Beyond Good and Evil by Frederich Nietzsche. A user’s guide.
Part 5 of 10 : THE RELIGIOUS MOOD (Sublime Abortion)
Teachers notes and Evaluation notes taken from
Teachers Notes
Nietzsche considers the demands that Christianity makes: for renunciation of freedom, pride, self-confidence of spirit, and much else besides. This Christian piety is best exemplified by the priestly type, who denies everything good in life and submits himself to isolation, humility, and chastity.
This ascetic ideal has held a great fascination in all places and times, as the saint then effects a reversal whereby he is able to make his self-debasement appear as the highest form of good. The power of the saint, Nietzsche says, lies precisely in the mystery of the value of all this self-denial. Someone willingly submitting himself to such torture must know something the rest of us don’t know. The saint exemplifies a new form of power, a new will to power.
Nietzsche characterizes us today as being atheistic, but still religious. The ideas of God as father, judge, or rewarder are no longer valid. God does not seem to hear us, nor to respond. Modern philosophy has been a great help to the growth of atheism.
In questioning the subject-predicate form of grammar, it has questioned whether there really is an “I” distinct from its predicates. In doubting the sovereignty of this “I” we doubt the existence of the soul. Also, religion demands a leisure class that can look down on work, seeing it as a distraction from spiritual matters. It should come as no surprise that this industrious age is turning away from religion.
While Nietzsche suggests that the modern age is atheistic, he thinks it is marked by an ever stronger religious spirit, albeit one that has evolved beyond theism. Religion demands sacrifice, and in primitive religions, this sacrifice was of a loved one or a first born: one was asked to sacrifice one’s nearest and dearest. This spirit of sacrifice was refined so that we no longer sacrificed others, but sacrificed ourselves instead. We surrendered our will, our freedom, and our strength to our God.
Having completely sacrificed ourselves, the next logical step was that taken by Christianity: we sacrificed our God, the one thing in which we had placed all our hopes and faith.
Having sacrificed our God, we are now left with nothing, and worship rocks, gravity, “the nothing”: we have traded God in for science, and worship that instead.
If we delve deep enough into this pessimism and nihilism, however, Nietzsche suggests we might find the most life-affirming spirit of all, the person that is not only reconciled with all that is, but would wish it repeated into all eternity.
Religion can mean different things for different people. To the ruling classes, it is a means to relate to their subjects and to keep them in line. To a rising class, it teaches self-discipline and prepares it for future rule. To the masses, it teaches them to rest content in their lowly position. But religion does not only serve others’ purposes; Christianity has purposes of its own. Primarily, it seeks to preserve and care for the human species.
This means preserving the majority who are sick and weak of spirit. As a result, it comes to value the suffering and the weakness in those it cares for. It effects a total reversal in our moral valuations, so that weakness and suffering are considered “good” and health and strength are considered “evil.”
While we can admire the “spiritual men” of Europe, Nietzsche concludes that this devaluation of all our noble instincts has bred a Europe of mediocrity and banality.
Evaluation
Underlying much of what Nietzsche says here is the important contrast between master morality and slave morality. According to Nietzsche, morality was originally a matter of saying that health, strength, freedom, and the like were good, and that their undesirable opposites were bad. This morality was reversed by the Judeo-Christian “slave revolt of morality,” where those who were neither healthy, strong, nor free came to resent the people in positions of power and identified them as “evil.” They then came to identify themselves — weak, sick, and poor — as “good.” This is the remarkable reversal of the ascetic priest or saint, who finds power in a turning-inward of all aggressive instincts.
Nietzsche characterizes the majority of humanity as “weak” and “sick” because they lack the power to direct their aggressive instincts outward. A poor slave cannot find any outlet for his animal instincts, and so turns his aggression inward, developing resentment toward those who oppress him. Because the majority of us are similarly incapable of outward aggression, Christianity panders to this majority, and creates a heaven that rewards poverty, chastity, and humility. Those who have no power in this life are convinced that they will have power in another life.
Thus, Christianity encourages and rewards the sicknesses and weaknesses that Nietzsche thinks we should try to overcome. It persuades us to rest content in our weakness rather than to try to grow strong. Because the Christian instinct has grown so powerful in Europe, it has developed a Europe that sees this mediocrity as a goal worth pursuing.
It is fashionable to see science as the antithesis of religion, as an exemplar of reason fighting against faith and superstition. However, Nietzsche does not see science as a force opposed to religion so much as he sees it as religion’s latest development. Nietzsche lives in an age that has become increasingly atheistic, but in which he believes the Christian instinct toward weakness and mediocrity is stronger than ever.
Science has become supremely powerful in this age because it preaches that there is no meaning at all: there are just the laws of physics and the interactions of matter. In science, asceticism has grown so strong that it has renounced not only strength, health, and happiness, but even God, who was previously the only justification for asceticism. Nietzsche characterizes this lack of positive faith as “nihilism,” and sees it as a great danger. We need something to aim for, some higher goal, or we will give up on life entirely. (In another work, Nietzsche prophetically hints that the nihilism of his age, if left unchecked, will lead to wars unlike any this earth has ever seen.)
Nietzsche only alludes briefly, in section 56, to the force that he hopes will oppose nihilism. If we can see a universe of meaningless events, following one after the other, and delight in this, wishing nothing more than its constant repetition, we will have found affirmation precisely in the emptiness of the nihilism that threatens us. Nietzsche introduces this idea, called the “eternal recurrence,” at the climax of ##Thus Spoke Zarathustra##, and considers this the culmination of all his philosophy. Unfortunately, nobody seems to agree on what the eternal recurrence is or what it means.
One of the better formulations comes from Gilles Deleuze, who discusses the eternal recurrence as the “being of becoming.” If we recall, Nietzsche’s metaphysics rests on the assertion that the fundamental nature of the universe is change, and not constancy. If we focus on what is changing rather than what is remaining the same, we will see the universe as being in a perpetual process of becoming. All philosophy and religion looks for some kind of permanence in which to ground things, be it God, morality, Plato’s Forms, or the laws of science. However, if we can acknowledge that nothing is fixed, nothing is true, and yet celebrate this inconstancy, we will celebrate the “being of becoming,” and will have freed ourselves from all dogmatism and faith.
Deleuze’s is just one interpretation of the eternal recurrence. Walter Kaufmann provides a less adventurous account when he suggests that the eternal recurrence simply means the recurrence of the same events over and over without change. In spite of many differences in interpretations, there seems to be a consensus that this culmination of Nietzsche’s philosophy rests in the ability to say “yes” to all of life, the good and the bad, and to accept it for what it is without any belief in or hope for anything beyond this life.
[46] That ‘free-spirited’ world vanished.
Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave,
— this faith is NOT that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason — a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow.
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.
There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience, it takes for granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL, that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form of which ‘faith’ comes to it.
Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, ‘God on the Cross”. Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula
: it promised a transvaluation of all ancient values.
-It was the Orient, the PROFOUND Orient, it was the Oriental slave who thus took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-minded toleration, on the Roman ‘Catholicism’ of non-faith, and it was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them.
‘Enlightenment’ causes revolt, for the slave desires the unconditioned, he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals, he loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness his many HIDDEN sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to DENY suffering.
The skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the last great slave-insurrection which began with the French Revolution.
Enlightenment causes revolt because slaves cannot tolerate freedom from the faith, all must believe. The state must purify itself and become a theocracy. Christians were fanatic, barbaric zealots compared with the tolerant Romans. “Freedom from the faith” also means the freedom to believe but the Christians wanted that freedom removed.
[49] Gratitude for life — before Jesus
That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it pours forth
— it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an attitude towards nature and life.
— Later on, when the populace got the upper hand in Greece, FEAR became rampant also in religion; and Christianity was preparing itself.
[52] The Bible — before Jesus
In the Jewish Old Testament, the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little outpushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the ‘Progress of Mankind.’
To be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people of today, including the Christians of ‘cultured’ Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins — the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to ‘great’ and ‘small”:
perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it).
To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the ‘Bible,’ as ‘The Book in Itself,’ is perhaps the greatest audacity and ‘sin against the Spirit’ which literary Europe has upon its conscience.
Hellfire and damnation please! Friedrich is not a big fan of the New Testament. Rococo painting, which originated in early 18th century Paris, is characterized by soft colors and curvy lines, and depicts scenes of love, nature, amorous encounters, light-hearted entertainment, and youth. The word “rococo” derives from rocaille, which is French for rubble or rock.
[54] What does all modern philosophy mainly do?
Since Descartes [1645]
— and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure
— an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception
— that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine.
Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN, although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious.
Formerly, in effect, 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 is conditioned — to think is an activity for which one MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made, with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of this net, — to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: ‘think’ the condition, and ‘I’ the conditioned; ‘I,’ therefore, only a synthesis which has been MADE by thinking itself. KANT really wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved — nor the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT EXISTENCE of the subject, and therefore of ‘the soul,’ may not always have been strange to him, — the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philosophy.
In 1645 Descartes turned european philosophy upside down. From a world where God created man, to a world where Man created God. This inversion in perspective is expressed by Nietzsche as follows: “Is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders?”
[55] The great ladder of religious cruelty
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rounds; but three of these are the most important. Once on a time men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the best — to this category belong the firstling sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their ‘nature”; THIS festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and ‘anti-natural’ fanatics.
Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed? Was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness?
To sacrifice God for nothingness — this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already.
[57] Humbling conceptions
The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever coming into view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for children and childish minds.
Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions ‘God’ and ‘sin,’ will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child’s plaything or a child’s pain seems to an old man;— and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be necessary once more for ‘the old man’— always childish enough, an eternal child!
[58] Little arrogant dwarf atheists
Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its soft placidity called ‘prayer,’ the state of perpetual readiness for the ‘coming of God’),
I mean the idleness with a good conscience, the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic sentiment that work is DISHONOURING — that it vulgarizes body and soul — is not quite unfamiliar?
And that consequently the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud laboriousness educates and prepares for ‘unbelief’ more than anything else?
Among these, for instance, who are at present living apart from religion in Germany, I find ‘free-thinkers’ of diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose religions serve, and only note their existence in the world with a kind of dull astonishment.
They feel themselves already fully occupied, these good people, be it by their business or by their pleasures, not to mention the ‘Fatherland,’ and the newspapers, and their ‘family duties”; it seems that they have no time whatever left for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure — for it is impossible, they say to themselves, that people should go to church merely to spoil their tempers.
They are by no means enemies of religious customs; should certain circumstances, State affairs perhaps, require their participation in such customs, they do what is required, as so many things are done — with a patient and unassuming seriousness, and without much curiosity or discomfort; — they live too much apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a FOR or AGAINST in such matters.
Among those indifferent persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority of German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the great laborious centres of trade and commerce; also the majority of laborious scholars, and the entire University personnel (with the exception of the theologians, whose existence and possibility there always gives psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to solve).
On the part of pious, or merely church-going people, there is seldom any idea of HOW MUCH good-will, one might say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously; his whole profession (and as I have said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty and almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the ‘uncleanliness’ of spirit which he takes for granted wherever any one still professes to belong to the Church.
It is only with the help of history (NOT through his own personal experience, therefore) that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a certain timid deference in presence of religions; but even when his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them, he has not personally advanced one step nearer to that which still maintains itself as Church or as piety; perhaps even the contrary.
The practical indifference to religious matters in the midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually sublimates itself in his case into circumspection and cleanliness, which shuns contact with religious men and things; and it may be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings with it.
Every age has its own divine type of naivete, for the discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much naivete — adorable, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naivete is involved in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting, simple certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and less valuable type, beyond, before, and ABOVE which he himself has developed — he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man, the sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of ‘ideas,’ of ‘modern ideas’!
We all know the atheist who sneers down at religious people and the mob-man like the marxist, the anarchist or the fascist — purveyors of modern ideas.
[59] Men are Superficial
Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined what wisdom there is in the fact that. Men are superficial. It is their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and false.
Here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration of ‘pure forms’ in philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another made an unlucky dive BENEATH it.
Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to FALSIFY its image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might guess to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and deified,
— one might reckon the homines religiosi among the artists, as their HIGHEST rank. It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism which compels whole centuries to fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of the instinct which divines that truth might be attained TOO soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough….
Piety, the ‘Life in God,’ regarded in this light, would appear as the most elaborate and ultimate product of the FEAR of truth, as artist-adoration and artist-intoxication in presence of the most logical of all falsifications, as the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. Perhaps there has hitherto been no more effective means of beautifying man than piety, by means of it man can become so artful, so superficial, so iridescent, and so good, that his appearance no longer offends.
People who show off their religious credentials are often hiding a dirty secret. It makes much sense to conceal one’s immodesty.
[60] FOR GOD’S SAKE *
To love mankind FOR GOD’S SAKE — this has so far been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained. That love to mankind, without any redeeming intention in the background, is only an ADDITIONAL folly and brutishness, that the inclination to this love has first to get its proportion, its delicacy, its gram of salt and sprinkling of ambergris from a higher inclination — whoever first perceived and ‘experienced’ this, however his tongue may have stammered as it attempted to express such a delicate matter, let him for all time be holy and respected, as the man who has so far flown highest and gone astray in the finest fashion!
Signs of gratitude are hard to find in this text, so we must be grateful for this one. I like this — it is like you have to sympathise with God for his grave error of the human being.
[61] Theocratic Rule
The philosopher, as WE free spirits understand him
-as the man of the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for the general development of mankind,
— will use religion for his disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the contemporary political and economic conditions.
The selecting and disciplining influence — destructive, as well as creative and fashioning — which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied, according to the sort of people placed under its spell and protection.
For those who are strong and independent, destined and trained to command, in whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated, religion is an additional means for overcoming resistance in the exercise of authority — as a bond which binds rulers and subjects in common, betraying and surrendering to the former the conscience of the latter, their inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience.
And in the case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by virtue of superior spirituality they should incline to a more retired and contemplative life, reserving to themselves only the more refined forms of government (over chosen disciples or members of an order), religion itself may be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of managing GROSSER affairs, and for securing immunity from the UNAVOIDABLE filth of all political agitation. The Brahmins, for instance, understood this fact.
With the help of a religious organization, they secured to themselves the power of nominating kings for the people, while their sentiments prompted them to keep apart and outside, as men with a higher and super-regal mission. At the same time religion gives inducement and opportunity to some of the subjects to qualify themselves for future ruling and commanding the slowly ascending ranks and classes, in which, through fortunate marriage customs, volitional power and delight in self-control are on the increase. To them religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silence, and of solitude.
Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy.
And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semi-animal poverty of their souls.
Religion, together with the religious significance of life, sheds sunshine over such perpetually harassed men, and makes even their own aspect endurable to them, it operates upon them as the Epicurean philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a higher order, in a refreshing and refining manner, almost TURNING suffering TO ACCOUNT, and in the end even hallowing and vindicating it.
There is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to a seemingly higher order of things, and thereby to retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it difficult enough to live — this very difficulty being necessary.
This is Nietzsche the consummate patrician. Complimenting religion as tool to distance oneself from the “filth of political agitation”. In our world this would be a Grand Ayatollah in Iran, or the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party. Stalin trained to be a priest in Georgia reminding us that a modern politician is simply a priest who hasn’t yet been ordained.
[62] The Sublime Abortion
To be sure — to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers — the cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means.
Among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception; and in view of the fact that man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception.
But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine. What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life?
They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible.
However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inas- much as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions — to give a general appreciation of them — are among the principal causes which have kept the type of ‘man’ upon a lower level — they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE PERISHED.
One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the ‘spiritual men’ of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto! But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE? To REVERSE all estimates of value -
THAT is what they had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious — all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of ‘man’ — into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things
— THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, ‘unworldliness,’ ‘unsensuousness,’ and ‘higher man’ fused into one sentiment.
If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man?
He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: ‘Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed to do!’ — I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions.
Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime self- constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:
— SUCH men, with their ‘equality before God,’ have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.
