The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche

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СКАЧАТЬ understood the great needs of the pagan world, and he gave quite an absolutely arbitrary picture of those two plain facts, Christ s life and death. He gave the whole a new accent, altering the equilibrium everywhere ... he was one of the most active destroyers of primitive Christianity. The attempt made on the life of priests and theo logians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priest hood and theology a ruling caste and a Church. The attempt made to suppress the fussy im portance of the " person," culminated in the belief in the eternal " personality " (and in the anxiety concerning " eternal salvation " . . .), and in the 138 most paradoxical exaggeration of individual egoism. This is the humorous side of the question tragic humour: Paul again set up on a large scale precisely what Jesus had overthrown by His life. At last, when the Church edifice was complete, it even sanctioned the existence of the State.

      168. The Church is precisely that against which Jesus inveighed and against which He taught His disciples to fight.

      169. A God who died for our sins, salvation through faith, resurrection after death all these things are the counterfeit coins of real Christianity, for which that pernicious blockhead Paul must be held responsible. The life ivJiich must serve as an example consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and con tempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandon ment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual; 139 in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life. Once the Church had allowed itself to take over all the Christian practice, and had formally sanctioned the State, that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns, it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals that is to say, in the faith in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions " sin," " for giveness," " punishment," " reward " everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite absent from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground. An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc.

      170. Christianity has, from the first, always trans formed the symbolical into crude realities: (1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into " life here " and " life beyond." (2) The notion " eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into " personal immortality "; (3) The process of fraternising by means of sharing the same food and drink, after the Hebrew- Arabian manner, is interpreted as the " miracle of transubstantiation." (4) " Resurrection " which was intended to 140 mean the entrance to the " true life," in the sense of being intellectually " born again," becomes an historical contingency, supposed to take place at some moment after death; (5) The teaching of the Son of man as the " Son of God," that is to say, the life-relationship between man and God, becomes the " second person of the Trinity," and thus the filial relation ship of every man even the lowest to God, is done away with; (6) Salvation through faith (that is to say, that there is no other way to this filial relationship to God, save through the practice of life taught by Christ) becomes transformed into the belief that there is a miraculous way of atoning for all sin; though not through our own endeavours, but by means of Christ: For all these purposes, " Christ on the Cross " had to be interpreted afresh. The death itself would certainly not be the principal feature of the event ... it was only another sign pointing to the way in which one should behave towards the authorities and the laws of the world that one was not to defend oneself this was the exemplary life.

      171. Concerning the psychology of Paul. The im portant fact is Christ s death. This remains to be explained. . . . That there may be truth or error in an explanation never entered these people s heads: one day a sublime possibility strikes them, " His death might mean so and so " 14! and it forthwith becomes so and so. An hypo thesis is proved by the sublime ardour it lends to its discoverer. . . . " The proof of strength ": i.e., a thought is demonstrated by its effects (" by their fruits," as the Bible ingenuously says); that which fires en thusiasm must be true, what one loses one s blood for must be true In every department of this world of thought, the sudden feeling of power which an idea imparts to him who is responsible for it, is placed to the credit of that idea: and as there seems no other way of honoring an idea than by calling it true, the first epithet it is honored with is the word true, . , . How could it have any effect other wise? It was imagined by some power: if that power were not real, it could not be the cause of anything. . . . The thought is then understood as inspired: the effect it causes has something of the violent nature of a demoniacal influence A thought which a decadent like Paul could not resist and to which he completely yields, is thus " proved " true All these holy epileptics and visionaries did not possess a thousandth part of the honesty in self-criticism with which a philologist, nowadays, reads a text, or tests the truth of an historical event. . . . Beside us, such people were moral cretins.

      172. whet) provided it be effective: total absence of intellectual It matters little whether a thing be true, 142 uprightness. Everything is good, whether it be lying, slander, or shameless " cooking," provided it serve to heighten the degree of heat to the point at which people " believe." We are face to face with an actual school for the teaching of the means wherewith men are seduced to a belief: we see systematic contempt for those spheres whence contradiction might come (that is to say, for reason, philosophy, wisdom, doubt, and caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the teaching, with continual refer ences to the fact that it was God who presented us with it that the apostle signifies nothing. that no criticism is brooked, but only faith, ac ceptance; that it is the greatest blessing and favour to receive such a doctrine of salvation; that the state in which one should receive it, ought to be one of the profoundest thankfulness and humility. . . . The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though they were the mean ing and salt of the earth. Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the 143 teaching; it is sufficient to take note of the means it uses in order to be aware of the nature of the phenomenon one is examining. It identified itself with virtue, it appropriated the whole of the fasci nating power of virtue, shamelessly, for its own purposes ... it availed itself of the power of paradox, and of the need, manifested by old civilisation, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed and revolted at the same time; it provoked per secutions and ill-treatment. It is the same kind of vdl-thought-out meanness with which the Jewish priesthood established their power and built up their Church. . . . One must be able to discern: (i)that warmth of passion " love " (resting on a base of ardent sensuality); (2) the thoroughly ignoble character of Christianity: the continual exaggeration and verbosity; the lack of cool intellectuality and irony; the unmilitary character of all its instincts; the priestly prejudices against manly pride, sensuality, the sciences, the arts.

      173. Paul: seeks power against ruling Judaism, his attempt is too weak. . . . Revaluation of the notion " Jew ": the " race " is put aside: but that means denying the very basis of the whole struc ture. The " martyr," the " fanatic," the value of all strong belief. Christianity is fat form of decay of the old world, after the latter s collapse, and it is characterised by the fact that it brings all the most sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top. 144 THE WILL T0 POWER. Consequently other instincts had to step into the foreground, in order to constitute an entity, a power able to stand alone in short, a condition of tense sorrow was necessary, like that out of which the Jews had derived their instinct of self-preserva tion. . . . The persecution of Christians was invaluable for this purpose. Unity in the face of danger; the conversion of the masses becomes the only means of putting an end to the persecution of the individual. (The notion " conversion " is therefore made as elastic as possible.)

      174. The Christian Judaic life: here resentment did not prevail. СКАЧАТЬ