This discourse contains perhaps the boldest of Nietzsche’s suggestions
concerning Atheism, as well as some extremely penetrating remarks upon
the sentiment of pity. Zarathustra comes across the repulsive creature
sitting on the wayside, and what does he do? He manifests the only
correct feelings that can be manifested in the presence of any great
misery—that is to say, shame, reverence, embarrassment. Nietzsche
detested the obtrusive and gushing pity that goes up to misery without
a blush either on its cheek or in its heart—the pity which is only
another form of self-glorification. “Thank God that I am not like
thee!”—only this self-glorifying sentiment can lend a well-constituted
man the impudence to SHOW his pity for the cripple and the
ill-constituted. In the presence of the ugliest man Nietzsche
blushes,—he blushes for his race; his own particular kind of
altruism—the altruism that might have prevented the existence of this
man—strikes him with all its force. He will have the world otherwise.
He will have a world where one need not blush for one’s fellows—hence
his appeal to us to love only our children’s land, the land undiscovered
in the remotest sea.
Zarathustra calls the ugliest man the murderer of God! Certainly, this
is one aspect of a certain kind of Atheism—the Atheism of the man who
reveres beauty to such an extent that his own ugliness, which outrages
him, must be concealed from every eye lest it should not be respected as
Zarathustra respected it. If there be a God, He too must be evaded. His
pity must be foiled. But God is ubiquitous and omniscient. Therefore,
for the really GREAT ugly man, He must not exist. “Their pity IS it from
which I flee away,” he says—that is to say: “It is from their want of
reverence and lack of shame in presence of my great misery!” The ugliest
man despises himself; but Zarathustra said in his Prologue: “I love
the great despisers because they are the great adorers, and arrows of
longing for the other shore.” He therefore honours the ugliest man: sees
height in his self-contempt, and invites him to join the other higher
men in the cave.