring things! ... And Luther restored the church:
he
attacked it .... The Renaissance — an event without meaning, a great futility
! — Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us!
Futility — that
has
always been the work of the Germans. — The Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant
and so-called German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire --
every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something
irrecoverable
... These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness
in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay.
For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their
fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures,
all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of, — they also
have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists,
and the most incurable and indestructible — Protestantism .... If mankind
never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans
will be to
blame ....
62.
— With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce
my judgment. I condemn
Christianity; I bring against the Christian
church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever
had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions;
it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption.
The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has
turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and
every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me
of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against
any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it
creates distress
to make
itself
immortal .... For example, the worm of sin: it was
the church that first enriched mankind with this misery! — The "equality
of souls before God" — this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes
of
all the base-minded — this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the
modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order — this
is Christian
dynamite .... The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity
forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art
of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt
for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism"
of Christianity! — Parasitism as the only
practice of the church;
with its anaemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love,
all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the
cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever
heard of, — against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness
of
soul — against life itself ....
This eternal accusation against Christianity
I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found — I have letters
that even the blind will be able to see .... I call Christianity the one
great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct
of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean
and small
enough, — I call it the one immortal blemish upon the
human race ....
And mankind reckons
time from the
dies
nefastus when this fatality befell — from the
first day of Christianity!
— Why not rather from its last? — From today? — The transvaluation
of all values! ... |
