non-sanctified gives him his historical importance. Because there
existed a delusion respecting the saint, his soul states being falsely
viewed and his personality being sundered as much as possible from
humanity as a something incomparable and supernatural, because of these
things he attained the extraordinary with which he swayed the
imaginations of whole nations and whole ages. Even he knew himself not
for even he regarded his dispositions, passions and actions in
accordance with a system of interpretation as artificial and exaggerated
as the pneumatic interpretation of the bible. The distorted and diseased
in his own nature with its blending of spiritual poverty, defective
knowledge, ruined health, overwrought nerves, remained as hidden from
his view as from the view of his beholders. He was neither a
particularly good man nor a particularly bad man but he stood for
something that was far above the human standard in wisdom and goodness.
Faith in him sustained faith in the divine and miraculous, in a
religious significance of all existence, in an impending day of
judgment. In the last rays of the setting sun of the ancient world,
which fell upon the christian peoples, the shadowy form of the saint
attained enormous proportions--to such enormous proportions, indeed,
that down even to our own age, which no longer believes in god, there
are thinkers who believe in the saints.
144
It stands to reason that this sketch of the saint, made upon the model
of the whole species, can be confronted with many opposing sketches that
would create a more agreeable impression. There are certain exceptions
among the species who distinguish themselves either by especial
gentleness or especial humanity, and perhaps by the strength of their
own personality. Others are in the highest degree fascinating because
certain of their delusions shed a particular glow over their whole
being, as is the case with the founder of christianity who took himself
for the only begotten son of God and hence felt himself sinless; so that
through his imagination--that should not be too harshly judged since the
whole of antiquity swarmed with sons of god--he attained the same goal,
the sense of complete sinlessness, complete irresponsibility, that can
now be attained by every individual through science.--In the same manner
I have viewed the saints of India who occupy an intermediate station
between the christian saints and the Greek philosophers and hence are
not to be regarded as a pure type. Knowledge and science--as far as they
existed--and superiority to the rest of mankind by logical discipline
and training of the intellectual powers were insisted upon by the
Buddhists as essential to sanctity, just as they were denounced by the
christian world as the indications of sinfulness.
End of Project Gutenberg's Human, All Too Human, by Friedrich Nietzsche