Part 9

The _life which must serve as an example_ consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and contempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandonment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual;--in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life.

Once the Church had allowed itself to take over _all the Christian practice,_ and had formally sanctioned the State,--that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns,--it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals--that is to say, in the _faith_ in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions "sin," "forgiveness," "punishment," "reward"--everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite _absent_ from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground.

An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc.

170.

Christianity has, from the first, always transformed the symbolical into crude realities:

(1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into "life here" and "life beyond."

(2) The notion "eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into "personal immortality";

(3) The process of fraternising by means of sharing the same food and drink, after the Hebrew-Arabian manner, is interpreted as the "miracle of transubstantiation."

(4) "Resurrection" which was intended to mean the entrance to the "true life," in the sense of being intellectually "born again," becomes an historical contingency, supposed to take place at some moment after death;

(5) The teaching of the Son of man as the "Son of God,"--that is to say, the life-relationship between man and God,--becomes the "second person of the Trinity," and thus the filial relationship of every man--even the lowest--to God, is _done away with_;

(6) Salvation through faith (that is to say, that there is no other way to this filial relationship to God, save through the _practice of life_ taught by Christ) becomes transformed into the belief that there is a miraculous way of _atoning_ for all _sin_; though not through our own endeavours, but by means of Christ:

For all these purposes, "Christ on the Cross" had to be interpreted afresh. The _death_ itself would certainly not be the principal feature of the event ... it was only another sign pointing to the way in which one should behave towards the authorities and the laws of the world--_that one was not to defend oneself--this was the exemplary life._

171.

Concerning the psychology of _Paul._--The important fact is Christ's death. This remains to be _explained ..._. That there may be truth or error in an explanation never entered these people's heads: one day a sublime possibility strikes them, "His death _might_ mean so and so" --and it forthwith _becomes_ so and so. An hypothesis is proved by the sublime _ardour_ it lends to its discoverer....

"The proof of strength": _i.e.,_ a thought is demonstrated by its _effects_ ("by their fruits," as the Bible ingenuously says); that which fires enthusiasm must be _true,_--what one loses one's blood for must be _true--_

In every department of this world of thought, the sudden feeling of power which an idea imparts to him who is responsible for it, is placed to the _credit_ of that idea:--and as there seems no other way of honouring an idea than by calling it true, the first epithet it is honoured with is the word _true._ ... How could it have any effect otherwise? It was imagined by some power: if that power were not real, it could not be the cause of anything.... The thought is then understood as _inspired_: the effect it causes has something of the violent nature of a demoniacal influence--

A thought which a decadent like Paul could not resist and to which he completely yields, is thus "proved" _true_!!!

All these holy epileptics and visionaries did not possess a thousandth part of the honesty in self-criticism with which a philologist, nowadays, reads a text, or tests the truth of an historical event.... Beside us, such people were moral cretins.

172.

It matters little _whether a thing be true,_ provided it be _effective_: total _absence of intellectual uprightness._ Everything is good, whether it be lying, slander, or shameless "cooking," provided it serve to heighten the degree of heat to the point at which people "believe."

We are face to face with an actual school for the teaching of _the means wherewith_ men are _seduced_ to a belief: we see systematic _contempt_ for those spheres whence contradiction might come (that is to say, for reason, philosophy, wisdom, doubt, and caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the teaching, with continual references to the fact that it was God who presented us with it--that the apostle signifies nothing--that no criticism is brooked, but only faith, acceptance; that it is the greatest blessing and favour to receive such a doctrine of salvation; that the state in which one should receive it, ought to be one of the profoundest thankfulness and humility....

The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though _they_ were the meaning and salt of the earth.

Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the teaching; it is sufficient to take note of the means it uses in order to be aware of the nature of the phenomenon one is examining. It identified itself with _virtue,_ it appropriated the whole of the _fascinating power of virtue,_ shamelessly, for its own purposes ... it availed itself of the power of paradox, and of the need, manifested by old civilisation, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed and revolted at the same time; it provoked persecutions and ill-treatment.

It is the same kind of _well-thought-out meanness_ with which the Jewish priesthood established their power and built up their Church....

One must be able to discern: (1) that warmth of passion "love" (resting on a base of ardent sensuality); (2) the thoroughly _ignoble character_ of Christianity:--the continual exaggeration and verbosity;--the lack of cool intellectuality and irony;--the unmilitary character of all its instincts;--the priestly prejudices against manly pride, sensuality, the sciences, the arts.

173.

_Paul_: seeks power _against_ ruling Judaism,--his attempt is too weak.... Transvaluation of the notion "Jew": the "race" is put aside: but that means denying the very basis of the whole structure. The "martyr," the "fanatic," the value of all _strong_ belief. Christianity is the _form of decay_ of the old world, after the latter's collapse, and it is characterised by the fact that it brings all the most sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top.

_Consequently other_ instincts had to step into the foreground, in order to _constitute_ an entity, a power able to stand alone--in short, a condition of tense sorrow was necessary, like that out of which the Jews had derived their _instinct of self-preservation...._

The persecution of Christians was invaluable for this purpose.

Unity in the face of danger; the conversion of the masses becomes the only means of putting an end to the persecution of the individual. (The notion "conversion" is therefore made as elastic as possible.)

174.

The _Christian Judaic_ life: here resentment did not prevail. The great persecutions alone could have driven out the passions to that extent--as also the _ardour of love_ and _hate._

When the creatures a man most loves are sacrificed before his eyes for the sake of his faith, that man becomes _aggressive_; the triumph of Christianity is due to its persecutors.

_Asceticism_ is not specifically Christian: this is what Schopenhauer misunderstood. It only shoots up in Christianity, wherever it would have existed without that religion.

Melancholy Christianity, the torture and torment of the conscience, also only a peculiarity of a particular soil, where Christian values have taken root: it is not Christianity properly speaking. Christianity has absorbed all the different kinds of diseases which grow from morbid soil: one could refute it at one blow by showing that it did not know how to resist any contagion. But _that_ precisely is the essential feature of it. Christianity is a type of decadence.

175.

The reality on which Christianity was able to build up its power consisted of the small dispersed _Jewish families,_ with their warmth, tenderness, and peculiar readiness to help, which, to the whole of the Roman Empire, was perhaps the most incomprehensible and least familiar of their characteristics; they were also united by their pride at being a "chosen people," concealed beneath a cloak of humility, and by their secret denial of all that was uppermost and that possessed power and splendour, although there was no shade of envy in their denial. _To have recognised this as a power,_ to have regarded this _blessed_ state as communicable, seductive, and infectious even where pagans were concerned--this constituted Paul's genius: to use up the treasure of latent energy and cautious happiness for the purposes of "a Jewish Church of free confession," and to avail himself of all the Jewish experience, their propaganda, and their expertness in _the preservation of a community_ under a foreign power--this is what he conceived to be his duty. He it was who discovered that absolutely unpolitical and isolated body of _paltry people,_ and their art of asserting themselves and pushing themselves to the front, by means of a host of acquired virtues which are made to represent the only forms of virtue ("the self-preservative measure and weapon of success of a certain class of man").

The principle of _love_ comes from the small community of Jewish people: a _very passionate_ soul glows here, beneath the ashes of humility and wretchedness: it is neither Greek, Indian, nor German. The song in praise of love which Paul wrote is not Christian; it is the Jewish flare of that eternal flame which is Semitic. If Christianity has done anything essentially new in a psychological sense, it is this, that it has _increased the temperature of the soul_ among those cooler and more noble races who were at one time at the head of affairs; it discovered that the most wretched life could be made rich and invaluable, by means of an elevation of the temperature of the soul....

It is easily understood that a transfer of this sort could _not_ take place among the ruling classes: the Jews and Christians were at a disadvantage owing to their bad manners--spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing (I become aware of these bad manners while reading the New Testament). It was necessary to be related both in baseness and sorrow with this type of lower manhood in order to feel anything attractive in him.... The attitude a man maintains towards the New Testament is a test of the amount of taste he may have for the classics (see Tacitus); he who is not revolted by it, he who does not feel honestly and deeply that he is in the presence of a sort of _fœda superstitio_ when reading it, and who does not draw his hand back so as not to soil his fingers--such a man does not know what is classical. A man must feel about "the cross" as Goethe did.[1]

[Footnote 1:

Vieles kann ich ertragen. Die meisten beschwerlichen Dinge Duld' ich mit ruhigem Mut, wie es ein Gott mir gebeut. Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider; Viere: Rauch des Tabaks, Wanzen, und Knoblauch und Goethe's _Venetian Epigrams,_ No. 67.

Much can I bear. Things the most irksome I endure with such patience as comes from a god. Four things, however, repulse me like venom:--Tobacco smoke, garlic, bugs, and the cross.

(TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.) ]

176.

_The reaction of paltry people_:--Love provides the feeling of highest power. It should be understood to what extent, not man in general, but only a certain kind of man is speaking here.

"We are godly in love, we shall be 'the children of God'; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love"; that is to say: all morality, obedience, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does;--a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone.

Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living sentiment of unity felt as the _sum of the feeling of life._ Helping, caring for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success, the expression of pleasure, emphasise the feeling of power; pride is not lacking either, it is felt in the form of the community, the House of God, and the "chosen people."

As a matter of fact, man has once more experienced an "_altération" of his personality_: this time he called his feeling of love--God. The awakening of such a feeling must be pictured; it is a sort of ecstasy, a strange language, a "Gospel"--it was this newness which did not allow man to attribute love to himself--he thought it was God leading him on and taking shape in his heart. "God descends among men," one's neighbour is transfigured and becomes a God (in so far as he provokes the sentiment of love), _Jesus is the neighbour,_ the moment He is transfigured in thought into a God, and into a cause _provoking the feeling of power._

177.

Believers are aware that they owe an infinite amount to Christianity, and therefore conclude that its Founder must have been a man of the first rank.... This conclusion is false, but it is typical of the reverents. Regarded objectively, it is, _in the first place,_ just possible that they are mistaken concerning the extent of their debt to Christianity: a man's convictions prove nothing concerning the thing he is convinced about, and in religions they are more likely to give rise to suspicions.... Secondly, it is possible that the debt owing to Christianity is not due to its Founder at all, but to the whole structure, the whole thing--to the Church, etc. The notion "Founder" is so very equivocal, that it may stand even for the accidental cause of a movement: the person of the Founder has been inflated in proportion as the Church has grown: but even this process of veneration allows of the conclusion that, at one time or other, this Founder was something exceedingly insecure and doubtful--in the beginning.... Let any one think of the _free and easy way_ in which Paul treats the problem of the personality of Jesus, how he almost juggles with it: some one who died, who was seen after His death,--some one whom the Jews delivered up to death--all this was only the theme--_Paul_ wrote the music to it.

178.

The founder of a religion _may_ be quite insignificant--a wax vesta and no _more_!

179.

_Concerning the psychological problem of Christianity.--The driving forces are_: resentment, popular insurrection, the revolt of the bungled and the botched. (In Buddhism it is different: it is not _born_ of _resentment._ It rather combats resentment because the latter leads to _action_!)

This party, which stands for freedom, understands that the _abandonment of antagonism in thought and deed_ is a condition of distinction and preservation. Here lies the psychological difficulty which has stood in the way of Christianity being understood: the force which created it, urges to a struggle against itself.

Only as a party standing _for peace_ and _innocence_ can this insurrectionary movement hope to be successful: it must conquer by means of excessive mildness, sweetness, softness, and its instincts are aware of this. The _feat_ was to deny and condemn the force, of which man is the expression, and to press the reverse of that force continually to the fore, by word and deed.

180.

_The pretence of youthfulness._--It is a mistake to imagine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful people rose against an old culture; the story goes that it was out of the lowest levels of society, where Christianity flourished and shot its roots, that the more profound source of life gushed forth afresh: but nothing can be understood of the psychology of Christianity, if it be supposed that it was the expression of revived youth among a people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is rather a typical form of decadence, of moral-softening and of hysteria, amid a general hotch-potch of races and people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and sick. The wonderful company which gathered round this master-seducer of the populace, would not be at all out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this crowd--the absence of a known duty, the feeling that everything is nearing its end, that nothing is any longer worth while, and that contentment lies in _dolce far niente_.

The power and certainty of the future in the Jew's instinct, its monstrous will for life and for power, lies in its ruling classes; the people who upheld primitive Christianity are best distinguished by this _exhausted condition_ of their instincts. On the one hand, they are sick of everything; on the other, they are content with each other, with themselves and for themselves.

181.

Christianity regarded as _emancipated Judaism_ (just as a nobility which is both racial and indigenous ultimately emancipates itself from these conditions, and _goes in search of_ kindred elements....).

(1) As a Church (community) on the territory of the State, as an unpolitical institution.

(2) As life, breeding, practice, art of living.

(3) As a _religion of sin_ (sin committed against _God, being the only recognised kind,_ and the only cause of all suffering), with a universal cure for it. There is no sin save against God; what is done against men, man shall not sit in judgment upon, nor call to account, except in the name of God. At the same time, all commandments (love): everything is associated with God, and all acts are performed according to God's will. Beneath this arrangement there lies exceptional intelligence (a very narrow life, such as that led by the Esquimaux, can only be endured by most peaceful and indulgent people: the Judæo-Christian dogma turns against sin in favour of the "sinner").

182.

The Jewish priesthood understood how to present everything it claimed to be right as a _divine precept,_ as an act of obedience to God, and also to introduce all those things which conduced to _preserve Israel_ and were the _conditions_ of its existence (for instance: the large number of "_works_": circumcision and the cult of sacrifices, as the very pivot of the national conscience), not as Nature, but as God.

_This process continued; within the very heart_ of Judaism, where the need of these "works" was not felt (that is to say, as a means of keeping a race distinct), a priestly sort of man was pictured, whose bearing towards the aristocracy was like that of "noble nature"; a sacerdotalism of the soul, which now, in order to throw its opposite into strong relief, attaches value, not to the "dutiful acts" themselves, but to the sentiment....

At bottom, the problem was once again, how to make a certain kind of soul _prevail_: it was also _a popular insurrection in the midst of a priestly people_--a pietistic movement coming from below (sinners, publicans, women, and children). Jesus of Nazareth was the symbol of their sect. And again, in order to believe in themselves, they were in need of a _theological transfiguration_: they require nothing less than "the Son of God" in order to create a belief for themselves. And just as the priesthood had falsified the whole history of Israel, another attempt was made, here, to _alter and falsify_ the whole history of mankind in such a way as to make Christianity seem like the most important event it contained. This movement could have originated only upon the soil of Judaism, the main feature of which was the confounding of _guilt with sorrow_ and the reduction of all _sin_ to _sin against God._ Of all this, Christianity is the _second degree of power._

183.

The symbolism of Christianity is based upon that of _Judaism,_ which had already transfigured all reality (history, Nature) into a holy and artificial unreality--which refused to recognise real history, and which showed no more interest in a natural course of things.

184.

The Jews made the attempt to prevail, after two of their castes--the warrior and the agricultural castes, had disappeared from their midst.

In this sense they are the "castrated people": they have their priests and then--their Chandala....

How easily a disturbance occurs among them--an insurrection of their Chandala. This was the origin of _Christianity._

Owing to the fact that they had no knowledge of warriors except as their masters, they introduced enmity towards the nobles, the men of honour, pride, and power, and the _ruling_ classes, into their religion: they are pessimists from _indignation...._

Thus they created a very important and novel position: the priests in the van of the Chandala--against the _noble classes...._

Christianity was the logical conclusion of this movement: even in the Jewish priesthood, it still scented the existence of the caste, of the privileged and noble minority--_it therefore did away with priests._

Christ is the unit of the Chandala who removes the priest ... the Chandala who redeems himself....

That is why the _French_ Revolution is the lineal descendant and the continuator of _Christianity--_ it is characterised by an instinct of hate towards castes, nobles, and the last privileges.

185.

The "_Christian Ideal_" put on the stage with Jewish astuteness--these are the fundamental _psychological forces_ of its "nature":--

Revolt against the ruling spiritual powers;

The attempt to make those virtues which facilitate the _happiness of the lowly,_ a standard of all values--in fact, to call _God_ that which is no more than the self-preservative instinct of that class of man possessed of least vitality;

Obedience and absolute _abstention_ from war and resistance, justified by this ideal;

The love of one another as a result of the love of God.

_The trick_: The _denial_ of all _natural mobilia,_ and their transference to the spiritual world beyond ... the exploitation of _virtue_ and its _veneration_ for wholly interested motives, gradual _denial_ of virtue in everything that is not Christian.

186.

The _profound contempt_ with which the Christian was treated by the noble people of antiquity, is of the same order as the present instinctive aversion to Jews: it is the hatred which free and self-respecting classes feel towards those _who wish to creep in secretly,_ and who combine an awkward bearing with foolish self-sufficiency.

The New Testament is the gospel of a completely _ignoble_ species of man; its pretensions to highest values--_yea, to all_ values, is, as a matter of fact, revolting--even nowadays.

187.