done to the importance of religion, of this there can be no doubt. It is
also equally certain that in the ensuing reaction of enlightenment, the
demands of justice were far exceeded inasmuch as religion was treated
with love, even with infatuation and proclaimed as a profound, indeed
the most profound knowledge of the world, which science had but to
divest of its dogmatic garb in order to possess "truth" in its
unmythical form. Religions must therefore--this was the contention of
all foes of enlightenment--sensu allegorico, with regard for the
comprehension of the masses, give expression to that ancient truth which
is wisdom in itself, inasmuch as all science of modern times has led up
to it instead of away from it. So that between the most ancient wisdom
of man and all later wisdom there prevails harmony, even similarity of
viewpoint; and the advancement of knowledge--if one be disposed to
concede such a thing--has to do not with its nature but with its
propagation. This whole conception of religion and science is through
and through erroneous, and none would to-day be hardy enough to
countenance it had not Schopenhauer's rhetoric taken it under
protection, this high sounding rhetoric which now gains auditors after
the lapse of a generation. Much as may be gained from Schopenhauer's
religio-ethical human and cosmical oracle as regards the comprehension
of Christianity and other religions, it is nevertheless certain that he
erred regarding the value of religion to knowledge. He himself was in
this but a servile pupil of the scientific teachers of his time who had
all taken romanticism under their protection and renounced the spirit of
enlightenment. Had he been born in our own time it would have been
impossible for him to have spoken of the sensus allegoricus of religion.
He would instead have done truth the justice to say: never has a
religion, directly or indirectly, either as dogma or as allegory,
contained a truth. For all religions grew out of dread or necessity, and
came into existence through an error of the reason. They have, perhaps,
in times of danger from science, incorporated some philosophical
doctrine or other into their systems in order to make it possible to
continue one's existence within them. But this is but a theological work
of art dating from the time in which a religion began to doubt of
itself. These theological feats of art, which are most common in
Christianity as the religion of a learned age, impregnated with
philosophy, have led to this superstition of the sensus allegoricus, as
has, even more, the habit of the philosophers (namely those
half-natures, the poetical philosophers and the philosophising artists)
of dealing with their own feelings as if they constituted the
fundamental nature of humanity and hence of giving their own religious
feelings a predominant influence over the structure of their systems. As
the philosophers mostly philosophised under the influence of hereditary
religious habits, or at least under the traditional influence of this
"metaphysical necessity," they naturally arrived at conclusions
closely resembling the Judaic or Christian or Indian religious
tenets--resembling, in the way that children are apt to look like their
mothers: only in this case the fathers were not certain as to the
maternity, as easily happens--but in the innocence of their admiration,
they fabled regarding the family likeness of all religion and science.
In reality, there exists between religion and true science neither
relationship nor friendship, not even enmity: they dwell in different
spheres. Every philosophy that lets the religious comet gleam through
the darkness of its last outposts renders everything within it that
purports to be science, suspicious. It is all probably religion,
although it may assume the guise of science.--Moreover, though all the
peoples agree concerning certain religious things, for example, the
existence of a god (which, by the way, as regards this point, is not
the case) this fact would constitute an argument against the thing
agreed upon, for example the very existence of a god. The consensus
gentium and especially hominum can probably amount only to an absurdity.
Against it there is no consensus omnium sapientium whatever, on any
point, with the exception of which Goethe's verse speaks:
"All greatest sages to all latest ages
Will smile, wink and slily agree
'Tis folly to wait till a fool's empty pate
Has learned to be knowing and free.
So children of wisdom must look upon fools
As creatures who're never the better for schools."
Stated without rhyme or metre and adapted to our case: the consensus
sapientium is to the effect that the consensus gentium amounts to an
absurdity.
111
=Origin of Religious Worship.=--Let us transport ourselves back to the
times in which religious life flourished most vigorously and we will
find a fundamental conviction prevalent which we no longer share and
which has resulted in the closing of the door to religious life once for
all so far as we are concerned: this conviction has to do with nature
and intercourse with her. In those times nothing is yet known of
nature's laws. Neither for earth nor for heaven is there a must. A
season, sunshine, rain can come or stay away as it pleases. There is
wanting, in particular, all idea of natural causation. If a man rows, it
is not the oar that moves the boat, but rowing is a magical ceremony
whereby a demon is constrained to move the boat. All illness, death
itself, is a consequence of magical influences. In sickness and death
nothing natural is conceived. The whole idea of "natural course" is
wanting. The idea dawns first upon the ancient Greeks, that is to say in
a very late period of humanity, in the conception of a Moira [fate]
ruling over the gods. If any person shoots off a bow, there is always an
irrational strength and agency in the act. If the wells suddenly run
dry, the first thought is of subterranean demons and their pranks. It
must have been the dart of a god beneath whose invisible influence a
human being suddenly collapses. In India, the carpenter (according to
Lubbock) is in the habit of making devout offerings to his hammer and
hatchet. A Brahmin treats the plume with which he writes, a soldier the
weapon that he takes into the field, a mason his trowel, a laborer his
plow, in the same way. All nature is, in the opinion of religious
people, a sum total of the doings of conscious and willing beings, an
immense mass of complex volitions. In regard to all that takes place
outside of us no conclusion is permissible that anything will result
thus and so, must result thus and so, that we are comparatively
calculable and certain in our experiences, that man is the rule, nature
the ruleless. This view forms the fundamental conviction that dominates
crude, religion-producing, early civilizations. We contemporary men feel
exactly the opposite: the richer man now feels himself inwardly, the
more polyphone the music and the sounding of his soul, the more
powerfully does the uniformity of nature impress him. We all, with
Goethe, recognize in nature the great means of repose for the soul. We
listen to the pendulum stroke of this great clock with longing for rest,
for absolute calm and quiescence, as if we could drink in the uniformity
of nature and thereby arrive first at an enjoyment of oneself. Formerly
it was the reverse: if we carry ourselves back to the periods of crude
civilization, or if we contemplate contemporary savages, we will find
them most strongly influenced by rule, by tradition. The individual is
almost automatically bound to rule and tradition and moves with the
uniformity of a pendulum. To him nature--the uncomprehended, fearful,
mysterious nature--must seem the domain of freedom, of volition, of
higher power, indeed as an ultra-human degree of destiny, as god. Every
individual in such periods and circumstances feels that his existence,
his happiness, the existence and happiness of the family, the state,
the success or failure of every undertaking, must depend upon these
dispositions of nature. Certain natural events must occur at the proper
time and certain others must not occur. How can influence be exercised
over this fearful unknown, how can this domain of freedom be brought
under subjection? thus he asks himself, thus he worries: Is there no
means to render these powers of nature as subject to rule and tradition
as you are yourself?--The cogitation of the superstitious and
magic-deluded man is upon the theme of imposing a law upon nature: and
to put it briefly, religious worship is the result of such cogitation.
The problem which is present to every man is closely connected with this
one: how can the weaker party dictate laws to the stronger, control its
acts in reference to the weaker? At first the most harmless form of
influence is recollected, that influence which is acquired when the
partiality of anyone has been won. Through beseeching and prayer,
through abject humiliation, through obligations to regular gifts and
propitiations, through flattering homages, it is possible, therefore, to
impose some guidance upon the forces of nature, to the extent that their
partiality be won: love binds and is bound. Then agreements can be
entered into by means of which certain courses of conduct are mutually
concluded, vows are made and authorities prescribed. But far more potent
is that species of power exercised by means of magic and incantation. As
a man is able to injure a powerful enemy by means of the magician and
render him helpless with fear, as the love potion operates at a
distance, so can the mighty forces of nature, in the opinion of weaker
mankind, be controlled by similar means. The principal means of
effecting incantations is to acquire control of something belonging to
the party to be influenced, hair, finger nails, food from his table,
even his picture or his name. With such apparatus it is possible to act
by means of magic, for the basic principle is that to everything
spiritual corresponds something corporeal. With the aid of this
corporeal element the spirit may be bound, injured or destroyed. The
corporeal affords the handle by which the spiritual can be laid hold of.
In the same way that man influences mankind does he influences some
spirit of nature, for this latter has also its corporeal element that
can be grasped. The tree, and on the same basis, the seed from which it
grew: this puzzling sequence seems to demonstrate that in both forms the
same spirit is embodied, now large, now small. A stone that suddenly
rolls, is the body in which the spirit works. Does a huge boulder lie in
a lonely moor? It is impossible to think of mortal power having placed
it there. The stone must have moved itself there. That is to say some
spirit must dominate it. Everything that has a body is subject to magic,
including, therefore, the spirits of nature. If a god is directly
connected with his portrait, a direct influence (by refraining from
devout offerings, by whippings, chainings and the like) can be brought
to bear upon him. The lower classes in China tie cords around the
picture of their god in order to defy his departing favor, when he has
left them in the lurch, and tear the picture to pieces, drag it through
the streets into dung heaps and gutters, crying: "You dog of a spirit,
we housed you in a beautiful temple, we gilded you prettily, we fed you
well, we brought you offerings, and yet how ungrateful you are!" Similar
displays of resentment have been made against pictures of the mother of
god and pictures of saints in Catholic countries during the present
century when such pictures would not do their duty during times of
pestilence and drought.
Through all these magical relationships to nature countless ceremonies
are occasioned, and finally, when their complexity and confusion grow
too great, pains are taken to systematize them, to arrange them so that
the favorable course of nature's progress, namely the great yearly
circle of the seasons, may be brought about by a corresponding course of
the ceremonial progress. The aim of religious worship is to influence
nature to human advantage, and hence to instil a subjection to law into
her that originally she has not, whereas at present man desires to find
out the subjection to law of nature in order to guide himself thereby.
In brief, the system of religious worship rests upon the idea of magic
between man and man, and the magician is older than the priest. But it
rests equally upon other and higher ideas. It brings into prominence the
sympathetic relation of man to man, the existence of benevolence,
gratitude, prayer, of truces between enemies, of loans upon security, of
arrangements for the protection of property. Man, even in very inferior
degrees of civilization, does not stand in the presence of nature as a
helpless slave, he is not willy-nilly the absolute servant of nature. In
the Greek development of religion, especially in the relationship to the
Olympian gods, it becomes possible to entertain the idea of an existence
side by side of two castes, a higher, more powerful, and a lower, less
powerful: but both are bound together in some way, on account of their
origin and are one species. They need not be ashamed of one another.
This is the element of distinction in Greek religion.
112
=At the Contemplation of Certain Ancient Sacrificial Proceedings.=--How
many sentiments are lost to us is manifest in the union of the farcical,
even of the obscene, with the religious feeling. The feeling that this
mixture is possible is becoming extinct. We realize the mixture only
historically, in the mysteries of Demeter and Dionysos and in the
Christian Easter festivals and religious mysteries. But we still
perceive the sublime in connection with the ridiculous, and the like,
the emotional with the absurd. Perhaps a later age will be unable to
understand even these combinations.
113
=Christianity as Antiquity.=--When on a Sunday morning we hear the old
bells ringing, we ask ourselves: Is it possible? All this for a Jew
crucified two thousand years ago who said he was God's son? The proof of
such an assertion is lacking.--Certainly, the Christian religion
constitutes in our time a protruding bit of antiquity from very remote
ages and that its assertions are still generally believed--although men
have become so keen in the scrutiny of claims--constitutes the oldest
relic of this inheritance. A god who begets children by a mortal woman;
a sage who demands that no more work be done, that no more justice be
administered but that the signs of the approaching end of the world be
heeded; a system of justice that accepts an innocent as a vicarious
sacrifice in the place of the guilty; a person who bids his disciples
drink his blood; prayers for miracles; sins against a god expiated upon
a god; fear of a hereafter to which death is the portal; the figure of
the cross as a symbol in an age that no longer knows the purpose and the
ignominy of the cross--how ghostly all these things flit before us out
of the grave of their primitive antiquity! Is one to believe that such
things can still be believed?
114
=The Un-Greek in Christianity.=--The Greeks did not look upon the
Homeric gods above them as lords nor upon themselves beneath as
servants, after the fashion of the Jews. They saw but the counterpart as
in a mirror of the most perfect specimens of their own caste, hence an
ideal, but no contradiction of their own nature. There was a feeling of
mutual relationship, resulting in a mutual interest, a sort of alliance.
Man thinks well of himself when he gives himself such gods and places
himself in a relationship akin to that of the lower nobility with the
higher; whereas the Italian races have a decidedly vulgar religion,
involving perpetual anxiety because of bad and mischievous powers and
soul disturbers. Wherever the Olympian gods receded into the background,
there even Greek life became gloomier and more perturbed.--Christianity,
on the other hand, oppressed and degraded humanity completely and sank
it into deepest mire: into the feeling of utter abasement it suddenly
flashed the gleam of divine compassion, so that the amazed and
grace-dazzled stupefied one gave a cry of delight and for a moment
believed that the whole of heaven was within him. Upon this unhealthy
excess of feeling, upon the accompanying corruption of heart and head,
Christianity attains all its psychological effects. It wants to
annihilate, debase, stupefy, amaze, bedazzle. There is but one thing
that it does not want: measure, standard (das Maas) and therefore is it
in the worst sense barbarous, asiatic, vulgar, un-Greek.
115
=Being Religious to Some Purpose.=--There are certain insipid,
traffic-virtuous people to whom religion is pinned like the hem of some
garb of a higher humanity. These people do well to remain religious: it
adorns them. All who are not versed in some professional
weapon--including tongue and pen as weapons--are servile: to all such
the Christian religion is very useful, for then their servility assumes
the aspect of Christian virtue and is amazingly adorned.--People whose
daily lives are empty and colorless are readily religious. This is
comprehensible and pardonable, but they have no right to demand that
others, whose daily lives are not empty and colorless, should be
religious also.
116
=The Everyday Christian.=--If Christianity, with its allegations of an
avenging God, universal sinfulness, choice of grace, and the danger of
eternal damnation, were true, it would be an indication of weakness of
mind and character not to be a priest or an apostle or a hermit, and
toil for one's own salvation. It would be irrational to lose sight of
one's eternal well being in comparison with temporary advantage:
Assuming these dogmas to be generally believed, the every day Christian
is a pitiable figure, a man who really cannot count as far as three, and
who, for the rest, just because of his intellectual incapacity, does not
deserve to be as hard punished as Christianity promises he shall be.
117
=Concerning the Cleverness of Christianity.=--It is a master stroke of
Christianity to so emphasize the unworthiness, sinfulness and
degradation of men in general that contempt of one's fellow creatures
becomes impossible. "He may sin as much as he pleases, he is not by
nature different from me. It is I who in every way am unworthy and
contemptible." So says the Christian to himself. But even this feeling
has lost its keenest sting for the Christian does not believe in his
individual degradation. He is bad in his general human capacity and he
soothes himself a little with the assertion that we are all alike.
118
=Personal Change.=--As soon as a religion rules, it has for its
opponents those who were its first disciples.
119
=Fate of Christianity.=--Christianity arose to lighten the heart, but
now it must first make the heart heavy in order to be able to lighten it
afterwards. Christianity will consequently go down.
120
=The Testimony of Pleasure.=--The agreeable opinion is accepted as true.
This is the testimony of pleasure (or as the church says, the evidence
of strength) of which all religions are so proud, although they should
all be ashamed of it. If a belief did not make blessed it would not be
believed. How little it would be worth, then!
121
=Dangerous Play.=--Whoever gives religious feeling room, must then also
let it grow. He can do nothing else. Then his being gradually changes.
The religious element brings with it affinities and kinships. The whole
circle of his judgment and feeling is clouded and draped in religious
shadows. Feeling cannot stand still. One should be on one's guard.
122
=The Blind Pupil.=--As long as one knows very well the strength and the
weakness of one's dogma, one's art, one's religion, its strength is
still low. The pupil and apostle who has no eye for the weaknesses of a
dogma, a religion and so on, dazzled by the aspect of the master and by
his own reverence for him, has, on that very account, generally more
power than the master. Without blind pupils the influence of a man and
his work has never become great. To give victory to knowledge, often
amounts to no more than so allying it with stupidity that the brute
force of the latter forces triumph for the former.
123
=The Breaking off of Churches.=--There is not sufficient religion in the
world merely to put an end to the number of religions.
124
=Sinlessness of Men.=--If one have understood how "Sin came into the
world," namely through errors of the reason, through which men in their
intercourse with one another and even individual men looked upon
themselves as much blacker and wickeder than was really the case, one's
whole feeling is much lightened and man and the world appear together in
such a halo of harmlessness that a sentiment of well being is instilled
into one's whole nature. Man in the midst of nature is as a child left
to its own devices. This child indeed dreams a heavy, anxious dream. But
when it opens its eyes it finds itself always in paradise.
125
=Irreligiousness of Artists.=--Homer is so much at home among his gods
and is as a poet so good natured to them that he must have been
profoundly irreligious. That which was brought to him by the popular
faith--a mean, crude and partially repulsive superstition--he dealt with
as freely as the Sculptor with his clay, therefore with the same freedom
that AEschylus and Aristophanes evinced and with which in later times the
great artists of the renaissance, and also Shakespeare and Goethe, drew
their pictures.
126
=Art and Strength of False Interpretation.=--All the visions, fears,
exhaustions and delights of the saint are well known symptoms of
sickness, which in him, owing to deep rooted religious and psychological
delusions, are explained quite differently, that is not as symptoms of
sickness.--So, too, perhaps, the demon of Socrates was nothing but a
malady of the ear that he explained, in view of his predominant moral
theory, in a manner different from what would be thought rational
to-day. Nor is the case different with the frenzy and the frenzied
speeches of the prophets and of the priests of the oracles. It is always
the degree of wisdom, imagination, capacity and morality in the heart
and mind of the interpreters that got so much out of them. It is among
the greatest feats of the men who are called geniuses and saints that
they made interpreters for themselves who, fortunately for mankind, did
not understand them.
127
=Reverence for Madness.=--Because it was perceived that an excitement of
some kind often made the head clearer and occasioned fortunate
inspirations, it was concluded that the utmost excitement would occasion
the most fortunate inspirations. Hence the frenzied being was revered as
a sage and an oracle giver. A false conclusion lies at the bottom of all
this.
128
=Promises of Wisdom.=--Modern science has as its object as little pain
as possible, as long a life as possible--hence a sort of eternal
blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises
of religion.
129
=Forbidden Generosity.=--There is not enough of love and goodness in the
world to throw any of it away on conceited people.
130
=Survival of Religious Training in the Disposition.=--The Catholic
Church, and before it all ancient education, controlled the whole domain
of means through which man was put into certain unordinary moods and
withdrawn from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from calm,
rational reflection. A church vibrating with deep tones; gloomy,
regular, restraining exhortations from a priestly band, who
involuntarily communicate their own tension to their congregation and
lead them to listen almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in
course of preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as the
house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in all its
shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting power--who would care
to reduce men to the level of these things if the ideas upon which they
rest became extinct? But the results of all these things are
nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional,
prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in
man largely through cultivation. What still exists in his soul was
formerly, as he germinated, grew and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined.
131
=Religious After-Pains.=--Though one believe oneself absolutely weaned
away from religion, the process has yet not been so thorough as to make
impossible a feeling of joy at the presence of religious feelings and
dispositions without intelligible content, as, for example, in music;
and if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical hopes,
through the peace of soul therein attainable, and also speaks of "the
whole true gospel in the look of Raphael's Madonna," we greet such
declarations and innuendoes with a welcome smile. The philosopher has
here a matter easy of demonstration. He responds with that which he is
glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to accept. Hence it is
observable how the less reflective free spirits collide only with dogmas
but yield readily to the magic of religious feelings; it is a source of
pain to them to let the latter go simply on account of the
former.--Scientific philosophy must be very much on its guard lest on
account of this necessity--an evolved and hence, also, a transitory
necessity--delusions are smuggled in. Even logicians speak of
"presentiments" of truth in ethics and in art (for example of the
presentiment that the essence of things is unity) a thing which,
nevertheless, ought to be prohibited. Between carefully deduced truths
and such "foreboded" things there lies the abysmal distinction that the
former are products of the intellect and the latter of the necessity.
Hunger is no evidence that there is food at hand to appease it. Hunger
merely craves food. "Presentiment" does not denote that the existence of
a thing is known in any way whatever. It denotes merely that it is
deemed possible to the extent that it is desired or feared. The
"presentiment" is not one step forward in the domain of certainty.--It
is involuntarily believed that the religious tinted sections of a
philosophy are better attested than the others, but the case is at
bottom just the opposite: there is simply the inner wish that it may be
so, that the thing which beautifies may also be true. This wish leads us
to accept bad grounds as good.
132