In this discourse, Nietzsche wishes to give his followers a warning.
He thinks he has so far helped them that they have become convalescent,
that new desires are awakened in them and that new hopes are in their
arms and legs. But he mistakes the nature of the change. True, he has
helped them, he has given them back what they most need, i.e., belief in
believing—the confidence in having confidence in something, but how
do they use it? This belief in faith, if one can so express it without
seeming tautological, has certainly been restored to them, and in
the first flood of their enthusiasm they use it by bowing down and
worshipping an ass! When writing this passage, Nietzsche was obviously
thinking of the accusations which were levelled at the early Christians
by their pagan contemporaries. It is well known that they were supposed
not only to be eaters of human flesh but also ass-worshippers, and among
the Roman graffiti, the most famous is the one found on the Palatino,
showing a man worshipping a cross on which is suspended a figure
with the head of an ass (see Minucius Felix, “Octavius” IX.; Tacitus,
“Historiae” v. 3; Tertullian, “Apologia”, etc.). Nietzsche’s obvious
moral, however, is that great scientists and thinkers, once they have
reached the wall encircling scepticism and have thereby learned to
recover their confidence in the act of believing, as such, usually
manifest the change in their outlook by falling victims to the narrowest
and most superstitious of creeds. So much for the introduction of the
ass as an object of worship.
Now, with regard to the actual service and Ass-Festival, no reader who
happens to be acquainted with the religious history of the Middle Ages
will fail to see the allusion here to the asinaria festa which were by
no means uncommon in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe during the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.