One has
regarded
life carelessly, if one has failed
to see the hand that-kills with leniency.
to see the hand that-kills with leniency.
Nietzsche - v12 - Beyond Good and Evil
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! Was that a
work for your hands ? How you have hacked and
botched my finest stone! What have you presumed
to do! ”-I should say that Christianity has hitherto
been the most portentous of presumptions. Men,
not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled
as artists to take part in fashioning man ; men, not
sufficiently strong and far-sighted to allow, with
sublime self-constraint, the obvious law of the
thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail ;
men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically dif-
ferent grades of rank and intervals of rank that
separate man from man :-such men, with their
"equality before God,” have hitherto swayed the
destiny of Europe ; until at last a dwarfed, almost
ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious
animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the
European of the present day.
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
FOURTH CHAPTER
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
63.
He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously
—and even himself-only in relation to his pupils.
66
)
64.
Knowledge for its own sake”_that is the last
snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely
entangled in morals once more.
65.
The charm of knowledge would be small, were it
not that so much shame has to be overcome on
the way to it.
65A.
We are most dishonourable towards our God: he
is not permitted to sin.
66.
The tendency of a person to allow himself to be
degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might
be the diffidence of a God amongst men.
a
67.
Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised
at the expense of all others. Love to God also!
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
68.
"I did that," says my memory.
“ I could not
have done that," says my pride, and remains in-
exorable. Eventually—the memory yields.
69.
One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed
to see the hand that-kills with leniency.
70.
If a man has character, he has also his typical
experience, which always recurs.
71.
The Sage as Astronomer. —So long as thou feelest
the stars as an “above thee,” thou lackest the eye
of the discerning one.
72.
It is not the strength, but the duration of great
sentiments that makes great men.
73.
He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby
surpasses it.
73A.
Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye-
and calls it his pride.
74.
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess
at least two things besides : gratitude and purity.
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
87
75.
The degree and nature of a man's sensuality
extends to the highest altitudes of his spirit.
76.
Under peaceful conditions the militant man
attacks himself,
77.
With his principles a man seeks either to domi-
nate, or justify, or honour, or reproach, or conceal
his habits : two men with the same principles
probably seek fundamentally different ends there-
with.
78.
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems
himself thereby, as a despiser.
79.
A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not
itself love, betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.
80
A thing that is explained ceases to concern us. -
What did the God mean who gave the advice,
“Know thyself! ” Did it perhaps imply : “Cease
to be concerned about thyself! become objective ! "
-And Socrates ? -And the “ scientific man"?
6
81.
It is terrible to die of thirst at sea.
Is it necessary
that you should so salt your
truth that it will no
longer~-quench thirst ?
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
66
82.
Sympathy for all ”—would be harshness and
tyranny for thee, my good neighbour !
-
83
Instinct. -When the house is on fire one forgets
even the dinner. —Yes, but one recovers it from
amongst the ashes.
84.
Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she-
forgets how to charm.
85.
The same emotions are in man and woman, but
in different tempo; on that account man and woman
never cease to misunderstand each other.
86.
In the background of all their personal vanity,
women themselves have still their impersonal
scorn-for “woman. "
87.
Fettered Heart, Free Spirit. -When one firmly
fetters one's heart and keeps it prisoner, one can
allow one's spirit many liberties : I said this once
before. But people do not believe it when I say
so, unless they know it already.
4
88.
One begins to distrust very clever persons when
they become embarrassed.
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
89
89.
Dreadful experiences raise the question whether
he who experiences them is not something dreadful
also.
90.
Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come
temporarily to their surface, precisely by that
which makes others heavy-by hatred and love.
91.
So cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at
the touch of him! Every hand that lays hold of
him shrinks back ! -And for that very reason
many think him red-hot.
92.
Who has not, at one time or another-sacrificed
himself for the sake of his good name?
93.
In affability there is no hatred of men, but
precisely on that account a great deal too much
contempt of men.
94.
The maturity of man—that means, to have
reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child
at play.
95.
To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on
the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also
of one's morality.
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
96.
One should part from life as Ulysses parted
from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love
with it.
97
What? A great man? I always see merely
the play-actor of his own ideal,
98.
When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one
while it bites.
99.
The Disappointed One Speaks. -"I listened for
the echo and I heard only praise. ”
100.
We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler
than we are; we thus relax ourselves away from
our fellows.
IOI.
A discerning one might easily regard himself at
present as the animalisation of God.
102.
Discovering reciprocal love should really dis-
enchant the lover with regard to the beloved.
“What! She is modest enough to love even you?
Or stupid enough? Or-or-
103
The Danger in Happiness. -"Everything now
turns out best for me, I now love every fate :—who
would like to be my fate ? "
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
91
104.
Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of
their love, prevents the Christians of to-day-
burning us.
105.
The pia fraus is still more repugnant to the taste
(the “piety ") of the free spirit (the “pious man of
knowledge ") than the impia fraus. Hence the
”
profound lack of judgment, in comparison with the
church, characteristic of the type “free spirit”-as
its non-freedom.
106.
By means of music the very passions enjoy
themselves.
107.
A sign of strong character, when once the
resolution has been taken, to shut the ear even to
the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, there-
fore, a will to stupidity.
108.
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but
only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
109.
The criminal is often enough not equal to his
deed : he extenuates and maligns it.
IIO.
The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists
enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the
deed to the advantage of the doer.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
III.
Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when
our pride has been wounded.
112.
To him who feels himself preordained to con-
templation and not to belief, all believers are too
noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
113.
“You want to prepossess him in your favour?
Then you must be embarrassed before him. ”
114.
The immense expectation with regard to sexual
love, and the coyness in this expectation, spoils all
the perspectives of women at the outset.
115.
Where there is neither love nor hatred in the
game, woman's play is mediocre.
116.
The great epochs of our life are at the points
when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as
the best in us.
117
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately
only the will of another, or of several other,
emotions.
118.
There is an innocence of admiration: it is
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
93
possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred
that he himself may be admired some day.
119.
Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to
prevent us cleaning ourselves—"justifying” our-
selves.
I 20.
Sensuality often forces the growth of love too
much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily
torn up
I21.
It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when
a
he wished to turn author—and that he did not learn
it better.
I 22.
To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases
merely politeness of heart—and the very opposite
of vanity of spirit.
123.
Even concubinage has been corrupted by
marriage.
I 24.
He who exults at the stake, does not triumph
over pain, but because of the fact that he does not
feel pain where he expected it. A parable.
125.
When we have to change an opinion about any
one, we charge heavily to his account the incon-
venience he thereby causes us.
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
1 26.
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or
seven great men. -Yes, and then to get round them.
127.
In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to
the sense of shame. They feel as if one wished to
peep under their skin with it- or worse still! under
their dress and finery.
128.
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach,
the more must you allure the senses to it.
129.
The devil has the most extensive perspectives for
God; on that account he keeps so. far
away from
him :—the devil, in effect, as the oldest friend of
knowledge.
130.
What a person is begins to betray itself when
his talent decreases, when he ceases to show what
he can do. Talent is also an adornment; an
adornment is also a concealment.
131.
The sexes deceive themselves about each other :
the reason is that in reality they honour and love
only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it
more agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be
peaceable: but in fact woman is essentially unpeace-
able, like the cat, however well she may have
assumed the peaceable demeanour.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
95
132.
One is punished best for one's virtues.
133.
He who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives
more frivolously and shamelessly than the man
without an ideal.
134.
From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all
good conscience, all evidence of truth.
135.
Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man;
a considerable part of it is rather an essential condi-
tion of being good.
136.
The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the
other seeks some one whom he can assist: a good
conversation thus originates.
.
137.
In intercourse with scholars and artists one
readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds : in a
remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a
mediocre man; and often even in a mediocre artist,
one finds a very remarkable man.
138.
We do the same when awake as when dreaming:
we only invent and imagine him with whom we
have intercourse—and forget it immediately.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
139.
In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous
than man.
140.
Advice as a Riddle. -—“If the band is not to break,
bite it first-secure to make ! "
141.
The belly is the reason why man does not so
readily take himself for a God.
142.
The chastest utterance I ever heard : “ Dans le
véritable amour c'est l'âme qui enveloppe le corps. "
143.
Our vanity would like what we do best to pass
precisely for what is most difficult to us. —Con-
cerning the origin of many systems of morals.
144.
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there
is generally something wrong with her sexual
nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain
virility of taste ; man, indeed, if I may say so, is
“ the barren animal. ”
145.
Comparing man and woman generally, one may
say that woman would not have the genius for
adornment, if she had not the instinct for the
secondary rôle.
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! Was that a
work for your hands ? How you have hacked and
botched my finest stone! What have you presumed
to do! ”-I should say that Christianity has hitherto
been the most portentous of presumptions. Men,
not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled
as artists to take part in fashioning man ; men, not
sufficiently strong and far-sighted to allow, with
sublime self-constraint, the obvious law of the
thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail ;
men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically dif-
ferent grades of rank and intervals of rank that
separate man from man :-such men, with their
"equality before God,” have hitherto swayed the
destiny of Europe ; until at last a dwarfed, almost
ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious
animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the
European of the present day.
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
FOURTH CHAPTER
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
63.
He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously
—and even himself-only in relation to his pupils.
66
)
64.
Knowledge for its own sake”_that is the last
snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely
entangled in morals once more.
65.
The charm of knowledge would be small, were it
not that so much shame has to be overcome on
the way to it.
65A.
We are most dishonourable towards our God: he
is not permitted to sin.
66.
The tendency of a person to allow himself to be
degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might
be the diffidence of a God amongst men.
a
67.
Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised
at the expense of all others. Love to God also!
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
68.
"I did that," says my memory.
“ I could not
have done that," says my pride, and remains in-
exorable. Eventually—the memory yields.
69.
One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed
to see the hand that-kills with leniency.
70.
If a man has character, he has also his typical
experience, which always recurs.
71.
The Sage as Astronomer. —So long as thou feelest
the stars as an “above thee,” thou lackest the eye
of the discerning one.
72.
It is not the strength, but the duration of great
sentiments that makes great men.
73.
He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby
surpasses it.
73A.
Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye-
and calls it his pride.
74.
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess
at least two things besides : gratitude and purity.
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
87
75.
The degree and nature of a man's sensuality
extends to the highest altitudes of his spirit.
76.
Under peaceful conditions the militant man
attacks himself,
77.
With his principles a man seeks either to domi-
nate, or justify, or honour, or reproach, or conceal
his habits : two men with the same principles
probably seek fundamentally different ends there-
with.
78.
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems
himself thereby, as a despiser.
79.
A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not
itself love, betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.
80
A thing that is explained ceases to concern us. -
What did the God mean who gave the advice,
“Know thyself! ” Did it perhaps imply : “Cease
to be concerned about thyself! become objective ! "
-And Socrates ? -And the “ scientific man"?
6
81.
It is terrible to die of thirst at sea.
Is it necessary
that you should so salt your
truth that it will no
longer~-quench thirst ?
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
66
82.
Sympathy for all ”—would be harshness and
tyranny for thee, my good neighbour !
-
83
Instinct. -When the house is on fire one forgets
even the dinner. —Yes, but one recovers it from
amongst the ashes.
84.
Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she-
forgets how to charm.
85.
The same emotions are in man and woman, but
in different tempo; on that account man and woman
never cease to misunderstand each other.
86.
In the background of all their personal vanity,
women themselves have still their impersonal
scorn-for “woman. "
87.
Fettered Heart, Free Spirit. -When one firmly
fetters one's heart and keeps it prisoner, one can
allow one's spirit many liberties : I said this once
before. But people do not believe it when I say
so, unless they know it already.
4
88.
One begins to distrust very clever persons when
they become embarrassed.
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
89
89.
Dreadful experiences raise the question whether
he who experiences them is not something dreadful
also.
90.
Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come
temporarily to their surface, precisely by that
which makes others heavy-by hatred and love.
91.
So cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at
the touch of him! Every hand that lays hold of
him shrinks back ! -And for that very reason
many think him red-hot.
92.
Who has not, at one time or another-sacrificed
himself for the sake of his good name?
93.
In affability there is no hatred of men, but
precisely on that account a great deal too much
contempt of men.
94.
The maturity of man—that means, to have
reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child
at play.
95.
To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on
the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also
of one's morality.
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
96.
One should part from life as Ulysses parted
from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love
with it.
97
What? A great man? I always see merely
the play-actor of his own ideal,
98.
When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one
while it bites.
99.
The Disappointed One Speaks. -"I listened for
the echo and I heard only praise. ”
100.
We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler
than we are; we thus relax ourselves away from
our fellows.
IOI.
A discerning one might easily regard himself at
present as the animalisation of God.
102.
Discovering reciprocal love should really dis-
enchant the lover with regard to the beloved.
“What! She is modest enough to love even you?
Or stupid enough? Or-or-
103
The Danger in Happiness. -"Everything now
turns out best for me, I now love every fate :—who
would like to be my fate ? "
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
91
104.
Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of
their love, prevents the Christians of to-day-
burning us.
105.
The pia fraus is still more repugnant to the taste
(the “piety ") of the free spirit (the “pious man of
knowledge ") than the impia fraus. Hence the
”
profound lack of judgment, in comparison with the
church, characteristic of the type “free spirit”-as
its non-freedom.
106.
By means of music the very passions enjoy
themselves.
107.
A sign of strong character, when once the
resolution has been taken, to shut the ear even to
the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, there-
fore, a will to stupidity.
108.
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but
only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
109.
The criminal is often enough not equal to his
deed : he extenuates and maligns it.
IIO.
The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists
enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the
deed to the advantage of the doer.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
III.
Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when
our pride has been wounded.
112.
To him who feels himself preordained to con-
templation and not to belief, all believers are too
noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
113.
“You want to prepossess him in your favour?
Then you must be embarrassed before him. ”
114.
The immense expectation with regard to sexual
love, and the coyness in this expectation, spoils all
the perspectives of women at the outset.
115.
Where there is neither love nor hatred in the
game, woman's play is mediocre.
116.
The great epochs of our life are at the points
when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as
the best in us.
117
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately
only the will of another, or of several other,
emotions.
118.
There is an innocence of admiration: it is
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
93
possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred
that he himself may be admired some day.
119.
Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to
prevent us cleaning ourselves—"justifying” our-
selves.
I 20.
Sensuality often forces the growth of love too
much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily
torn up
I21.
It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when
a
he wished to turn author—and that he did not learn
it better.
I 22.
To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases
merely politeness of heart—and the very opposite
of vanity of spirit.
123.
Even concubinage has been corrupted by
marriage.
I 24.
He who exults at the stake, does not triumph
over pain, but because of the fact that he does not
feel pain where he expected it. A parable.
125.
When we have to change an opinion about any
one, we charge heavily to his account the incon-
venience he thereby causes us.
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
1 26.
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or
seven great men. -Yes, and then to get round them.
127.
In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to
the sense of shame. They feel as if one wished to
peep under their skin with it- or worse still! under
their dress and finery.
128.
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach,
the more must you allure the senses to it.
129.
The devil has the most extensive perspectives for
God; on that account he keeps so. far
away from
him :—the devil, in effect, as the oldest friend of
knowledge.
130.
What a person is begins to betray itself when
his talent decreases, when he ceases to show what
he can do. Talent is also an adornment; an
adornment is also a concealment.
131.
The sexes deceive themselves about each other :
the reason is that in reality they honour and love
only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it
more agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be
peaceable: but in fact woman is essentially unpeace-
able, like the cat, however well she may have
assumed the peaceable demeanour.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES.
95
132.
One is punished best for one's virtues.
133.
He who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives
more frivolously and shamelessly than the man
without an ideal.
134.
From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all
good conscience, all evidence of truth.
135.
Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man;
a considerable part of it is rather an essential condi-
tion of being good.
136.
The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the
other seeks some one whom he can assist: a good
conversation thus originates.
.
137.
In intercourse with scholars and artists one
readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds : in a
remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a
mediocre man; and often even in a mediocre artist,
one finds a very remarkable man.
138.
We do the same when awake as when dreaming:
we only invent and imagine him with whom we
have intercourse—and forget it immediately.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.
139.
In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous
than man.
140.
Advice as a Riddle. -—“If the band is not to break,
bite it first-secure to make ! "
141.
The belly is the reason why man does not so
readily take himself for a God.
142.
The chastest utterance I ever heard : “ Dans le
véritable amour c'est l'âme qui enveloppe le corps. "
143.
Our vanity would like what we do best to pass
precisely for what is most difficult to us. —Con-
cerning the origin of many systems of morals.
144.
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there
is generally something wrong with her sexual
nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain
virility of taste ; man, indeed, if I may say so, is
“ the barren animal. ”
145.
Comparing man and woman generally, one may
say that woman would not have the genius for
adornment, if she had not the instinct for the
secondary rôle.
