The imaginations of many of the
Christian saints were obscene to a degree; and because of the theory
that sexual desires were in reality demons that raged within them, the
saints did not feel wholly responsible for them.
Christian saints were obscene to a degree; and because of the theory
that sexual desires were in reality demons that raged within them, the
saints did not feel wholly responsible for them.
Human, All Too Human- A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
=--How
many sentiments are lost to us is manifest in the union of the farcical,
even of the obscene, with the religious feeling. The feeling that this
mixture is possible is becoming extinct. We realize the mixture only
historically, in the mysteries of Demeter and Dionysos and in the
Christian Easter festivals and religious mysteries. But we still
perceive the sublime in connection with the ridiculous, and the like,
the emotional with the absurd. Perhaps a later age will be unable to
understand even these combinations.
113
=Christianity as Antiquity. =--When on a Sunday morning we hear the old
bells ringing, we ask ourselves: Is it possible? All this for a Jew
crucified two thousand years ago who said he was God's son? The proof of
such an assertion is lacking. --Certainly, the Christian religion
constitutes in our time a protruding bit of antiquity from very remote
ages and that its assertions are still generally believed--although men
have become so keen in the scrutiny of claims--constitutes the oldest
relic of this inheritance. A god who begets children by a mortal woman;
a sage who demands that no more work be done, that no more justice be
administered but that the signs of the approaching end of the world be
heeded; a system of justice that accepts an innocent as a vicarious
sacrifice in the place of the guilty; a person who bids his disciples
drink his blood; prayers for miracles; sins against a god expiated upon
a god; fear of a hereafter to which death is the portal; the figure of
the cross as a symbol in an age that no longer knows the purpose and the
ignominy of the cross--how ghostly all these things flit before us out
of the grave of their primitive antiquity! Is one to believe that such
things can still be believed?
114
=The Un-Greek in Christianity. =--The Greeks did not look upon the
Homeric gods above them as lords nor upon themselves beneath as
servants, after the fashion of the Jews. They saw but the counterpart as
in a mirror of the most perfect specimens of their own caste, hence an
ideal, but no contradiction of their own nature. There was a feeling of
mutual relationship, resulting in a mutual interest, a sort of alliance.
Man thinks well of himself when he gives himself such gods and places
himself in a relationship akin to that of the lower nobility with the
higher; whereas the Italian races have a decidedly vulgar religion,
involving perpetual anxiety because of bad and mischievous powers and
soul disturbers. Wherever the Olympian gods receded into the background,
there even Greek life became gloomier and more perturbed. --Christianity,
on the other hand, oppressed and degraded humanity completely and sank
it into deepest mire: into the feeling of utter abasement it suddenly
flashed the gleam of divine compassion, so that the amazed and
grace-dazzled stupefied one gave a cry of delight and for a moment
believed that the whole of heaven was within him. Upon this unhealthy
excess of feeling, upon the accompanying corruption of heart and head,
Christianity attains all its psychological effects. It wants to
annihilate, debase, stupefy, amaze, bedazzle. There is but one thing
that it does not want: measure, standard (das Maas) and therefore is it
in the worst sense barbarous, asiatic, vulgar, un-Greek.
115
=Being Religious to Some Purpose. =--There are certain insipid,
traffic-virtuous people to whom religion is pinned like the hem of some
garb of a higher humanity. These people do well to remain religious: it
adorns them. All who are not versed in some professional
weapon--including tongue and pen as weapons--are servile: to all such
the Christian religion is very useful, for then their servility assumes
the aspect of Christian virtue and is amazingly adorned. --People whose
daily lives are empty and colorless are readily religious. This is
comprehensible and pardonable, but they have no right to demand that
others, whose daily lives are not empty and colorless, should be
religious also.
116
=The Everyday Christian. =--If Christianity, with its allegations of an
avenging God, universal sinfulness, choice of grace, and the danger of
eternal damnation, were true, it would be an indication of weakness of
mind and character not to be a priest or an apostle or a hermit, and
toil for one's own salvation. It would be irrational to lose sight of
one's eternal well being in comparison with temporary advantage:
Assuming these dogmas to be generally believed, the every day Christian
is a pitiable figure, a man who really cannot count as far as three, and
who, for the rest, just because of his intellectual incapacity, does not
deserve to be as hard punished as Christianity promises he shall be.
117
=Concerning the Cleverness of Christianity. =--It is a master stroke of
Christianity to so emphasize the unworthiness, sinfulness and
degradation of men in general that contempt of one's fellow creatures
becomes impossible. "He may sin as much as he pleases, he is not by
nature different from me. It is I who in every way am unworthy and
contemptible. " So says the Christian to himself. But even this feeling
has lost its keenest sting for the Christian does not believe in his
individual degradation. He is bad in his general human capacity and he
soothes himself a little with the assertion that we are all alike.
118
=Personal Change. =--As soon as a religion rules, it has for its
opponents those who were its first disciples.
119
=Fate of Christianity. =--Christianity arose to lighten the heart, but
now it must first make the heart heavy in order to be able to lighten it
afterwards. Christianity will consequently go down.
120
=The Testimony of Pleasure. =--The agreeable opinion is accepted as true.
This is the testimony of pleasure (or as the church says, the evidence
of strength) of which all religions are so proud, although they should
all be ashamed of it. If a belief did not make blessed it would not be
believed. How little it would be worth, then!
121
=Dangerous Play. =--Whoever gives religious feeling room, must then also
let it grow. He can do nothing else. Then his being gradually changes.
The religious element brings with it affinities and kinships. The whole
circle of his judgment and feeling is clouded and draped in religious
shadows. Feeling cannot stand still. One should be on one's guard.
122
=The Blind Pupil. =--As long as one knows very well the strength and the
weakness of one's dogma, one's art, one's religion, its strength is
still low. The pupil and apostle who has no eye for the weaknesses of a
dogma, a religion and so on, dazzled by the aspect of the master and by
his own reverence for him, has, on that very account, generally more
power than the master. Without blind pupils the influence of a man and
his work has never become great. To give victory to knowledge, often
amounts to no more than so allying it with stupidity that the brute
force of the latter forces triumph for the former.
123
=The Breaking off of Churches. =--There is not sufficient religion in the
world merely to put an end to the number of religions.
124
=Sinlessness of Men. =--If one have understood how "Sin came into the
world," namely through errors of the reason, through which men in their
intercourse with one another and even individual men looked upon
themselves as much blacker and wickeder than was really the case, one's
whole feeling is much lightened and man and the world appear together in
such a halo of harmlessness that a sentiment of well being is instilled
into one's whole nature. Man in the midst of nature is as a child left
to its own devices. This child indeed dreams a heavy, anxious dream. But
when it opens its eyes it finds itself always in paradise.
125
=Irreligiousness of Artists. =--Homer is so much at home among his gods
and is as a poet so good natured to them that he must have been
profoundly irreligious. That which was brought to him by the popular
faith--a mean, crude and partially repulsive superstition--he dealt with
as freely as the Sculptor with his clay, therefore with the same freedom
that AEschylus and Aristophanes evinced and with which in later times the
great artists of the renaissance, and also Shakespeare and Goethe, drew
their pictures.
126
=Art and Strength of False Interpretation. =--All the visions, fears,
exhaustions and delights of the saint are well known symptoms of
sickness, which in him, owing to deep rooted religious and psychological
delusions, are explained quite differently, that is not as symptoms of
sickness. --So, too, perhaps, the demon of Socrates was nothing but a
malady of the ear that he explained, in view of his predominant moral
theory, in a manner different from what would be thought rational
to-day. Nor is the case different with the frenzy and the frenzied
speeches of the prophets and of the priests of the oracles. It is always
the degree of wisdom, imagination, capacity and morality in the heart
and mind of the interpreters that got so much out of them. It is among
the greatest feats of the men who are called geniuses and saints that
they made interpreters for themselves who, fortunately for mankind, did
not understand them.
127
=Reverence for Madness. =--Because it was perceived that an excitement of
some kind often made the head clearer and occasioned fortunate
inspirations, it was concluded that the utmost excitement would occasion
the most fortunate inspirations. Hence the frenzied being was revered as
a sage and an oracle giver. A false conclusion lies at the bottom of all
this.
128
=Promises of Wisdom. =--Modern science has as its object as little pain
as possible, as long a life as possible--hence a sort of eternal
blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises
of religion.
129
=Forbidden Generosity. =--There is not enough of love and goodness in the
world to throw any of it away on conceited people.
130
=Survival of Religious Training in the Disposition. =--The Catholic
Church, and before it all ancient education, controlled the whole domain
of means through which man was put into certain unordinary moods and
withdrawn from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from calm,
rational reflection. A church vibrating with deep tones; gloomy,
regular, restraining exhortations from a priestly band, who
involuntarily communicate their own tension to their congregation and
lead them to listen almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in
course of preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as the
house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in all its
shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting power--who would care
to reduce men to the level of these things if the ideas upon which they
rest became extinct? But the results of all these things are
nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional,
prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in
man largely through cultivation. What still exists in his soul was
formerly, as he germinated, grew and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined.
131
=Religious After-Pains. =--Though one believe oneself absolutely weaned
away from religion, the process has yet not been so thorough as to make
impossible a feeling of joy at the presence of religious feelings and
dispositions without intelligible content, as, for example, in music;
and if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical hopes,
through the peace of soul therein attainable, and also speaks of "the
whole true gospel in the look of Raphael's Madonna," we greet such
declarations and innuendoes with a welcome smile. The philosopher has
here a matter easy of demonstration. He responds with that which he is
glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to accept. Hence it is
observable how the less reflective free spirits collide only with dogmas
but yield readily to the magic of religious feelings; it is a source of
pain to them to let the latter go simply on account of the
former. --Scientific philosophy must be very much on its guard lest on
account of this necessity--an evolved and hence, also, a transitory
necessity--delusions are smuggled in. Even logicians speak of
"presentiments" of truth in ethics and in art (for example of the
presentiment that the essence of things is unity) a thing which,
nevertheless, ought to be prohibited. Between carefully deduced truths
and such "foreboded" things there lies the abysmal distinction that the
former are products of the intellect and the latter of the necessity.
Hunger is no evidence that there is food at hand to appease it. Hunger
merely craves food. "Presentiment" does not denote that the existence of
a thing is known in any way whatever. It denotes merely that it is
deemed possible to the extent that it is desired or feared. The
"presentiment" is not one step forward in the domain of certainty. --It
is involuntarily believed that the religious tinted sections of a
philosophy are better attested than the others, but the case is at
bottom just the opposite: there is simply the inner wish that it may be
so, that the thing which beautifies may also be true. This wish leads us
to accept bad grounds as good.
132
=Of the Christian Need of Salvation. =--Careful consideration must render
it possible to propound some explanation of that process in the soul of
a Christian which is termed need of salvation, and to propound an
explanation, too, free from mythology: hence one purely psychological.
Heretofore psychological explanations of religious conditions and
processes have really been in disrepute, inasmuch as a theology calling
itself free gave vent to its unprofitable nature in this domain; for its
principal aim, so far as may be judged from the spirit of its creator,
Schleier-macher, was the preservation of the Christian religion and the
maintenance of the Christian theology. It appeared that in the
psychological analysis of religious "facts" a new anchorage and above
all a new calling were to be gained. Undisturbed by such predecessors,
we venture the following exposition of the phenomena alluded to. Man is
conscious of certain acts which are very firmly implanted in the general
course of conduct: indeed he discovers in himself a predisposition to
such acts that seems to him to be as unalterable as his very being. How
gladly he would essay some other kind of acts which in the general
estimate of conduct are rated the best and highest, how gladly he would
welcome the consciousness of well doing which ought to follow unselfish
motive! Unfortunately, however, it goes no further than this longing:
the discontent consequent upon being unable to satisfy it is added to
all other kinds of discontent which result from his life destiny in
particular or which may be due to so called bad acts; so that a deep
depression ensues accompanied by a desire for some physician to remove
it and all its causes. --This condition would not be found so bitter if
the individual but compared himself freely with other men: for then he
would have no reason to be discontented with himself in particular as he
is merely bearing his share of the general burden of human discontent
and incompleteness. But he compares himself with a being who alone must
be capable of the conduct that is called unegoistic and of an enduring
consciousness of unselfish motive, with God. It is because he gazes into
this clear mirror, that his own self seems so extraordinarily distracted
and so troubled. Thereupon the thought of that being, in so far as it
flits before his fancy as retributive justice, occasions him anxiety. In
every conceivable small and great experience he believes he sees the
anger of the being, his threats, the very implements and manacles of his
judge and prison. What succors him in this danger, which, in the
prospect of an eternal duration of punishment, transcends in hideousness
all the horrors that can be presented to the imagination?
133
Before we consider this condition in its further effects, we would admit
to ourselves that man is betrayed into this condition not through his
"fault" and "sin" but through a series of delusions of the reason; that
it was the fault of the mirror if his own self appeared to him in the
highest degree dark and hateful, and that that mirror was his own work,
the very imperfect work of human imagination and judgment. In the first
place a being capable of absolutely unegoistic conduct is as fabulous as
the phoenix. Such a being is not even thinkable for the very reason that
the whole notion of "unegoistic conduct," when closely examined,
vanishes into air. Never yet has a man done anything solely for others
and entirely without reference to a personal motive; indeed how could he
possibly do anything that had no reference to himself, that is without
inward compulsion (which must always have its basis in a personal need)?
How could the ego act without ego? --A god, who, on the other hand, is
all love, as he is usually represented, would not be capable of a
solitary unegoistic act: whence one is reminded of a reflection of
Lichtenberg's which is, in truth, taken from a lower sphere: "We cannot
possibly feel for others, as the expression goes; we feel only for
ourselves. The assertion sounds hard, but it is not, if rightly
understood. A man loves neither his father nor his mother nor his wife
nor his child, but simply the feelings which they inspire. " Or, as La
Rochefoucauld says: "If you think you love your mistress for the mere
love of her, you are very much mistaken. " Why acts of love are more
highly prized than others, namely not on account of their nature, but on
account of their utility, has already been explained in the section on
the origin of moral feelings. But if a man should wish to be all love
like the god aforesaid, and want to do all things for others and nothing
for himself, the procedure would be fundamentally impossible because he
_must_ do a great deal for himself before there would be any possibility
of doing anything for the love of others. It is also essential that
others be sufficiently egoistic to accept always and at all times this
self sacrifice and living for others, so that the men of love and self
sacrifice have an interest in the survival of unloving and selfish
egoists, while the highest morality, in order to maintain itself must
formally enforce the existence of immorality (wherein it would be really
destroying itself. )--Further: the idea of a god perturbs and discourages
as long as it is accepted but as to how it originated can no longer, in
the present state of comparative ethnological science, be a matter of
doubt, and with the insight into the origin of this belief all faith
collapses. What happens to the Christian who compares his nature with
that of God is exactly what happened to Don Quixote, who depreciated his
own prowess because his head was filled with the wondrous deeds of the
heroes of chivalrous romance. The standard of measurement which both
employ belongs to the domain of fable. --But if the idea of God
collapses, so too, does the feeling of "sin" as a violation of divine
rescript, as a stain upon a god-like creation. There still apparently
remains that discouragement which is closely allied with fear of the
punishment of worldly justice or of the contempt of one's fellow men.
The keenest thorn in the sentiment of sin is dulled when it is perceived
that one's acts have contravened human tradition, human rules and human
laws without having thereby endangered the "eternal salvation of the
soul" and its relations with deity. If finally men attain to the
conviction of the absolute necessity of all acts and of their utter
irresponsibility and then absorb it into their flesh and blood, every
relic of conscience pangs will disappear.
134
If now, as stated, the Christian, through certain delusive feelings, is
betrayed into self contempt, that is by a false and unscientific view of
his acts and feelings, he must, nevertheless, perceive with the utmost
amazement that this state of self contempt, of conscience pangs, of
despair in particular, does not last, that there are hours during which
all these things are wafted away from the soul and he feels himself once
more free and courageous. The truth is that joy in his own being, the
fulness of his own powers in connection with the inevitable decline of
his profound excitation with the lapse of time, bore off the palm of
victory. The man loves himself once more, he feels it--but this very new
love, this new self esteem seems to him incredible. He can see in it
only the wholly unmerited stream of the light of grace shed down upon
him. If he formerly saw in every event merely warnings, threats,
punishments and every kind of indication of divine anger, he now reads
into his experiences the grace of god. The latter circumstance seems to
him full of love, the former as a helpful pointing of the way, and his
entirely joyful frame of mind now seems to him to be an absolute proof
of the goodness of God. As formerly in his states of discouragement he
interpreted his conduct falsely so now he does the same with his
experiences. His state of consolation is now regarded as the effect
produced by some external power. The love with which, at bottom, he
loves himself, seems to be the divine love. That which he calls grace
and the preliminary of salvation is in reality self-grace,
self-salvation.
135
Therefore a certain false psychology, a certain kind of imaginativeness
in the interpretation of motives and experiences is the essential
preliminary to being a Christian and to experiencing the need of
salvation. Upon gaining an insight into this wandering of the reason and
the imagination, one ceases to be a Christian.
136
=Of Christian Asceticism and Sanctity. =--Much as some thinkers have
exerted themselves to impart an air of the miraculous to those singular
phenomena known as asceticism and sanctity, to question which or to
account for which upon a rational basis would be wickedness and
sacrilege, the temptation to this wickedness is none the less great. A
powerful impulse of nature has in every age led to protest against such
phenomena. At any rate science, inasmuch as it is the imitation of
nature, permits the casting of doubts upon the inexplicable character
and the supernal degree of such phenomena. It is true that heretofore
science has not succeeded in its attempts at explanation. The phenomena
remain unexplained still, to the great satisfaction of those who revere
moral miracles. For, speaking generally, the unexplained must rank as
the inexplicable, the inexplicable as the non-natural, supernatural,
miraculous--so runs the demand in the souls of all the religious and all
the metaphysicians (even the artists if they happen to be thinkers),
whereas the scientific man sees in this demand the "evil
principle. "--The universal, first, apparent truth that is encountered in
the contemplation of sanctity and asceticism is that their nature is
complicated; for nearly always, within the physical world as well as in
the moral, the apparently miraculous may be traced successfully to the
complex, the obscure, the multi-conditioned. Let us venture then to
isolate a few impulses in the soul of the saint and the ascetic, to
consider them separately and then view them as a synthetic development.
137
There is an obstinacy against oneself, certain sublimated forms of which
are included in asceticism. Certain kinds of men are under such a strong
necessity of exercising their power and dominating impulses that, if
other objects are lacking or if they have not succeeded with other
objects they will actually tyrannize over some portions of their own
nature or over sections and stages of their own personality. Thus do
many thinkers bring themselves to views which are far from likely to
increase or improve their fame. Many deliberately bring down the
contempt of others upon themselves although they could easily have
retained consideration by silence. Others contradict earlier opinions
and do not shrink from the ordeal of being deemed inconsistent. On the
contrary they strive for this and act like eager riders who enjoy
horseback exercise most when the horse is skittish. Thus will men in
dangerous paths ascend to the highest steeps in order to laugh to scorn
their own fear and their own trembling limbs. Thus will the philosopher
embrace the dogmas of asceticism, humility, sanctity, in the light of
which his own image appears in its most hideous aspect. This crushing of
self, this mockery of one's own nature, this spernere se sperni out of
which religions have made so much is in reality but a very high
development of vanity. The whole ethic of the sermon on the mount
belongs in this category: man has a true delight in mastering himself
through exaggerated pretensions or excessive expedients and later
deifying this tyrannically exacting something within him. In every
scheme of ascetic ethics, man prays to one part of himself as if it were
god and hence it is necessary for him to treat the rest of himself as
devil.
138
=Man is Not at All Hours Equally Moral=; this is established. If one's
morality be judged according to one's capacity for great, self
sacrificing resolutions and abnegations (which when continual, and made
a habit are known as sanctity) one is, in affection, or disposition, the
most moral: while higher excitement supplies wholly new impulses which,
were one calm and cool as ordinarily, one would not deem oneself even
capable of. How comes this? Apparently from the propinquity of all great
and lofty emotional states. If a man is brought to an extraordinary
pitch of feeling he can resolve upon a fearful revenge or upon a fearful
renunciation of his thirst for vengeance indifferently. He craves, under
the influences of powerful emotion, the great, the powerful, the
immense, and if he chances to perceive that the sacrifice of himself
will afford him as much satisfaction as the sacrifice of another, or
will afford him more, he will choose self sacrifice. What concerns him
particularly is simply the unloading of his emotion. Hence he readily,
to relieve his tension, grasps the darts of the enemy and buries them in
his own breast. That in self abnegation and not in revenge the element
of greatness consisted must have been brought home to mankind only after
long habituation. A god who sacrifices himself would be the most
powerful and most effective symbol of this sort of greatness. As the
conquest of the most hardly conquered enemy, the sudden mastering of a
passion--thus does such abnegation _appear_: hence it passes for the
summit of morality. In reality all that is involved is the exchange of
one idea for another whilst the temperament remained at a like altitude,
a like tidal state. Men when coming out of the spell, or resting from
such passionate excitation, no longer understand the morality of such
instants, but the admiration of all who participated in the occasion
sustains them. Pride is their support if the passion and the
comprehension of their act weaken. Therefore, at bottom even such acts
of self-abnegation are not moral inasmuch as they are not done with a
strict regard for others. Rather do others afford the high strung
temperament an opportunity to lighten itself through such abnegation.
139
=Even the Ascetic Seeks to Make Life Easier=, and generally by means of
absolute subjection to another will or to an all inclusive rule and
ritual, pretty much as the Brahmin leaves absolutely nothing to his own
volition but is guided in every moment of his life by some holy
injunction or other. This subjection is a potent means of acquiring
dominion over oneself. One is occupied, hence time does not bang heavy
and there is no incitement of the personal will and of the individual
passion. The deed once done there is no feeling of responsibility nor
the sting of regret. One has given up one's own will once for all and
this is easier than to give it up occasionally, as it is also easier
wholly to renounce a desire than to yield to it in measured degree. When
we consider the present relation of man to the state we perceive
unconditional obedience is easier than conditional. The holy person also
makes his lot easier through the complete surrender of his life
personality and it is all delusion to admire such a phenomenon as the
loftiest heroism of morality. It is always more difficult to assert
one's personality without shrinking and without hesitation than to give
it up altogether in the manner indicated, and it requires moreover more
intellect and thought.
140
After having discovered in many of the less comprehensible actions mere
manifestations of pleasure in emotion for its own sake, I fancy I can
detect in the self contempt which characterises holy persons, and also
in their acts of self torture (through hunger and scourgings,
distortions and chaining of the limbs, acts of madness) simply a means
whereby such natures may resist the general exhaustion of their will to
live (their nerves). They employ the most painful expedients to escape
if only for a time from the heaviness and weariness in which they are
steeped by their great mental indolence and their subjection to a will
other than their own.
141
=The Most Usual Means= by which the ascetic and the sanctified
individual seeks to make life more endurable comprises certain combats
of an inner nature involving alternations of victory and prostration.
For this purpose an enemy is necessary and he is found in the so called
"inner enemy. " That is, the holy individual makes use of his tendency to
vanity, domineering and pride, and of his mental longings in order to
contemplate his life as a sort of continuous battle and himself as a
battlefield, in which good and evil spirits wage war with varying
fortune. It is an established fact that the imagination is restrained
through the regularity and adequacy of sexual intercourse while on the
other hand abstention from or great irregularity in sexual intercourse
will cause the imagination to run riot.
The imaginations of many of the
Christian saints were obscene to a degree; and because of the theory
that sexual desires were in reality demons that raged within them, the
saints did not feel wholly responsible for them. It is to this
conviction that we are indebted for the highly instructive sincerity of
their evidence against themselves. It was to their interest that this
contest should always be kept up in some fashion because by means of
this contest, as already stated, their empty lives gained distraction.
In order that the contest might seem sufficiently great to inspire
sympathy and admiration in the unsanctified, it was essential that
sexual capacity be ever more and more damned and denounced. Indeed the
danger of eternal damnation was so closely allied to this capacity that
for whole generations Christians showed their children with actual
conscience pangs. What evil may not have been done to humanity through
this! And yet here the truth is just upside down: an exceedingly
unseemly attitude for the truth. Christianity, it is true, had said that
every man is conceived and born in sin, and in the intolerable and
excessive Christianity of Calderon this thought is again perverted and
entangled into the most distorted paradox extant in the well known lines
The greatest sin of man
Is the sin of being born.
In all pessimistic religions the act of procreation is looked upon as
evil in itself. This is far from being the general human opinion. It is
not even the opinion of all pessimists. Empedocles, for example, knows
nothing of anything shameful, devilish and sinful in it. He sees rather
in the great field of bliss of unholiness simply a healthful and hopeful
phenomenon, Aphrodite. She is to him an evidence that strife does not
always rage but that some time a gentle demon is to wield the sceptre.
The Christian pessimists of practice, had, as stated, a direct interest
in the prevalence of an opposite belief. They needed in the loneliness
and the spiritual wilderness of their lives an ever living enemy, and a
universally known enemy through whose conquest they might appear to the
unsanctified as utterly incomprehensible and half unnatural beings. When
this enemy at last, as a result of their mode of life and their
shattered health, took flight forever, they were able immediately to
people their inner selves with new demons. The rise and fall of the
balance of cheerfulness and despair maintained their addled brains in a
totally new fluctuation of longing and peace of soul. And in that period
psychology served not only to cast suspicion on everything human but to
wound and scourge it, to crucify it. Man wanted to find himself as base
and evil as possible. Man sought to become anxious about the state of
his soul, he wished to be doubtful of his own capacity. Everything
natural with which man connects the idea of badness and sinfulness (as,
for instance, is still customary in regard to the erotic) injures and
degrades the imagination, occasions a shamed aspect, leads man to war
upon himself and makes him uncertain, distrustful of himself. Even his
dreams acquire a tincture of the unclean conscience. And yet this
suffering because of the natural element in certain things is wholly
superfluous. It is simply the result of opinions regarding the things.
It is easy to understand why men become worse than they are if they are
brought to look upon the unavoidably natural as bad and later to feel it
as of evil origin. It is the master stroke of religions and metaphysics
that wish to make man out bad and sinful by nature, to render nature
suspicious in his eyes and to so make himself evil, for he learns to
feel himself evil when he cannot divest himself of nature. He gradually
comes to look upon himself, after a long life lived naturally, so
oppressed by a weight of sin that supernatural powers become necessary
to relieve him of the burden; and with this notion comes the so called
need of salvation, which is the result not of a real but of an imaginary
sinfulness. Go through the separate moral expositions in the vouchers of
christianity and it will always be found that the demands are excessive
in order that it may be impossible for man to satisfy them. The object
is not that he may become moral but that he may feel as sinful as
possible. If this feeling had not been rendered agreeable to man--why
should he have improvised such an ideal and clung to it so long? As in
the ancient world an incalculable strength of intellect and capacity for
feeling was squandered in order to increase the joy of living through
feastful systems of worship, so in the era of christianity an equally
incalculable quantity of intellectual capacity has been sacrificed in
another endeavor: that man should in every way feel himself sinful and
thereby be moved, inspired, inspirited. To move, to inspire, to inspirit
at any cost--is not this the freedom cry of an exhausted, over-ripe,
over cultivated age? The circle of all the natural sensations had been
gone through a hundred times: the soul had grown weary. Then the saints
and the ascetics found a new order of ecstacies. They set themselves
before the eyes of all not alone as models for imitation to many, but as
fearful and yet delightful spectacles on the boundary line between this
world and the next world, where in that period everyone thought he saw
at one time rays of heavenly light, at another fearful, threatening
tongues of flame. The eye of the saint, directed upon the fearful
significance of the shortness of earthly life, upon the imminence of the
last judgment, upon eternal life hereafter; this glowering eye in an
emaciated body caused men, in the old time world, to tremble to the
depths of their being. To look, to look away and shudder, to feel anew
the fascination of the spectacle, to yield to it, sate oneself upon it
until the soul trembled with ardor and fever--that was the last pleasure
left to classical antiquity when its sensibilities had been blunted by
the arena and the gladiatorial show.
142
=To Sum Up All That Has Been Said=: that condition of soul at which the
saint or expectant saint is rejoiced is a combination of elements which
we are all familiar with, except that under other influences than those
of mere religious ideation they customarily arouse the censure of men in
the same way that when combined with religion itself and regarded as the
supreme attainment of sanctity, they are object of admiration and even
of prayer--at least in more simple times. Very soon the saint turns upon
himself that severity that is so closely allied to the instinct of
domination at any price and which inspire even in the most solitary
individual the sense of power. Soon his swollen sensitiveness of feeling
breaks forth from the longing to restrain his passions within it and is
transformed into a longing to master them as if they were wild steeds,
the master impulse being ever that of a proud spirit; next he craves a
complete cessation of all perturbing, fascinating feelings, a waking
sleep, an enduring repose in the lap of a dull, animal, plant-like
indolence. Next he seeks the battle and extinguishes it within himself
because weariness and boredom confront him. He binds his
self-deification with self-contempt. He delights in the wild tumult of
his desires and the sharp pain of sin, in the very idea of being lost.
He is able to play his very passions, for instance the desire to
domineer, a trick so that he goes to the other extreme of abject
humiliation and subjection, so that his overwrought soul is without any
restraint through this antithesis. And, finally, when indulgence in
visions, in talks with the dead or with divine beings overcomes him,
this is really but a form of gratification that he craves, perhaps a
form of gratification in which all other gratifications are blended.
Novalis, one of the authorities in matters of sanctity, because of his
experience and instinct, betrays the whole secret with the utmost
simplicity when he says: "It is remarkable that the close connection of
gratification, religion and cruelty has not long ago made men aware of
their inner relationship and common tendency. "
143
=Not What the Saint is but what he was in= the eyes of the
non-sanctified gives him his historical importance. Because there
existed a delusion respecting the saint, his soul states being falsely
viewed and his personality being sundered as much as possible from
humanity as a something incomparable and supernatural, because of these
things he attained the extraordinary with which he swayed the
imaginations of whole nations and whole ages. Even he knew himself not
for even he regarded his dispositions, passions and actions in
accordance with a system of interpretation as artificial and exaggerated
as the pneumatic interpretation of the bible. The distorted and diseased
in his own nature with its blending of spiritual poverty, defective
knowledge, ruined health, overwrought nerves, remained as hidden from
his view as from the view of his beholders. He was neither a
particularly good man nor a particularly bad man but he stood for
something that was far above the human standard in wisdom and goodness.
Faith in him sustained faith in the divine and miraculous, in a
religious significance of all existence, in an impending day of
judgment. In the last rays of the setting sun of the ancient world,
which fell upon the christian peoples, the shadowy form of the saint
attained enormous proportions--to such enormous proportions, indeed,
that down even to our own age, which no longer believes in god, there
are thinkers who believe in the saints.
144
It stands to reason that this sketch of the saint, made upon the model
of the whole species, can be confronted with many opposing sketches that
would create a more agreeable impression. There are certain exceptions
among the species who distinguish themselves either by especial
gentleness or especial humanity, and perhaps by the strength of their
own personality. Others are in the highest degree fascinating because
certain of their delusions shed a particular glow over their whole
being, as is the case with the founder of christianity who took himself
for the only begotten son of God and hence felt himself sinless; so that
through his imagination--that should not be too harshly judged since the
whole of antiquity swarmed with sons of god--he attained the same goal,
the sense of complete sinlessness, complete irresponsibility, that can
now be attained by every individual through science. --In the same manner
I have viewed the saints of India who occupy an intermediate station
between the christian saints and the Greek philosophers and hence are
not to be regarded as a pure type. Knowledge and science--as far as they
existed--and superiority to the rest of mankind by logical discipline
and training of the intellectual powers were insisted upon by the
Buddhists as essential to sanctity, just as they were denounced by the
christian world as the indications of sinfulness.
many sentiments are lost to us is manifest in the union of the farcical,
even of the obscene, with the religious feeling. The feeling that this
mixture is possible is becoming extinct. We realize the mixture only
historically, in the mysteries of Demeter and Dionysos and in the
Christian Easter festivals and religious mysteries. But we still
perceive the sublime in connection with the ridiculous, and the like,
the emotional with the absurd. Perhaps a later age will be unable to
understand even these combinations.
113
=Christianity as Antiquity. =--When on a Sunday morning we hear the old
bells ringing, we ask ourselves: Is it possible? All this for a Jew
crucified two thousand years ago who said he was God's son? The proof of
such an assertion is lacking. --Certainly, the Christian religion
constitutes in our time a protruding bit of antiquity from very remote
ages and that its assertions are still generally believed--although men
have become so keen in the scrutiny of claims--constitutes the oldest
relic of this inheritance. A god who begets children by a mortal woman;
a sage who demands that no more work be done, that no more justice be
administered but that the signs of the approaching end of the world be
heeded; a system of justice that accepts an innocent as a vicarious
sacrifice in the place of the guilty; a person who bids his disciples
drink his blood; prayers for miracles; sins against a god expiated upon
a god; fear of a hereafter to which death is the portal; the figure of
the cross as a symbol in an age that no longer knows the purpose and the
ignominy of the cross--how ghostly all these things flit before us out
of the grave of their primitive antiquity! Is one to believe that such
things can still be believed?
114
=The Un-Greek in Christianity. =--The Greeks did not look upon the
Homeric gods above them as lords nor upon themselves beneath as
servants, after the fashion of the Jews. They saw but the counterpart as
in a mirror of the most perfect specimens of their own caste, hence an
ideal, but no contradiction of their own nature. There was a feeling of
mutual relationship, resulting in a mutual interest, a sort of alliance.
Man thinks well of himself when he gives himself such gods and places
himself in a relationship akin to that of the lower nobility with the
higher; whereas the Italian races have a decidedly vulgar religion,
involving perpetual anxiety because of bad and mischievous powers and
soul disturbers. Wherever the Olympian gods receded into the background,
there even Greek life became gloomier and more perturbed. --Christianity,
on the other hand, oppressed and degraded humanity completely and sank
it into deepest mire: into the feeling of utter abasement it suddenly
flashed the gleam of divine compassion, so that the amazed and
grace-dazzled stupefied one gave a cry of delight and for a moment
believed that the whole of heaven was within him. Upon this unhealthy
excess of feeling, upon the accompanying corruption of heart and head,
Christianity attains all its psychological effects. It wants to
annihilate, debase, stupefy, amaze, bedazzle. There is but one thing
that it does not want: measure, standard (das Maas) and therefore is it
in the worst sense barbarous, asiatic, vulgar, un-Greek.
115
=Being Religious to Some Purpose. =--There are certain insipid,
traffic-virtuous people to whom religion is pinned like the hem of some
garb of a higher humanity. These people do well to remain religious: it
adorns them. All who are not versed in some professional
weapon--including tongue and pen as weapons--are servile: to all such
the Christian religion is very useful, for then their servility assumes
the aspect of Christian virtue and is amazingly adorned. --People whose
daily lives are empty and colorless are readily religious. This is
comprehensible and pardonable, but they have no right to demand that
others, whose daily lives are not empty and colorless, should be
religious also.
116
=The Everyday Christian. =--If Christianity, with its allegations of an
avenging God, universal sinfulness, choice of grace, and the danger of
eternal damnation, were true, it would be an indication of weakness of
mind and character not to be a priest or an apostle or a hermit, and
toil for one's own salvation. It would be irrational to lose sight of
one's eternal well being in comparison with temporary advantage:
Assuming these dogmas to be generally believed, the every day Christian
is a pitiable figure, a man who really cannot count as far as three, and
who, for the rest, just because of his intellectual incapacity, does not
deserve to be as hard punished as Christianity promises he shall be.
117
=Concerning the Cleverness of Christianity. =--It is a master stroke of
Christianity to so emphasize the unworthiness, sinfulness and
degradation of men in general that contempt of one's fellow creatures
becomes impossible. "He may sin as much as he pleases, he is not by
nature different from me. It is I who in every way am unworthy and
contemptible. " So says the Christian to himself. But even this feeling
has lost its keenest sting for the Christian does not believe in his
individual degradation. He is bad in his general human capacity and he
soothes himself a little with the assertion that we are all alike.
118
=Personal Change. =--As soon as a religion rules, it has for its
opponents those who were its first disciples.
119
=Fate of Christianity. =--Christianity arose to lighten the heart, but
now it must first make the heart heavy in order to be able to lighten it
afterwards. Christianity will consequently go down.
120
=The Testimony of Pleasure. =--The agreeable opinion is accepted as true.
This is the testimony of pleasure (or as the church says, the evidence
of strength) of which all religions are so proud, although they should
all be ashamed of it. If a belief did not make blessed it would not be
believed. How little it would be worth, then!
121
=Dangerous Play. =--Whoever gives religious feeling room, must then also
let it grow. He can do nothing else. Then his being gradually changes.
The religious element brings with it affinities and kinships. The whole
circle of his judgment and feeling is clouded and draped in religious
shadows. Feeling cannot stand still. One should be on one's guard.
122
=The Blind Pupil. =--As long as one knows very well the strength and the
weakness of one's dogma, one's art, one's religion, its strength is
still low. The pupil and apostle who has no eye for the weaknesses of a
dogma, a religion and so on, dazzled by the aspect of the master and by
his own reverence for him, has, on that very account, generally more
power than the master. Without blind pupils the influence of a man and
his work has never become great. To give victory to knowledge, often
amounts to no more than so allying it with stupidity that the brute
force of the latter forces triumph for the former.
123
=The Breaking off of Churches. =--There is not sufficient religion in the
world merely to put an end to the number of religions.
124
=Sinlessness of Men. =--If one have understood how "Sin came into the
world," namely through errors of the reason, through which men in their
intercourse with one another and even individual men looked upon
themselves as much blacker and wickeder than was really the case, one's
whole feeling is much lightened and man and the world appear together in
such a halo of harmlessness that a sentiment of well being is instilled
into one's whole nature. Man in the midst of nature is as a child left
to its own devices. This child indeed dreams a heavy, anxious dream. But
when it opens its eyes it finds itself always in paradise.
125
=Irreligiousness of Artists. =--Homer is so much at home among his gods
and is as a poet so good natured to them that he must have been
profoundly irreligious. That which was brought to him by the popular
faith--a mean, crude and partially repulsive superstition--he dealt with
as freely as the Sculptor with his clay, therefore with the same freedom
that AEschylus and Aristophanes evinced and with which in later times the
great artists of the renaissance, and also Shakespeare and Goethe, drew
their pictures.
126
=Art and Strength of False Interpretation. =--All the visions, fears,
exhaustions and delights of the saint are well known symptoms of
sickness, which in him, owing to deep rooted religious and psychological
delusions, are explained quite differently, that is not as symptoms of
sickness. --So, too, perhaps, the demon of Socrates was nothing but a
malady of the ear that he explained, in view of his predominant moral
theory, in a manner different from what would be thought rational
to-day. Nor is the case different with the frenzy and the frenzied
speeches of the prophets and of the priests of the oracles. It is always
the degree of wisdom, imagination, capacity and morality in the heart
and mind of the interpreters that got so much out of them. It is among
the greatest feats of the men who are called geniuses and saints that
they made interpreters for themselves who, fortunately for mankind, did
not understand them.
127
=Reverence for Madness. =--Because it was perceived that an excitement of
some kind often made the head clearer and occasioned fortunate
inspirations, it was concluded that the utmost excitement would occasion
the most fortunate inspirations. Hence the frenzied being was revered as
a sage and an oracle giver. A false conclusion lies at the bottom of all
this.
128
=Promises of Wisdom. =--Modern science has as its object as little pain
as possible, as long a life as possible--hence a sort of eternal
blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises
of religion.
129
=Forbidden Generosity. =--There is not enough of love and goodness in the
world to throw any of it away on conceited people.
130
=Survival of Religious Training in the Disposition. =--The Catholic
Church, and before it all ancient education, controlled the whole domain
of means through which man was put into certain unordinary moods and
withdrawn from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from calm,
rational reflection. A church vibrating with deep tones; gloomy,
regular, restraining exhortations from a priestly band, who
involuntarily communicate their own tension to their congregation and
lead them to listen almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in
course of preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as the
house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in all its
shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting power--who would care
to reduce men to the level of these things if the ideas upon which they
rest became extinct? But the results of all these things are
nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional,
prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in
man largely through cultivation. What still exists in his soul was
formerly, as he germinated, grew and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined.
131
=Religious After-Pains. =--Though one believe oneself absolutely weaned
away from religion, the process has yet not been so thorough as to make
impossible a feeling of joy at the presence of religious feelings and
dispositions without intelligible content, as, for example, in music;
and if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical hopes,
through the peace of soul therein attainable, and also speaks of "the
whole true gospel in the look of Raphael's Madonna," we greet such
declarations and innuendoes with a welcome smile. The philosopher has
here a matter easy of demonstration. He responds with that which he is
glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to accept. Hence it is
observable how the less reflective free spirits collide only with dogmas
but yield readily to the magic of religious feelings; it is a source of
pain to them to let the latter go simply on account of the
former. --Scientific philosophy must be very much on its guard lest on
account of this necessity--an evolved and hence, also, a transitory
necessity--delusions are smuggled in. Even logicians speak of
"presentiments" of truth in ethics and in art (for example of the
presentiment that the essence of things is unity) a thing which,
nevertheless, ought to be prohibited. Between carefully deduced truths
and such "foreboded" things there lies the abysmal distinction that the
former are products of the intellect and the latter of the necessity.
Hunger is no evidence that there is food at hand to appease it. Hunger
merely craves food. "Presentiment" does not denote that the existence of
a thing is known in any way whatever. It denotes merely that it is
deemed possible to the extent that it is desired or feared. The
"presentiment" is not one step forward in the domain of certainty. --It
is involuntarily believed that the religious tinted sections of a
philosophy are better attested than the others, but the case is at
bottom just the opposite: there is simply the inner wish that it may be
so, that the thing which beautifies may also be true. This wish leads us
to accept bad grounds as good.
132
=Of the Christian Need of Salvation. =--Careful consideration must render
it possible to propound some explanation of that process in the soul of
a Christian which is termed need of salvation, and to propound an
explanation, too, free from mythology: hence one purely psychological.
Heretofore psychological explanations of religious conditions and
processes have really been in disrepute, inasmuch as a theology calling
itself free gave vent to its unprofitable nature in this domain; for its
principal aim, so far as may be judged from the spirit of its creator,
Schleier-macher, was the preservation of the Christian religion and the
maintenance of the Christian theology. It appeared that in the
psychological analysis of religious "facts" a new anchorage and above
all a new calling were to be gained. Undisturbed by such predecessors,
we venture the following exposition of the phenomena alluded to. Man is
conscious of certain acts which are very firmly implanted in the general
course of conduct: indeed he discovers in himself a predisposition to
such acts that seems to him to be as unalterable as his very being. How
gladly he would essay some other kind of acts which in the general
estimate of conduct are rated the best and highest, how gladly he would
welcome the consciousness of well doing which ought to follow unselfish
motive! Unfortunately, however, it goes no further than this longing:
the discontent consequent upon being unable to satisfy it is added to
all other kinds of discontent which result from his life destiny in
particular or which may be due to so called bad acts; so that a deep
depression ensues accompanied by a desire for some physician to remove
it and all its causes. --This condition would not be found so bitter if
the individual but compared himself freely with other men: for then he
would have no reason to be discontented with himself in particular as he
is merely bearing his share of the general burden of human discontent
and incompleteness. But he compares himself with a being who alone must
be capable of the conduct that is called unegoistic and of an enduring
consciousness of unselfish motive, with God. It is because he gazes into
this clear mirror, that his own self seems so extraordinarily distracted
and so troubled. Thereupon the thought of that being, in so far as it
flits before his fancy as retributive justice, occasions him anxiety. In
every conceivable small and great experience he believes he sees the
anger of the being, his threats, the very implements and manacles of his
judge and prison. What succors him in this danger, which, in the
prospect of an eternal duration of punishment, transcends in hideousness
all the horrors that can be presented to the imagination?
133
Before we consider this condition in its further effects, we would admit
to ourselves that man is betrayed into this condition not through his
"fault" and "sin" but through a series of delusions of the reason; that
it was the fault of the mirror if his own self appeared to him in the
highest degree dark and hateful, and that that mirror was his own work,
the very imperfect work of human imagination and judgment. In the first
place a being capable of absolutely unegoistic conduct is as fabulous as
the phoenix. Such a being is not even thinkable for the very reason that
the whole notion of "unegoistic conduct," when closely examined,
vanishes into air. Never yet has a man done anything solely for others
and entirely without reference to a personal motive; indeed how could he
possibly do anything that had no reference to himself, that is without
inward compulsion (which must always have its basis in a personal need)?
How could the ego act without ego? --A god, who, on the other hand, is
all love, as he is usually represented, would not be capable of a
solitary unegoistic act: whence one is reminded of a reflection of
Lichtenberg's which is, in truth, taken from a lower sphere: "We cannot
possibly feel for others, as the expression goes; we feel only for
ourselves. The assertion sounds hard, but it is not, if rightly
understood. A man loves neither his father nor his mother nor his wife
nor his child, but simply the feelings which they inspire. " Or, as La
Rochefoucauld says: "If you think you love your mistress for the mere
love of her, you are very much mistaken. " Why acts of love are more
highly prized than others, namely not on account of their nature, but on
account of their utility, has already been explained in the section on
the origin of moral feelings. But if a man should wish to be all love
like the god aforesaid, and want to do all things for others and nothing
for himself, the procedure would be fundamentally impossible because he
_must_ do a great deal for himself before there would be any possibility
of doing anything for the love of others. It is also essential that
others be sufficiently egoistic to accept always and at all times this
self sacrifice and living for others, so that the men of love and self
sacrifice have an interest in the survival of unloving and selfish
egoists, while the highest morality, in order to maintain itself must
formally enforce the existence of immorality (wherein it would be really
destroying itself. )--Further: the idea of a god perturbs and discourages
as long as it is accepted but as to how it originated can no longer, in
the present state of comparative ethnological science, be a matter of
doubt, and with the insight into the origin of this belief all faith
collapses. What happens to the Christian who compares his nature with
that of God is exactly what happened to Don Quixote, who depreciated his
own prowess because his head was filled with the wondrous deeds of the
heroes of chivalrous romance. The standard of measurement which both
employ belongs to the domain of fable. --But if the idea of God
collapses, so too, does the feeling of "sin" as a violation of divine
rescript, as a stain upon a god-like creation. There still apparently
remains that discouragement which is closely allied with fear of the
punishment of worldly justice or of the contempt of one's fellow men.
The keenest thorn in the sentiment of sin is dulled when it is perceived
that one's acts have contravened human tradition, human rules and human
laws without having thereby endangered the "eternal salvation of the
soul" and its relations with deity. If finally men attain to the
conviction of the absolute necessity of all acts and of their utter
irresponsibility and then absorb it into their flesh and blood, every
relic of conscience pangs will disappear.
134
If now, as stated, the Christian, through certain delusive feelings, is
betrayed into self contempt, that is by a false and unscientific view of
his acts and feelings, he must, nevertheless, perceive with the utmost
amazement that this state of self contempt, of conscience pangs, of
despair in particular, does not last, that there are hours during which
all these things are wafted away from the soul and he feels himself once
more free and courageous. The truth is that joy in his own being, the
fulness of his own powers in connection with the inevitable decline of
his profound excitation with the lapse of time, bore off the palm of
victory. The man loves himself once more, he feels it--but this very new
love, this new self esteem seems to him incredible. He can see in it
only the wholly unmerited stream of the light of grace shed down upon
him. If he formerly saw in every event merely warnings, threats,
punishments and every kind of indication of divine anger, he now reads
into his experiences the grace of god. The latter circumstance seems to
him full of love, the former as a helpful pointing of the way, and his
entirely joyful frame of mind now seems to him to be an absolute proof
of the goodness of God. As formerly in his states of discouragement he
interpreted his conduct falsely so now he does the same with his
experiences. His state of consolation is now regarded as the effect
produced by some external power. The love with which, at bottom, he
loves himself, seems to be the divine love. That which he calls grace
and the preliminary of salvation is in reality self-grace,
self-salvation.
135
Therefore a certain false psychology, a certain kind of imaginativeness
in the interpretation of motives and experiences is the essential
preliminary to being a Christian and to experiencing the need of
salvation. Upon gaining an insight into this wandering of the reason and
the imagination, one ceases to be a Christian.
136
=Of Christian Asceticism and Sanctity. =--Much as some thinkers have
exerted themselves to impart an air of the miraculous to those singular
phenomena known as asceticism and sanctity, to question which or to
account for which upon a rational basis would be wickedness and
sacrilege, the temptation to this wickedness is none the less great. A
powerful impulse of nature has in every age led to protest against such
phenomena. At any rate science, inasmuch as it is the imitation of
nature, permits the casting of doubts upon the inexplicable character
and the supernal degree of such phenomena. It is true that heretofore
science has not succeeded in its attempts at explanation. The phenomena
remain unexplained still, to the great satisfaction of those who revere
moral miracles. For, speaking generally, the unexplained must rank as
the inexplicable, the inexplicable as the non-natural, supernatural,
miraculous--so runs the demand in the souls of all the religious and all
the metaphysicians (even the artists if they happen to be thinkers),
whereas the scientific man sees in this demand the "evil
principle. "--The universal, first, apparent truth that is encountered in
the contemplation of sanctity and asceticism is that their nature is
complicated; for nearly always, within the physical world as well as in
the moral, the apparently miraculous may be traced successfully to the
complex, the obscure, the multi-conditioned. Let us venture then to
isolate a few impulses in the soul of the saint and the ascetic, to
consider them separately and then view them as a synthetic development.
137
There is an obstinacy against oneself, certain sublimated forms of which
are included in asceticism. Certain kinds of men are under such a strong
necessity of exercising their power and dominating impulses that, if
other objects are lacking or if they have not succeeded with other
objects they will actually tyrannize over some portions of their own
nature or over sections and stages of their own personality. Thus do
many thinkers bring themselves to views which are far from likely to
increase or improve their fame. Many deliberately bring down the
contempt of others upon themselves although they could easily have
retained consideration by silence. Others contradict earlier opinions
and do not shrink from the ordeal of being deemed inconsistent. On the
contrary they strive for this and act like eager riders who enjoy
horseback exercise most when the horse is skittish. Thus will men in
dangerous paths ascend to the highest steeps in order to laugh to scorn
their own fear and their own trembling limbs. Thus will the philosopher
embrace the dogmas of asceticism, humility, sanctity, in the light of
which his own image appears in its most hideous aspect. This crushing of
self, this mockery of one's own nature, this spernere se sperni out of
which religions have made so much is in reality but a very high
development of vanity. The whole ethic of the sermon on the mount
belongs in this category: man has a true delight in mastering himself
through exaggerated pretensions or excessive expedients and later
deifying this tyrannically exacting something within him. In every
scheme of ascetic ethics, man prays to one part of himself as if it were
god and hence it is necessary for him to treat the rest of himself as
devil.
138
=Man is Not at All Hours Equally Moral=; this is established. If one's
morality be judged according to one's capacity for great, self
sacrificing resolutions and abnegations (which when continual, and made
a habit are known as sanctity) one is, in affection, or disposition, the
most moral: while higher excitement supplies wholly new impulses which,
were one calm and cool as ordinarily, one would not deem oneself even
capable of. How comes this? Apparently from the propinquity of all great
and lofty emotional states. If a man is brought to an extraordinary
pitch of feeling he can resolve upon a fearful revenge or upon a fearful
renunciation of his thirst for vengeance indifferently. He craves, under
the influences of powerful emotion, the great, the powerful, the
immense, and if he chances to perceive that the sacrifice of himself
will afford him as much satisfaction as the sacrifice of another, or
will afford him more, he will choose self sacrifice. What concerns him
particularly is simply the unloading of his emotion. Hence he readily,
to relieve his tension, grasps the darts of the enemy and buries them in
his own breast. That in self abnegation and not in revenge the element
of greatness consisted must have been brought home to mankind only after
long habituation. A god who sacrifices himself would be the most
powerful and most effective symbol of this sort of greatness. As the
conquest of the most hardly conquered enemy, the sudden mastering of a
passion--thus does such abnegation _appear_: hence it passes for the
summit of morality. In reality all that is involved is the exchange of
one idea for another whilst the temperament remained at a like altitude,
a like tidal state. Men when coming out of the spell, or resting from
such passionate excitation, no longer understand the morality of such
instants, but the admiration of all who participated in the occasion
sustains them. Pride is their support if the passion and the
comprehension of their act weaken. Therefore, at bottom even such acts
of self-abnegation are not moral inasmuch as they are not done with a
strict regard for others. Rather do others afford the high strung
temperament an opportunity to lighten itself through such abnegation.
139
=Even the Ascetic Seeks to Make Life Easier=, and generally by means of
absolute subjection to another will or to an all inclusive rule and
ritual, pretty much as the Brahmin leaves absolutely nothing to his own
volition but is guided in every moment of his life by some holy
injunction or other. This subjection is a potent means of acquiring
dominion over oneself. One is occupied, hence time does not bang heavy
and there is no incitement of the personal will and of the individual
passion. The deed once done there is no feeling of responsibility nor
the sting of regret. One has given up one's own will once for all and
this is easier than to give it up occasionally, as it is also easier
wholly to renounce a desire than to yield to it in measured degree. When
we consider the present relation of man to the state we perceive
unconditional obedience is easier than conditional. The holy person also
makes his lot easier through the complete surrender of his life
personality and it is all delusion to admire such a phenomenon as the
loftiest heroism of morality. It is always more difficult to assert
one's personality without shrinking and without hesitation than to give
it up altogether in the manner indicated, and it requires moreover more
intellect and thought.
140
After having discovered in many of the less comprehensible actions mere
manifestations of pleasure in emotion for its own sake, I fancy I can
detect in the self contempt which characterises holy persons, and also
in their acts of self torture (through hunger and scourgings,
distortions and chaining of the limbs, acts of madness) simply a means
whereby such natures may resist the general exhaustion of their will to
live (their nerves). They employ the most painful expedients to escape
if only for a time from the heaviness and weariness in which they are
steeped by their great mental indolence and their subjection to a will
other than their own.
141
=The Most Usual Means= by which the ascetic and the sanctified
individual seeks to make life more endurable comprises certain combats
of an inner nature involving alternations of victory and prostration.
For this purpose an enemy is necessary and he is found in the so called
"inner enemy. " That is, the holy individual makes use of his tendency to
vanity, domineering and pride, and of his mental longings in order to
contemplate his life as a sort of continuous battle and himself as a
battlefield, in which good and evil spirits wage war with varying
fortune. It is an established fact that the imagination is restrained
through the regularity and adequacy of sexual intercourse while on the
other hand abstention from or great irregularity in sexual intercourse
will cause the imagination to run riot.
The imaginations of many of the
Christian saints were obscene to a degree; and because of the theory
that sexual desires were in reality demons that raged within them, the
saints did not feel wholly responsible for them. It is to this
conviction that we are indebted for the highly instructive sincerity of
their evidence against themselves. It was to their interest that this
contest should always be kept up in some fashion because by means of
this contest, as already stated, their empty lives gained distraction.
In order that the contest might seem sufficiently great to inspire
sympathy and admiration in the unsanctified, it was essential that
sexual capacity be ever more and more damned and denounced. Indeed the
danger of eternal damnation was so closely allied to this capacity that
for whole generations Christians showed their children with actual
conscience pangs. What evil may not have been done to humanity through
this! And yet here the truth is just upside down: an exceedingly
unseemly attitude for the truth. Christianity, it is true, had said that
every man is conceived and born in sin, and in the intolerable and
excessive Christianity of Calderon this thought is again perverted and
entangled into the most distorted paradox extant in the well known lines
The greatest sin of man
Is the sin of being born.
In all pessimistic religions the act of procreation is looked upon as
evil in itself. This is far from being the general human opinion. It is
not even the opinion of all pessimists. Empedocles, for example, knows
nothing of anything shameful, devilish and sinful in it. He sees rather
in the great field of bliss of unholiness simply a healthful and hopeful
phenomenon, Aphrodite. She is to him an evidence that strife does not
always rage but that some time a gentle demon is to wield the sceptre.
The Christian pessimists of practice, had, as stated, a direct interest
in the prevalence of an opposite belief. They needed in the loneliness
and the spiritual wilderness of their lives an ever living enemy, and a
universally known enemy through whose conquest they might appear to the
unsanctified as utterly incomprehensible and half unnatural beings. When
this enemy at last, as a result of their mode of life and their
shattered health, took flight forever, they were able immediately to
people their inner selves with new demons. The rise and fall of the
balance of cheerfulness and despair maintained their addled brains in a
totally new fluctuation of longing and peace of soul. And in that period
psychology served not only to cast suspicion on everything human but to
wound and scourge it, to crucify it. Man wanted to find himself as base
and evil as possible. Man sought to become anxious about the state of
his soul, he wished to be doubtful of his own capacity. Everything
natural with which man connects the idea of badness and sinfulness (as,
for instance, is still customary in regard to the erotic) injures and
degrades the imagination, occasions a shamed aspect, leads man to war
upon himself and makes him uncertain, distrustful of himself. Even his
dreams acquire a tincture of the unclean conscience. And yet this
suffering because of the natural element in certain things is wholly
superfluous. It is simply the result of opinions regarding the things.
It is easy to understand why men become worse than they are if they are
brought to look upon the unavoidably natural as bad and later to feel it
as of evil origin. It is the master stroke of religions and metaphysics
that wish to make man out bad and sinful by nature, to render nature
suspicious in his eyes and to so make himself evil, for he learns to
feel himself evil when he cannot divest himself of nature. He gradually
comes to look upon himself, after a long life lived naturally, so
oppressed by a weight of sin that supernatural powers become necessary
to relieve him of the burden; and with this notion comes the so called
need of salvation, which is the result not of a real but of an imaginary
sinfulness. Go through the separate moral expositions in the vouchers of
christianity and it will always be found that the demands are excessive
in order that it may be impossible for man to satisfy them. The object
is not that he may become moral but that he may feel as sinful as
possible. If this feeling had not been rendered agreeable to man--why
should he have improvised such an ideal and clung to it so long? As in
the ancient world an incalculable strength of intellect and capacity for
feeling was squandered in order to increase the joy of living through
feastful systems of worship, so in the era of christianity an equally
incalculable quantity of intellectual capacity has been sacrificed in
another endeavor: that man should in every way feel himself sinful and
thereby be moved, inspired, inspirited. To move, to inspire, to inspirit
at any cost--is not this the freedom cry of an exhausted, over-ripe,
over cultivated age? The circle of all the natural sensations had been
gone through a hundred times: the soul had grown weary. Then the saints
and the ascetics found a new order of ecstacies. They set themselves
before the eyes of all not alone as models for imitation to many, but as
fearful and yet delightful spectacles on the boundary line between this
world and the next world, where in that period everyone thought he saw
at one time rays of heavenly light, at another fearful, threatening
tongues of flame. The eye of the saint, directed upon the fearful
significance of the shortness of earthly life, upon the imminence of the
last judgment, upon eternal life hereafter; this glowering eye in an
emaciated body caused men, in the old time world, to tremble to the
depths of their being. To look, to look away and shudder, to feel anew
the fascination of the spectacle, to yield to it, sate oneself upon it
until the soul trembled with ardor and fever--that was the last pleasure
left to classical antiquity when its sensibilities had been blunted by
the arena and the gladiatorial show.
142
=To Sum Up All That Has Been Said=: that condition of soul at which the
saint or expectant saint is rejoiced is a combination of elements which
we are all familiar with, except that under other influences than those
of mere religious ideation they customarily arouse the censure of men in
the same way that when combined with religion itself and regarded as the
supreme attainment of sanctity, they are object of admiration and even
of prayer--at least in more simple times. Very soon the saint turns upon
himself that severity that is so closely allied to the instinct of
domination at any price and which inspire even in the most solitary
individual the sense of power. Soon his swollen sensitiveness of feeling
breaks forth from the longing to restrain his passions within it and is
transformed into a longing to master them as if they were wild steeds,
the master impulse being ever that of a proud spirit; next he craves a
complete cessation of all perturbing, fascinating feelings, a waking
sleep, an enduring repose in the lap of a dull, animal, plant-like
indolence. Next he seeks the battle and extinguishes it within himself
because weariness and boredom confront him. He binds his
self-deification with self-contempt. He delights in the wild tumult of
his desires and the sharp pain of sin, in the very idea of being lost.
He is able to play his very passions, for instance the desire to
domineer, a trick so that he goes to the other extreme of abject
humiliation and subjection, so that his overwrought soul is without any
restraint through this antithesis. And, finally, when indulgence in
visions, in talks with the dead or with divine beings overcomes him,
this is really but a form of gratification that he craves, perhaps a
form of gratification in which all other gratifications are blended.
Novalis, one of the authorities in matters of sanctity, because of his
experience and instinct, betrays the whole secret with the utmost
simplicity when he says: "It is remarkable that the close connection of
gratification, religion and cruelty has not long ago made men aware of
their inner relationship and common tendency. "
143
=Not What the Saint is but what he was in= the eyes of the
non-sanctified gives him his historical importance. Because there
existed a delusion respecting the saint, his soul states being falsely
viewed and his personality being sundered as much as possible from
humanity as a something incomparable and supernatural, because of these
things he attained the extraordinary with which he swayed the
imaginations of whole nations and whole ages. Even he knew himself not
for even he regarded his dispositions, passions and actions in
accordance with a system of interpretation as artificial and exaggerated
as the pneumatic interpretation of the bible. The distorted and diseased
in his own nature with its blending of spiritual poverty, defective
knowledge, ruined health, overwrought nerves, remained as hidden from
his view as from the view of his beholders. He was neither a
particularly good man nor a particularly bad man but he stood for
something that was far above the human standard in wisdom and goodness.
Faith in him sustained faith in the divine and miraculous, in a
religious significance of all existence, in an impending day of
judgment. In the last rays of the setting sun of the ancient world,
which fell upon the christian peoples, the shadowy form of the saint
attained enormous proportions--to such enormous proportions, indeed,
that down even to our own age, which no longer believes in god, there
are thinkers who believe in the saints.
144
It stands to reason that this sketch of the saint, made upon the model
of the whole species, can be confronted with many opposing sketches that
would create a more agreeable impression. There are certain exceptions
among the species who distinguish themselves either by especial
gentleness or especial humanity, and perhaps by the strength of their
own personality. Others are in the highest degree fascinating because
certain of their delusions shed a particular glow over their whole
being, as is the case with the founder of christianity who took himself
for the only begotten son of God and hence felt himself sinless; so that
through his imagination--that should not be too harshly judged since the
whole of antiquity swarmed with sons of god--he attained the same goal,
the sense of complete sinlessness, complete irresponsibility, that can
now be attained by every individual through science. --In the same manner
I have viewed the saints of India who occupy an intermediate station
between the christian saints and the Greek philosophers and hence are
not to be regarded as a pure type. Knowledge and science--as far as they
existed--and superiority to the rest of mankind by logical discipline
and training of the intellectual powers were insisted upon by the
Buddhists as essential to sanctity, just as they were denounced by the
christian world as the indications of sinfulness.
