Part Three: The Religious Nature
45
The
human soul and its frontiers, the compass of inner human experience in general attained
hitherto, the heights, depths and distances of this experience, the entire
history of the soul hitherto and its still unexhausted
possibilities: this is the predestined hunting-ground for a born psychologist
and lover of the 'big-game hunt'. But how
often must he say despairingly to himself: 'one man! alas,
but one man! and this great forest and jungle!' And thus he wishes he had a few hundred
beaters and subtle well-instructed tracker dogs whom he could send into the
history of the human soul and there round up his game. In vain: he discovers again and again,
thoroughly and bitterly, how hard it is to find beaters and dogs for all the
things which arouse his curiosity. The
drawback in sending scholars out into new and dangerous hunting-grounds where
courage, prudence, subtlety in every sense are needed is that they cease to be
of any use precisely where the 'big hunt', but also the big danger,
begins - precisely there do they loose their keenness of eye and keenness of
nose. To divine and establish, for
example, what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience
has had in the soul of homines religiosi one would oneself perhaps have to be as
profound, as wounded, as monstrous as Pascal's intellectual conscience was -
and then there would still be needed that broad heaven of bright, malicious
spirituality capable of looking down on this turmoil of dangerous and painful
experiences, surveying and ordering them and forcing them into formulas. - But
who could do me this service! And who could
have the time to wait for such servants! - they appear
too rarely, they are at all times so very improbable! In the end one has to do everything oneself if one
is to know a few things oneself: that is to say, one has much to do! -
But a curiosity like mine is after all the most pleasurable of vices - I beg
your pardon! I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in Heaven, and
already upon earth. -
46
The
faith such as primitive Christianity demanded and not infrequently obtained in
the midst of a sceptical and southerly free-spirited world with a
centuries-long struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, plus
the education in tolerance provided by the Imperium
Romanum - this faith is not that gruff,
true-hearted liegeman's faith with which a Luther, say, or a Cromwell, or some
other northern barbarian of the spirit cleaved to his God and his Christianity;
it is rather than faith of Pascal which resembles in a terrible fashion a
protracted suicide of reason - of a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason which is
not to be killed instantaneously with a single blow. The Christian faith is from the beginning
sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all
self-confidence of the spirit, at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith exacted of an over-ripe,
manifold and much-indulged conscience: its presupposition is that the
subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful, that the entire past
and habitude of such a spirit resists the absurdissimum
which 'faith' appears to it to be.
Modern men, with their obtuseness to all Christian nomenclature, no
longer sense the gruesome superlative which lay for an antique taste in the
paradoxical formula 'god on the cross'.
Never and nowhere has there hitherto been a comparable boldness in
inversion, anything so fearsome, questioning and questionable, as this formula:
it promised a revaluation of all antique values. - It is the orient, the innermost
orient, it is the oriental slave who in this fashion took vengeance on Rome and
its noble and frivolous tolerance, on Roman 'catholicism'
of faith, that has enraged slaves in their masters and against their
masters. 'Enlightenment' enrages: for
the slave wants the unconditional, he understands in the domain of morality too
only the tyrannical, he loves as he hates, without nuance, into the depths of
him, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness - the great hidden
suffering he feels is enraged at the noble taste which seems to deny
suffering. Scepticism towards suffering,
at bottom no more than a pose of aristocratic morality, was likewise not the
least contributory cause of the last great slave revolt which began with the
French Revolution.
47
Wherever
the religious neurosis has hitherto appeared on earth we find it tied to three
dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence - but
without our being able to decide with certainty which is cause here and which
effect, or whether any relation of cause and effect is involved here at
all. The justification of the latter
doubt is that one of the most frequent symptoms of the condition, in the case
of savage and tame peoples, is the most sudden and most extravagant
voluptuousness which is then, just as suddenly, reversed into a convulsion of
penitence and a denial of world and will: both perhaps interpretable as masked
epilepsy? But nowhere is it more
necessary to renounce interpretations: around no other type has there grown up
such an abundance of nonsense and superstition, none seems to have hitherto
interested men, even philosophers, more - the time has come to cool down a
little on this matter, to learn caution: better, to look away, to go away.
- Still in the background of the most recent philosophy, the Schopenhaueran, there stands, almost as the problem in
itself, this gruesome question-mark of the religious crisis and awakening. How is denial of the will possible? How is the saint possible? - this really seems to have been the question over which
Schopenhauer became a philosopher and set to work. And thus it showed a genuinely Schopenhaueran outcome that his most convinced adherent
(perhaps also his last adherent, so far as Germany is concerned - ), namely
Richard Wagner, brought his own life's work to an end at precisely this point
and at last introduced that dreadful and eternal type onto the stage as Kundry, type vécu, just as
it is; and at the very time when the psychiatrists of almost all the nations of
Europe had an opportunity of studying it at close quarters wherever the
religious neurosis - or, as I call it, 'the religious nature' - staged its
latest epidemic parade and outbreak as the 'Salvation Army'. - But if one asks
what it has really been in this whole phenomenon of the saint that has
interested men of all types and ages, even philosophers, so immoderately, then
the answer is, beyond doubt, the appearance of the miraculous adhering to it,
namely the direct succession of opposites, of morally antithetical
states of soul: here it seemed a palpable fact that a 'bad man' all at once
became a 'saint', a good man. Psychology
has hitherto come to grief at this point: has it not been principally because
it has acknowledged the dominion of morality, because it itself
believed in antithetical moral values and saw, read, interpreted
these antitheses into the text and the facts? - What? The 'miracle' only an error
of interpretation? A lack of philology? -
48
It
seems that their Catholicism is much more an intrinsic part of the Latin races
than the whole of Christianity in general is of us northerners; and that
unbelief consequently signifies something altogether different in Catholic
countries from what it does in Protestant - namely a kind of revolt against the
spirit of the race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit (or lack
of spirit - ) of the race. We northerners are undoubtedly descended from
barbarian races also in respect of our talent for religion: we have little
talent for it. We may except
the Celts, who therefore supplied the best soil for the reception of the
Christian infection in the north - the Christian ideal came to blossom, so far
as the pale northern sun permitted it, in
49
What
astonishes one about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the tremendous
amount of gratitude that emanates from it - the kind of man who stands thus
before nature and before life is a very noble one! - Later, when the rabble
came to predominate in
50
The
passion for God: there is the peasant, true-hearted and importunate kind, like
Luther's - the whole of Protestantism lacks southern delicatezza. There is an oriental ecstatic kind, like that
of a slave who has been undeservedly pardoned and elevated, as for example in
the case of Augustine, who lacks in an offensive manner all nobility of bearing
and desire. There is the womanly tender
and longing kind which presses bashfully and ignorantly for a unio mystica et physica: as in the case of
Madame de Guyon.
In many cases it appears strangely enough as a disguise for the puberty
of a girl or a youth; now and then even as the hysteria of an old maid, also as
her final ambition - the church has more than once canonized the woman in
question.
51
Hitherto
the mightiest men have still bowed down reverently before the saint as the
enigma of self-constraint and voluntary final renunciation: why did they bow? They sensed in him - as it were behind the
question-mark presented by his fragile and miserable appearance - the superior
force that sought to prove itself through such a constraint, the strength of
will in which they recognized and knew how to honour their own strength and joy
in ruling: they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the
saint. In addition to this, the sight of
the saint aroused a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature,
will not have been desired for nothing, they said to themselves. Is there perhaps a reason for it, a very
great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret visitors and
informants, might possess closer knowledge?
Enough, the mighty of the world learned in fact of him a new fear, they
sensed a new power, a strange enemy as yet unsubdued
- it was the 'will to power' which constrained them to halt before the
saint. They had to question him. -
52
In
the Jewish 'Old Testament', the book of divine justice, there are men, things and
speeches of so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to
set beside it. One stands in reverence
and trembling before these remnants of what man once was and has sorrowful
thoughts about old Asia and its little jutting-out promontory Europe, which
would like to signify as against Asia the 'progress of man'. To be sure: he who is only a measly tame
domestic animal and knows only the needs of a domestic animal (like our
cultured people of today, the Christians of 'cultured' Christianity included -
) has no reason to wonder, let alone to sorrow, among those ruins - the taste
for the Old Testament is a touchstone in regard to 'great' and 'small' - :
perhaps he will find the New Testament, the book of mercy, more after his own
heart (there is in it a great deal of genuine delicate, musty odour of devotee
and petty soul). To have glued this New
Testament, a species of rococo taste in every respect, on to the Old Testament
to form a single book, as 'bible', as 'the book of books': that is perhaps
the greatest piece of temerity and 'sin against the spirit' than literary
53
Why
atheism today? - 'The father' in God is thoroughly refuted; likewise 'the
judge', 'the rewarder'. Likewise his 'free will': he does not hear -
and if he heard he would still not know how to help. The worst thing is: he seems incapable of
making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he means? -
These are what, in the course of many conversations, asking and listening, I
found to be the causes of the decline of European theism; it seems to me that
the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth - but that it rejects the
theistic answer with profound mistrust.
54
What,
at bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes - and indeed rather in spite
of him than on the basis of his precedent - all philosophers have been making
an attentat on the ancient soul concept under
the cloak of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept - that is to say,
an attentat on the fundamental presupposition
of Christian doctrine. Modern
philosophy, as an epistemological scepticism, is, covertly or openly, anti-Christian:
although, to speak to more refined ears, by no means anti-religious. For in the past one believed in 'the soul' as
one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said 'I' is the
condition, 'think' is the predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity
to which a subject must be thought of as cause. Then one tried with admirable artfulness and
tenacity to fathom whether one could not get out of this net - whether the
reverse was not perhaps true: 'think' the condition, 'I' conditioned; 'I' thus
being only a synthesis produced by thinking. Kant wanted fundamentally to prove
that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved - nor could be
object: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, that is
to say of 'the soul', may not always have been remote from him, that idea
which, as the philosophy of the Vedanta, has exerted immense influence on earth
before.
55
There
is a great ladder of religious cruelty with many rungs; but three of them are
the most important. At one time one sacrificed
human beings to one's god, perhaps precisely those human beings one loved best
- the sacrifice of the first-born present in all prehistoric religions belongs
here, as does the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithras
grotto on the isle of Capri, that most horrible of all Roman anachronisms. Then, in the moral epoch of mankind, one
sacrificed to one's god the strongest instincts one possessed, one's 'nature';
the joy of this festival glitters in the cruel glance of the ascetic,
the inspired 'anti-naturalist'. Finally:
what was left to be sacrificed? Did one
not finally have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing,
all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in a future bliss and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and
out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate,
nothingness? To sacrifice God for
nothingness - this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was
reversed for the generation which is even now arising: we all know something of
it already. -
56
He
who, prompted by some enigmatic desire, has, like me, long endeavoured to think
pessimism through to the bottom and to redeem it from the half-Christian,
half-German simplicity and narrowness with which it finally presented itself to
this century [i.e. nineteenth century], namely in the form of the Schopenhaueran philosophy; he who has really gazed with an
Asiatic and more than Asiatic eye down into the most world-denying of all
possible modes of thought - beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and
Schopenhauer, under the spell and illusion of morality - perhaps by this very
act, and without really intending to, may have had his eyes opened to the
opposite ideal: to the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most
world-affirming man, who has not only learned to get on and treat with all that
was and is but who wants to have it again as it was and is to all
eternity, insatiably calling out da capo
not only to himself but to the whole piece and play, and not only to a play but
fundamentally to him who needs precisely this play - and who makes it
necessary: because he needs himself again and again - and makes himself
necessary - What? And would this not be circulus vitiosus deus?
57
With
the strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were
the space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new
stars, ever new images and enigmas come into view. Perhaps everything on which the spirit's eye
has exercised its profundity and acuteness has been really but an opportunity
for its exercise, a game, something for children and the childish. Perhaps the most solemn concepts which have
occasioned the most strife and suffering, the concepts 'God' and 'sin', will
one day seem to us of no more importance than a child's toy and a child's
troubles seem to an old man - and perhaps 'old man' will then have need of
another toy and other troubles - still enough of a child, an eternal child!
58
Has
it been observed to what extent a genuine religious life (both for its
favourite labour of microscopic self-examination and that gentle composure
which calls itself 'prayer' and which is a constant readiness for the 'coming
of god' - ) requires external leisure or semi-leisure,
I mean leisure with a good conscience, inherited, by blood, which is not
altogether unfamiliar with the aristocratic idea that work degrades -
that is to say, makes soul and body common?
And that consequently modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud and stupidly
proud industriousness educates and prepares precisely for 'unbelief' more than
anything else does? Among those in
Germany for example who nowadays live without religion, I find people whose
'free-thinking' is of differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of
those in whom industriousness from generation to generation has extinguished
the religious instincts: so that they no longer have any idea what religions
are supposed to be for and as it were merely register their existence in the
world with a kind of dumb amazement.
They feel they are already fully occupied, these worthy people, whether
with their businesses or with their pleasures, not to speak of the 'fatherland'
and the newspapers and 'family duties': it seems that they have no time at all
left for religion, especially as it is not clear to them whether it involves
another business or another pleasure - for they tell themselves it is not
possible that one goes to church simply to make oneself miserable. They are not opposed to religious usages; if
participation in such usages is demanded in certain cases, by the state for
instance, they do what is demanded of them as one does so many things - with
patient and modest seriousness and without much curiosity and discomfort - it
is only that they live too much aside and outside even to feel the need for any
for or against in such things. The great
majority of German middle-class Protestants can today be numbered among these
indifferent people, especially in the great industrious centres of trade and
commerce; likewise the great majority of industrious scholars and the entire
university equipage (excepting the theologians, whose possibility and presence
there provides the psychologist with ever more and ever subtler enigmas to
solve). Pious or even merely church-going
people seldom realize how much good will, one might even say wilfulness,
it requires nowadays for a German scholar to take the problem of religion
seriously; his whole trade (and, as said above, the tradesmanlike
industriousness to which his modern conscience obliges him) disposes him to a
superior, almost good-natured merriment in regard to religion, sometimes mixed
with a mild contempt directed at the 'uncleanliness'
of spirit which he presupposes wherever one still belongs to the church. It is only with the aid of history (thus not
from his personal experience) that the scholar succeeds in summoning up a
reverent seriousness and a certain shy respect towards religion; but if he
intensifies his feelings towards it even to the point of feeling grateful to
it, his has still in his own person not got so much as a single step closer to
that which still exists as church or piety: perhaps the reverse. The practical indifference to religious
things in which he was born and raised is as a rule sublimated in him into a
caution and cleanliness which avoids contact with religious people and things;
and it can be precisely the depth of his tolerance and humanity that bids him
evade the subtle distress which tolerance itself brings with it. - Every age has
its own divine kind of naivety for the invention of which other ages may envy
it - and how much naivety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid naivety
there is in the scholar's belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of
his tolerance, in the simple
unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an
inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above -
he, the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head -
and handyman of 'ideas', of 'modern ideas'!
59
He
who has seen deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that
men are superficial. It is their
instinct for preservation which teaches them to be fickle, light and false. Here and there, among philosophers as well as
artists, one finds a passionate and exaggerated worship of 'pure forms': let
no-one doubt that he who needs the cult of surfaces to that extent has
at some time or other made a calamitous attempt to get beneath
them. Perhaps there might even exist an
order of rank in regard to these burnt children, these born artists who can
find pleasure in life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were
in a long drawn-out revenge on life - ): one could
determine the degree to which life has been spoiled for them by the extent to
which they want to see its image falsified, attenuated and made otherworldly
and divine - one could include the homines religiosi among the artists and their highest
rank. It is the profound suspicious fear
of an incurable pessimism which compels whole millennia to cling with their
teeth to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear born of that
instinct which senses that one might get hold of the truth too soon,
before mankind was sufficiently strong, sufficiently hard, sufficient of an
artist.... Piety, the 'life in God', would, viewed in this light, appear as the
subtlest and ultimate product of the fear of truth, as the artist's
worship of an intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications, as
the will to inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. Perhaps there has up till now been no finer
way of making man himself more beautiful than piety: through piety man can
become to so great a degree art, surface, play of colours, goodness, that one
no longer suffers at the sight of him. -
60
To
love men for the sake of God - that has been the noblest and most remote
feeling attained to among men up till now.
That love of man without some sanctifying ulterior objective is one piece
of stupidity and animality more, that the
inclination to this love of man has first to receive its measure, its
refinement, its grain of salt and drop of amber from a higher inclination -
whatever man it was who first felt and 'experience' this, however much his
tongue may have faltered as it sought to express such a delicate thought, let
him be holy and venerated to us for all time as the man who has soared the
highest and gone the most beautifully astray!
61
The
philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits - as the man of the
most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the collective
evolution of mankind: this philosopher will make use of the existing religions
for his work of education and breeding, just as he will make use of existing
political and economic conditions. The
influence on selection and breeding, that is to say the destructive as well as
the creative and formative influence which can be exercised with the aid of the
existing religions, is manifold and various depending on the kind of man placed
under their spell and protection. For
the strong and independent prepared and predestined for command, in whom the
art and reason of a ruling race is incarnated, religion is one more means of
overcoming resistance so as to be able to rule: as a bond that unites together
ruler and ruled and betrays and hands over to the former the consciences of the
latter, all that is hidden and most intimate in them which would like to
exclude itself from obedience; and if some natures of such noble descent
incline through lofty spirituality to a more withdrawn and meditative life and
reserve to themselves only the most refined kind of rule (over select disciples
or brothers), then religion can even be used as a means of obtaining peace from
the noise and effort of cruder modes of government, and cleanliness from
the necessary dirt of all politics.
Thus did the Brahmins, for example, arrange things: with the aid of a
religious organization they gave themselves the power of nominating their kings
for the people, while keeping and feeling themselves aside and outside as men
of higher and more than kingly tasks. In
the meantime, religion also gives a section of the ruled guidance and
opportunity for preparing itself for future rule and command; that is to say,
those slowly rising orders and classes in which through fortunate marriage
customs the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-mastery, is always
increasing - religion presents them with sufficient instigations and
temptations to take the road to higher spirituality, to test the feelings of
great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude - asceticism and puritanism are virtually indispensable means of educations
and ennobling if a race wants to become master over its origins in the rabble,
and work its way up towards future rule.
To ordinary men, finally, the great majority, who exist for service and
general utility and who may exist only for that purpose, religion gives
an invaluable contentment with their nature and station, manifold peace of
heart, an ennobling of obedience, one piece of joy and sorrow more to share
with their fellows, and some transfiguration of the whole everydayness, the
whole lowliness, the whole half-bestial poverty of their souls. Religion and the religious significance of
life sheds sunshine over these perpetual drudges and makes their own sight
tolerable to them, it has the effect which an Epicurean philosophy usually has
on sufferers of a higher rank, refreshing, refining, as it were making the
most use of suffering, ultimately even sanctifying and justifying. Perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism
is so venerable as their art of teaching even the
lowliest to set themselves through piety in an apparently higher order of
things and thus to preserve their contentment with the real order, within which
they live hard enough lives - and necessarily have to!
62
In
the end, to be sure, to present the debit side of the account to these
religions and to bring into the light of day their uncanny perilousness
- it costs dear and terribly when religions hold sway, not as means of
education and breeding in the hands of the philosopher, but in their own right
and as sovereign, when they themselves want to be final ends and not
means beside other means. Among men, as
among every other species, there is a surplus of failures, of the sick, the
degenerate, the fragile, of those who are bound to suffer; the successful cases
are, among men too, always the exception, and, considering that man is the
animal whose nature has not yet been fixed, the rare exception. But worse still: the higher the type of man a
man represents, the greater the improbability he will turn out well:
chance, the law of absurdity in the total economy of mankind, shows itself in
its most dreadful shape in its destructive effect on higher men, whose
conditions of life are subtle, manifold and difficult to compute. Now what is the attitude of the above-named
two chief religions towards this surplus of unsuccessful cases? They seek to preserve, to retain in life,
whatever can in any way be preserved, indeed they side with it as a matter of
principle as religions for sufferers, they maintain that all those who
suffer from life as from an illness are in the right, and would like every
other feeling of life to be counted false and become impossible. However highly one may rate this kindly
preservative solicitude, inasmuch as, together with all the other types of man,
it has been and is applied to the highest type, which has hitherto almost
always been the type that has suffered most: in the total accounting the
hitherto sovereign religions are among the main reasons the type 'man'
has been kept on a lower level - they have preserved too much of that which
ought to perish. We have inestimable
benefits to thank them for; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to be
impoverished in face of all that the 'spiritual men' of Christianity, for
example, have hitherto done for
