in wanting to be a function; they strive after it, and have the
keenest scent for all those positions in which precisely _they_
themselves can be functions. Among such persons are those women who
transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but
weakly-developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or
his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they
insert themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they
become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.
120.
_Health of the Soul._--The favourite medico-moral formula (whose
originator was Ariston of Chios), "Virtue is the health of the soul,"
would, for all practical purposes, have to be altered to this: "Thy
virtue is the health of thy soul." For there is no such thing as
health in itself, and all attempts to define a thing in that way have
lamentably failed. It is necessary to know thy aim, thy horizon,
thy powers, thy impulses, thy errors, and especially the ideals and
fantasies of thy soul, in order to determine _what health_ implies even
for thy _body._ There are consequently innumerable kinds of physical
health; and the more one again permits the unique and unparalleled to
raise its head, the more one unlearns the dogma of the "Equality of
men," so much the more also must the conception of a normal health,
together with a normal diet and a normal course of disease, be
abrogated by our physicians. And then only would it be time to turn
our thoughts to the health and disease of the _soul,_ and make the
special virtue of everyone consist in its health; but, to be sure,
what appeared as health in one person might appear as the contrary of
health in another. In the end the great question might still remain
open:--Whether we could _do without_ sickness for the development of
our virtue, and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge
would not especially need the sickly soul as well as the sound one; in
short, whether the mere will to health is not a prejudice, a cowardice,
and perhaps an instance of the subtlest barbarism and unprogressiveness?
121.
_Life no Argument._--We have arranged for ourselves a world in which
we can live--by the postulating of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and
effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of
faith no one could manage to live at present! But for all that they
are still unproved. Life is no argument; error might be among the
conditions of life.
122.
_The Element of Moral Scepticism in Christianity._--Christianity also
has made a great contribution to enlightenment, and has taught moral
scepticism --in a very impressive and effective manner, accusing and
embittering, but with untiring patience and subtlety; it annihilated
in every individual the belief in his virtues: it made the great
virtuous ones, of whom antiquity had no lack, vanish for ever from
the earth, those popular men, who, in the belief in their perfection,
walked about with the dignity of a hero of the bull-fight. When,
trained in this Christian school of scepticism, we now read the moral
books of the ancients, for example those of Seneca and Epictetus, we
feel a pleasurable superiority, and are full of secret insight and
penetration,--it seems to us as if a child talked before an old man, or
a pretty, gushing girl before La Rochefoucauld:--we know better what
virtue is! After all, however, we have applied the same scepticism to
all _religious_ states and processes, such as sin, repentance, grace,
sanctification, &c., and have allowed the worm to burrow so well, that
we have now the same feeling of subtle superiority and insight even
in reading all Christian books:--we know also the religious feelings
better! And it is time to know them well and describe them well, for
the pious ones of the old belief die out also; let us save their
likeness and type, at least for the sake of knowledge.
123.
_Knowledge more than a Means._--Also _without_ this passion--I refer
to the passion for knowledge--science would be furthered: science has
hitherto increased and grown up without it. The good faith in science,
the prejudice in its favour, by which States are at present dominated
(it was even the Church formerly), rests fundamentally on the fact that
the absolute inclination and impulse has so rarely revealed itself in
it, and that science is regarded _not_ as a passion, but as a condition
and an "ethos." Indeed, _amour-plaisir_ of knowledge (curiosity) often
enough suffices, _amour-vanité_ suffices, and habituation to it, with
the afterthought of obtaining honour and bread; it even suffices for
many that they do not know what to do with a surplus of leisure, except
to continue reading, collecting, arranging, observing and narrating;
their "scientific impulse" is their ennui. Pope Leo X once (in the
brief to Beroaldus) sang the praise of science; he designated it as the
finest ornament and the greatest pride of our life, a noble employment
in happiness and in misfortune; "without it," he says finally, "all
human undertakings would be without a firm basis,--even with it they
are still sufficiently mutable and insecure!" But this rather sceptical
Pope, like all other ecclesiastical panegyrists of science, suppressed
his ultimate judgment concerning it. If one may deduce from his words
what is remarkable enough for such a lover of art, that he places
science above art it is alter all, however, only from politeness that
he omits to speak of that which he places high above all science:
the "revealed truth," and the "eternal salvation o the soul,"--what
are ornament, pride, entertainment and security of life to him, in
comparison thereto? "Science is something of secondary rank, nothing
ultimate or unconditioned, no object of passion"--this judgment was
kept back in Leos soul: the truly Christian judgment concerning
science! In antiquity its dignity and appreciation were lessened by
the fact that, even among its most eager disciples, the striving after
_virtue_ stood foremost and that people thought they had given the
highest praise to knowledge when they celebrated it as the best means
to virtue. It is something new in history that knowledge claims to be
more than a means.
124.
_In the Horizon of the Infinite._--We have left the land and have gone
aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us,--nay, more, the
land behind us! Well, little ship! look out! Beside thee is the ocean;
it is true it does not always roar, and sometimes it spreads out like
silk and gold and a gentle reverie. But times will come when thou wilt
feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful than
infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and now strikes
against the walls of this cage! Alas, if home-sickness for the land
should attack thee, as if there had been more _freedom_ there,--and
there is no "land" any longer!
125.
_The Madman._--Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright
morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out
unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!"--As there were many people
standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal
of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a
child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of
us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated?--the people cried out
laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst
and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called
out. "I mean to tell you! _We have killed him,_--you and I! We are all
his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up
the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What
did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it
now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on
unceasingly? Back-wards, sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is
there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite
nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become
colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall
we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise
of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine
putrefaction?--for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead!
And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most
murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the
world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,--who
will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse
ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is
not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves
have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a
greater event,--and on account of it, all who are born after us belong
to a higher history than any history hitherto!"--Here the madman was
silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and
looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground,
so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. "I come too early,"
he then said, "I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event
is still on its way, and is travelling,--it has not yet reached men's
ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs
time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard.
This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star,--_and yet
they have done it!"--It_ is further stated that the madman made his way
into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his _Requiem
æternam deo._ When led out and called to account, he always gave the
reply: "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and
monuments of God?"--
126.
_Mystical Explanations._--Mystical explanations are regarded as
profound; the truth is that they do not even go the length of being
superficial.
127.
_After-Effect of the most Ancient Religiousness.--_The thoughtless
man thinks that the Will is the only thing that operates, that willing
is something simple, manifestly given, underived, and comprehensible
in itself. He is convinced that when he does anything, for example,
when he delivers a blow, it is _he_ who strikes, and he has struck
because he _willed_ to strike. He does not notice anything of a problem
therein, but the feeling of _willing_ suffices to him, not only for
the acceptance of cause and effect, but also for the belief that he
_understands_ their relationship. Of the mechanism of the occurrence,
and of the manifold subtle operations that must be performed in order
that the blow may result, and likewise of the incapacity of the Will
in itself to effect even the smallest part of those operations--he
knows nothing. The Will is to him a magically operating force; the
belief in the Will as the cause of effects is the belief in magically
operating forces. In fact, whenever he saw anything happen, man
originally believed in a Will as cause, and in personally _willing_
beings operating in the background,--the conception of mechanism was
very remote from him. Because, however, man for immense periods of
time believed only in persons (and not in matter, forces, things,
&c.), the belief in cause and effect has become a fundamental belief
with him, which he applies everywhere when anything happens,--and even
still uses instinctively as a piece of atavism of remotest origin. The
propositions, "No effect without a cause," and "Every effect again
implies a cause," appear as generalisations of several less general
propositions:--"Where there is operation there has been _willing_."
"Operating is only possible on _willing_ beings." "There is never
a pure, resultless experience of activity, but every experience
involves stimulation of the Will" (to activity, defence, revenge or
retaliation). But in the primitive period of the human race, the
latter and the former propositions were identical, the first were not
generalisations of the second, but the second were explanations of
the first.--Schopenhauer, with his assumption that all that exists is
something _volitional,_ has set a primitive mythology on the throne;
he seems never to have attempted an analysis of the Will, because
he _believed_ like everybody in the simplicity and immediateness of
all volition:--while volition is in fact such a cleverly practised
mechanical process that it almost escapes the observing eye. I set the
following propositions against those of Schopenhauer:--Firstly, in
order that Will may arise, an idea of pleasure and pain is necessary.
Secondly, that a vigorous excitation may be felt as pleasure or pain,
is the affair of the _interpreting_ intellect, which, to be sure,
operates thereby for the most part unconsciously to us, and one and the
same excitation _may_ be interpreted as pleasure or pain. Thirdly, it
is only in an intellectual being that there is pleasure, displeasure
and Will; the immense majority of organisms have nothing of the kind.
128.
_The Value of Prayer.--_Prayer has been devised for such men as have
never any thoughts of their own, and to whom an elevation of the soul
is unknown, or passes unnoticed; what shall these people do in holy
places and in all important situations in life which require repose and
some kind of dignity? In order at least that they may not _disturb,_
the wisdom of all the founders of religions, the small as well as
the great, has commended to them the formula of prayer, as a long
mechanical labour of the lips, united with an effort of the memory,
and with a uniform, prescribed attitude of hands and feet--_and_ eyes!
They may then, like the Tibetans, chew the cud of their "_om mane
padme hum,"_ innumerable times, or, as in Benares, count the name of
the God Ram-Ram-Ram (etc., with or without grace) on their fingers;
or honour Vishnu with his thousand names of invocation, Allah with his
ninety-nine; or they may make use of the prayer-wheels and the rosary:
the main thing is that they are settled down for a time at this work,
and present a tolerable appearance; their mode of prayer is devised
for the advantage of the pious who have thought and elevation of their
own. But even these have their weary hours when a series of venerable
words and sounds, and a mechanical, pious ritual does them good. But
supposing that these rare men--in every religion the religious man is
an exception--know how to help themselves, the poor in spirit do not
know, and to forbid them the prayer-babbling would mean to take their
religion from them, a fact which Protestantism brings more and more to
light. All that religion wants with such persons is that they should
_keep still_ with their eyes, hands, legs, and all their organs: they
thereby become temporarily beautified and--more human-looking!
129.
_The Conditions for God.--_"God himself cannot subsist without wise
men," said Luther, and with good reason; but "God can still less
subsist without unwise men,"--good Luther did not say that!
130.
_A Dangerous Resolution.--_The Christian resolution to find the world
ugly and bad, has made the world ugly and bad.
131.
_Christianity and Suicide._--Christianity made use of the excessive
longing for suicide at the time of its origin as a lever for its power:
it left only two forms of suicide, invested them with the highest
dignity and the highest hopes, and forbade all others with dreadful
threatenings. But martyrdom and the slow self-annihilation of the
ascetic were permitted.
132.
_Against Christianity._--It is now no longer our reason, but our taste
that decides against Christianity.
133.
_Axioms._--An unavoidable hypothesis on which mankind must always fall
back again, is in the long run _more powerful_ than the most firmly
believed belief in something untrue (like the Christian belief). In the
long run: that means a hundred thousand years hence.
134.
_Pessimists as Victims._--When a profound dislike of existence gets
the upper hand, the after-effect of a great error in diet of which a
people has been long guilty comes to light. The spread of Buddhism
(_not_ its origin) is thus to a considerable extent dependent on the
excessive and almost exclusive rice-fare of the Indians, and on the
universal enervation that results therefrom. Perhaps the modern,
European discontentedness is to be looked upon as caused by the fact
that the world of our forefathers, the whole Middle Ages, was given to
drink, owing to the influence of German tastes in Europe: the Middle
Ages, that means the alcoholic poisoning of Europe.--The German dislike
of life (including the influence of the cellar-air and stove-poison in
German dwellings), is essentially a cold-weather complaint.
135.
_Origin of Sin_--Sin, as it is at present felt wherever Christianity
prevails or has prevailed is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention;
and in respect to this background of all Christian morality
Christianity has in fact aimed at "Judaising" the whole world. To
what an extent this has succeeded in Europe is traced most accurately
in our remarkable alienness to Greek antiquity--a world without the
feeling of sin--in our sentiments even at present; in spite of all the
good will to approximation and assimilation, which whole generations
and many distinguished individuals have not failed to display. "Only
when thou _repentest_ is God gracious to thee"--that would arouse
the laughter or the wrath of a Greek: he would say, "Slaves may have
such sentiments." Here a mighty being, an almighty being, and yet a
revengeful being, is presupposed; his power is so great that no injury
whatever can be done to him except in the point of honour. Every sin is
an infringement of respect, a _crimen læsæ majestatis divinæ_?--and
nothing more! Contrition, degradation, rolling-in-the-dust,--these
are the first and last conditions on which his favour depends: the
restoration, therefore, of his divine honour! If injury be caused
otherwise by sin, if a profound, spreading evil be propagated by it,
an evil which, like a disease, attacks and strangles one man after
another--that does not trouble this honour-craving Oriental in heaven;
sin is an offence against him, not against mankind!--to him on whom
he has bestowed his favour he bestows also this indifference to the
natural consequences of sin. God and mankind are here thought of as
separated as so antithetical that sin against the latter cannot be at
all possible,--all deeds are to be looked upon _solely with respect to
their supernatural consequences,_ and not with respect to their natural
results: it is thus that the Jewish feeling, to which all that is
natural seems unworthy in itself, would have things. The _Greeks,_ on
the other hand, were more familiar with the thought that transgression
also may have dignity,--even theft, as in the case of Prometheus, even
the slaughtering of cattle as the expression of frantic jealousy, as in
the case of Ajax; in their need to attribute dignity to transgression
and embody it therein, they invented _tragedy,_--an art and a delight,
which in its profoundest essence has remained alien to the Jew, in
spite of all his poetic endowment and taste for the sublime.
136.
_The Chosen People._--The Jews, who regard themselves as the chosen
people among the nations, and that too because they are the moral
genius among the nations (in virtue of their capacity for _despising_
the human in themselves _more_ than any other people)--the Jews have
a pleasure in their divine monarch and saint similar to that which
the French nobility had in Louis XIV. This nobility had allowed its
power and autocracy to be taken from it, and had become contemptible:
in order not to feel this, in order to be able to forget it, an
_unequalled_ royal magnificence, royal authority and plenitude of power
was needed, to which there was access only for the nobility. As in
accordance with this privilege they raised themselves to the elevation
of the court, and from that elevation saw everything under them,--saw
everything contemptible,--they got beyond all uneasiness of conscience.
They thus elevated intentionally the tower of the royal power more and
more into the clouds, and set the final coping-stone of their own power
thereon.
137.
_Spoken in Parable._--A Jesus Christ was only possible in a
Jewish landscape--I mean in one over which the gloomy and sublime
thunder-cloud of the angry Jehovah hung continually. Here only was
the rare, sudden flashing of a single sunbeam through the dreadful,
universal and continuous nocturnal-day regarded as a miracle of "love,"
as a beam of the most unmerited "grace." Here only could Christ dream
of his rainbow and celestial ladder on which God descended to man;
everywhere else the clear weather and the sun were considered the rule
and the commonplace.
138.
_The Error of Christ.--_The founder of Christianity thought there was
nothing from which men suffered so much as from their sins:--it was
his error, the error of him who felt himself without sin, to whom
experience was lacking in this respect! It was thus that his soul
filled with that marvellous, fantastic pity which had reference to
a trouble that even among his own people, the inventors of sin, was
rarely a great trouble! But Christians understood subsequently how
to do justice to their master, and how to sanctify his error into a
"truth."
139.
_Colour of the Passions.--_Natures such as the apostle Paul, have
an evil eye for the passions; they learn to know only the filthy,
the distorting, and the heart-breaking in them,--their ideal aim,
therefore, is the annihilation of the passions; in the divine they see
complete purification from passion. The Greeks, quite otherwise than
Paul and the Jews, directed their ideal aim precisely to the passions,
and loved, elevated, embellished and deified them: in passion they
evidently not only felt themselves happier, but also purer and diviner
than otherwise.--And now the Christians? Have they wished to become
Jews in this respect? Have they perhaps become Jews?
140.
_Too Jewish.--_If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would
first of all have had to forgo judging and justice:-a judge, and even
a gracious judge, is no object of love. The founder of Christianity
showed too little of the finer feelings in this respect--being a Jew.
141.
_Too Oriental._--What? A God who loves men provided that they believe
in him, and who hurls frightful glances and threatenings at him who
does not believe in this love! What? A conditioned love as the feeling
of an almighty God! A love which has not even become master of the
sentiment of honour and of the irritable desire for vengeance! How
Oriental is all that! "If I love thee, what does it concern thee?"[1]
is already a sufficient criticism of the whole of Christianity.
142.
_Frankincense.--Buddha_ says: "Do not flatter thy benefactor!" Let one
repeat this saying in a Christian church:--it immediately purifies the
air.
143.