Part III — The Religious Nature
Original German
Drittes Hauptstück:
Das religiöse Wesen.
45 Die menschliche Seele und ihre Grenzen, der bisher überhaupt erreichte Umfang menschlicher innerer Erfahrungen, die Höhen, Tiefen und Fernen dieser Erfahrungen, die ganze bisherige Geschichte der Seele und ihre noch unausgetrunkenen Möglichkeiten: das ist für einen geborenen Psychologen und Freund der "grossen Jagd" das vorbestimmte Jagdbereich. Aber wie oft muss er sich verzweifelt sagen: "ein Einzelner! ach, nur ein Einzelner! und dieser grosse Wald und Urwald!" Und so wünscht er sich einige hundert Jagdgehülfen und feine gelehrte Spürhunde, welche er in die Geschichte der menschlichen Seele treiben könnte, um dort sein Wild zusammenzutreiben. Umsonst: er erprobt es immer wieder, gründlich und bitterlich, wie schlecht zu allen Dingen, die gerade seine Neugierde reizen, Gehülfen und Hunde zu finden sind. Der Übelstand, den es hat, Gelehrte auf neue und gefährliche Jagdbereiche auszuschicken, wo Muth, Klugheit, Feinheit in jedem Sinne noth thun, liegt darin, dass sie gerade dort nicht mehr brauchbar sind, wo die "grosse Jagd", aber auch die grosse Gefahr beginnt:—gerade dort verlieren sie ihr Spürauge und ihre Spürnase. Um zum Beispiel zu errathen und festzustellen, was für eine Geschichte bisher das Problem von Wissen und Gewissen in der Seele der homines religiosi gehabt hat, dazu müsste Einer vielleicht selbst so tief, so verwundet, so ungeheuer sein, wie es das intellektuelle Gewissen Pascal's war:—und dann bedürfte es immer noch jenes ausgespannten Himmels von heller, boshafter Geistigkeit, welcher von Oben herab dies Gewimmel von gefährlichen und schmerzlichen Erlebnissen zu übersehn, zu ordnen, in Formeln zu zwingen vermöchte.—Aber wer thäte mir diesen Dienst! Aber wer hätte Zeit, auf solche Diener zu warten!—sie wachsen ersichtlich zu selten, sie sind zu allen Zeiten so unwahrscheinlich! Zuletzt muss man Alles selber thun, um selber Einiges zu wissen: das heisst, man hat viel zu thun!—Aber eine Neugierde meiner Art bleibt nun einmal das angenehmste aller Laster,—Verzeihung! ich wollte sagen: die Liebe zur Wahrheit hat ihren Lohn im Himmel und schon auf Erden.—
46 Der Glaube, wie ihn das erste Christenthum verlangt und nicht selten erreicht hat, inmitten einer skeptischen und südlich-freigeisterischen Welt, die einen Jahrhunderte langen Kampf von Philosophenschulen hinter sich und in sich hatte, hinzugerechnet die Erziehung zur Toleranz, welche das imperium Romanum gab,—dieser Glaube ist nicht jener treuherzige und bärbeissige Unterthanen-Glaube, mit dem etwa ein Luther oder ein Cromwell oder sonst ein nordischer Barbar des Geistes an ihrem Gotte und Christenthum gehangen haben; viel eher schon jener Glaube Pascal's, der auf schreckliche Weise einem dauernden Selbstmorde der Vernunft ähnlich sieht,—einer zähen langlebigen wurmhaften Vernunft, die nicht mit Einem Male und Einem Streiche todtzumachen ist. Der christliche Glaube ist von Anbeginn Opferung: Opferung aller Freiheit, alles Stolzes, aller Selbstgewissheit des Geistes; zugleich Verknechtung und Selbst-Verhöhnung, Selbst-Verstümmelung. Es ist Grausamkeit und religiöser Phönicismus in diesem Glauben, der einem mürben, vielfachen und viel verwöhnten Gewissen zugemuthet wird: seine Voraussetzung ist, dass die Unterwerfung des Geistes unbeschreiblich wehe thut, dass die ganze Vergangenheit und Gewohnheit eines solchen Geistes sich gegen das Absurdissimum wehrt, als welches ihm der "Glaube" entgegentritt. Die modernen Menschen, mit ihrer Abstumpfung gegen alle christliche Nomenklatur, fühlen das Schauerlich-Superlativische nicht mehr nach, das für einen antiken Geschmack in der Paradoxie der Formel "Gott am Kreuze" lag. Es hat bisher noch niemals und nirgendswo eine gleiche Kühnheit im Umkehren, etwas gleich Furchtbares, Fragendes und Fragwürdiges gegeben wie diese Formel: sie verhiess eine Umwerthung aller antiken Werthe.—Es ist der Orient, der tiefe Orient, es ist der orientalische Sklave, der auf diese Weise an Rom und seiner vornehmen und frivolen Toleranz, am römischen "Katholicismus" des Glaubens Rache nahm:—und immer war es nicht der Glaube, sondern die Freiheit vom Glauben, jene halb stoische und lächelnde Unbekümmertheit um den Ernst des Glaubens, was die Sklaven an ihren Herrn, gegen ihre Herrn empört hat. Die "Aufklärung" empört: der Sklave nämlich will Unbedingtes, er versteht nur das Tyrannische, auch in der Moral, er liebt wie er hasst, ohne Nuance, bis in die Tiefe, bis zum Schmerz, bis zur Krankheit,—sein vieles verborgenes Leiden empört sich gegen den vornehmen Geschmack, der das Leiden zu leugnen scheint. Die Skepsis gegen das Leiden, im Grunde nur eine Attitude der aristokratischen Moral, ist nicht am wenigsten auch an der Entstehung des letzten grossen Sklaven-Aufstandes betheiligt, welcher mit der französischen Revolution begonnen hat.
47 Wo nur auf Erden bisher die religiöse Neurose aufgetreten ist, finden wir sie verknüpft mit drei gefährlichen Diät-Verordnungen: Einsamkeit, Fasten und geschlechtlicher Enthaltsamkeit,—doch ohne dass hier mit Sicherheit zu entscheiden wäre, was da Ursache, was Wirkung sei, und ob hier überhaupt ein Verhältniss von Ursache und Wirkung vorliege. Zum letzten Zweifel berechtigt, dass gerade zu ihren regelmässigsten Symptomen, bei wilden wie bei zahmen Völkern, auch die plötzlichste ausschweifendste Wollüstigkeit gehört, welche dann, ebenso plötzlich, in Busskrampf und Welt- und Willens-Verneinung umschlägt: beides vielleicht als maskirte Epilepsie deutbar? Aber nirgendswo sollte man sich der Deutungen mehr entschlagen: um keinen Typus herum ist bisher eine solche Fülle von Unsinn und Aberglauben aufgewachsen, keiner scheint bisher die Menschen, selbst die Philosophen, mehr interessirt zu haben,—es wäre an der Zeit, hier gerade ein Wenig kalt zu werden, Vorsicht zu lernen, besser noch: wegzusehn, wegzugehn.—Noch im Hintergrunde der letztgekommenen Philosophie, der Schopenhauerischen, steht, beinahe als das Problem an sich, dieses schauerliche Fragezeichen der religiösen Krisis und Erweckung. Wie ist Willensverneinung möglich? wie ist der Heilige möglich?—das scheint wirklich die Frage gewesen zu sein, bei der Schopenhauer zum Philosophen wurde und anfieng. Und so war es eine ächt Schopenhauerische Consequenz, dass sein überzeugtester Anhänger (vielleicht auch sein letzter, was Deutschland betrifft -), nämlich Richard Wagner, das eigne Lebenswerk gerade hier zu Ende brachte und zuletzt noch jenen furchtbaren und ewigen Typus als Kundry auf der Bühne vorführte, type vécu, und wie er leibt und lebt; zu gleicher Zeit, wo die Irrenärzte fast aller Länder Europa's einen Anlass hatten, ihn aus der Nähe zu studiren, überall, wo die religiöse Neurose—oder, wie ich es nenne, "das religiöse Wesen"—als "Heilsarmee" ihren letzten epidemischen Ausbruch und Aufzug gemacht hat.—Fragt man sich aber, was eigentlich am ganzen Phänomen des Heiligen den Menschen aller Art und Zeit, auch den Philosophen, so unbändig interessant gewesen ist: so ist es ohne allen Zweifel der ihm anhaftende Anschein des Wunders, nämlich der unmittelbaren Aufeinanderfolge von Gegensätzen, von moralisch entgegengesetzt gewertheten Zuständen der Seele: man glaubte hier mit Händen zu greifen, dass aus einem "schlechten Menschen" mit Einem Male ein "Heiliger", ein guter Mensch werde. Die bisherige Psychologie litt an dieser Stelle Schiffbruch: sollte es nicht vornehmlich darum geschehen sein, weil sie sich unter die Herrschaft der Moral gestellt hatte, weil sie an die moralischen Werth-Gegensätze selbst glaubte, und diese Gegensätze in den Text und Thatbestand hineinsah, hineinlas, hineindeutete?—Wie? Das "Wunder" nur ein Fehler der Interpretation? Ein Mangel an Philologie?—
48 Es scheint, dass den lateinischen Rassen ihr Katholicismus viel innerlicher zugehört, als uns Nordländern das ganze Christentum überhaupt: und dass folglich der Unglaube in katholischen Ländern etwas ganz Anderes zu bedeuten hat, als in protestantischen—nämlich eine Art Empörung gegen den Geist der Rasse, während er bei uns eher eine Rückkehr zum Geist (oder Ungeist -) der Rasse ist. Wir Nordländer stammen unzweifelhaft aus Barbaren-Rassen, auch in Hinsicht auf unsere Begabung zur Religion: wir sind schlecht für sie begabt. Man darf die Kelten ausnehmen, welche deshalb auch den besten Boden für die Aufnahme der christlichen Infektion im Norden abgegeben haben:—in Frankreich kam das christliche Ideal, soweit es nur die blasse Sonne des Nordens erlaubt hat, zum Ausblühen. Wie fremdartig fromm sind unserm Geschmack selbst diese letzten französischen Skeptiker noch, sofern etwas keltisches Blut in ihrer Abkunft ist! Wie katholisch, wie undeutsch riecht uns Auguste Comte's Sociologie mit ihrer römischen Logik der Instinkte! Wie jesuitisch jener liebenswürdige und kluge Cicerone von Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, trotz all seiner Jesuiten-Feindschaft! Und gar Ernest Renan: wie unzugänglich klingt uns Nordländern die Sprache solch eines Renan, in dem alle Augenblicke irgend ein Nichts von religiöser Spannung seine in feinerem Sinne wollüstige und bequem sich bettende Seele um ihr Gleichgewicht bringt! Man spreche ihm einmal diese schönen Sätze nach,—und was für Bosheit und Übermuth regt sich sofort in unserer wahrscheinlich weniger schönen und härteren, nämlich deutscheren Seele als Antwort! -"disons donc hardiment que la religion est un produit de l'homme normal, que l'homme est le plus dans le vrai quand il est le plus religieux et le plus assuré d'une destinée infinie… C'est quand il est bon qu'il veut que la vertu corresponde à un ordre éternel, c'est quand il contemple les choses d'une manière désintéressée qu'il trouve la mort révoltante et absurde. Comment ne pas supposer que c'est dans ces moments-là, que l'homme voit le mieux?…" Diese Sätze sind meinen Ohren und Gewohnheiten so sehr antipodisch, dass, als ich sie fand, mein erster Ingrimm daneben schrieb "la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!"—bis mein letzter Ingrimm sie gar noch lieb gewann, diese Sätze mit ihrer auf den Kopf gestellten Wahrheit! Es ist so artig, so auszeichnend, seine eignen Antipoden zu haben!
49 Das, was an der Religiosität der alten Griechen staunen macht, ist die unbändige Fülle von Dankbarkeit, welche sie ausströmt:—es ist eine sehr vornehme Art Mensch, welche so vor der Natur und vor dem Leben steht!—Später, als der Pöbel in Griechenland zum Übergewicht kommt, überwuchert die Furcht auch in der Religion; und das Christenthum bereitete sich vor.-
50 Die Leidenschaft für Gott: es giebt bäurische, treuherzige und zudringliche Arten, wie die Luther's,—der ganze Protestantismus entbehrt der südlichen delicatezza. Es giebt ein orientalisches Aussersichsein darin, wie bei einem unverdient begnadeten oder erhobenen Sklaven, zum Beispiel bei Augustin, der auf eine beleidigende Weise aller Vornehmheit der Gebärden und Begierden ermangelt. Es giebt frauenhafte Zärtlichkeit und Begehrlichkeit darin, welche schamhaft und unwissend nach einer unio mystica et physica drängt: wie bei Madame de Guyon. In vielen Fällen erscheint sie wunderlich genug als Verkleidung der Pubertät eines Mädchens oder Jünglings; hier und da selbst als Hysterie einer alten Jungfer, auch als deren letzter Ehrgeiz:—die Kirche hat das Weib schon mehrfach in einem solchen Falle heilig gesprochen.
51 Bisher haben sich die mächtigsten Menschen immer noch verehrend vor dem Heiligen gebeugt, als dem Räthsel der Selbstbezwingung und absichtlichen letzten Entbehrung: warum beugten sie sich? Sie ahnten in ihm—und gleichsam hinter dem Fragezeichen seines gebrechlichen und kläglichen Anscheins—die überlegene Kraft, welche sich an einer solchen Bezwingung erproben wollte, die Stärke des Willens, in der sie die eigne Stärke und herrschaftliche Lust wieder erkannten und zu ehren wussten: sie ehrten Etwas an sich, wenn sie den Heiligen ehrten. Es kam hinzu, dass der Anblick des Heiligen ihnen einen Argwohn eingab: ein solches Ungeheures von Verneinung, von Wider-Natur wird nicht umsonst begehrt worden sein, so sagten und fragten sie sich. Es giebt vielleicht einen Grund dazu, eine ganz grosse Gefahr, über welche der Asket, Dank seinen geheimen Zusprechern und Besuchern, näher unterrichtet sein möchte? Genug, die Mächtigen der Welt lernten vor ihm eine neue Furcht, sie ahnten eine neue Macht, einen fremden, noch unbezwungenen Feind:—der "Wille zur Macht" war es, der sie nöthigte, vor dem Heiligen stehen zu bleiben. Sie mussten ihn fragen—-
52 Im jüdischen "alten Testament", dem Buche von der göttlichen Gerechtigkeit, giebt es Menschen, Dinge und Reden in einem so grossen Stile, dass das griechische und indische Schriftenthum ihm nichts zur Seite zu stellen hat. Man steht mit Schrecken und Ehrfurcht vor diesen ungeheuren Überbleibseln dessen, was der Mensch einstmals war, und wird dabei über das alte Asien und sein vorgeschobenes Halbinselchen Europa, das durchaus gegen Asien den "Fortschritt des Menschen" bedeuten möchte, seine traurigen Gedanken haben. Freilich: wer selbst nur ein dünnes zahmes Hausthier ist und nur Hausthier-Bedürfnisse kennt (gleich unsren Gebildeten von heute, die Christen des "gebildeten" Christenthums hinzugenommen -), der hat unter jenen Ruinen weder sich zu verwundern, noch gar sich zu betrüben—der Geschmack am alten Testament ist ein Prüfstein in Hinsicht auf "Gross" und "Klein" -: vielleicht, dass er das neue Testament, das Buch von der Gnade, immer noch eher nach seinem Herzen findet (in ihm ist viel von dem rechten zärtlichen dumpfen Betbrüder- und Kleinen-Seelen-Geruch). Dieses neue Testament, eine Art Rokoko des Geschmacks in jedem Betrachte, mit dem alten Testament zu Einem Buche zusammengeleimt zu haben, als "Bibel", als "das Buch an sich": das ist vielleicht die grösste Verwegenheit und "Sünde wider den Geist", welche das litterarische Europa auf dem Gewissen hat.
53 Warum heute Atheismus?—"Der Vater" in Gott ist gründlich widerlegt; ebenso "der Richter", "der Belohner". Insgleichen sein "freier Wille": er hört nicht,—und wenn er hörte, wüsste er trotzdem nicht zu helfen. Das Schlimmste ist: er scheint unfähig, sich deutlich mitzutheilen: ist er unklar?—Dies ist es, was ich, als Ursachen für den Niedergang des europäischen Theismus, aus vielerlei Gesprächen, fragend, hinhorchend, ausfindig gemacht habe; es scheint mir, dass zwar der religiöse Instinkt mächtig im Wachsen ist,—dass er aber gerade die theistische Befriedigung mit tiefem Misstrauen ablehnt.
54 Was thut denn im Grunde die ganze neuere Philosophie? Seit Descartes—und zwar mehr aus Trotz gegen ihn, als auf Grund seines Vorgangs—macht man seitens aller Philosophen ein Attentat auf den alten Seelen-Begriff, unter dem Anschein einer Kritik des Subjekt- und Prädikat-Begriffs—das heisst: ein Attentat auf die Grundvoraussetzung der christlichen Lehre. Die neuere Philosophie, als eine erkenntnisstheoretische Skepsis, ist, versteckt oder offen, antichristlich: obschon, für feinere Ohren gesagt, keineswegs antireligiös. Ehemals nämlich glaubte man an "die Seele", wie man an die Grammatik und das grammatische Subjekt glaubte: man sagte, "Ich" ist Bedingung, "denke" ist Prädikat und bedingt—Denken ist eine Thätigkeit, zu der ein Subjekt als Ursache gedacht werden muss. Nun versuchte man, mit einer bewunderungswürdigen Zähigkeit und List, ob man nicht aus diesem Netze heraus könne,—ob nicht vielleicht das Umgekehrte wahr sei: "denke" Bedingung, "Ich" bedingt; "Ich" also erst eine Synthese, welche durch das Denken selbst gemacht wird. Kant wollte im Grunde beweisen, dass vom Subjekt aus das Subjekt nicht bewiesen werden könne,—das Objekt auch nicht: die Möglichkeit einer Scheinexistenz des Subjekts, also "der Seele", mag ihm nicht immer fremd gewesen sein, jener Gedanke, welcher als Vedanta-Philosophie schon einmal und in ungeheurer Macht auf Erden dagewesen ist.
55 Es giebt eine grosse Leiter der religiösen Grausamkeit, mit vielen Sprossen; aber drei davon sind die wichtigsten. Einst opferte man seinem Gotte Menschen, vielleicht gerade solche, welche man am besten liebte,—dahin gehören die Erstlings-Opfer aller Vorzeit-Religionen, dahin auch das Opfer des Kaisers Tiberius in der Mithrasgrotte der Insel Capri, jener schauerlichste aller römischen Anachronismen. Dann, in der moralischen Epoche der Menschheit, opferte man seinem Gotte die stärksten Instinkte, die man besass, seine "Natur"; diese Festfreude glänzt im grausamen Blicke des Asketen, des begeisterten "Wider-Natürlichen". Endlich: was blieb noch übrig zu opfern? Musste man nicht endlich einmal alles Tröstliche, Heilige, Heilende, alle Hoffnung, allen Glauben an verborgene Harmonie, an zukünftige Seligkeiten und Gerechtigkeiten opfern? musste man nicht Gott selber opfern und, aus Grausamkeit gegen sich, den Stein, die Dummheit, die Schwere, das Schicksal, das Nichts anbeten? Für das Nichts Gott opfern—dieses paradoxe Mysterium der letzten Grausamkeit blieb dem Geschlechte, welches jetzt eben herauf kommt, aufgespart: wir Alle kennen schon etwas davon.—
56 Wer, gleich mir, mit irgend einer räthselhaften Begierde sich lange darum bemüht hat, den Pessimismus in die Tiefe zu denken und aus der halb christlichen, halb deutschen Enge und Einfalt zu erlösen, mit der er sich diesem Jahrhundert zuletzt dargestellt hat, nämlich in Gestalt der Schopenhauerischen Philosophie; wer wirklich einmal mit einem asiatischen und überasiatischen Auge in die weltverneinendste aller möglichen Denkweisen hinein und hinunter geblickt hat—jenseits von Gut und Böse, und nicht mehr, wie Buddha und Schopenhauer, im Bann und Wahne der Moral -, der hat vielleicht ebendamit, ohne dass er es eigentlich wollte, sich die Augen für das umgekehrte Ideal aufgemacht: für das Ideal des übermüthigsten lebendigsten und weltbejahendsten Menschen, der sich nicht nur mit dem, was war und ist, abgefunden und vertragen gelernt hat, sondern es, so wie es war und ist, wieder haben will, in alle Ewigkeit hinaus, unersättlich da capo rufend, nicht nur zu sich, sondern zum ganzen Stücke und Schauspiele, und nicht nur zu einem Schauspiele, sondern im Grunde zu Dem, der gerade dies Schauspiel nöthig hat—und nöthig macht: weil er immer wieder sich nöthig hat—und nöthig macht—- Wie? Und dies wäre nicht—circulus vitiosus deus?
57 Mit der Kraft seines geistigen Blicks und Einblicks wächst die Ferne und gleichsam der Raum um den Menschen: seine Welt wird tiefer, immer neue Sterne, immer neue Räthsel und Bilder kommen ihm in Sicht. Vielleicht war Alles, woran das Auge des Geistes seinen Scharfsinn und Tiefsinn geübt hat, eben nur ein Anlass zu seiner Übung, eine Sache des Spiels, Etwas für Kinder und Kindsköpfe. Vielleicht erscheinen uns einst die feierlichsten Begriffe, um die am meisten gekämpft und gelitten worden ist, die Begriffe "Gott" und "Sünde", nicht wichtiger, als dem alten Manne ein Kinder-Spielzeug und Kinder-Schmerz erscheint,—und vielleicht hat dann "der alte Mensch" wieder ein andres Spielzeug und einen andren Schmerz nöthig,—immer noch Kinds genug, ein ewiges Kind!
58 Hat man wohl beachtet, in wiefern zu einem eigentlich religiösen Leben (und sowohl zu seiner mikroskopischen Lieblings-Arbeit der Selbstprüfung, als zu jener zarten Gelassenheit, welche sich "Gebet" nennt und eine beständige Bereitschaft für das "Kommen Gottes" ist) der äussere Müssiggang oder Halb-Müssiggang noth thut, ich meine der Müssiggang mit gutem Gewissen, von Alters her, von Geblüt, dem das Aristokraten-Gefühl nicht ganz fremd ist, dass Arbeit schändet,—nämlich Seele und Leib gemein macht? Und dass folglich die moderne, lärmende, Zeit-auskaufende, auf sich stolze, dumm-stolze Arbeitsamkeit, mehr als alles Übrige, gerade zum "Unglauben" erzieht und vorbereitet? Unter Denen, welche zum Beispiel jetzt in Deutschland abseits von der Religion leben, finde ich Menschen von vielerlei Art und Abkunft der "Freidenkerei", vor Allem aber eine Mehrzahl solcher, denen Arbeitsamkeit, von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht, die religiösen Instinkte aufgelöst hat: so dass sie gar nicht mehr wissen, wozu Religionen nütze sind, und nur mit einer Art stumpfen Erstaunens ihr Vorhandensein in der Welt gleichsam registriren. Sie fühlen sich schon reichlich in Anspruch genommen, diese braven Leute, sei es von ihren Geschäften, sei es von ihren Vergnügungen, gar nicht zu reden vom "Vaterlande" und den Zeitungen und den "Pflichten der Familie": es scheint, dass sie gar keine Zeit für die Religion übrig haben, zumal es ihnen unklar bleibt, ob es sich dabei um ein neues Geschäft oder ein neues Vergnügen handelt,—denn unmöglich, sagen sie sich, geht man in die Kirche, rein um sich die gute Laune zu verderben. Sie sind keine Feinde der religiösen Gebräuche; verlangt man in gewissen Fällen, etwa von Seiten des Staates, die Betheiligung an solchen Gebräuchen, so thun sie, was man verlangt, wie man so Vieles thut -, mit einem geduldigen und bescheidenen Ernste und ohne viel Neugierde und Unbehagen:—sie leben eben zu sehr abseits und ausserhalb, um selbst nur ein Für und Wider in solchen Dingen bei sich nöthig zu finden. Zu diesen Gleichgültigen gehört heute die Überzahl der deutschen Protestanten in den mittleren Ständen, sonderlich in den arbeitsamen grossen Handels- und Verkehrscentren; ebenfalls die Überzahl der arbeitsamen Gelehrten und der ganze Universitäts-Zubehör (die Theologen ausgenommen, deren Dasein und Möglichkeit daselbst dem Psychologen immer mehr und immer feinere Räthsel zu rathen giebt). Man macht sich selten von Seiten frommer oder auch nur kirchlicher Menschen eine Vorstellung davon, wie viel guter Wille, man könnte sagen, willkürlicher Wille jetzt dazu gehört, dass ein deutscher Gelehrter das Problem der Religion ernst nimmt; von seinem ganzen Handwerk her (und, wie gesagt, von der handwerkerhaften Arbeitsamkeit her, zu welcher ihn sein modernes Gewissen verpflichtet) neigt er zu einer überlegenen, beinahe gütigen Heiterkeit gegen die Religion, zu der sich bisweilen eine leichte Geringschätzung mischt, gerichtet gegen die "Unsauberkeit" des Geistes, welche er überall dort voraussetzt, wo man sich noch zur Kirche bekennt. Es gelingt dem Gelehrten erst mit Hülfe der Geschichte (also nicht von seiner persönlichen Erfahrung aus), es gegenüber den Religionen zu einem ehrfurchtsvollen Ernste und zu einer gewissen scheuen Rücksicht zu bringen; aber wenn er sein Gefühl sogar bis zur Dankbarkeit gegen sie gehoben hat, so ist er mit seiner Person auch noch keinen Schritt weit dem, was noch als Kirche oder Frömmigkeit besteht, näher gekommen: vielleicht umgekehrt. Die praktische Gleichgültigkeit gegen religiöse Dinge, in welche hinein er geboren und erzogen ist, pflegt sich bei ihm zur Behutsamkeit und Reinlichkeit zu sublimiren, welche die Berührung mit religiösen Menschen und Dingen scheut; und es kann gerade die Tiefe seiner Toleranz und Menschlichkeit sein, die ihn vor dem feinen Nothstande ausweichen heisst, welchen das Toleriren selbst mit sich bringt.—Jede Zeit hat ihre eigene göttliche Art von Naivetät, um deren Erfindung sie andre Zeitalter beneiden dürfen:—und wie viel Naivetät, verehrungswürdige, kindliche und unbegrenzt tölpelhafte Naivetät liegt in diesem Überlegenheits-Glauben des Gelehrten, im guten Gewissen seiner Toleranz, in der ahnungslosen schlichten Sicherheit, mit der sein Instinkt den religiösen Menschen als einen minderwerthigen und niedrigeren Typus behandelt, über den er selbst hinaus, hinweg, hinauf gewachsen ist,—er, der kleine anmaassliche Zwerg und Pöbelmann, der fleissig-flinke Kopf- und Handarbeiter der "Ideen", der "modernen Ideen"!
59 Wer tief in die Welt gesehen hat, erräth wohl, welche Weisheit darin liegt, dass die Menschen oberflächlich sind. Es ist ihr erhaltender Instinkt, der sie lehrt, flüchtig, leicht und falsch zu sein. Man findet hier und da eine leidenschaftliche und übertreibende Anbetung der "reinen Formen", bei Philosophen wie bei Künstlern: möge Niemand zweifeln, dass wer dergestalt den Cultus der Oberfläche nöthig hat, irgend wann einmal einen unglückseligen Griff unter sie gethan hat. Vielleicht giebt es sogar hinsichtlich dieser verbrannten Kinder, der geborenen Künstler, welche den Genuss des Lebens nur noch in der Absicht finden, sein Bild zu fälschen (gleichsam in einer langwierigen Rache am Leben -), auch noch eine Ordnung des Ranges: man könnte den Grad, in dem ihnen das Leben verleidet ist, daraus abnehmen, bis wie weit sie sein Bild verfälscht, verdünnt, verjenseitigt, vergöttlicht zu sehn wünschen,—man könnte die homines religiosi mit unter die Künstler rechnen, als ihren höchsten Rang. Es ist die tiefe argwöhnische Furcht vor einem unheilbaren Pessimismus, der ganze Jahrtausende zwingt, sich mit den Zähnen in eine religiöse Interpretation des Daseins zu verbeissen: die Furcht jenes Instinktes, welcher ahnt, dass man der Wahrheit zu früh habhaft werden könnte, ehe der Mensch stark genug, hart genug, Künstler genug geworden ist… Die Frömmigkeit, das "Leben in Gott", mit diesem Blicke betrachtet, erschiene dabei als die feinste und letzte Ausgeburt der Furcht vor der Wahrheit, als Künstler-Anbetung und -Trunkenheit vor der consequentesten aller Fälschungen, als der Wille zur Umkehrung der Wahrheit, zur Unwahrheit um jeden Preis. Vielleicht, dass es bis jetzt kein stärkeres Mittel gab, den Menschen selbst zu verschönern, als eben Frömmigkeit: durch sie kann der Mensch so sehr Kunst, Oberfläche, Farbenspiel, Güte werden, dass man an seinem Anblicke nicht mehr leidet.—
60 Den Menschen zu lieben um Gottes Willen—das war bis jetzt das vornehmste und entlegenste Gefühl, das unter Menschen erreicht worden ist. Dass die Liebe zum Menschen ohne irgendeine heiligende Hinterabsicht eine Dummheit und Thierheit mehr ist, dass der Hang zu dieser Menschenliebe erst von einem höheren Hange sein Maass, seine Feinheit, sein Körnchen Salz und Stäubchen Ambra zu bekommen hat:—welcher Mensch es auch war, der dies zuerst empfunden und "erlebt" hat, wie sehr auch seine Zunge gestolpert haben mag, als sie versuchte, solch eine Zartheit auszudrücken, er bleibe uns in alle Zeiten heilig und verehrenswerth, als der Mensch, der am höchsten bisher geflogen und am schönsten sich verirrt hat!
61 Der Philosoph, wie wir ihn verstehen, wir freien Geister—, als der Mensch der umfänglichsten Verantwortlichkeit, der das Gewissen für die Gesammt-Entwicklung des Menschen hat: dieser Philosoph wird sich der Religionen zu seinem Züchtungs- und Erziehungswerke bedienen, wie er sich der jeweiligen politischen und wirthschaftlichen Zustände bedienen wird. Der auslesende, züchtende, das heisst immer ebensowohl der zerstörende als der schöpferische und gestaltende Einfluss, welcher mit Hülfe der Religionen ausgeübt werden kann, ist je nach der Art Menschen, die unter ihren Bann und Schutz gestellt werden, ein vielfacher und verschiedener. Für die Starken, Unabhängigen, zum Befehlen Vorbereiteten und Vorbestimmten, in denen die Vernunft und Kunst einer regierenden Rasse leibhaft wird, ist Religion ein Mittel mehr, um Widerstände zu überwinden, um herrschen zu können: als ein Band, das Herrscher und Unterthanen gemeinsam bindet und die Gewissen der Letzteren, ihr Verborgenes und Innerlichstes, das sich gerne dem Gehorsam entziehen möchte, den Ersteren verräth und überantwortet; und falls einzelne Naturen einer solchen vornehmen Herkunft, durch hohe Geistigkeit, einem abgezogeneren und beschaulicheren Leben sich zuneigen und nur die feinste Artung des Herrschens (über ausgesuchte Jünger oder Ordensbrüder) sich vorbehalten, so kann Religion selbst als Mittel benutzt werden, sich Ruhe vor dem Lärm und der Mühsal des gröberen Regierens und Reinheit vor dem nothwendigen Schmutz alles Politik-Machens zu schaffen. So verstanden es zum Beispiel die Brahmanen: mit Hülfe einer religiösen Organisation gaben sie sich die Macht, dem Volke seine Könige zu ernennen, während sie sich selber abseits und ausserhalb hielten und fühlten, als die Menschen höherer und überköniglicher Aufgaben. Inzwischen giebt die Religion auch einem Theile der Beherrschten Anleitung und Gelegenheit, sich auf einstmaliges Herrschen und Befehlen vorzubereiten, jenen langsam heraufkommenden Klassen und Ständen nämlich, in denen, durch glückliche Ehesitten, die Kraft und Lust des Willens, der Wille zur Selbstbeherrschung, immer im Steigen ist:—ihnen bietet die Religion Anstösse und Versuchungen genug, die Wege zur höheren Geistigkeit zu gehen, die Gefühle der grossen Selbstüberwindung, des Schweigens und der Einsamkeit zu erproben:—Asketismus und Puritanismus sind fast unentbehrliche Erziehungs- und Veredelungsmittel, wenn eine Rasse über ihre Herkunft aus dem Pöbel Herr werden will und sich zur einstmaligen Herrschaft emporarbeitet. Den gewöhnlichen Menschen endlich, den Allermeisten, welche zum Dienen und zum allgemeinen Nutzen dasind und nur insofern dasein dürfen, giebt die Religion eine unschätzbare Genügsamkeit mit ihrer Lage und Art, vielfachen Frieden des Herzens, eine Veredelung des Gehorsams, ein Glück und Leid mehr mit Ihres-Gleichen und Etwas von Verklärung und Verschönerung, Etwas von Rechtfertigung des ganzen Alltags, der ganzen Niedrigkeit, der ganzen Halbthier-Armuth ihrer Seele. Religion und religiöse Bedeutsamkeit des Lebens legt Sonnenglanz auf solche immer geplagte Menschen und macht ihnen selbst den eigenen Anblick erträglich, sie wirkt, wie eine epikurische Philosophie auf Leidende höheren Ranges zu wirken pflegt, erquickend, verfeinernd, das Leiden gleichsam ausnützend, zuletzt gar heiligend und rechtfertigend. Vielleicht ist am Christenthum und Buddhismus nichts so ehrwürdig als ihre Kunst, noch den Niedrigsten anzulehren, sich durch Frömmigkeit in eine höhere Schein-Ordnung der Dinge zu stellen und damit das Genügen an der wirklichen Ordnung, innerhalb deren sie hart genug leben,—und gerade diese Härte thut Noth!—bei sich festzuhalten.
62 Zuletzt freilich, um solchen Religionen auch die schlimme Gegenrechnung zu machen und ihre unheimliche Gefährlichkeit an's Licht zu stellen:—es bezahlt sich immer theuer und fürchterlich, wenn Religionen nicht als Züchtungs- und Erziehungsmittel in der Hand des Philosophen, sondern von sich aus und souverän walten, wenn sie selber letzte Zwecke und nicht Mittel neben anderen Mitteln sein wollen. Es giebt bei dem Menschen wie bei jeder anderen Thierart einen Überschuss von Missrathenen, Kranken, Entartenden, Gebrechlichen, nothwendig Leidenden; die gelungenen Fälle sind auch beim Menschen immer die Ausnahme und sogar in Hinsicht darauf, dass der Mensch das noch nicht festgestellte Thier ist, die spärliche Ausnahme. Aber noch schlimmer: je höher geartet der Typus eines Menschen ist, der durch ihn dargestellt wird, um so mehr steigt noch die Unwahrscheinlichkeit, dass er geräth: das Zufällige, das Gesetz des Unsinns im gesammten Haushalte der Menschheit zeigt sich am erschrecklichsten in seiner zerstörerischen Wirkung auf die höheren Menschen, deren Lebensbedingungen fein, vielfach und schwer auszurechnen sind. Wie verhalten sich nun die genannten beiden grössten Religionen zu diesem Überschuss der misslungenen Fälle? Sie suchen zu erhalten, im Leben festzuhalten, was sich nur irgend halten lässt, ja sie nehmen grundsätzlich für sie Partei, als Religionen für Leidende, sie geben allen Denen Recht, welche am Leben wie an einer Krankheit leiden, und möchten es durchsetzen, dass jede andre Empfindung des Lebens als falsch gelte und unmöglich werde. Möchte man diese schonende und erhaltende Fürsorge, insofern sie neben allen anderen auch dem höchsten, bisher fast immer auch leidendsten Typus des Menschen gilt und galt, noch so hoch anschlagen: in der Gesammt-Abrechnung gehören die bisherigen, nämlich souveränen Religionen zu den Hauptursachen, welche den Typus "Mensch" auf einer niedrigeren Stufe festhielten,—sie erhielten zu viel von dem, was zu Grunde gehn sollte. Man hat ihnen Unschätzbares zu danken; und wer ist reich genug an Dankbarkeit, um nicht vor alle dem arm zu werden, was zum Beispiel die "geistlichen Menschen" des Christenthums bisher für Europa gethan haben! Und doch, wenn sie den Leidenden Trost, den Unterdrückten und Verzweifelnden Muth, den Unselbständigen einen Stab und Halt gaben und die Innerlich-Zerstörten und Wild-Gewordenen von der Gesellschaft weg in Klöster und seelische Zuchthäuser lockten: was mussten sie ausserdem thun, um mit gutem Gewissen dergestalt grundsätzlich an der Erhaltung alles Kranken und Leidenden, das heisst in That und Wahrheit an der Verschlechterung der europäischen Rasse zu arbeiten? Alle Werthschätzungen auf den Kopf stellen—das mussten sie! Und die Starken zerbrechen, die grossen Hoffnungen ankränkeln, das Glück in der Schönheit verdächtigen, alles Selbstherrliche, Männliche, Erobernde, Herrschsüchtige, alle Instinkte, welche dem höchsten und wohlgerathensten Typus "Mensch" zu eigen sind, in Unsicherheit, Gewissens-Noth, Selbstzerstörung umknicken, ja die ganze Liebe zum Irdischen und zur Herrschaft über die Erde in Hass gegen die Erde und das Irdische verkehren—das stellte sich die Kirche zur Aufgabe und musste es sich stellen, bis für ihre Schätzung endlich "Entweltlichung", "Entsinnlichung" und "höherer Mensch" in Ein Gefühl zusammenschmolzen. Gesetzt, dass man mit dem spöttischen und unbetheiligten Auge eines epikurischen Gottes die wunderlich schmerzliche und ebenso grobe wie feine Komödie des europäischen Christenthums zu überschauen vermöchte, ich glaube, man fände kein Ende mehr zu staunen und zu lachen: scheint es denn nicht, dass Ein Wille über Europa durch achtzehn Jahrhunderte geherrscht hat, aus dem Menschen eine sublime Missgeburt zu machen? Wer aber mit umgekehrten Bedürfnissen, nicht epikurisch mehr, sondern mit irgend einem göttlichen Hammer in der Hand auf diese fast willkürliche Entartung und Verkümmerung des Menschen zuträte, wie sie der christliche Europäer ist (Pascal zum Beispiel), müsste er da nicht mit Grimm, mit Mitleid, mit Entsetzen schreien: "Oh ihr Tölpel, ihr anmaassenden mitleidigen Tölpel, was habt ihr da gemacht! War das eine Arbeit für eure Hände! Wie habt ihr mir meinen schönsten Stein verhauen und verhunzt! Was nahmt ihr euch heraus!"—Ich wollte sagen: das Christenthum war bisher die verhängnissvollste Art von Selbst-Überhebung. Menschen, nicht hoch und hart genug, um am Menschen als Künstler gestalten zu dürfen; Menschen, nicht stark und fernsichtig genug, um, mit einer erhabenen Selbst-Bezwingung, das Vordergrund-Gesetz des tausendfältigen Missrathens und Zugrundegehns walten zu lassen; Menschen, nicht vornehm genug, um die abgründlich verschiedene Rangordnung und Rangkluft zwischen Mensch und Mensch zu sehen:—solche Menschen haben, mit ihrem "Gleich vor Gott", bisher über dem Schicksale Europa's gewaltet, bis endlich eine verkleinerte, fast lächerliche Art, ein Heerdenthier, etwas Gutwilliges, Kränkliches und Mittelmässiges, herangezüchtet ist, der heutige Europäer…
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the German and reviewed against it.
Third Main Division:
The Religious Nature.
45 The human soul and its limits, the whole range of human inner experience attained so far, the heights, depths, and distances of these experiences, the entire history of the soul until now and its still-undrained possibilities: that is the predestined hunting ground for a born psychologist and friend of the “great hunt.” But how often must he say to himself in despair: “One individual! Ah, only one individual! And this great forest, this primeval forest!” And so he wishes for a few hundred hunting assistants and fine, learned hounds whom he could send into the history of the human soul to drive his game together there. In vain: again and again he learns, thoroughly and bitterly, how hard it is to find assistants and dogs for precisely the things that excite his curiosity. The trouble with sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, intelligence, subtlety in every sense are needed, is that they cease to be useful precisely where the “great hunt,” but also the great danger, begins—precisely there they lose their tracking eye and tracking nose. To divine and establish, for example, what history the problem of knowledge and conscience has so far had in the souls of homines religiosi, one would perhaps have to be as deep, as wounded, as immense oneself as Pascal's intellectual conscience was: and then one would still need that overarching heaven of bright, malicious intellect capable of surveying from above, ordering, forcing into formulas this swarm of dangerous and painful experiences.—But who would do me this service! But who would have time to wait for such servants!—Clearly they grow too rarely; at all times they are so improbable! In the end one must do everything oneself to know something oneself: which means one has much to do!—But a curiosity of my kind remains, after all, the most pleasant of all vices—forgive me! I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven and already on earth.—
46 Faith as early Christianity demanded and not infrequently attained it, amid a skeptical and southerly free-spirited world that had a centuries-long struggle of philosophical schools behind it and within it, added to the schooling in tolerance supplied by the imperium Romanum—this faith is not that loyal-hearted, surly faith of subjects with which, say, a Luther or a Cromwell or some other northern barbarian of the spirit clung to his God and Christianity; much more, rather, that faith of Pascal's which bears a terrifying resemblance to a continual suicide of reason—a tenacious, long-lived, wormlike reason that cannot be killed all at once and with a single blow. Christian faith is sacrifice from the beginning: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-assurance of the spirit; at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith imposed on a softened, complex, much-pampered conscience: its presupposition is that the subjection of the spirit hurts indescribably, that the entire past and habit of such a spirit resists the absurdissimum in which “faith” confronts it. Modern people, with their dulled sensitivity to all Christian nomenclature, no longer feel the terrifying superlative that lay, for an ancient taste, in the paradox of the formula “God on the cross.” Never yet and nowhere has there been an equal daring in reversal, anything equally terrible, questioning, and questionable, as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all ancient values.—It is the Orient, the deep Orient, it is the Oriental slave who in this way took revenge on Rome and its noble, frivolous tolerance, on the Roman “catholicism” of faith—and it was always not faith but freedom from faith, that half-stoic, smiling unconcern about the seriousness of faith, that aroused the slaves' indignation at their masters, their revolt against them. “Enlightenment” arouses revolt: for the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only the tyrannical, in morality too; he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness—his great hidden suffering rebels against noble taste, which seems to deny suffering. Skepticism toward suffering, at bottom only an attitude of aristocratic morality, also played no small part in the emergence of the last great slave revolt, which began with the French Revolution.
47 Wherever on earth religious neurosis has appeared so far, we find it linked with three dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence—though we cannot decide with certainty here what is cause and what effect, or whether any relation of cause and effect exists at all. This last doubt is justified by the fact that, among savage and tame peoples alike, one of its most regular symptoms is also the most sudden, extravagant sensuality, which then turns just as suddenly into spasms of penitence and denial of world and will: both perhaps interpretable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere should we renounce interpretations more: no type has yet had such a profusion of nonsense and superstition grow around it; none seems so far to have interested people, even philosophers, more—it would be time to grow a little cold precisely here, to learn caution, better still: to look away, to go away.—Even in the background of the latest philosophy, Schopenhauer's, stands this terrifying question mark of religious crisis and awakening, almost as the problem in itself. How is denial of the will possible? How is the saint possible?—This really seems to have been the question with which Schopenhauer became and began as a philosopher. And so it was a genuinely Schopenhauerian consequence that his most convinced follower (perhaps also his last, as far as Germany is concerned—), namely Richard Wagner, brought his own life's work to a close at precisely this point and finally put that terrible and eternal type onstage as Kundry, a type drawn from life, in flesh and blood; at the very time when psychiatrists in almost every country of Europe had occasion to study it at close quarters, wherever religious neurosis—or, as I call it, “the religious nature”—made its latest epidemic outbreak and appearance as the “Salvation Army.”—But if we ask what it actually was about the whole phenomenon of the saint that people of every kind and age, philosophers included, found so irresistibly interesting: without any doubt it was the appearance of the miraculous attaching to him, namely the immediate succession of opposites, of states of soul valued as moral opposites: people believed they could grasp with their very hands here that a “bad person” became, all at once, a “saint,” a good person. Psychology until now suffered shipwreck at this point: might that not have happened chiefly because it had placed itself under the dominion of morality, because it believed in the moral oppositions of value themselves, and saw, read, interpreted these oppositions into the text and the facts?—What? The “miracle” only a mistake of interpretation? A lack of philology?—
48 It seems that Catholicism belongs far more intimately to the Latin races than the whole of Christianity does to us northerners: and consequently that unbelief in Catholic countries means something quite different from what it does in Protestant ones—namely a kind of rebellion against the spirit of the race, whereas among us it is more a return to the spirit (or unspirit—) of the race. We northerners undoubtedly descend from barbarian races, also as regards our aptitude for religion: we have little talent for it. The Celts may be excepted, and for that reason they also provided the best soil in the north for the reception of the Christian infection—in France the Christian ideal blossomed as far as the north's pale sun permitted. How strangely pious, to our taste, even these latest French skeptics remain, insofar as there is some Celtic blood in their descent! How Catholic, how un-German Auguste Comte's sociology smells to us, with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that amiable and clever guide to Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, despite all his hostility toward the Jesuits! And Ernest Renan in particular: how inaccessible the language of such a Renan sounds to us northerners, in whom at every moment some mere nothing of religious tension throws his soul, voluptuous in a subtler sense and settling itself comfortably, off balance! Just repeat these beautiful sentences after him—and what malice and high spirits immediately stir in response in our probably less beautiful and harder, that is, more German soul!—“Let us therefore boldly say that religion is a product of the normal human being, that a person is most in the truth when most religious and most assured of an infinite destiny… It is when he is good that he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order; it is when he contemplates things disinterestedly that he finds death revolting and absurd. How can we not suppose that it is in those moments that a person sees best?…” These sentences are so antipodal to my ears and habits that, when I found them, my first fit of rage wrote beside them “religious silliness par excellence!”—until my last fit of rage actually grew fond of them, these sentences with their truth stood on its head! It is so charming, so distinguishing, to have one's own antipodes!
49 What astonishes us in the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the unbridled abundance of gratitude it pours out—it is a very noble kind of human being who stands like this before nature and before life!—Later, when the rabble gains the upper hand in Greece, fear overgrows religion too; and Christianity was preparing itself.—
50 The passion for God: there are peasant-like, loyal-hearted, and importunate forms, such as Luther's—all Protestantism lacks the southern delicatezza. There is an Oriental ecstasy in it, as in a slave undeservedly pardoned or exalted, for example in Augustine, who lacks all nobility of gesture and desire to an offensive degree. There is womanly tenderness and longing in it, pressing shyly and unknowingly toward a mystical and physical union: as in Madame de Guyon. In many cases it appears, strangely enough, as a disguise for the puberty of a girl or young man; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also as her last ambition—the Church has more than once canonized a woman in such a case.
51 So far the mightiest human beings have always bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate, ultimate deprivation: why did they bow? They sensed in him—and as it were behind the question mark of his frail and pitiful appearance—the superior force that wanted to test itself in such conquest, the strength of will in which they recognized their own strength and delight in mastery and knew how to honor it: they were honoring something in themselves when they honored the saint. Moreover, the sight of the saint instilled a suspicion in them: something so monstrous in the way of denial, of opposition to nature, will not have been desired for nothing, they said and asked themselves. Perhaps there is a reason for it, some very great danger of which the ascetic, thanks to his secret counselors and visitors, might be better informed? In short, the mighty of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, still-unconquered enemy—it was the “will to power” that compelled them to stop before the saint. They had to question him——
52 In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are people, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to set beside them. One stands with terror and reverence before these immense remnants of what the human being once was, and will have one's melancholy thoughts about old Asia and its little protruding peninsula Europe, which insists on representing “human progress” over against Asia. Admittedly, anyone who is himself only a thin, tame domestic animal and knows only domestic-animal needs (like our educated people today, including the Christians of “educated” Christianity—) has no cause either for wonder or, still less, for sorrow among those ruins—taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with regard to “great” and “small”—perhaps he still finds the New Testament, the book of grace, more to his heart (there is much in it of the true, tender, stuffy smell of prayer-brothers and little souls). To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, together with the Old Testament into one book, as “Bible,” as “the book in itself”: that is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the spirit” that literary Europe has on its conscience.
53 Why atheism today?—“The father” in God has been thoroughly refuted; likewise “the judge,” “the rewarder.” So too his “free will”: he does not hear—and if he did hear, he still would not know how to help. Worst of all: he seems incapable of communicating clearly: is he unclear?—These are the causes of the decline of European theism I have tracked down through many conversations, questioning, listening; it seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed growing powerfully—but that it rejects precisely the theistic satisfaction of it with profound distrust.
54 What, at bottom, is all modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes—and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his example—all philosophers have been making an assassination attempt on the old concept of the soul, under the appearance of criticizing the concepts of subject and predicate—which means an assassination attempt on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism, is covertly or openly anti-Christian: although, for subtler ears, by no means antireligious. For formerly people believed in “the soul” as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: they said, “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned—thinking is an activity for which a subject must be thought of as cause. Then, with admirable tenacity and cunning, people tried to see whether they could escape this net—whether perhaps the reverse was true: “think” the condition, “I” conditioned; “I” thus only a synthesis made by thinking itself. At bottom Kant wanted to prove that the subject could not be proved from the subject—nor could the object: the possibility of a merely apparent existence of the subject, thus of “the soul,” may not always have been foreign to him—that thought which once before, as Vedanta philosophy, existed on earth in tremendous power.
55 There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of them are the most important. Once people sacrificed human beings to their god, perhaps precisely those they loved best—here belong the sacrifices of the firstborn in all prehistoric religions, and here too the Emperor Tiberius's sacrifice in the grotto of Mithras on the island of Capri, that most terrifying of all Roman anachronisms. Then, in humanity's moral epoch, people sacrificed to their god the strongest instincts they possessed, their “nature”; this festive joy gleams in the cruel eye of the ascetic, of the enthusiast “against nature.” Finally: what still remained to sacrifice? Did one not at last have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all belief in hidden harmony, in future blessedness and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and, out of cruelty toward oneself, worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation just now rising: we all already know something of it.—
56 Anyone who, like me, has long striven with some enigmatic appetite to think pessimism through to its depths and free it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it last presented itself to this century, namely in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy; anyone who has really once looked with an Asiatic and more-than-Asiatic eye into and down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking—beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under morality's spell and delusion—has perhaps, through precisely this, without really wanting to, opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most exuberant, most alive, most world-affirming human being, who has not merely learned to come to terms with and reconcile himself to what was and is, but wants it again just as it was and is, through all eternity, insatiably crying da capo, not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle—and makes it necessary: because he always needs himself again—and makes himself necessary——What? And this would not be—circulus vitiosus deus?
57 As the power of a person's intellectual sight and insight grows, so does the distance, and as it were the space, around him: his world grows deeper; ever-new stars, ever-new riddles and images come into view. Perhaps everything on which the mind's eye has practiced its acuteness and depth was only an occasion for that practice, a matter of play, something for children and childish heads. Perhaps someday the most solemn concepts, those most fought and suffered over, the concepts “God” and “sin,” will seem no more important to us than a child's toy and a child's pain seem to an old man—and perhaps then “the old human being” will again need a different toy and a different pain—still child enough, an eternal child!
58 Has anyone properly noticed to what extent a genuinely religious life (both its favorite microscopic labor of self-examination and that tender serenity called “prayer,” which is a continual readiness for the “coming of God”) requires outward idleness or half-idleness, I mean idleness with a good conscience, from of old, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work dishonors—namely makes soul and body common—is not entirely foreign? And that consequently modern, noisy industriousness, buying up every moment, proud of itself, stupidly proud, schools and prepares people for “unbelief” more than anything else does? Among those who now live apart from religion in Germany, for example, I find people of many kinds and origins of “freethinking,” but above all a majority whose industriousness has dissolved their religious instincts from generation to generation: so that they no longer even know what religions are useful for, and merely register their presence in the world, as it were, with a kind of dull astonishment. These decent people already feel quite fully occupied, whether by their business or their pleasures, not to mention the “fatherland” and the newspapers and the “duties of the family”: it seems they have no time at all left for religion, especially since they remain unclear whether it is a new business or a new pleasure—for surely, they tell themselves, one does not go to church purely to spoil one's good mood. They are no enemies of religious customs; if participation in such customs is demanded in certain cases, say by the state, they do what is demanded, as one does so many things—with a patient, modest seriousness and without much curiosity or discomfort—they simply live too far apart and outside to find even a weighing of pros and cons in such matters necessary for themselves. To these indifferent people belong today the great majority of German Protestants in the middle classes, especially in the industrious great centers of trade and transport; likewise the great majority of industrious scholars and the whole university entourage (except the theologians, whose existence and possibility there give the psychologist ever more and subtler riddles to solve). Pious or even merely churchgoing people rarely imagine how much good will, one might say arbitrary will, it now takes for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously; his whole craft (and, as I said, the craftlike industriousness to which his modern conscience obliges him) inclines him toward a superior, almost kindly cheerfulness in the face of religion, sometimes mingled with a slight contempt directed against the “uncleanliness” of mind he presupposes wherever someone still professes allegiance to the Church. Only with the help of history (thus not from personal experience) does the scholar succeed in attaining a reverent seriousness and a certain shy consideration toward religions; but even if he has raised his feeling to gratitude toward them, he has personally come not one step closer to what still exists as church or piety: perhaps the reverse. The practical indifference toward religious matters into which he was born and educated usually sublimates in him into a caution and cleanliness that shrinks from contact with religious people and things; and it may be precisely the depth of his tolerance and humanity that bids him avoid the subtle predicament that toleration itself brings with it.—Every age has its own divine kind of naïveté, for whose invention other ages may envy it—and how much naïveté, venerable, childlike, and boundlessly boorish naïveté, lies in this scholar's belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting, simple assurance with which his instinct treats the religious human being as an inferior and lower type beyond which he himself has grown, away and upward—he, the little presumptuous dwarf and rabble-man, the diligent, nimble head-and-hand worker of “ideas,” of “modern ideas”!
59 Anyone who has looked deeply into the world will divine the wisdom in people's being superficial. It is their preserving instinct that teaches them to be fleeting, light, and false. Here and there, among philosophers as among artists, one finds a passionate, exaggerated worship of “pure forms”: let no one doubt that anyone who needs the cult of the surface in this way has at some time made an ill-fated grasp beneath it. Perhaps there is even an order of rank among these burned children, the born artists who find enjoyment in life only in the intention to falsify its image (as it were in a protracted revenge on life—): one could infer the degree to which life has been spoiled for them from how far they wish to see its image falsified, thinned, carried into a beyond, deified—one could count the homines religiosi among artists as their highest rank. It is the deep, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that compels whole millennia to fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of that instinct which senses that one might get hold of truth too early, before the human being has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough… Piety, “life in God,” viewed in this light, would appear as the finest and final offspring of the fear of truth, as an artist's worship and intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications, as the will to invert truth, to untruth at any price. Perhaps there has so far been no stronger means of beautifying the human being himself than precisely piety: through it a person can become so much art, surface, play of colors, goodness, that one no longer suffers at the sight of him.—
60 To love human beings for God's sake—that has so far been the noblest and most remote feeling attained among human beings. That love of humanity without some sanctifying ulterior intention is one more stupidity and piece of animality, that the inclination toward this love of humanity must first receive its measure, its refinement, its grain of salt and speck of ambergris from a higher inclination—whoever the person was who first felt and “experienced” this, however much his tongue may have stumbled when it tried to express such a delicacy, let him remain holy and worthy of reverence to us for all time, as the human being who has flown highest so far and lost his way most beautifully!
61 The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits—as the human being of the most comprehensive responsibility, who has the conscience for the overall development of humanity: this philosopher will employ religions for his work of breeding and education, just as he will employ the political and economic conditions of the time. The selecting, breeding influence—which always means the destructive as well as the creative and formative influence—that can be exercised with the help of religions is manifold and different according to the kind of people placed under their spell and protection. For the strong, independent, prepared and predestined to command, in whom the reason and art of a ruling race become flesh, religion is one more means of overcoming resistance, of being able to rule: as a bond that binds rulers and subjects together and betrays and hands over to the former the consciences of the latter, their hidden and innermost part, which would like to evade obedience; and if individual natures of such noble origin incline, through high spirituality, toward a more withdrawn and contemplative life and reserve for themselves only the most refined form of ruling (over chosen disciples or brothers of an order), religion itself can be used as a means to secure peace from the noise and trouble of coarser government and purity from the necessary dirt of all politicking. This, for example, is how the Brahmins understood it: with the help of a religious organization they gave themselves the power to appoint the people's kings, while keeping and feeling themselves apart and outside, as human beings of higher and more-than-royal tasks. Meanwhile religion also gives a portion of the ruled guidance and opportunity to prepare themselves to rule and command someday: namely those slowly rising classes and estates in which, through fortunate marital customs, the strength and delight of the will, the will to self-mastery, are continually increasing—it offers them incentives and temptations enough to take the paths toward higher spirituality, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, silence, and solitude—asceticism and puritanism are almost indispensable means of education and ennoblement when a race wants to master its origin in the rabble and works its way upward toward eventual rule. Finally, to ordinary human beings, the vast majority, who exist to serve and for general usefulness and may exist only insofar as they do, religion gives an inestimable contentment with their condition and kind, manifold peace of heart, an ennoblement of obedience, one more happiness and sorrow shared with their kind, and something of transfiguration and beautification, something of justification for the whole of everyday life, for all the lowliness, all the half-animal poverty of their souls. Religion and the religious significance of life spread sunshine over such perpetually troubled people and make even the sight of themselves bearable to them; religion acts as an Epicurean philosophy usually acts on sufferers of a higher rank, refreshing, refining, making use of suffering, as it were, finally even sanctifying and justifying it. Perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism is so worthy of reverence as their art of teaching even the lowliest to place themselves through piety in a higher, apparent order of things, and thereby to retain their contentment with the real order within which they live harshly enough—and precisely this harshness is necessary!
62 Finally, of course, to enter the grim counteraccount against such religions too, and bring their uncanny dangerousness to light—it always costs dearly and terribly when religions rule not as means of breeding and education in the philosopher's hand but in their own right and sovereignly, when they themselves want to be ultimate ends and not means alongside other means. Among human beings, as among every other animal species, there is a surplus of failures, sick, degenerating, frail, necessarily suffering individuals; successful cases are always the exception among human beings too, and indeed, considering that the human being is the animal not yet fixed, the sparse exception. But worse still: the higher the nature of the human type represented by an individual, the more improbable it becomes that he will turn out well: the accidental, the law of nonsense in humanity's whole economy, reveals itself most terrifyingly in its destructive effect on higher human beings, whose conditions of life are delicate, manifold, and hard to calculate. How, then, do the two greatest religions named above treat this surplus of failed cases? They seek to preserve, to hold in life whatever can possibly be held; indeed, they take their side on principle, as religions for sufferers, they declare all those right who suffer from life as from an illness, and would like to ensure that every other feeling about life counts as false and becomes impossible. However highly one may value this protective and preserving care, insofar as, alongside all the others, it applies and has applied to the highest and so far almost always also most suffering human type: in the overall reckoning the religions until now, namely the sovereign religions, belong among the chief causes that have held the type “human being” at a lower level—they preserved too much of what ought to perish. We owe them inestimable things; and who is rich enough in gratitude not to become poor before all that, for example, the “spiritual men” of Christianity have done for Europe! And yet, when they gave sufferers comfort, the oppressed and despairing courage, the dependent a staff and support, and lured the inwardly shattered and those gone wild away from society into monasteries and penitentiaries of the soul: what else did they have to do in order to work in this way, with a good conscience and on principle, for the preservation of everything sick and suffering, that is, in deed and in truth, for the deterioration of the European race? Stand all valuations on their head—that is what they had to do! And break the strong, infect the great hopes with sickness, cast suspicion on happiness in beauty, bend everything self-ruling, manly, conquering, lusting for mastery, all the instincts peculiar to the highest and most successful type “human being,” into insecurity, anguish of conscience, self-destruction; indeed, turn the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly—the Church set itself this task, and had to set it, until at last in its valuation “unworlding,” “desensualizing,” and “higher human being” fused into a single feeling. Suppose one could survey the strangely painful and equally coarse and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking, uninvolved eye of an Epicurean god: I believe one would never finish marveling and laughing: does it not seem as though one will had ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries, to make the human being into a sublime monstrosity? But anyone who approached this almost arbitrary degeneration and stunting of the human being embodied in the Christian European (Pascal, for example) with opposite needs, no longer Epicurean but with some divine hammer in his hand—would he not have to cry out in fury, in pity, in horror: “Oh you bunglers, you presumptuous, pitying bunglers, what have you done! Was this work for your hands! How you have hacked and botched my most beautiful stone! What a liberty you took!”—I meant to say: Christianity has so far been the most fateful kind of self-exaltation. People not high and hard enough to be permitted to shape the human being as artists; people not strong and far-sighted enough, with a sublime self-conquest, to let the foreground law of thousandfold failure and destruction hold sway; people not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank and gulf of rank between human being and human being—such people, with their “equal before God,” have so far governed the fate of Europe, until finally a diminished, almost ridiculous kind, a herd animal, something good-natured, sickly, and mediocre, has been bred: the European of today…
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English translation, made independently and directly from the German and reviewed against it.
Third Main Part:
The Religious Nature.
45 The human soul and its limits; the full range of human inner experience reached so far; the heights, depths, and distances of these experiences; the soul’s entire history so far and its still undrained possibilities: this is the hunting ground marked out for a born psychologist and lover of the “great hunt.” But how often he must tell himself in despair: “One person! Oh, only one person! And this huge forest, this primeval forest!” So he wishes for a few hundred hunting assistants and fine, scholarly tracking dogs. He could send them into the history of the human soul to round up his game there. In vain: again and again he learns thoroughly and bitterly how hard it is to find helpers and dogs for precisely the things that excite his curiosity. The trouble with sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, good judgment, and sensitivity of every kind are needed, is that they become useless just where the “great hunt,” and also the great danger, begin. That is just where they lose their tracking eye and nose. To guess and establish, for example, the history that the problem of knowledge and conscience has had in the souls of religious people, someone might have to be as deep, as wounded, as immense as Pascal’s intellectual conscience was. And even then he would need that wide sky of bright, malicious intelligence, able to look down from above on this swarm of dangerous and painful experiences, arrange them, and force them into formulas.—But who would do me this service! And who would have time to wait for such servants! They clearly grow too rarely; at every period they are so unlikely! In the end you have to do everything yourself to know a few things yourself: that means you have a great deal to do!—But curiosity of my kind remains the most pleasant of all vices—forgive me! I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and on earth already.—
46 The faith that early Christianity demanded, and often achieved, arose in a skeptical world of southern free spirits. This world had centuries of conflict between philosophical schools behind it and within it, along with the training in tolerance given by the Roman Empire. This faith is not the loyal, gruff faith of subjects with which a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit, clung to his God and Christianity. It is much closer to Pascal’s faith. That faith looks horribly like a prolonged suicide of reason—a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason that cannot be killed all at once with a single blow. From the beginning, Christian faith is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all the mind’s confidence in itself. At the same time it is enslavement, self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and a Phoenician kind of religion in this faith imposed on a tender, complex, much-pampered conscience. It presupposes that the mind’s submission hurts beyond description, that such a mind’s entire past and habits resist the supreme absurdity confronting it as “faith.” Modern people, dulled to all Christian terminology, no longer feel the ultimate horror that an ancient taste found in the paradoxical formula “God on the cross.” Never before, anywhere, had there been an equally daring reversal, anything as terrible, as questioning and questionable, as this formula. It promised a revaluation of all ancient values.—It is the East, the deep East, the eastern slave, that took revenge this way on Rome and its noble, casual tolerance, on Roman “catholicity” in matters of belief. And it was never faith, but freedom from faith, that half-Stoic, smiling unconcern about the seriousness of faith, that made slaves rebel against their masters. “Enlightenment” stirs rebellion: the slave wants something unconditional. He understands only tyranny, even in morality. He loves as he hates, without shades of difference, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness. His great, hidden suffering rebels against the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Skepticism about suffering, basically just a posture of aristocratic morality, also played no small part in the rise of the last great slave revolt, which began with the French Revolution.
47 Wherever religious neurosis has appeared on earth so far, we find it linked with three dangerous rules for living: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. Yet we cannot decide for sure which is cause and which effect, or whether there is any relation of cause and effect at all. This last doubt is justified because one of its most regular symptoms, among both wild and tame peoples, is also the most sudden and excessive lust. Then, just as suddenly, this turns into spasms of repentance and denial of the world and the will. Could both perhaps be interpreted as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere should we be more willing to give up interpretations. No other type has attracted such a mass of nonsense and superstition. None seems to have interested people, even philosophers, more. It is time to cool down a little on this very subject, to learn caution—or better still, to look away, to walk away.—Even behind the latest philosophy, Schopenhauer’s, stands this terrifying question mark of religious crisis and awakening, almost as the problem itself. How is denial of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question at which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and made his start. And so it was a genuinely Schopenhauerian consequence that his most convinced follower (perhaps also his last, as far as Germany is concerned), Richard Wagner, brought his own life’s work to its end at this very point. Finally he put that terrible and eternal type on the stage as Kundry, a type drawn from life, in flesh and blood. At the same time, psychiatrists in almost every European country had an opportunity to study it close up, wherever religious neurosis—or, as I call it, “the religious nature”—made its latest epidemic outbreak and public appearance as the “Salvation Army.” But if we ask what exactly in the whole phenomenon of the saint has been so irresistibly interesting to people of every kind and age, including philosophers, the answer is undoubtedly the appearance of a miracle that clings to him. Opposites follow one another immediately: states of the soul valued as moral opposites. People believed they could grasp it with their hands here: a “bad person” suddenly became a “saint,” a good person. Earlier psychology suffered shipwreck at this point. Wasn’t that mainly because it had put itself under morality’s rule, because it believed in the oppositions between moral values themselves, and saw, read, and interpreted these oppositions into the text and the facts?—What? The “miracle” only a mistake in interpretation? A lack of skill in reading texts?—
48 Catholicism seems to belong much more deeply to the Latin peoples than Christianity as a whole belongs to us northerners. Consequently, unbelief in Catholic countries means something quite different from unbelief in Protestant ones. It means a kind of rebellion against the spirit of the race, whereas among us it is more a return to the race’s spirit (or lack of spirit). We northerners undoubtedly descend from barbarian races, including in our aptitude for religion: we have little talent for it. We can except the Celts, who for that reason also provided the best soil in the north for receiving the Christian infection. In France the Christian ideal came into flower as fully as the pale northern sun allowed. How strangely devout even these latest French skeptics still seem to our taste, insofar as they have some Celtic blood in their ancestry! How Catholic, how un-German Auguste Comte’s sociology smells to us, with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that charming, clever guide to Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, despite all his hostility to Jesuits! And Ernest Renan above all: how inaccessible the language of such a Renan sounds to us northerners! In him, at every moment, some tiny religious tension throws his soul off balance, a soul that is sensually indulgent in a subtler sense and likes to settle into comfort. Just repeat these beautiful sentences after him—and what malice and high spirits immediately stir in reply within our probably less beautiful and harder soul, our more German soul!—“Let us therefore say boldly that religion is a product of the normal human being; that a person is most in the truth when most religious and most certain of an infinite destiny… It is when he is good that he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order; it is when he looks at things without self-interest that he finds death revolting and absurd. How can we not suppose that it is at these moments that a person sees best?…” These sentences are so completely opposite to my ears and habits that, when I found them, my first burst of anger wrote beside them: “Religious foolishness at its finest!”—until my final burst of anger actually grew fond of them, these sentences with their truth turned upside down! It is so pleasant, so distinguishing, to have your own exact opposites!
49 What amazes us in the ancient Greeks’ religious feeling is the unrestrained wealth of gratitude it pours out. The kind of person who faces nature and life this way is very noble! Later, when the rabble gains the upper hand in Greece, fear also overgrows religion. And Christianity was preparing its arrival.—
50 Passion for God: there are rustic, trusting, intrusive forms of it, like Luther’s. All Protestantism lacks southern delicacy. It can contain an eastern ecstasy, like that of a slave who has been pardoned or promoted without deserving it. Augustine is an example: he lacks all nobility of gesture and desire in an offensive way. It can contain a womanly tenderness and longing that pushes, shyly and ignorantly, toward a mystical and physical union, as in Madame de Guyon. Oddly enough, in many cases it seems to disguise a girl’s or a boy’s puberty. Here and there it is even an old maid’s hysteria, and also her last ambition. The Church has canonized a woman in such a case more than once.
51 Until now, the most powerful people have always bowed in reverence before the saint, seeing him as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate, ultimate deprivation. Why did they bow? They sensed in him—as if behind the question mark of his frail and pitiful appearance—the superior force that wanted to test itself in such conquest. They sensed the strength of will in which they recognized and knew how to honor their own strength and pleasure in ruling. In honoring the saint they honored something in themselves. Besides, the sight of the saint made them suspicious. Such a monstrous amount of denial, of opposition to nature, cannot have been desired for nothing, they said and asked themselves. Perhaps there is a reason for it, some enormous danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret counselors and visitors, might know more? In short, the powerful people of the world learned a new fear in his presence. They sensed a new power, a strange enemy not yet conquered. It was the “will to power” that forced them to stop before the saint. They had to question him——
52 In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are people, things, and speeches on so grand a scale that Greek and Indian writing have nothing to set beside them. We stand in terror and reverence before these immense remains of what humanity once was. And we have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its little projecting peninsula, Europe, which insists on representing “human progress” compared with Asia. Admittedly, someone who is only a thin, tame domestic animal himself and knows only a domestic animal’s needs—like our educated people today, including the Christians of “educated” Christianity—has no reason to feel wonder among those ruins, much less grief. A taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for “great” and “small.” Perhaps he will still find the New Testament, the book of grace, more to his liking. It has plenty of that proper smell of tender, dull praying brothers and little souls. To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo taste in every respect, together with the Old Testament as a single book, the “Bible,” “the book itself”: that may be the greatest act of recklessness and “sin against the spirit” on literary Europe’s conscience.
53 Why atheism today?—“The father” in God has been thoroughly disproved; so have “the judge” and “the rewarder.” Likewise his “free will”: he does not hear—and if he did hear, he still would not know how to help. Worst of all, he seems incapable of communicating clearly: is he confused?—These are the causes of European theism’s decline that I have discovered by questioning and listening in many different conversations. It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed growing powerfully—but deeply distrusts and rejects precisely the satisfaction offered by theism.
54 What, at bottom, is all modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes—and more in defiance of him than by following his lead—all philosophers have been trying to kill off the old concept of the soul, under the appearance of criticizing the concepts of subject and predicate. That means trying to kill off the basic assumption of Christian teaching. Modern philosophy, as skepticism about knowledge, is secretly or openly anti-Christian, although—to put it for more sensitive ears—by no means anti-religious. In the past, people believed in “the soul” as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject. They said that “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and depends on it: thinking is an activity for which a subject must be supposed as the cause. Then people tried, with admirable persistence and cunning, to see whether they could escape this net—whether the reverse might be true: “think” the condition, “I” dependent on it; “I,” then, only a synthesis made by thinking itself. What Kant really wanted to prove was that, starting from the subject, neither the subject nor the object could be proved. The possibility that the subject, and thus “the soul,” has only an apparent existence may not always have been foreign to him. This thought has already appeared once on earth, with immense power, as Vedanta philosophy.
55 There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs, but three are the most important. Once people sacrificed human beings to their god, perhaps the very people they loved best. This includes the sacrifices of firstborn children in all prehistoric religions, and also the emperor Tiberius’s sacrifice in the grotto of Mithras on the island of Capri, that most horrifying of all Roman anachronisms. Then, in humanity’s moral age, people sacrificed to their god their strongest instincts, their “nature.” This festive joy shines in the cruel eye of the ascetic, the inspired enemy of nature. Finally, what was left to sacrifice? Didn’t people eventually have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing; all hope; all faith in hidden harmony, in future happiness and justice? Didn’t they have to sacrifice God himself, and, out of cruelty toward themselves, worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was kept for the generation now coming up. All of us already know something about it.—
56 Suppose someone, like me, has long worked with some mysterious longing to think pessimism through to its depths. He has tried to free it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it last appeared to this century, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Suppose he has really looked, with an Asian and more-than-Asian eye, into and down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking—beyond good and evil, no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under morality’s spell and delusion. In doing so, without really intending it, he may have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most exuberant, alive, and world-affirming person. This person has not merely learned to accept and put up with what was and is. He wants it back, just as it was and is, for all eternity. Insatiably he calls “From the beginning!” not only to himself but to the whole play and performance. And not only to a performance, but fundamentally to the one who needs this very performance—and makes it necessary: because he keeps needing himself—and making himself necessary——What? And wouldn’t this be—a vicious-circle God?
57 As the power of a person’s mental sight and insight grows, so does the distance, and as it were the space, around him. His world grows deeper; ever-new stars, ever-new riddles and images come into view. Perhaps everything on which the mind’s eye has practiced its sharpness and depth has been only an occasion for practice, something to play with, something for children and childish minds. Perhaps one day the most solemn concepts, those most fought and suffered over, the concepts “God” and “sin,” will seem no more important to us than a child’s toy and a child’s grief seem to an old man. And perhaps then the “old human being” will need another toy and another grief—still child enough, an eternal child!
58 Has anyone properly noticed how much a truly religious life requires outward idleness or half-idleness? This applies both to its favorite microscopic work of self-examination and to that tender calm called “prayer,” a constant readiness for the “coming of God.” I mean idleness with a good conscience, inherited from ancient times and in the blood, not entirely unfamiliar with the aristocratic feeling that work dishonors—that it makes soul and body common. And consequently, isn’t modern industriousness, noisy, eager to squeeze value from every moment, proud of itself, stupidly proud, what trains and prepares people for “unbelief” more than anything else? Among those now living apart from religion in Germany, for example, I find people of many kinds and origins of “freethinking.” Above all, however, I find a majority whose religious instincts have been dissolved by industriousness, generation after generation. They no longer even know what religions are useful for. They merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dull amazement. These good people already feel fully occupied, whether by their business or their pleasures, not to mention the “fatherland,” the newspapers, and “family duties.” They seem to have no time left for religion, especially since they cannot tell whether it is a new business or a new pleasure. For surely, they tell themselves, nobody goes to church just to spoil a good mood. They are not enemies of religious customs. If participation is required in certain cases, by the state for example, they do what is required, as people do so many things: with patient, modest seriousness and without much curiosity or discomfort. They simply live too far apart and outside to find even a personal decision for or against such things necessary. Today this indifferent group includes most middle-class German Protestants, especially in the busy great centers of trade and transportation. It also includes most hardworking scholars and everyone attached to the universities—except the theologians, whose existence and very possibility there give psychologists ever more and subtler riddles to solve. Devout people, or even merely churchgoing people, rarely imagine how much goodwill—one might say willful choice—is now needed for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously. His whole trade, and, as I said, the craftsmanlike industriousness to which his modern conscience commits him, incline him toward a superior, almost kindly cheerfulness about religion. Sometimes this mixes with a slight contempt for the “uncleanliness” of mind he assumes wherever someone still professes allegiance to the Church. Only with the help of history—not from personal experience—does the scholar manage to reach a reverent seriousness and a certain shy consideration toward religions. But even if he has raised his feelings to gratitude toward them, he has personally come not one step closer to what still exists as church or devotion; perhaps the reverse. The practical indifference toward religious matters into which he was born and educated usually becomes refined into a caution and cleanliness that avoid contact with religious people and things. It may be precisely the depth of his tolerance and humanity that tells him to avoid the delicate difficulty that toleration itself brings.—Every age has its own divine kind of naivety, whose invention other ages may envy. And how much naivety, venerable, childlike, boundlessly clumsy naivety, lies in the scholar’s belief in his own superiority, in his tolerance’s good conscience! How much lies in the unsuspecting, simple certainty with which his instinct treats the religious person as an inferior, lower type that he himself has grown beyond, away from, and above—he, the little conceited dwarf and man of the rabble, the diligent, nimble worker with head and hands in “ideas,” in “modern ideas”!
59 Someone who has looked deeply into the world can probably guess the wisdom in people’s superficiality. Their instinct for preservation teaches them to be fleeting, light, and false. Here and there, among philosophers as among artists, we find a passionate and exaggerated worship of “pure forms.” Let no one doubt that someone who needs this cult of the surface once reached beneath it with disastrous results. Perhaps even among these burned children, the born artists who can enjoy life only by intending to falsify its image—as if taking a drawn-out revenge on life—there is an order of rank. We could measure how thoroughly life has spoiled their taste for it by how far they want its image falsified, thinned out, moved to another world, made divine. We could count religious people among the artists, as their highest rank. It is the deep, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces entire millennia to sink their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence. It is the fear of an instinct that senses we might get hold of the truth too soon, before humanity has become strong enough, hard enough, enough of an artist… Seen this way, devotion, “life in God,” would appear as the subtlest and final offspring of fear of truth: an artist’s worship and intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications; the will to reverse truth, to embrace untruth at any price. Perhaps until now there has been no stronger means of making human beings themselves beautiful than devotion. Through it, a person can become so much art, surface, play of colors, goodness, that looking at him no longer hurts.—
60 To love human beings for God’s sake—that has so far been the noblest and most remote feeling reached among human beings. Love of humanity without some sanctifying purpose behind it is just one more stupidity and animal impulse. The inclination toward this human love must first receive its measure, its delicacy, its grain of salt and speck of ambergris from a higher inclination. Whoever first felt and “experienced” this, however much his tongue may have stumbled when it tried to express such a delicate thing, let him remain holy and worthy of our reverence for all time, as the person who has flown highest so far and lost his way most beautifully!
61 The philosopher as we free spirits understand him is the person with the widest responsibility, whose conscience takes responsibility for humanity’s entire development. This philosopher will use religions for his work of breeding and education, just as he will use the political and economic conditions of his time. The selecting, breeding influence that can be exerted through religions—that is, always a destructive influence as well as a creative and shaping one—is varied and different according to the kind of people placed under their spell and protection. For the strong and independent, those prepared and destined to command, in whom the reason and skill of a ruling race take bodily form, religion is one more means of overcoming resistance and being able to rule. It is a bond tying rulers and subjects together. It exposes and surrenders the subjects’ consciences to the rulers—their hidden, innermost selves, which would like to escape obedience. And if some individuals of such noble origin, through high intellectual development, incline toward a more withdrawn and thoughtful life, reserving for themselves only the most refined kind of rule over selected disciples or brothers of an order, religion itself can be used to gain peace from the noise and effort of coarser government and keep clear of the inevitable dirt of all political activity. The Brahmins, for example, understood this. Through a religious organization they gave themselves the power to appoint the people’s kings, while keeping and feeling themselves apart and outside, as people with higher tasks, above those of kings. Meanwhile, religion also gives some of the ruled instruction and opportunity to prepare themselves for eventually ruling and commanding. These are the slowly rising classes and social ranks in which, through fortunate marriage customs, the strength and pleasure of the will, the will to self-control, constantly increase. Religion offers them plenty of prompts and temptations to take the paths toward higher intellectual life, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, silence, and solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable tools of education and ennoblement when a race wants to master its origins among the rabble and work its way up toward eventual rule. Finally, to ordinary people, the great majority, who exist to serve and be generally useful and may exist only to that extent, religion gives an invaluable contentment with their situation and kind. It gives them many kinds of peace of heart, ennobles obedience, adds happiness and suffering shared with people like themselves, and supplies something that transfigures and beautifies, something that justifies their whole everyday life, all its lowliness, all the half-animal poverty of their souls. Religion and life’s religious significance spread sunshine over these constantly troubled people and make even their own appearance bearable to them. Religion works as an Epicurean philosophy usually works on sufferers of a higher rank: refreshing, refining, making use of suffering, as it were, and finally even sanctifying and justifying it. Perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism deserves so much respect as their skill in teaching even the lowest to place themselves, through devotion, in a higher apparent order of things. This lets them maintain their contentment with the real order in which their lives are hard enough—and that very hardness is necessary!
62 Finally, though, we must also put the bad side of such religions on the balance sheet and bring their sinister danger to light. The price is always high and terrible when religions rule independently and with sovereign power, rather than as tools of breeding and education in the philosopher’s hands; when they themselves want to be final ends, not means among other means. Among human beings, as among every other animal species, there is a surplus of failures, sick people, degenerating people, frail people, people who must suffer. Successful cases are always the exception among humans too—and a rare exception, considering that the human being is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed. But worse still: the higher the type of humanity that a person represents, the less likely he is to turn out well. Chance, the law of meaninglessness in humanity’s overall economy, shows itself most frighteningly in its destructive effect on higher people, whose conditions of life are subtle, complex, and hard to calculate. How, then, do the two greatest religions just mentioned deal with this surplus of failed cases? They try to preserve and hold in life whatever can possibly be held. Indeed, as religions for sufferers, they take their side as a matter of principle. They agree with all those who suffer from life as from a disease. They would like to make every other feeling about life count as wrong and become impossible. However highly we may value this protective, preserving care, insofar as it applies and has applied, among all the others, to the highest type of person, so far almost always also the one who suffers most, the overall reckoning remains: religions until now, the sovereign religions, are among the main causes that have kept the type “human” at a lower level. They preserved too much of what ought to perish. We owe them things beyond price. And who is rich enough in gratitude not to become poor before everything that Christianity’s “spiritual people,” for example, have done for Europe! And yet, when they gave comfort to sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the dependent, and lured the inwardly shattered and those who had turned savage away from society into monasteries and prisons for the soul, what else did they have to do? How could they work with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to preserve everything sick and suffering—that is, in actual fact, to worsen the European race? Turn all value judgments upside down—that is what they had to do! And break the strong, sicken the great hopes, cast suspicion on happiness in beauty, bend everything self-governing, manly, conquering, hungry for rule—all the instincts belonging to the highest and most successful type of “human”—into uncertainty, torment of conscience, self-destruction. Indeed, they had to turn all love of earthly things and of rule over the earth into hatred of the earth and earthly things. The Church made this its task, and had to make it its task, until finally, in its valuation, “turning away from the world,” “turning away from the senses,” and “higher human being” melted into a single feeling. Suppose we could survey the strangely painful comedy of European Christianity, as crude as it is subtle, with the mocking, uninvolved eye of an Epicurean god. I believe we would never stop wondering and laughing. Doesn’t it look as though one will has ruled Europe for eighteen centuries: to turn humanity into a sublime deformity? But suppose someone approached this almost arbitrary degeneration and stunting of humanity represented by the Christian European—Pascal, for example—with the opposite needs, no longer an Epicurean but holding some divine hammer. Wouldn’t he have to cry out in anger, pity, and horror: “Oh, you bunglers, you conceited, pitying bunglers, what have you done! Was this work for your hands! How you have hacked up and ruined my finest stone! What gave you the right!”—What I meant to say is this: Christianity has so far been the most disastrous kind of self-exaltation. People not high and hard enough to be allowed to shape humanity as artists; people not strong and farsighted enough to let the foreground law of failure and destruction by the thousand run its course, with sublime self-restraint; people not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank and gulf of rank between one person and another—such people, with their “equal before God,” have so far ruled over Europe’s fate. Finally they have bred a diminished, almost ridiculous kind, a herd animal, something well-meaning, sickly, and mediocre: the European of today…
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Part III — The Religious Nature is part of Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is part 4 of 11 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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