_denaturalization_ of natural values: let me point to five facts
which relate thereto. Originally, and above all in the period of
the kings, even Israel’s attitude to all things was the _right_ one
—that is to say, the natural one. Its Jehovah was the expression of
its consciousness of power, of its joy over itself, of its hope for
itself: victory and salvation were expected from him, through him it
was confident that Nature would give what a people requires—above
all rain. Jehovah is the God of Israel, and _consequently_ the God
of justice: this is the reasoning of every people which is in the
position of power, and which has a good conscience in that position. In
the solemn cult both sides of this self-affirmation of a people find
expression: it is grateful for the great strokes of fate by means of
which it became uppermost; it is grateful for the regularity in the
succession of the seasons and for all good fortune in the rearing of
cattle and in the tilling of the soil.—This state of affairs remained
the ideal for some considerable time, even after it had been swept away
in a deplorable manner by anarchy from within and the Assyrians from
without But the people still retained, as their highest desideratum,
that vision of a king who was a good soldier and a severe judge;
and he who retained it most of all was that typical prophet (—that
is to say, critic and satirist of the age), Isaiah.—But all hopes
remained unrealised. The old God was no longer able to do what he had
done formerly. He ought to have been dropped. What happened? The idea
of him was changed,—the idea of him was denaturalised: this was the
price they paid for retaining him.—Jehovah, the God of “Justice,”—is
no longer one with Israel, no longer the expression of a people’s
sense of dignity: he is only a god on certain conditions.... The
idea of him becomes a weapon in the hands of priestly agitators who
henceforth interpret all happiness as a reward, all unhappiness as a
punishment for disobedience to God, for “sin”: that most fraudulent
method of interpretation which arrives at a so-called “moral order
of the Universe,” by means of which the concept “cause” and “effect”
is turned upside down. Once natural causation has been swept out of
the world by reward and punishment, a causation _hostile to nature_
becomes necessary; whereupon all the forms of unnaturalness follow.
A God who _demands,_—in the place of a God who helps, who advises,
who is at bottom only a name for every happy inspiration of courage
and of self-reliance.... Morality is no longer the expression of the
conditions of life and growth, no longer the most fundamental instinct
of life, but it has become abstract, it has become the opposite of
life,—Morality as the fundamental perversion of the imagination,
as the “evil eye” for all things. What is Jewish morality, what is
Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness
polluted with the idea of “sin”; well-being interpreted as a danger, as
a “temptation”; physiological indisposition poisoned by means of the
canker-worm of conscience....
26
The concept of God falsified; the concept of morality falsified: but
the Jewish priesthood did not stop at this. No use could be made of
the whole _history_ of Israel, therefore it must go! These priests
accomplished that miracle of falsification, of which the greater part
of the Bible is the document: with unparalleled contempt and in the
teeth of all tradition and historical facts, they interpreted their own
people’s past in a religious manner,—that is to say, they converted
it into a ridiculous mechanical process of salvation, on the principle
that all sin against Jehovah led to punishment, and that all pious
worship of Jehovah led to reward. We would feel this shameful act of
historical falsification far more poignantly if the ecclesiastical
interpretation of history through millenniums had not blunted almost
all our sense for the demands of uprightness _in historicis._ And
the church is seconded by the philosophers: _the_ of “a moral order
of the universe” permeates the whole development even of more modern
philosophy. What does a “moral order of the universe” mean? That once
and for all there is such a thing as a will of God which determines
what man has to do and what he has to leave undone; that the value
of a people or of an individual is measured according to how much or
how little the one or the other obeys the will of God; that in the
destinies of a people or of an individual, the will of God shows
itself dominant, that is to say it punishes or rewards according to
the degree of obedience. In the place of this miserable falsehood,
_reality_ says: a parasitical type of man, who can flourish only at the
cost of all the healthy elements of life, the priest abuses the name
of God: he calls that state of affairs in which the priest determines
the value of things “the Kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby
such a state of affairs is attained or maintained, “the Will of God”;
with cold-blooded cynicism he measures peoples, ages and individuals
according to whether they favour or oppose the ascendancy of the
priesthood. Watch him at work: in the hands of the Jewish priesthood
the Augustan Age in the history of Israel became an age of decline;
the exile, the protracted misfortune transformed itself into eternal
_punishment_ for the Augustan Age—that age in which the priest did not
yet exist Out of the mighty and thoroughly free-born figures of the
history of Israel, they made, according to their requirements, either
wretched bigots and hypocrites, or “godless ones”: they simplified
the psychology of every great event to the idiotic formula “obedient
or disobedient to God.”—A step further: the “Will of God,” that is
to say the self-preservative measures of the priesthood, must be
known—to this end a “revelation” is necessary. In plain English: a
stupendous literary fraud becomes necessary, “holy scriptures” are
discovered,—and they are published abroad with all hieratic pomp,
with days of penance and lamentations over the long state Of “sin.”
The “Will of God” has long stood firm: the whole of the trouble
lies in the fact that the “Holy Scriptures” have been discarded....
Moses was already the “Will of God” revealed.... What had happened?
With severity and pedantry, the priest had formulated once and for
all—even to the largest and smallest contributions that were to be
paid to him (—not forgetting the daintiest portions of meat; for the
priest is a consumer of beef-steaks)—_what he wanted,_ “what the Will
of God was.” ... Hence-forward everything became so arranged that the
priests were _indispensable everywhere._ At all the natural events of
life, at birth, at marriage, at the sick-bed, at death,—not to speak
of the sacrifice (“the meal”),—the holy parasite appears in order
to denaturalise, or in his language, to “sanctify,” everything....
For this should be understood: every natural custom, every natural
institution (the State, the administration of justice, marriage, the
care of the sick and the poor), every demand inspired by the instinct
of life, in short everything that has a value in itself, is rendered
absolutely worthless and even dangerous through the parasitism of the
priest (or of the “moral order of the universe”): a sanction after
the fact is required,—a _power which imparts value_ is necessary,
which in so doing says, Nay to nature, and which by this means alone
_creates_ a valuation.... The priest depreciates and desecrates nature:
it is only at this price that he exists at all.—Disobedience to God,
that is to say, to the priest, to the “law,” now receives the name of
“sin”; the means of “reconciling one’s self with God” are of course
of a nature which render subordination to the priesthood all the
more fundamental: the priest alone is able to “save.” ... From the
psychological standpoint, in every society organised upon a hieratic
basis, “sins” are indispensable: they are the actual weapons of power,
the priest _lives_ upon sins, it is necessary for him that people
should “sin.” ... Supreme axiom: “God forgiveth him that repenteth”—in
plain English: _him that submitteth himself to the priest._
27
Christianity grew out of an utterly _false_ soil, in which all nature,
every natural value, every _reality_ had the deepest instincts of the
ruling class against it; it was a form of deadly hostility to reality
which has never been surpassed. The “holy people” which had retained
only priestly values and priestly names for all things, and which, with
a logical consistency that is terrifying, had divorced itself from
everything still powerful on earth as if it were “unholy,” “worldly,”
“sinful,”—this people created a final formula for its instinct which
was consistent to the point of self-suppression; as _Christianity_ it
denied even the last form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen
people,” _Jewish_ reality itself. The case is of supreme interest:
the small insurrectionary movement christened with the name of Jesus
of Nazareth, is the Jewish instinct _over again,_—in other words,
it is the sacerdotal instinct which can no longer endure the priest
as a fact; it is the discovery of a kind of life even more fantastic
than the one previously conceived, a vision of life which is even
more unreal than that which the organisation of a church stipulates.
Christianity denies the church.[3]
I fail to see against whom was directed the insurrection of which
rightly or _wrongly_ Jesus is understood to have been the promoter,
if it were not directed against the Jewish church,—the word “church”
being used here in precisely the same sense in which it is used to-day.
It was an insurrection against the “good and the just,” against
the “prophets of Israel,” against the hierarchy of society—not
against the latter’s corruption, but against caste, privilege, order,
formality. It was the lack of faith in “higher men,” it was a “Nay”
uttered against everything that was tinctured with the blood of priests
and theologians. But the hierarchy which was set in question if only
temporarily by this movement, formed the construction of piles upon
which, alone, the Jewish people was able to subsist in the midst of the
“waters”; it was that people’s _last_ chance of survival wrested from
the world at enormous pains, the _residuum_ of its political autonomy:
to attack this construction was tantamount to attacking the most
profound popular instinct, the most tenacious national will to live
that has ever existed on earth. This saintly anarchist who called the
lowest of the low, the outcasts and “sinners,” the Chandala of Judaism,
to revolt against the established order of things (and in language
which, if the gospels are to be trusted, would get one sent to Siberia
even to-day)—this man was a political criminal in so far as political
criminals were possible in a community so absurdly non-political. This
brought him to the cross: the proof of this is the inscription found
thereon. He died for _his_ sins—and no matter how often the contrary
has been asserted there is absolutely nothing to show that he died for
the sins of others.
28
As to whether he was conscious of this contrast, or whether he was
merely _regarded_ as such, is quite another question. And here, alone,
do I touch upon the problem of the psychology of the Saviour.—I
confess there are few books which I have as much difficulty in reading
as the gospels. These difficulties are quite different from those which
allowed the learned curiosity of the German, mind to celebrate one
of its most memorable triumphs. Many years have now elapsed since I,
like every young scholar, with the sage conscientiousness of a refined
philologist, relished the work of the incomparable Strauss. I was then
twenty years of age; now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What
do I care about the contradictions of “tradition”? How can saintly
legends be called “tradition” at all! The stories of saints constitute
the most ambiguous literature on earth: to apply the scientific method
to them, _when there are no other documents to hand,_ seems to me to be
a fatal procedure from the start—simply learned fooling.
29
The point that concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour.
This type might be contained in the gospels, in spite of the gospels,
and however much it may have been mutilated, or overladen with
foreign features: just as that of Francis of Assisi is contained
in his legends in spite of his legends. It is _not_ a question of
the truth concerning what he has done, what he has said, and how he
actually died; but whether his type may still be conceived in any way,
whether it has been handed down to us at all?—The attempts which
to my knowledge have been made to read the _history_ of a “soul” out
of the gospels, seem to me to point only to disreputable levity in
psychological matters. M. Renan, that buffoon _in psychologies,_ has
contributed the two most monstrous ideas imaginable to the explanation
of the type of Jesus: the idea of the _genius_ and the idea of the
_hero_ (“_héros_”). But if there is anything thoroughly unevangelical
surely it is the idea of the hero. It is precisely the reverse of all
struggle, of all consciousness of taking part in the fight, that has
become instinctive here: the inability to resist is here converted into
a morality (“resist not evil,” the profoundest sentence in the whole of
the gospels, their key in a certain sense), the blessedness of peace,
of gentleness, of not _being able_ to be an enemy. What is the meaning
of “glad tidings”?—True life, eternal life has been found—it is not
promised, it is actually here, it is in _you;_ it is life in love, in
love free from all selection or exclusion, free from all distance.
Everybody is the child of God—Jesus does not by any means claim
anything for himself alone,—as the child of God everybody is equal to
everybody else.... Fancy making Jesus a _hero!_—And what a tremendous
misunderstanding the word “genius” is! Our whole idea of “spirit,”
which is a civilised idea, could have had no meaning whatever in the
world in which Jesus lived. In the strict terms of the physiologist, a
very different word ought to be used here.... We know of a condition of
morbid irritability of the sense of _touch,_ which recoils shuddering
from every kind of contact, and from every attempt at grasping a solid
object. Any such physiological _habitus_ reduced to its ultimate
logical conclusion, becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a
flight into the “intangible,” into the “incomprehensible”; a repugnance
to all formulæ, to every notion of time and space, to everything that
is established such as customs, institutions, the church; a feeling
at one’s ease in a world in which no sign of reality is any longer
visible, a merely “inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal” world....
“The Kingdom of God is within you”...
30
_The instinctive hatred of reality_ is the outcome of an extreme
susceptibility to pain and to irritation, which can no longer endure to
be “touched” at all, because every sensation strikes too deep.
_The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, of all hostility, of all
boundaries and distances in feeling,_ is the outcome of an extreme
susceptibility to pain and to irritation, which regards all resistance,
all compulsory resistance as insufferable _anguish_(—that is to say,
as harmful, as _deprecated_ by the self-preservative instinct), and
which knows blessedness (happiness) only when it is no longer obliged
to offer resistance to anybody, either evil or detrimental,—love as
the Only ultimate possibility of life....
These are the two _physiological realities_ upon which and out of which
the doctrine of salvation has grown. I call them a sublime further
development of hedonism, upon a thoroughly morbid soil. Epicureanism,
the pagan theory of salvation, even though it possessed a large
proportion of Greek vitality and nervous energy, remains the most
closely related to the above. Epicurus was a _typical_ decadent: and I
was the first to recognise him as such.—The terror of pain, even of
infinitely slight pain—such a state cannot possibly help culminating
in a _religion_ of love....
31
I have given my reply to the problem in advance. The prerequisite
thereto was the admission of the fact that the type of the Saviour has
reached us only in a very distorted form. This distortion in itself
is extremely feasible: for many reasons a type of that kind could not
be pure, whole, and free from additions. The environment in which
this strange figure moved, must have left its mark upon him, and the
history, the _destiny_ of the first Christian communities must have
done so to a still greater degree. Thanks to that destiny, the type
must have been enriched retrospectively with features which can be
interpreted only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda
That strange and morbid world into which the gospels lead us—a
world which seems to have been drawn from a Russian novel, where
the scum and dross of society, diseases of the nerves and “childish”
imbecility seem to have given each other rendezvous—must in any case
have _coarsened_ the type: the first disciples especially must have
translated an existence conceived entirely in symbols and abstractions
into their own crudities, in order at least to be able to understand
something about it,—for them the type existed only after it had
been cast in a more familiar mould.... The prophet, the Messiah, the
future judge, the teacher of morals, the thaumaturgist, John the
Baptist—all these were but so many opportunities of misunderstanding
the type.... Finally, let us not under-rate the _proprium_ of all great
and especially sectarian veneration: very often it effaces from the
venerated object, all the original and frequently painfully un-familiar
traits and idiosyncrasies—_it does not even see them._ It is greatly
to be deplored that no Dostoiewsky lived in the neighbourhood of this
most interesting decadent,—I mean someone who would have known how to
feel the poignant charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the morbid,
and the childlike. Finally, the type, as an example of decadence, may
actually have been extraordinarily multifarious and contradictory:
this, as a possible alternative, is not to be altogether ignored.
Albeit, everything seems to point away from it; for, precisely in this
case, tradition would necessarily have been particularly true and
objective: whereas we have reasons for assuming the reverse. Meanwhile
a yawning chasm of contradiction separates the mountain, lake, and
pastoral preacher, who strikes us as a Buddha on a soil only very
slightly Hindu, from that combative fanatic, the mortal enemy of
theologians and priests, whom Renan’s malice has glorified as “_le
grand maître en ironie._” For my part, I do not doubt but what the
greater part of this venom (and even of _esprit_) was inoculated into
the type of the Master only as the outcome of the agitated condition
of Christian propaganda. For we have ample reasons for knowing the
unscrupulousness of all sectarians when they wish to contrive their own
_apology_ out of the person of their master. When the first Christian
community required a discerning, wrangling, quarrelsome, malicious and
hair-splitting theologian, to oppose other theologians, it created its
“God” according to its needs; just as it did not hesitate to put upon
his lips those utterly unevangelical ideas of “his second coming,” the
“last judgment,”—ideas with which it could not then dispense,—and
every kind of expectation and promise which happened to be current.
32
I can only repeat that I am opposed to the importation of the fanatic
into the type of the Saviour: the word “_impérieux,_” which Renan
uses, in itself annuls the type. The “glad tidings” are simply that
there are no longer any contradictions, that the Kingdom of Heaven is
for the _children;_ the faith which raises its voice here is not a
faith that has been won by a struggle,—it is to hand, it was there
from the beginning, it is a sort of spiritual return to childishness.
The case of delayed and undeveloped puberty in the organism, as the
result of degeneration is at least familiar to physiologists. A faith
of this sort does not show anger, it does not blame, neither does it
defend itself: it does not bring “the sword,”—it has no inkling of
how it will one day establish feuds between man and man. It does not
demonstrate itself, either by miracles, or by reward and promises, or
yet “through the scriptures”: it is in itself at every moment its own
miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own “Kingdom of God.” This
faith cannot be formulated—it lives, it guards against formulas. The
accident of environment, of speech, of preparatory culture, certainly
determines a particular series of conceptions: early Christianity deals
only in Judæo-Semitic conceptions (—the eating and drinking at the
last supper form part of these,—this idea which like everything Jewish
has been abused so maliciously by the church). But one should guard
against seeing anything more than a language of signs, semiotics, an
opportunity for parables in all this. The very fact that no word is to
be taken literally, is the only condition on which this Anti-realist
is able to speak at all. Among Indians he would have made use of the
ideas of Sankhyara, among Chinese, those of Lao-tze—and would not
have been aware of any difference. With a little terminological laxity
Jesus might be called a “free spirit”—he cares not a jot for anything
that is established: the word _killeth,_ everything fixed _killtth._
The idea, _experience,_ “life” as he alone knows it, is, according to
him, opposed to every kind of word, formula, law, faith and dogma. He
speaks only of the innermost things: “life” or “truth,” or “light,” is
his expression for the innermost thing,—everything else, the whole of
reality, the whole of nature, language even, has only the value of a
sign, of a simile for him.—It is of paramount importance not to make
any mistake at this point, however great may be the temptation thereto
that lies in Christian—I mean to say, ecclesiastical prejudice. Any
such essential symbolism stands beyond the pale of all religion, all
notions of cult, all history, all natural science, all experience of
the world, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books and
all Art—for his “wisdom” is precisely the complete ignorance[4] of the
existence of such things. He has not even heard speak of _culture,_ he
does not require to oppose it,—he does not deny it.... The same holds
good of the state, of the whole of civil and social order, of work
and of war—he never had any reason to deny the world, he had not the
vaguest notion of the ecclesiastical concept “the world.” ... Denying
is precisely what was quite impossible to him.—Dialectic is also
quite absent, as likewise the idea that any faith, any “truth” can be
proved by argument (—his proofs are inner “lights,” inward feelings of
happiness and self-affirmation, a host of “proofs of power”—). Neither
can such a doctrine contradict, it does not even realise the fact that
there are or can be other doctrines, it is absolutely incapable of
imagining a contrary judgment.... Wherever it encounters such things,
from a feeling of profound sympathy it bemoans such “blindness,”—for
it sees the “light,”—but it raises no objections.
33
The whole psychology of the “gospels” lacks the concept of guilt and
punishment, as also that of reward. “Sin,” any sort of aloofness
between God and man, is done away with,—_this is precisely what
constitutes the “glad tidings”._ Eternal bliss is not promised, it is
not bound up with certain conditions; it is the only reality—the rest
consists only of signs wherewith to speak about it....
The results of such a state project themselves into a new practice
of life, the actual evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” which
distinguishes the Christians: the Christian acts, he distinguishes
himself by means of a _different_ mode of action. He does not resist
his enemy either by words or in his heart He draws no distinction
between foreigners and natives, between Jews and Gentiles (“the
neighbour” really means the co-religionist, the Jew). He is angry with
no one, he despises no one. He neither shows himself at the tribunals
nor does he acknowledge any of their claims (“Swear not at all”).
He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when her
infidelity has been proved.—All this is at bottom one principle, it is
all the outcome of one instinct—
The life of the Saviour was naught else than this practice,—neither
was his death. He no longer required any formulæ, any rites for his
relations with God—not even prayer. He has done with all the Jewish
teaching of repentance and of atonement; he alone knows the _mode_
of life which makes one feel “divine,” “saved,” “evangelical,” and
at all times a “child of God.” _Not_ “repentance,” _not_ “prayer and
forgiveness” are the roads to God: the _evangelical mode of life
alone_ leads to God, it _is_ “God.”—That which the gospels abolished
was the Judaism of the concepts “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,”
“salvation through faith,”—the whole doctrine of the Jewish church was
denied by the “glad tidings.”
The profound instinct of how one must live in order to feel “in
Heaven,” in order to feel “eternal,” while in every other respect
one feels by _no_ means “in Heaven”: this alone is the psychological
reality of “Salvation.”—A new life and _not_ a new faith....
34