THE
RELIGIOUS
MOOD.
Nietzsche - v12 - Beyond Good and Evil
Finally, who would venture on a German translation
of Petronius, who, more than any great musician
hitherto, was a master of presto in invention, ideas,
and words? What matter in the end about the
swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the "ancient
world,” when like him, one has the feet of a wind,
the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a
wind, which makes everything healthy, by making
everything run! And with regard to Aristophanes
—that transfiguring, complementary genius, for
whose sake one pardons all Hellenism for having
existed, provided one has understood in its full
profundity all that there requires pardon and trans-
figuration ; there is nothing that has caused me to
meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like
nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that
under the pillow of his death-bed there was found
no “ Bible,” nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean,
or Platonic—but a book of Aristophanes. How
could even a Plato have endured life-a Greek life
which he repudiated-without an Aristophanes !
"
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THE FREE SPIRIT.
43
29.
It is the business of the very few to be inde-
pendent; it is a privilege of the strong. And who-
ever attempts it, even with the best right, but
without being obliged to do so, proves that he is
probably not only strong, but also daring beyond
measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies
a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself
already brings with it; not the least of which is
that no one can see how and where he loses his
way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by
some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a
one comes to grief, it is so far from the compre-
hension of men that they neither feel it, nor
sympathise with it. And he cannot any longer go
back! He cannot even go back again to the
sympathy of men!
30.
Our deepest insights must-and should-appear
as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes,
when they come unauthorisedly to the ears of those
who are not disposed and predestined for them.
The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly
distinguished by philosophers—among the Indians,
as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans,
in short, wherever people believed in gradations of
rank and not in equality and equal rights--are not
so much in contradistinction to one another in
respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and
viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from
the outside, and not from the inside ; the more
## p. 44 (#66) ##############################################
44
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
essential distinction is that the class in question
views things from below upwards — while the
esoteric class views things from above downwards.
There are heights of the soul from which tragedy
itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and
if all the woe in the world were taken together, who
would dare to decide whether the sight of it would
necessarily seduce and constrain to sympathy, and
thus to a doubling of the woe? . . . That which
serves the higher class of men for nourishment or
refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely
different and lower order of human beings. The
virtues of the common man would perhaps mean
vice and weaknesses in a philosopher; it might be
possible for a highly developed man, supposing him
to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities
thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have
to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into
which he had sunk. There are books which have
an inverse value for the soul and the health accord-
ing as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the
higher and more powerful, make use of them. In
the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, un-
settling books, in the latter case they are herald-
calls which summon the bravest to their bravery.
Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling
books, the odour of paltry people clings to them.
Where the populace eat and drink, and even
where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink.
One should not go into churches if one wishes
to breathe pure air.
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THE FREE SPIRIT.
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31.
In our youthful years we still venerate and
despise without the art of nuance, which is the best
gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard penance
for having fallen upon men and things with Yea and
Nay. Everything is so arranged that the worst of
all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly
befooled and abused, until a man learns to introduce
a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try
conclusions with the artificial, as do the real artists
of life. The angry and reverent spirit peculiar to
youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has
suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent
its passion upon them : youth in itself even, is some-
thing falsifying and deceptive. Later on, when the
young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally
turns suspiciously against itself-still ardent and
savage even in its suspicion and remorse of con-
science: how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it
tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long self-
blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blind-
ness! In this transition one punishes oneself by
!
distrust of one's sentiments; one tortures one's
enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good
conscience to be a danger, as if it were the self-
concealment and lassitude of a more refined up-
rightness; and above all, one espouses upon prin-
ciple the cause against "youth. ”-A decade later,
and one comprehends that all this also was still--
youth !
## p. 46 (#68) ##############################################
46
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
32.
Throughout the longest period of human history
-one calls it the prehistoric period—the value o
non-value of an action was inferred from its con-
sequences; the action in itself was not taken into
consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty
much as in China at present, where the distinction
or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents, the
retro-operating power of success or failure was what
induced men to think well or ill of an action. Let
us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind;
the imperative, “know thyself ! ” was then still un-
known. In the last ten thousand years, on the
other hand, on certain large portions of the earth,
one has gradually got so far, that one no longer lets
the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide
with regard to its worth : a great achievement as a
whole, an important refinement of vision and of
criterion, the unconscious effect of the supremacy
of aristocratic values and of the belief in "origin,"
the mark of a period which may be designated in
the narrower sense as the moral one: the first
attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. In-
stead of the consequences, the origin-what an
inversion of perspective! And assuredly an in-
version effected only after long struggle and
wavering! To be sure, an ominous new superstition,
a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained
supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an action
was interpreted in the most definite sense possible,
as origin out of an intention; people were agreed
in the belief that the value of an action lay in the
))
## p. 47 (#69) ##############################################
THE FREE SPIRIT.
47
value of its intention. The intention as the sole
origin and antecedent history of an action: under
the influence of this prejudice moral praise and
blame have been bestowed, and men have judged
and even philosophised almost up to the present
day. -Is it not possible, however, that the necessity
may now have arisen of again making up our minds
with regard to the reversing and fundamental shift-
ing of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and
acuteness in man-is it not possible that we may
be standing on the threshold of a period which to
begin with, would be distinguished negatively as
ultra-moral: nowadays when, at least amongst us
immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive
value of an action lies precisely in that which is not
intentional, and that all its intentionalness, all that
is seen, sensible, or “sensed” in it, belongs to its
surface or skin—which, like every skin, betrays
something, but conceals still more? In short, we
believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom,
which first requires an explanation—a sign, more-
over, which has too many interpretations, and
consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone:
that morality, in the sense in which it has been
understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been
a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminari-
ness, probably something of the same rank as astro-
logy and alchemy, but in any case something which
must be surmounted. The surmounting of morality,
in a certain sense even the self-surmounting of
morality—let that be the name for the long secret
labour which has been reserved for the most re-
fined, the most upright, and also the most wicked
## p. 48 (#70) ##############################################
48
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
consciences of to-day, as the living touchstones of
the soul.
33.
It cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender,
of sacrifice for one's neighbour, and all self-renun-
ciation - morality, must be mercilessly called to
account, and brought to judgment; just as the
æsthetics of “disinterested contemplation," under
which the emasculation of art nowadays seeks in-
sidiously enough to create itself a good conscience.
There is far too much witchery and sugar in the
sentiments "for others" and "not for myself,” for
one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and
for one asking promptly: "Are they not perhaps-
deceptions? ”—That they please_him who has them,
and him who enjoys their fruit, and also the mere
spectator—that is still no argument in their favour,
but just calls for caution. Let us therefore be
cautious!
34.
At whatever standpoint of philosophy one may
place oneself nowadays, seen from every position,
the erroneousness of the world in which we think
we live is the surest and most certain thing our
eyes can light upon: we find proof after proof
thereof, which would fain allure us into surmises
concerning a deceptive principle in the "nature of
things. " He, however, who makes thinking itself,
and consequently "the spirit,” responsible for the
falseness of the world-an honourable exit, which
every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei avails
himself of-he who regards this world, including
## p. 49 (#71) ##############################################
THE FREE SPIRIT.
49
"
space, time, forra, and movement, as falsely deduced,
would have at least good reason in the end to
become distrustful also of all thinking ; has it not
hitherto been playing upon us the worst of scurvy
tricks ? and what guarantee would it give that it
would not continue to do what it has always been
doing? In all seriousness, the innocence of thinkers
has something touching and respect-inspiring in it,
which even nowadays permits them to wait upon
consciousness with the request that it will give them
honest answers : for example, whether it be “real”
or not, and why it keeps the outer world so reso-
lutely at a distance, and other questions of the
same description. The belief in "immediate cer-
tainties” is a moral naïveté which does honour to
us philosophers; but we have now to cease being
“ “ merely moral” men! Apart from morality, such
belief is a folly which does little honour to us! If
in middle-class life an ever-ready distrust is re-
garded as the sign of a "bad character," and
consequently as an imprudence, here amongst us,
beyond the middle-class world and its Yeas and
Nays, what should prevent us being imprudent and
saying: the philosopher has at length a right to
“bad character," as the being who has hitherto
been most befooled on earth he is now under
obligation to distrustfulness, to the wickedest squint-
ing out of every
abyss of suspicion. -Forgive me
the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of ex-
pression; for I myself have long ago learned to
think and estimate differently with regard to de-
ceiving and being deceived, and I keep at least
couple of pokes in the ribs ready for the blind rage
D
## p. 50 (#72) ##############################################
50
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
with which philosophers struggle against being
deceived. Why not? It is nothing more than a
moral prejudice that truth is worth more than
semblance; it is, in fact, the worst proved supposi-
2
tion in the world. So much must be conceded :
there could have been no life at all except upon the
basis of perspective estimates and semblances; and
if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and stupidity of
many philosophers, one wished to do away alto-
gether with the “seeming world”-well, granted that
you could do that,—at least nothing of your "truth ”
“
would thereby remain! Indeed, what is it that
forces us in general to the supposition that there is
an essential opposition of "true" and "false"? Is
it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness,
and as it were lighter and darker shades and
tones of semblance — different valeurs, as the
painters say? Why might not the world which
concerns us—be a fiction? And to any one who sug-
gested : “But to a fiction belongs an originator ? "
-might it not be bluntly replied: Why? May not
this " belong" also belong to the fiction? Is it not
at length permitted to be a little ironical towards
the subject, just as towards the predicate and
object? Might not the philosopher elevate himself
above faith in grammar? All respect to governesses,
but is it not time that philosophy should renounce
governess-faith?
35.
O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There
is something ticklish in "the truth, and in the
search for the truth; and if man goes about it too
## p. 51 (#73) ##############################################
THE FREE SPIRIT.
51
humanely-"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le
bien"-1 wager he finds nothing !
3
36.
Supposing that nothing else is "given” as real
but our world of desires and passions, that we can-
not sink or rise to any other “reality” but just that
of our impulses-for thinking is only a relation of
these impulses to one another :-are we not per-
mitted to make the attempt and to ask the question
whether this which is "given” does not suffice, by
means of our counterparts, for the understanding
even of the so-called mechanical (or “material") .
world? I do not mean as an illusion, a “sem-
blance," a "representation " (in the Berkeleyan and
Schopenhauerian sense), but as possessing the same
degree of reality as our emotions themselves—as a
more primitive form of the world of emotions, in
which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity,
which afterwards branches off and develops itself
in organic processes (naturally also, refines and de-
bilitates)—as a kind of instinctive life in which all
organic functions, including self-regulation, assimi-
lation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter,
are still synthetically united with one another—as
a primary form of life ? - In the end, it is not only
permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded
by the conscience of logical method. Not to assume
several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to
get along with a single one has not been pushed to
its furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed
to say so): that is a morality of method which one
may not repudiate nowadays—it follows “from its
-
## p. 52 (#74) ##############################################
52
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
1)
:
definition," as mathematicians say. The question
.
is ultimately whether we really recognise the will
as operating, whether we believe in the causality of
the will; if we do so—and fundamentally our belief
in this is just our belief in causality itself—we must
make the attempt to posit hypothetically the caus-
ality of the will as the only causality. “Will” can
naturally only operate on "will”-and not on
"matter" (not on "nerves," for instance): in short,
the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does
not operate on will wherever “effects
are recog-
nised-and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch
as a power operates therein, is not just the power
of will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we
succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as
the development and ramification of one funda-
mental form of will_namely, the Will to Power, as
my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions
could be traced back to this Will to Power, and
that the solution of the problem of generation and
nutrition-it is one problem-could also be found
therein: one would thus have acquired the right to
define all active force unequivocally as Will to
Power. The world seen from within, the world
defined and designated according to its "intelligible
character”-it would simply be “Will to Power,"
and nothing else.
"
37.
“What? Does not that mean in popular lan-
guage: God is disproved, but not the devil ? "_On
the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And
who the devil also compels you to speak popularly!
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THE FREE SPIRIT.
53
38.
As happened finally in all the enlightenment of
modern times with the French Revolution (that
terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged close
at hand, into which, however, the noble and vision-
ary spectators of all Europe have interpreted
from a distance their own indignation and enthu-
siasm so long and passionately, until the text has
disappeared under the interpretation), so a noble
posterity might once more misunderstand the whole
of the past, and perhaps only thereby make its
aspect endurable. - Or rather, has not this already
happened? Have not we ourselves been-that
"noble posterity”? And, in so far as we now
comprehend this, is it not-thereby already past?
39.
Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine
as true merely because it makes people happy
or
virtuous — excepting perhaps the amiable
“Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good,
true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley,
coarse, and good-natured desirabilities swim about
promiscuously in their pond. Happiness and
virtue are no arguments. It is willingly forgotten,
however, even on the part of thoughtful minds,
that to make unhappy and to make bad are just
as little counter-arguments. A thing could be true,
although it were in the highest degree injurious
and dangerous ; indeed, the fundamental constitu-
tion of existence might be such that one succumbed
by a full knowledge of it-so that the strength of
## p. 54 (#76) ##############################################
54
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
a mind might be measured by the amount of
“ truth” it could endure—or to speak more plainly,
by the extent to which it required truth attenuated,
veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. But there
is no doubt that for the discovery of certain portions
of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more
favourably situated and have a greater likelihood
of success; not to speak of the wicked who are
happy-a species about whom moralists are silent.
Perhaps severity and craft are more favourable
conditions for the development of strong, inde-
pendent spirits and philosophers than the gentle,
refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of taking
things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized
in a learned man. Presupposing always, to begin
with, that the term "philosopher" be not confined
to the philosopher who writes books, or even
introduces his philosophy into books Stendhal
furnishes a last feature of the portrait of the free-
spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German
taste I will not omit to underline—for it is opposed
to German taste. “Pour être bon philosophe," says
this last great psychologist, “il faut être sec, clair,
sans illusion. Un banquier, qui a fait fortune, a une
partie du caractère requis pour faire des découvertes
en philosophie, c'est-à-dire pour voir clair dans ce
qui est. "
"
9
40.
Everything that is profound loves the mask; the
profoundest things have a hatred even of figure
and likeness. Should not the contrary only be the
right disguise for the shame of a God to go about
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THE FREE SPIRIT.
55
a
in? A question worth asking ! —it would be strange
if some mystic has not already ventured on the
same kind of thing. There are proceedings of such
a delicate nature that it is well to overwhelm them
with coarseness and make them unrecognisable ;
there are actions of love and of an extravagant
magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser than
to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly :
one thereby obscures his recollection. Many a
one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory,
in order at least to have vengeance on this sole
party in the secret: shame is inventive. They are
not the worst things of which one is most ashamed:
there is not only deceit behind a mask—there is so
much goodness in craft. I could imagine that a
man with something costly and fragile to conceal,
would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like
an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask: the refine-
ment of his shame requiring it to be so.
A man
who has depths in his shame meets his destiny
and his delicate decisions upon paths which few
ever reach, and with regard to the existence of
which his nearest and most intimate friends may
be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from
their eyes, and equally so his regained security.
Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs
speech for silence and concealment, and is in-
exhaustible in evasion of communication, desires
and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his
place in the hearts and heads of his friends; and
supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some
day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless
a mask of him there--and that it is well to be so.
## p. 56 (#78) ##############################################
56
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more,
around every profound spirit there continually
grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that
is to say, superficial interpretation of every word he
utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he
manifests.
a recess.
41.
One must subject oneself to one's own tests that
one is destined for independence and command, and
do so at the right time. One must not avoid one's
tests, although they constitute perhaps the most
dangerous game one can play, and are in the end
tests made only before ourselves and before no
other judge. Not to cleave to any person, be it
even the dearest-every person is a prison and also
Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it even
the most suffering and necessitous—it is even less
difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious
fatherland. Not to cleave to a sympathy, be it
even for higher men, into whose peculiar torture
and helplessness chance has given us an insight.
Not to cleave to a science, though it tempt one
with the most valuable discoveries, apparently
specially reserved for us. Not to cleave to one's
.
own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and
remoteness of the bird, which always flies further
aloft in order always to see more under it—the
danger of the fier. Not to cleave to our
virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any of
our specialities, to our "hospitality” for instance,
which is the danger of dangers for highly developed
and wealthy souls, who deal prodigally, almost
own
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THE FREE SPIRIT.
57
indifferently with themselves, and push the virtue
of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. One y
must know how to conserve oneself-the best test of
independence.
42.
A new order of philosophers is appearing; I
shall venture to baptize them by a name not
without danger. As far as I understand them, as
far as they allow themselves to be understood for
it is their nature to wish to remain something of a
puzzle—these philosophers of the future might
rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be desig-
nated as "tempters. This name itself is after all
only an attempt, or, if it be preferred, a temptation.
43.
Will they be new friends of “ truth,” these coming
philosophers ? Very probably, for all philosophers
hitherto have loved their truths. But assuredly
they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary
to their pride, and also contrary to their taste, that
their truth should still be truth for every one-
that which has hitherto been the secret wish and
ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts. : “My
opinion is my opinion: another person has not
easily a right to it”—such a philosopher of the
future will say, perhaps. One must renounce the
bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
"Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour
takes it into his mouth. And how could there be
a "common good”! The expression contradicts
itself; that which can be common is always of
a
## p. 58 (#80) ##############################################
58
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
small value. In the end things must be as they
are and have always been—the great things remain
for the great, the abysses for the profound, the
delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum
up shortly, everything rare for the rare.
44.
Need I say expressly after all this that they will
be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the
future-as certainly also they will not be merely
free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and
fundamentally different, which does not wish to be
misunderstood and mistaken? But while I say
this, I feel under obligation almost as much to them
as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds
and forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves alto-
gether a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding,
which, like a fog, has too long made the concep-
tion of “free spirit" obscure. In every country of
Europe, and the same in America, there is at
present something which makes an abuse of this
name: a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class
of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what
our intentions and instincts prompt-not to mention
that in respect to the new philosophers who are
appearing, they must still more be closed windows
and bolted doors. Briefly and regrettably, they
belong to the levellers, these wrongly named "free
spirits" - as glib - tongued and scribe - fingered
slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern
ideas": all of them men without solitude, without
personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom
neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to
C
:
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THE FREE SPIRIT.
59
be denied ; only, they are not free, and are ludi-
crously superficial, especially in their innate parti-
ality for seeing the cause of almost
all human
misery and failure in the old forms in which society
has hitherto existed -a notion which happily in-
verts the truth entirely! What they would fain
attain with all their strength, is the universal,
green-meadow happiness of the herd, together
with
security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for
every one; their two most frequently chanted songs
and doctrines are called “Equality of Rights" and
“Sympathy-with-all Sufferers"-and suffering itself
is looked upon by them as something which must
be done away with. We opposite ones, however,
who have opened our eye and conscience to the
question how and where the plant "man” has
hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this
has always taken place under the opposite condi-
tions, that for this end the dangerousness of his
situation had to be increased enormously, his inven-
tive faculty and dissembling power (his “spirit")
had to develop into subtlety and daring under long
oppression and compulsion, and his Will to Life
had to be increased to the unconditioned Will to
Power: We believe that severity, violence, slavery,
danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy,
stoic-
ism, tempter's art and develry of every kind,-
that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, preda-
tory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the
elevation of the human species as its opposite
we do not even say enough when we only say this
inuch; and in any case we find ourselves here, both
with our speech and our silence, at the other ex-
8
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60
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
2
9
treme of all modern ideology and gregarious desira-
bility, as their antipodes perhaps ? What wonder
that we "free spirits” are not exactly the most
communicative spirits ? that we do not wish to
betray in every respect what a spirit can free itself
from, and where perhaps it will then be driven ? And
as to the import of the dangerous formula, "Beyond
Good and Evil,” with which we at least avoid con-
fusion, we are something else than "libres-penseurs,"
"liberi pensatori," "free-thinkers," and whatever
these honest advocates of “modern ideas" like to
call themselves. Having been at home, or at least
guests, in many realms of the spirit; having escaped
again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks
in which preferences and prejudices, youth, origin,
the accident of men and books, or even the weari-
ness of travel seemed to confine us; full of malice
against the seductions of dependency which lie
concealed in honours, money, positions, or exalta-
tion of the senses ; grateful even for distress and
the vicissitudes of illness, because they always free
us from some rule, and its “ prejudice,” grateful to
the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us; inquisitive
to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty, with
unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth
and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for
any business that requires sagacity and acute
senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an
excess of " free will ”; with anterior and posterior
souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is
difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds
to the end of which no foot may run; hidden
ones under the mantles of light, appropriators,
"
## p. 61 (#83) ##############################################
THE FREE SPIRIT.
61
although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, ar-
rangers and collectors from morning till night,
misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers,
economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in
scheming ; sometimes proud of tables of categories,
sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work
even in full day; yea, if necessary, even scarecrows
—and it is necessary nowadays, that is to say, inas-
much as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of
solitude, of our own profoundest midnight and mid-
day solitude :—such kind of men are we, we free
spirits! And perhaps ye are also something of the
same kind, ye coming ones? ye new philosophers?
## p. 62 (#84) ##############################################
## p. 63 (#85) ##############################################
THIRD CHAPTER.
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
45.
THE human soul and its limits, the range of man's
inner experiences hitherto attained, the heights,
depths and distances of these experiences, the
entire history of the soul up to the present time, and
its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the pre-
ordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist
and lover of a “big hunt. ” But how often must he
say despairingly to himself: "A single individual!
alas, only a single individual! and this great forest,
this virgin forest! " So he would like to have some
hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained
hounds, that he could send into the history of the
human soul, to drive his game together. In vain :
again and again he experiences, profoundly and
bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs
for all the things that directly excite his curiosity.
The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous
hunting-domains, where courage, sagacity, and sub-
tlety in every sense are required, is that they are no
longer serviceable just when the "big hunt," and
also the great danger commences,-it is precisely
then that they lose their keen eye and nose. In
order, for instance, to divine and determine what
## p. 64 (#86) ##############################################
64
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
1
sort of history the problem of knowledge and con-
science has hitherto had in the souls of homines
religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to
possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an ex-
perience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal;
and then he would still require that wide-spread
heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from
above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and
effectively formulise this mass of dangerous and
painful experiences. —But who could do me this
service! And who would have time to wait for
such servants ! they evidently appear too rarely,
they are so improbable at all times! Eventually
one must do everything oneself in order to know
something ; which means that one has much to do!
-But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most
agreeable of vices—pardon me! I mean to say
that the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and
already upon earth.
46.
Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not
infrequently achieved in the midst of a sceptical
and southernly free-spirited world, which had cen-
turies of struggle between philosophical schools
behind it and in it, counting besides the education
in tolerance which the imperium Romanum gave-
this faith is not that sincere, austere slave-faith by
which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some
other northern barbarian of the spirit remained
attached to his God and Christianity; it is much
rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a
terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason-
—а
## p. 65 (#87) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
65
tough, long-lived, wormlike reason, which is not
to be slain at once and with a single blow. The
Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the
sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence
of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-
derision, and self-mutilation. There is cruelty and
religious Phænicianism in this faith, which is
adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious
conscience ; it takes for granted that the subjection
of the spirit is indescribably painful, that all the
past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the
absurdissimum, in the form of which "faith" comes
to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards
all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense
for the terribly superlative conception which was
implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the
formula, “God on the Cross. ” Hitherto there had
never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion,
nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and
questionable as this formula : it promised a trans-
valuation of all ancient values. - It was the Orient,
the profound Orient, it was the Oriental slave who
thus took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-
minded toleration, on the Roman "Catholicism" of
non-faith ; and it was always, not the faith, but the
freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling
indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which
made the slaves indignant at their masters and re-
volt against them. “Enlightenment" causes revolt:
for the slave desires the unconditioned, he under-
stands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals;
he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the very
depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness
canety
E
## p. 66 (#88) ##############################################
66
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
-his many hidden sufferings make him revolt
against the noble taste which seems to deny suffer-
ing. The scepticism with regard to suffering,
fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic
morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the
last great slave-insurrection which began with the
French Revolution.
47.
Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared
on the earth so far, we find it connected with three
dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude,
fasting, and sexual abstinence—but without it being
possible to determine with certainty which is cause
and which is effect, or if any relation at all of cause
and effect exists there. This latter doubt is justified
by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms
among savage as well as among civilised peoples
is the most sudden and excessive sensuality; which
then with equal suddenness transforms into peni-
tential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-
renunciation : both symptoms perhaps explainable
as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it more
obligatory to put aside explanations: around no
other type has there grown such a mass of absur-
dity and superstition, no other type seems to have
been more interesting to men and even to philo-
sophers—perhaps it is time to become just a little
indifferent here, to learn caution, or, better still, to
look away, to go away. — Yet in the background of
the most recent philosophy, that of Schopenhauer,
we find almost as the problem in itself, this terrible
note of interrogation of the religious crisis and
## p. 67 (#89) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
67
awakening. How is the negation of will possible ?
how is the saint possible ? —that seems to have been
the very question with which Schopenhauer made a
start and became a philosopher. And thus it was
a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his
most convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as
far as Germany is concerned), namely, Richard
Wagner, should bring his own life-work to an end
just here, and should finally put that terrible and
eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vécu,
and as it loved and lived, at the very time that the
mad-doctors in almost all European countries had
an opportunity to study the type close at hand,
wherever the religious neurosis-or as I call it, "the
religious mood”-made its latest epidemical out-
break and display as the “Salvation Army. ”—If it
be a question, however, as to what has been so
extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages,
and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon
of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of
the miraculous therein-namely, the immediate
succession of opposites, of states of the soul regarded
as morally antithetical : it was believed here to be
self-evident that a “bad man” was all at once
turned into a "saint," a good man. The hitherto
existing psychology was wrecked at this point; is
it not possible it may have happened principally
because psychology had placed itself under the
dominion of morals, because it believed in opposi-
tions of moral values, and saw, read, and interpreted
these oppositions into the text and facts of the
case? What? “Miracle” only an error of inter-
pretation? A lack of philology?
## p. 68 (#90) ##############################################
68
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
48.
It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply
attached to their Catholicism than we Northerners
are to Christianity generally, and that consequently
unbelief in Catholic countries means something
quite different from what it does among Protestants
_namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the
race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit
(or non-spirit) of the race. We Northerners un-
doubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races,
even as regards our talents for religion-we have
poor talents for it. One may make an exception
in the case of the Celts, who have therefore furnished
also the best soil for the Christian infection in the
north: the Christian ideal blossomed forth in
France as much as ever the pale sun of the north
would allow it. How strangely pious for our taste
are still these later French sceptics, whenever there
is any Celtic blood in their origin! How Catholic,
how un-German does Auguste Comte's Sociology
seem to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts !
How Jesuitical, that amiable and shrewd cicerone
of Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his
hostility to Jesuits! And even Ernest Renan :
how inaccessible to us Northerners does the lan-
guage of such a Renan appear, in whom every
instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws
his refinedly voluptuous and comfortably couching
soul off its balance! Let us repeat after him these
fine sentences—and what wickedness and haughti-
ness is immediately aroused by way of answer in
our probably less beautiful but harder souls, that is
## p. 69 (#91) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
69
to say, in our more German souls ! _" Disons donc
hardiment que la religion est un produit de l'homme
normal, que l'homme est le plus dans le vrai quand
il est le plus religieux et le plus assuré d'une destinée
infinie. . . C'est quand il est bon qu'il veut que
la virtu corresponde à un order éternel, c'est quand
il contemple les choses d'une manière désintéressée
qu'il trouve la inort révoltante et absurde. Comment
ne pas supposer que c'est dans ces moments-là, que
l'homme voit le mieux ? »
These sentences
are so extremely antipodal to my ears and habits
of thought, that in my first impulse of rage on
finding them, I wrote on the margin, “la niaiserie
religieuse par excellence ! "-until in my later rage I
1
even took a fancy to them, these sentences with their
truth absolutely inverted! It is so nice and such
a distinction to have one's own antipodes !
.
.
49.
That which is so astonishing in the religious life
of the ancient Greeks is the irrestrainable stream
of gratitude which it pours forth—it is a very
superior kind of man who takes such an attitude
towards nature and life. —Later on, when the popu-
lace got the upper hand in Greece, fear became
rampant also in religion; and Christianity was
preparing itself.
50.
The passion for God : there are churlish, honest-
hearted, and importunate kinds of it, like that of
Luther - the whole of Protestantism lacks the
southern delicatezza. There is an Oriental exalta-
-
## p. 70 (#92) ##############################################
70
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
a
tion of the mind in it, like that of an undeservedly
favoured or elevated slave, as in the case of St
Augustine, for instance, who lacks in an offensive
manner, all nobility in bearing and desires. There
is a feminine tenderness and sensuality in it, which
modestly and unconsciously longs for a unio mystica
et physica, as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In
many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the
disguise of a girl's or youth's puberty ; here and
there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also
as her last ambition. The Church has frequently
canonised the woman in such a case.
-
51.
The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed
reverently before the saint, as the enigma of self-
subjugation and utter voluntary privation—why did
they thus bow? They divined in him—and as it
were behind the questionableness of his frail and
wretched appearance — the superior force which
wished to test itself by such a subjugation; the
strength of will, in which they recognised their own
strength and love of power, and knew how to
honour it: they honoured something in themselves
when they honoured the saint. In addition to this,
the contemplation of the saint suggested to them a
suspicion : such an enormity of self-negation and
anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for
nothing--they have said, inquiringly. There is
,
perhaps a reason for it, some very great danger,
about which the ascetic might wish to be more
accurately informed through his secret interlocutors
and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the
?
## p. 71 (#93) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
71
world learned to have a new fear before him, they
divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered
enemy it was the "Will to Power" which obliged
them to halt before the saint. They had to question
him.
52.
In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of
“
divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on
such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian
literature has nothing to compare with it. One
stands with fear and reverence before those stu-
pendous remains of what man was formerly, and
one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little
out-pushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by
all means, to figure before Asia as the “ Progress of
Mankind. " To be sure, he who is himself only a
slender, tame house-animal, and knows only the
wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people
of to-day, including the Christians of “cultured”
Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad i
amid those ruins--the taste for the Old Testament
is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small":
perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the
book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there
is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid
beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound up
this New Testament (a kind of rococo of taste in
every respect) along with the Old Testament into
one book, as the “ Bible," as "The Book in Itself,"
is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against
the Spirit” which literary Europe has upon its
çonscience,
l
l
## p. 72 (#94) ##############################################
72
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
>
1
»
53.
Why Atheism nowadays? “The father” in God
is thoroughly refuted ; equally so “the judge," "the
;
rewarder. ” Also his “free will ”; he does not hear
—and even if he did, he would not know how to
help. The worst is that he seems incapable of
communicating himself clearly ; is he uncertain ?
This is what I have made out (by questioning, and
listening at a variety of conversations) to be the
cause of the decline of European theism ; it appears
to me that though the religious instinct is in
vigorous growth,-it rejects the theistic satisfaction
with profound distrust.
!
1
54.
What does all modern philosophy mainly do?
Since Descartes—and indeed more in defiance of
him than on the basis of his procedure—an attentat
has been made on the part of all philosophers on
the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a
criticism of the subject and predicate conception-
that is to say, an attentat on the fundamental pre-
supposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philo-
sophy, as epistemological scepticism, is secretly or
openly anti-Christian, although (for keener ears, be
it said) by no means anti-religious. Formerly, in
effect, one believed in “the soul” as one believed
in grammar and the grammatical subject: one
said, “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate
and is conditioned to think is an activity for
which one must suppose a subject as cause. The
attempt was then made, with marvellous tenacity
## p. 73 (#95) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
73
and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of
this net,—to see if the opposite was not perhaps
true: “think” the condition, and "I" the con-
ditioned; “I," therefore, only a synthesis which
has been made by thinking itself. Kant really
wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the
subject could not be proved-nor the object either :
the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject,
and therefore of “the soul,” may not always have
been strange to him,—the thought which once had
an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philo-
sophy,
55.
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with
many rounds; but three of these are the most
important. Once on a time men sacrificed human
beings to their God, and perhaps just those they
loved the best-to this category belong the firstling
sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the
sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-
Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of
all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral
epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the
strongest instincts they possessed, their “nature";
this festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics
and “anti-natural" fanatics. Finally, what still
remained to be sacrificed? Was it not necessary
in the end for men to sacrifice everything comfort-
ing, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden
harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was
it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out
of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity,
## p. 74 (#96) ##############################################
74
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for
,
nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ulti-
mate cruelty has been reserved for the rising
generation; we all know something thereof already.
an
56.
Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enig.
matical desire, has long endeavoured to go to the
bottom of the question of pessimism and free it
from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness
and stupidity in which it has finally presented
itself to this century, namely, in the form of
Schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever, with
Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, has actually looked
inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all
possible modes of thought-beyond good and evil,
and no longer like Buddha and Schopenhauer,
under the dominion and delusion of morality,–
whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby,
without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold
the opposite ideal : the ideal of the most world-
approving, exuberant and vivacious man, who has
not only learnt to compromise and arrange with
that which was and is, but wishes to have it again
as it was and is, for all eternity, insatiably calling
out da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole
piece and play; and not only to the play, but
actually to him who requires the play-and makes
it necessary; because he always requires himself
anew_and makes himself necessary. - -What?
And this would not be--circulus vitiosus deus ?
## p. 75 (#97) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD,
75
57
The distance, and as it were the space around
man, grows with the strength of his intellectual
vision and insight: his world becomes profounder ;
new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever
coming into view. Perhaps everything on which
the intellectual eye has exercised its acuteness and
profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise,
something of a game, something for children and
childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn con-
ceptions that have caused the most fighting and
suffering, the conceptions “God” and “sin," will
one day seem to us of no more importance than a
child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old
man ;—and perhaps another plaything and another
pain will then be necessary once more for “the old
man"-always childish enough, an eternal child !
58.
Has it been observed to what extent outward
idleness, or semi-idleness, is necessary to a real
religious life (alike for its favourite microscopic
labour of self-examination, and for its soft placidity
called “prayer," the state of perpetual readiness for
the "coming of God"), I mean the idleness with a
good conscience, the idleness of olden times and of
blood, to which the aristocratic sentiment that work
is dishonouring--that it vulgarises body and soul-
is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently
the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited,
foolishly proud laboriousness educates and pre-
pares for "unbelief” more than anything else?
## p. 76 (#98) ##############################################
76
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
>
Amongst these, for instance, who are at present
living apart from religion in Germany, I find “free-
thinkers " of diversified species and origin, but above
all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from
generation to generation has dissolved the religious
instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose
religions serve, and only note their existence in the
world with a kind of dull astonishment. They feel
themselves already fully occupied, these good people,
be it by their business or by their pleasures, not to
mention the “Fatherland," and the newspapers, and
their “family duties ”; it seems that they have no
time whatever left for religion; and above all, it is
not obvious to them whether it is a question of a
new business or a new pleasure—for it is impossible,
they say to themselves, that people should go to
church merely to spoil their tempers. They are by
no means enemies of religious customs; should
certain circumstances, State affairs perhaps, require
their participation in such customs, they do what is
required, as so many things are done - with a
patient and unassuming seriousness, and without
much curiosity or discomfort;—they live too much
apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a for
or against in such matters. Among those indifferent
persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority
of German Protestants of the middle classes,
especially in the great laborious centres of trade
and commerce ; also the majority of laborious
scholars, and the entire University personnel (with
the exception of the theologians, whose existence
and possibility there always gives psychologists new
and more subtle puzzles to solve). On the part of
-
## p. 77 (#99) ##############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
77
pious, or merely church-going people, there is
seldom any idea of how much goodwill, one might
say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German
scholar to take the problem of religion seriously;
his whole profession (and as I have said, his whole
workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled
by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty
and almost charitable serenity as regards religion,
with which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain
for the “uncleanliness” of spirit which he takes for
granted wherever any one still professes to belong
to the Church. It is only with the help of history
(not through his own personal experience, therefore)
that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a
respectful seriousness, and to a certain timid defer-
ence in presence of religions; but even when his
sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude
towards them, he has not personally advanced one
step nearer to that which still maintains itself as
Church or as piety; perhaps even the contrary. The
practical indifference to religious matters in the
midst of which he has been born and brought up,
usually sublimates itself in his case into circumspec-
tion and cleanliness, which shuns contact with
religious men and things; and it may be just the
depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts
him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance
itself brings with it. —Every age has its own divine
type of naïveté, for the discovery of which other
ages may envy it: and how much naïveté-ador-
able, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naïveté
is involved in this belief of the scholar in his
superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance,
## p. 78 (#100) #############################################
78
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
in the unsuspecting, simple certainty with which
his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and
less valuable type, beyond, before, and above which
he himself has developed-he, the little arrogant
dwarf and mob-man, the sedulously alert, head-and-
hand drudge of “ideas," of "modern ideas "!
59.
Whoever has seen deeply into the world has
doubtless divined what wisdom there is in the fact
that men are superficial. It is their preservative
instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome,
and false. Here and there one finds a passionate
and exaggerated adoration of "pure forms” in
philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be
doubted that whoever has need of the cult of the
superficial to that extent, has at one time or another
made an unlucky dive beneath it. Perhaps there is
even an order of rank with respect to those burnt
children, the born artists who find the enjoyment
of life only in trying to falsify its image (as if
taking wearisome revenge on it); one might guess
to what degree life has disgusted them, by the
extent to which they wish to see its image falsified,
attenuated, ultrified, and deified;-one might reckon
the homines religiosi amongst the artists, as their
highest rank. It is the profound, suspicious fear
of an incurable pessimism which compels whole
centuries to fasten their teeth into a religious inter-
pretation of existence: the fear of the instinct
which divines that truth might be attained too
soon, before man has become strong enough, hard
enough, artist enough. . . Piety, the “Life in
.
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
79
God,” regarded in this light, would appear as the
most elaborate and ultimate product of the fear of
truth, as artist-adoration and artist-intoxication in
presence of the most logical of all falsifications, as
the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any
price. Perhaps there has hitherto been no more
effective means of beautifying man than piety ; by
means of it man can become so artful, so super-
ficial, so iridescent, and so good, that his appear-
ance no longer offends.
60.
To love mankind for God's sake--this has so far
been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which
mankind has attained. That love to mankind,
without any redeeming intention in the background,
is only an additional folly and brutishness, that the
inclination to this love has first to get its propor-
tion, its delicacy, its grain of salt and sprinkling of
ambergris from a higher inclination:whoever first
perceived and "experienced” this, however his
tongue may have stammered as it attempted to
express such a delicate matter, let him for all time
be holy and respected, as the man who has so far
flown highest and gone astray in the finest fashion!
TH
61.
The philosopher, as we free spirits understand
him-as the man of the greatest responsibility, who
has the conscience for the general development of
mankind,—will use religion for his disciplining and
educating work, just as he will use the contem-
porary political and economic conditions. The
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
80
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
selecting and disciplining influence—destructive, as
well as creative and fashioning—which can be exer-
cised by means of religion is manifold and varied,
according to the sort of people placed under its
spell and protection. For those who are strong and
independent, destined and trained to command, in
whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is
incorporated, religion is an additional means for
overcoming resistance in the exercise of authority
as a bond which binds rulers and subjects in
common, betraying and surrendering to the former
the conscience of the latter, their inmost heart,
which would fain escape obedience. And in the
case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by
virtue of superior spirituality they should incline
to a more retired and contemplative life, reserving
to themselves only the more refined forms of
government (over chosen disciples or members of
an order), religion itself may be used as a means
for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of
managing grosser affairs, and for securing immunity
from the unavoidable filth of all political agita-
tion. The Brahmins, for instance, understood this
fact. With the help of a religious organisation,
they secured to themselves the power of nominat-
ing kings for the people, while their sentiments
prompted them to keep apart and outside, as men
with a higher and super-regal mission. At the
same time religion gives inducement and oppor-
tunity to some of the subjects to qualify themselves
for future ruling and commanding : the slowly
ascending ranks and classes, in which, through
fortunate marriage customs, volitional power and
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
81
delight in self-control are on the increase. To them
religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations
to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience
the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of
silence, and of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism
are almost indispensable means of educating and
ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its
hereditary baseness and work itself upward to
future supremacy. And finally, to ordinary men,
to the majority of the people, who exist for
service and general utility, and are only so far
entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable con-
tentedness with their lot and condition, peace of
heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social
happiness and sympathy, with something of trans-
figuration and embellishment, something of justifica-
tion of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness,
all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Reli-
gion, together with the religious significance of life,
sheds sunshine over such perpetually harassed
men, and makes even their own aspect endurable
to them; it operates upon them as the Epicurean
philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a
higher order, in a refreshing and refining manner,
almost turning suffering to account, and in the end
even hallowing and vindicating it. There is per-
haps nothing so admirable in Christianity and
Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest
to elevate themselves by piety to a seemingly
higher order of things, and thereby to retain their
satisfaction with the actual world in which they
find it difficult enough to live—this very difficulty
being necessary.
-
F
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
62.
To be sure to make also the bad counter-
reckoning against such religions, and to bring to
light their secret dangers—the cost is always ex-
cessive and terrible when religions do not operate
as an educational and disciplinary medium in the
hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and
paramountly, when they wish to be the final end, and
not a means along with other means. Among men,
as among all other animals, there is a surplus of
defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and neces-
sarily suffering individuals; the successful cases,
among men also, are always the exception; and in
view of the fact that man is the animal not yet
properly adapted to his environment, the rare excep-
tion. But worse still. The higher the type a man
represents, the greater is the improbability that he
will succeed; the accidental, the law of irrationality
in the general constitution of mankind, manifests
itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the
higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives
are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine.
What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest
religions above-mentioned to the surplus of failures
in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep
alive whatever can be preserved ; in fact, as the
religions for sufferers, they take the part of these
upon principle; they are always in favour of those
who suffer from life as from a disease, and they
would fain treat every other experience of life as
false and impossible.
However highly we may
esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inas-
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD.
83
much as in applying to others, it has applied, and
applies also to the highest and usually the most
suffering type of man), the hitherto paramount
religions—to give a general appreciation of them
are among the principal causes which have kept the
type of “man” upon a lower level—they have pre-
-
served too much that which should have perished.
One has to thank them for invaluable services; and
who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor
at the contemplation of all that the “spiritual men
of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto ! But
when they had given comfort to the sufferers,
courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and
support to the helpless, and when they had allured
from society into convents and spiritual peni-
tentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what
else had they to do in order to work systematically
in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the
preservation of all the sick and suffering, which
means, in deed and in truth, to work for the deterio-
ration of the European race? To reverse all esti-
mates of value—that is what they had to do! And
to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast
suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down
everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and
imperious-all instincts which are natural to the
highest and most successful type of “man"-into
uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruc-
tion; forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and
of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the
earth and earthly things that is the task the Church
imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until,
according to its standard of value, “ unworldliness,”
1
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
>
unsensuousness, and “higher man fused into
one sentiment. If one could observe the strangely
painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of
European Christianity with the derisive and im-
partial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one
would never cease marvelling and laughing ; does
it not actually seem that some single will has ruled
over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to
make a sublime abortion of man? He, however,
who, with opposite requirements (no longer
Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his
hand, could approach this almost voluntary degene-
ration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified
in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance),
would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity
and horror: “Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous
:
pitiful bunglers, what have you done!
