The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche

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СКАЧАТЬ The great persecutions alone could have driven out the passions to that extent as also the ardour of love and hate. When the creatures a man most loves are sacrificed before his eyes for the sake of his faith, that man becomes aggressive; the triumph of Christianity is due to its persecutors. Asceticism is not specifically Christian: this is what Schopenhauer misunderstood. It only shoots up in Christianity, wherever it would have existed without that religion. Melancholy Christianity, the torture and tor ment of the conscience, is also only a peculiarity of a particular soil, where Christian values have taken root: it is not Christianity properly speaking. Christianity has absorbed all the different kinds of diseases which grow from morbid soil: one could 145 refute it at one blow by showing that it did not know how to resist any contagion. But that precisely is the essential feature of it. Christi anity is a type of decadence.

      175. The reality on which Christianity was able to build up its power consisted of the small dispersed fezvish families, with their warmth, tenderness, and peculiar readiness to help, which, to the whole of the Roman Empire, was perhaps the most incom prehensible and least familiar of their character istics; they were also united by their pride at being a " chosen people," concealed beneath a cloak of humility, and by their secret denial of all that was uppermost and that possessed power and splendour, although there was no shade of envy in their denial. To have recognized this as a power, to have regarded this blessed state as com municable, seductive, and infectious even where pagans were concerned this constituted Paul s genius: to use up the treasure of latent energy and cautious happiness for the purposes of " a Jewish Church of free confession," and to avail himself of all the Jewish experience, their propa ganda, and their expertness in the preservation of a community under a foreign power this is what he conceived to be his duty. He it was who discovered that absolutely unpolitical and isolated body of paltry people, and their art of asserting themselves and pushing themselves to the front, by means of a host of acquired virtues which are made to represent the only forms of virtue (" the self-preservative measure and weapon of success of a certain class of man "). The principle of love comes from the small community of Jewish people: a very passionate soul glows here, beneath the ashes of humility and wretchedness: it is neither Greek, Indian, nor German. The song in praise of love which Paul wrote is not Christian; it is the Jewish flare of that eternal flame which is Semitic. If Christianity has done anything essentially new in a psychological sense, it is this, that it has increased the temperature of the soul among those cooler and more noble races who were at one time at the head of affairs; it discovered that the most wretched life could be made rich and invaluable, by means of an eleva tion of the temperature of the soul. . . . It is easily understood that a transfer of this sort could not take place among the ruling classes: the Jews and Christians were at a disadvantage owing to their bad manners spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by Kad manners, only provoke loathing (I become aware of these bad manners while reading the New Testament). It was necessary to be related both in baseness and sorrow with this type of lower manhood in order to feel anything attractive in him. . . . The atti tude a man maintains towards the New Testament is a test of the amount of taste he may have for the classics (see Tacitus); he who is not revolted by it, he who does not feel honestly and deeply that he is in the presence of a sort of fceda superstitio when reading it, and who does not draw his hand back so as not to soil his fingers such a man does not know what is classical. A man must feel about " the cross " as Goethe did.*

      176. The reaction of paltry people: Love provides the feeling of highest power. It should be under stood to what extent, not man in general, but only a certain kind of man is speaking here. " We are godly in love, we shall be the children of God; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love "; that is to say: all morality, obedi ence, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does; a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone. Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living senti ment of unity felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, caring for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success, the * Vieles kann ich ertragen. Die meisten beschwerlichen Dinge Duld ich mit ruhigem Mut, wie es ein Gott mir gebeut. Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider; Viere: Rauch des Tabaks, Wanzen, und Knoblauch und J. Goethe s Venetian Epigrams, No. 67. Much can I bear. Things the most irksome I endure with such patience as comes from a god. Four things, however, repulse me like venom: Tobacco smoke, garlic, bugs, and the cross. (TRANSLATOR S NOTE.) 148 expression of pleasure, emphasise the feeling of power; pride is not lacking either, it is felt in the form of the community, the House of God, and the " chosen people." As a matter of fact, man has once more experi enced an " alteration " of his personality: this time he called his feeling of love God. The awaken ing of such a feeling must be pictured; it is a sort of ecstasy, a strange language, a " Gospel " it was this newness which did not allow man to attribute love to himself he thought it was God leading him on and taking shape in his heart. " God descends among men," one s neighbour is trans figured and becomes a God (in so far as he provokes the sentiment of love). Jesus is the neighbour, the moment He is transfigured in thought into a God, and into a cause provoking the feeling of power.

      177. Believers are aware that they owe an infinite amount to Christianity, and therefore conclude that its Founder must have been a man of the first rank. . . . This conclusion is false, but it is typical of the reverents. Regarded objectively, it is, in the first place, just possible that they are mistaken concerning the extent of their debt to Christianity: a man s convictions prove nothing concerning the thing he is convinced about, and in religions they are more likely to give rise to suspicions. . . . Secondly, it is possible that the debt owing to Christianity is not due to its Founder at all, but to the whole structure, the 149 whole thing to the Church, etc. The notion " Founder " is so very equivocal, that it may stand even for the accidental cause of a movement: the person of the Founder has been inflated in proportion as the Church has grown: but even this process of veneration allows of the conclusion that, at one time or other, this Founder was some thing exceedingly insecure and doubtful in the beginning. . . . Let any one think of the free and easy way in which Paul treats the problem of the personality of Jesus, how he almost juggles with it: some one who died, who was seen after His death, some one whom the Jews delivered up to death all this was only the theme Paul wrote the music to it.

      178. The founder of a religion may be quite insignificant, a wax vesta and no more.

      179. Concerning the psychological problem of Christianity. The driving forces are; resentment, popular insurrection, the revolt of the bungled and the botched. (In Buddhism it is different: it is not born of resentment. It rather combats resent ment because the latter leads to action?) This party, which stands for freedom, under stands that the abandonment of antagonism in thought and deed is a condition of distinction and preservation. Here lies the psychological difficulty which has stood in the way of Christianity being understood: the force which created it, urges to a struggle against itself. Only as a party standing ior peace and innocence can this insurrectionary movement hope to be successful: it must conquer by means of excessive mildness, sweetness, softness, and its instincts are aware of this. The feat was to deny and con demn the force, of which man is the expression, and to press the reverse of that force continually to the fore, by word and deed.

      180. The pretence of youthfulness. It is a mistake to imagine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful people rose against an old culture; the story goes that it was out of the lowest levels of society, where Christianity flourished and shot its roots, that the more profound source of life gushed forth afresh: but nothing can be under stood of the psychology of Christianity, if it be supposed that it was the expression of revived youth among a people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is rather a typical form of decadence, of moral-softening and of hysteria, amid a general hotch-potch of races and people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and sick. The wonderful company which gathered round this master-seducer of the populace, would not be at all out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this crowd the absence of a known duty, the feeling that every- 151 thing is nearing its end, that nothing is any longer worth while, and that contentment lies in dolce far niente. The power and certainty of the future in the Jew s instinct, its monstrous will for life and for power, lies СКАЧАТЬ