Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the _freedom_ which proceed from
intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power,
_manifest_ themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not
count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and
lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far
enough, they do not see what is _below_ them: whereas a man who would
talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five
hundred convictions _beneath_ him--and _behind_ him.... A mind that
aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is
necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction _belongs_ to
strength, and to an independent point of view.... That grand passion
which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence,
and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself,
drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him
unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain
circumstances it does not _begrudge_ him even convictions. Conviction as
a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand
passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to
them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of
faith, of something unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may
be allowed the word, is a need of _weakness_. The man of faith, the
"believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man
cannot posit _himself_ as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself.
The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an
end; he must be _used up_; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct
gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted
to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity.
Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of
self-estrangement.... When one reflects how necessary it is to the great
majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and
hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense,
_slavery_, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being
of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once
understands conviction and "faith." To the man with convictions they are
his backbone. To _avoid_ seeing many things, to be impartial about
nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values
strictly and infallibly--these are conditions necessary to the existence
of such a man. But by the same token they are _antagonists_ of the
truthful man--of the truth.... The believer is not free to answer the
question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own
conscience: integrity on _this_ point would work his instant downfall.
The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions
into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre,
Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong,
_emancipated_ spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these _sick_
intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the
great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing
poses to listening to _reasons_....
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is
now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question
whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than
lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)[27] This time I desire
to put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between
a lie and a conviction?--All the world believes that there is; but what
is not believed by all the world!--Every conviction has its history, its
primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it _becomes_ a
conviction only after having been, for a long time, _not_ one, and then,
for an even longer time, _hardly_ one. What if falsehood be also one of
these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that is needed is a
change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in
the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse
to see it _as_ it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not
before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is
that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a
relatively rare offence.--Now, this will _not_ to see what one sees,
this will _not_ to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for
all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes
inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that
Rome was synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought
the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between
this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans,
including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of
morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its very
_survival_ to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it
every moment?--"This is _our_ conviction: we publish it to the whole
world; we live and die for it--let us respect all who have
convictions!"--I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of
anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not
become more respectable because he lies on principle.... The priests,
who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the
objection that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say,
of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle _because_ it serves a
purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in
the concepts, "God," "the will of God" and "the revelation of God" at
this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same
road: this was his _practical_ reason.[28] There are questions regarding
the truth or untruth of which it is _not_ for man to decide; all the
capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond
human reason.... To know the limits of reason--_that_ alone is genuine
philosophy.... Why did God make a revelation to man? Would God have done
anything superfluous? Man _could_ not find out for himself what was good
and what was evil, so God taught him His will.... Moral: the priest does
_not_ lie--the question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing to do with such
things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these
things. In order to lie here it would be necessary to know _what_ is
true. But this is more than man _can_ know; therefore, the priest is
simply the mouthpiece of God.--Such a priestly syllogism
is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the
_shrewd dodge_ of "revelation" belong to the general priestly type--to
the priest of the _décadence_ as well as to the priest of pagan times
(--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God" is a word
signifying acquiescence in all things).--The "law," the "will of God,"
the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these things are merely words
for the conditions _under_ which the priest comes to power and _with_
which he maintains his power,--these concepts are to be found at the
bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or
priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy lie"--common
alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the
Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this
means, no matter where it is heard, _the priest lies_....
[27] The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the
direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than
lies."
[28] A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft"
(Critique of Practical Reason).
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the _end_ of lying? The
fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is _my_
objection to the means it employs. Only _bad_ ends appear: the
poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the
body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of
sin--_therefore_, its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling
when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and
superior work, which it would be a sin against the _intelligence_ to so
much as _name_ in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why:
there is a genuine philosophy behind it, _in_ it, not merely an
evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even
the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And,
_not_ to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from
every kind of Bible: by means of it the _nobles_, the philosophers and
the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble
valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and
triumphant feeling toward self and life--the _sun_ shines upon the whole
book.--All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless
vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and marriage--are here
handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can
any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which
contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man
have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; ... it is
better to marry than to burn"?[29] And is it _possible_ to be a
Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to
say, _befouled_, by the doctrine of the _immaculata conceptio_?... I
know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of
women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a
way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to
surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a
maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always
pure." In another place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the
sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a
maiden." Finally, in still another place--perhaps this is also a holy
lie--: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all
below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."
[29] 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9.
57.
One catches the _unholiness_ of Christian means _in flagranti_ by the
simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the
ends sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously
antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity
cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity _contemptible_.--A
book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other
good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the
ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a
conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of
this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the
authority of a slowly and painfully attained _truth_ are fundamentally
different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book
never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a
law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou
shall," on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.--At
a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the
greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight,
declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall
live--or _can_ live--has come to an end. The object now is to reap as
rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment
and _hard_ experience. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided
above everything is further experimentation--the continuation of the
state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized
_ad infinitum_. Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand,
_revelation_, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the
laws are _not_ of human origin, that they were _not_ sought out and
found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of
divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a
history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand,
_tradition_, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged
from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one's
forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus
grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers _lived_ it.--The
higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract
consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right
living (that is to say, those that have been _proved_ to be right by
wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a
perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to
every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book
as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility of future
mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to the
highest reaches of the art of life. _To that end the thing must be made
unconscious_: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The _order of castes_,
the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an _order
of nature_, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary
fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. In every healthy
society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward
differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these
has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and
feeling of perfection. It is _not_ Manu but nature that sets off in one
class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are
marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who
are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only
mediocrity--the last-named represents the great majority, and the first
two the select. The superior caste--I call it the _fewest_--has, as the
most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for
beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of
men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can
goodness escape being weakness. _Pulchrum est paucorum hominum_:[30]
goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than
uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees
_ugliness_--or indignation against the general aspect of things.
Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "_The
world is perfect_"--so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the
instinct of the man who says yes to life. "Imperfection, whatever is
_inferior_ to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala
themselves are parts of this perfection." The most intelligent men, like
the _strongest_, find their happiness where others would find only
disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with
others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism
becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult
task as a privilege; it is to them a _recreation_ to play with burdens
that would crush all others.... Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They
are the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them
being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they
want to, but because they _are_; they are not at liberty to play
second.--The _second caste_: to this belong the guardians of the law,
the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all,
the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law.
The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals,
the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is _rough_ in the
business of ruling--their followers, their right hand, their most apt
disciples.--In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing
"made up"; whatever is to the _contrary_ is made up--by it nature is
brought to shame.... The order of castes, the _order of rank_, simply
formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three
types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution
of higher types, and the highest types--the _inequality_ of rights is
essential to the existence of any rights at all.--A right is a
privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of
existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the _mediocre_.
Life is always harder as one mounts the _heights_--the cold increases,
responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand
only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly
consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture,
_science_, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of
_occupational_ activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and
aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the
instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as
to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a
wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not
_society_, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable
of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is
a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one
thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound
intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is,
in fact, the _first_ prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional:
it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the
exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than
he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of
heart--it is simply his _duty_.... Whom do I hate most heartily among
the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the
Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his
feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who make him envious
and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in
the assertion of "equal" rights.... What is _bad_? But I have already
answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
_revenge_.--The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry....
[30] Few men are noble.
58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference:
whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness
between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points
only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of
this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied
a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the
conditions which cause life to _flourish_ into an "eternal" social
organization,--Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such
an organization, _because life flourished under it_. There the benefits
that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity
were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in
a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible;
here, on the contrary, the harvest is _blighted_ overnight.... That
which stood there _aere perennis_, the _imperium Romanum_, the most
magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has
ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after
it appears as patchwork, bungling, _dilletantism_--those holy anarchists
made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world," _which is to say_,
the _imperium Romanum_, so that in the end not a stone stood upon
another--and even Germans and other such louts were able to become its
masters.... The Christian and the anarchist: both are _décadents_; both
are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous,
degenerating, _blood-sucking_; both have an instinct of _mortal hatred_
of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and
promises life a future.... Christianity was the vampire of the _imperium
Romanum_,--overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans:
the conquest of the soil for a great culture _that could await its
time_. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The _imperium
Romanum_ that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces
teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all works
of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure
to follow was not to _prove_ its worth for thousands of years. To this
day, nothing on a like scale _sub specie aeterni_ has been brought into
being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong enough to
withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do
with such things--the _first_ principle of all genuinely great
architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the
_corruptest_ of all forms of corruption--against Christians.... These
stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity,
crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in
_real_ things, of all instinct for _reality_--this cowardly, effeminate
and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all "souls," step by step,
from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious,
manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own
cause, their own serious purpose, their own _pride_. The sneakishness of
hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell,
such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the _unio mystica_ in the
drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of
Chandala revenge--all _that_ sort of thing became master of Rome: the
same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had
combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know _what_ Epicurus made
war upon--_not_ paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say, the
corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and
immortality.--He combatted the _subterranean_ cults, the whole of latent
Christianity--to deny immortality was already a form of genuine
_salvation_.--Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in
Rome was Epicurean--_when Paul appeared_ ... Paul, the Chandala hatred
of Rome, of "the world," in the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew,
the _eternal_ Jew _par excellence_.... What he saw was how, with the aid
of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism,
a "world conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God
on the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic
intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power.
"Salvation is of the Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding
_and_ summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of
Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his
discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct
was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the
ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into the
mouth of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into the
mouth--he _made_ out of him something that even a priest of Mithras
could understand.... This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the
fact that he _needed_ the belief in immortality in order to rob "the
world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master Rome--that
the notion of a "beyond" is the _death of life_.... Nihilist and
Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme....
59.