22.
The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the mastery, corrupted the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted taste in artibus et litteris [Google translate: taste in the arts and letters]— he corrupts it still. "Consequently?" I hope I shall be granted this "consequently"; at any rate, I am not going to prove it first. One solitary indication, it concerns the arch-book of Christian literature, their real model, their "book-in-itself." In the very midst of the Graeco-Roman splendour, which was also a splendour of books, face to face with an ancient world of writings which had not yet fallen into decay and ruin, at a time when certain books were still to be read, to possess which we would give nowadays half our literature in exchange, at that time the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators (they are generally called Fathers of the Church) dared to declare: "We too have our classical literature, we do not need that of the Greeks" — and meanwhile they proudly pointed to their books of legends, their letters of apostles, and their apologetic tractlets, just in the same way that to-day the English "Salvation Army" wages its fight against Shakespeare and other "heathens" with an analogous literature. You already guess it, I do not like the "New Testament"; it almost upsets me that I stand so isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this over-valued Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is against me; but what boots it! "Here I stand! I cannot help myself" [5] — I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament — yes, that is something quite different, all honour to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; further still, I find a people. In the New, on the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure rococo of the soul, twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic sweetness which appertains to the epoch (and the Roman province) and is less Jewish than Hellenistic. Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an emotional garrulousness that almost deafens; passionate hysteria, but no passion; painful pantomime; here manifestly every one lacked good breeding. How dare any one make so much fuss about their little failings as do these pious little fellows! No one cares a straw about it— let alone God. Finally they actually wish to have "the crown of eternal life," do all these little provincials! In return for what, in sooth? For what end? It is impossible to carry insolence any further. An immortal Peter! who could stand him! They have an ambition which makes one laugh: the thing dishes up cut and dried his most personal life, his melancholies, and common-or-garden troubles, as though the Universe itself were under an obligation to bother itself about them, for it never gets tired of wrapping up God Himself in the petty misery in which its troubles are involved.
Marcion believed that this cosmos in which we live bears witness to the existence of an inflexible, legalistic, and sometimes spiteful and vengeful God. This view arose from a quite literal reading of the Old Testament, which does contain several passages describing God in terms not quite conducive to divinity—or at least to the idea of the divine that was current in the Hellenistic era. Marcion then, following Paul (in Romans 1:20) declared that God is knowable through His creation; however, unlike Paul, Marcion did not take this “natural revelation” as evidence of God’s singularity and goodness. Quite the contrary, Marcion believed that he knew the God of this realm all too well, and that He was not worthy of the devotion and obedience that He demanded....
Moreover, instead of attempting to discover the historical connection between the revelation of Christ and the teachings of the Old Testament, Marcion simply rejected the latter in favor of the former, on the belief that only the Gospel (thoughtfully edited by Marcion himself) points us toward complete wisdom (Irenaeus 1.27.2-3; Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.3).
-- Gnosticism, by Edward Moore, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A famous medieval Gnostic sect, the Cathars, came to identify the Old Testament god, Jehovah, with the demiurge, the creator of the material world and therefore the equivalent of Satan. Within Gnosticism, then, existed the idea that the Jewish god was really the devil, responsible for all the evil in the world. He was opposed to the New Testament God. The Cathars tried to eliminate the Old Testament from Church theology and condemned Judaism as a work of Satan's, whose aim was to tempt men away from the spirit. Jehovah, they said, was the god of an earth "waste and void," with darkness "upon the face of the deep." Was he not cruel and capricious? They quoted Scripture to prove it. The New Testament God, on the other hand, was light. He declared that "there is neither male nor female," for everyone was united in Christ. These two gods, obviously, had nothing in common.
-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar
And how about the atrocious form of this chronic hobnobbing with God? This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, slobbering and clawing importunacy towards God!— There exist little despised "heathen nations'' in East Africa, from whom these first Christians could have learnt something worth learning, a little tact in worshipping; these nations do not allow themselves to say aloud the name of their God. This seems to me delicate enough, it is certain that it is too delicate, and not only for primitive Christians; to take a contrast, just recollect Luther, the most "eloquent" and insolent peasant whom Germany has had, think of the Lutherian tone, in which he felt quite the most in his element during his tete-a-tetes with God. Luther's opposition to the mediaeval saints of the Church (in particular, against "that devil's hog, the Pope"), was, there is no doubt, at bottom the opposition of a boor, who was offended at the good etiquette of the Church, that worship-etiquette of the sacerdotal code, which only admits to the holy of holies the initiated and the silent, and shuts the door against the boors. These definitely were not to be allowed a hearing in this planet — but Luther the peasant simply it otherwise; as it was, it was not German enough for him. He personally wished himself to talk direct, to talk personally, to talk "straight from the shoulder" with his God. Well, he's done it. The ascetic ideal, you will guess, was at no time and in no place, a school of good taste, still less of good manners — at the best it was a school for sacerdotal manners: that is, it contains in itself something which was a deadly enemy to all good manners. Lack of measure, opposition to measure it is itself a "non plus ultra [nothing further beyond]."
In the system of Ptolemy we are explicitly told that the cause of Sophia’s fall was her desire to know the ineffable Father. Since the purpose of the Father’s generating of the Aeons (of which Sophia was the last) was to “elevate all of them into thought” (Irenaeus 1.2.1) it was not permitted for any Aeon to attain a full knowledge of the Father. The purpose of the Pleroma was to exist as a living, collective expression of the intellectual magnitude of the Father, and if any single being within the Pleroma were to attain to the Father, all life would cease. This idea is based on an essentially positive attitude toward existence—that is, existence understood in the sense of striving, not for a reposeful end, but for an ever-increasing degree of creative or “constitutive” insight. The goal, on this view, is to produce through wisdom, and not simply to attain wisdom as an object or end in itself. Such an existence is not characterized by desire for an object, but rather by desire for the ability to persist in creative, constitutive engagement with/in one’s own “circumstance” (circumscribed stance or individual arena). When Sophia desired to know the Father, then, what she was desiring was her own dissolution in favor of an envelopment in that which made her existence possible in the first place. This amounted to a rejection of the gift of the Father—that is, of the gift of individual existence and life. It is for this reason that Sophia was not permitted to know the Father, but was turned back by the “boundary” (horos) that separates the Pleroma from the “ineffable magnitude” of the Father (Irenaeus 1.2.2).
-- Gnosticism, by Edward Moore, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
It alone is eternal since It does not need anything. For It is totally perfect. It does not lack anything such that anything would perfect It, but It is always completely perfect in light. It cannot be limited because there is nothing before It to limit It. It is inscrutable because there is no one who exists before It to scrutinize It. It is immeasurable because there is nothing which exists before It to measure It. It is invisible because there is no one to see It. It is an eternity existing eternally. It is ineffable because there is no one able to comprehend It in order to speak about It. It is unnameable because there is no one before It to name It. It is [the immeasurable light, which is pure, holy, and unpolluted. It is ineffable being perfect in incorruptibility. (It does) not (exist) in perfection, blessedness, or divinity but It is far superior (to these).
-- The Apocryphon of John, translated by Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse
23.
The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted — I shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to the end?). I have here to expose not what this ideal effected; but rather only what it means, on what it is based, what lies lurking behind it and under it, that of which it is the provisional expression, an obscure expression bristling with queries and misunderstandings. And with this object only in view I presumed "not to spare" my readers a glance at the awfulness of its results, a glance at its fatal results; I did this to prepare them for the final and most awful aspect presented to me by the question of the significance of that ideal. What is the significance of the power of that ideal, the monstrousness of its power? Why is it given such an amount of scope? Why is not a better resistance offered against it? The ascetic ideal expresses one will: where is the opposition will, in which an opposition ideal expresses itself? The ascetic ideal has an aim — this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it repudiates, denies, affirms, confirms, only in the sense of its own interpretation (and [was] there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system of interpretation?); it subjects itself to no power, rather does it believe in its own precedence over every power— it believes that nothing powerful exists in the world that has not first got to receive from "it" a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as being an instrument in its work, a way and means to its end, to one end. Where is the counterpart of this complete system of will, end, and interpretation? Why is the counterpart lacking? Where is the other "one aim"? But I am told it is not lacking, that not only has it fought a long and fortunate fight with that ideal, but that further it has already won the mastery over that ideal in all essentials: let our whole modern science attest this — that modern science, which, like the genuine reality-philosophy which it is, manifestly believes in itself alone, manifestly has the courage to be itself, the will to be itself, and has got on well enough without God, another world, and negative virtues.
With all their noisy agitator-babble, however, they effect nothing with me; these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices do not come from the deeps with sufficient audibility, they are not the mouthpiece for the abyss of scientific knowledge — for to-day scientific knowledge is an abyss — the word "science," in such trumpeter-mouths, is a prostitution, an abuse, an impertinence. The truth is just the opposite from what is maintained in the ascetic theory. Science has to-day absolutely no belief in itself, let alone in an ideal superior to itself, and wherever science still consists of passion, love, ardour, suffering it is not the opposition to that ascetic ideal, but rather the incarnation of its latest and noblest form. Does that ring strange? There are enough brave and decent working people, even among the learned men of to-day, who like their little corner, and who, just because they are pleased so to do, become at times indecently loud with their demand, that people to-day should be quite content, especially in science — for in science there is so much useful work to do. I do not deny it — there is nothing I should like less than to spoil the delight of these honest workers in their handiwork; for I rejoice in their work. But the fact of science requiring hard work, the fact of its having contented workers, is absolutely no proof of science as a whole having to-day one end, one will, one ideal, one passion for a great faith; the contrary, as I have said, is the case. When science is not the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal — but these are cases of such rarity, selectness, and exquisiteness, as to preclude the general judgment being affected thereby — science is a hiding-place for every kind of cowardice, disbelief, remorse, despectio sui [Google translate: contempt], bad conscience — it is the very anxiety that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent with an enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science not cover to-day? How much, at any rate, does it not try to cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both ends — their very mastery in their handiwork — how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a certain thing? Science as a self-anaesthetic: do you know that? You wound them — everyone who consorts with scholars experiences this — you wound them sometimes to the quick through just a harmless word; when you think you are paying them a compliment you embitter them beyond all bounds, simply because you didn't have the finesse to infer the real kind of customers you had to tackle, the sufferer kind (who won't own up even to themselves what they really are), the dazed and unconscious kind who have only one fear — coming to consciousness.
24.
And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of which I spoke, the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for opponents of the ascetic ideal, its arti-idealists? In fact, they believe themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all of them that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea of being opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on this subject, so passionate in word and gesture; — but does it follow that what they believe must necessarily be true? We "knowers" have grown by degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by step habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people have drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of proving what is believed, the conclusion of its actual improbability. We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation'': for that very reason we do deny that faith proves anything, — a strong faith, which produces happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it does not establish its "truth," it does establish a certain probability of — illusion. What is now the position in these cases? These solitaries and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic spirits, who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics," and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience dwells and is alive — in point of fact they believe themselves as far away as possible from the ascetic ideal, do these "free, very free spirits": and yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see — for they stand too near themselves: this ideal is simply their ideal, they represent it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves are its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form of seduction. — If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no free spirits; for they still believe in truth. When the Christian Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tallyword, that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their secretum, "Nothing is true, everything is allowed," — in sooth, that was freedom of thought, thereby was taking leave of the very belief in truth.
Free, equal, passionate, pagan, dominant,
Mystic, indomitable, self-controlled,
The red rose glowing on the cross of gold ...
-- The Vindication of Nietzsche, by Aleister Crowley
Has indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know from experience the Minotauros of this den. — I doubt it — nay, I know otherwise. Nothing is more really alien to these "monofanatics," these so-called "free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters — that dignified philosophic abstinence to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the factum brutum, that fatalism in ''petits faits" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation) — all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation). But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives, — make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject — he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis" — has first got to "turn upside-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself — the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it — and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, our world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief — even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we, too, take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But what if this belief becomes more and more incredible, what if nothing proves itself to be divine, unless it be error, blindness, lies — what if God Himself proved Himself to be our oldest lie?" — It is necessary to stop at this point and to consider the situation carefully. Science itself now needs a justification (which is not for a minute to say that there is such a justification). Turn in this context to the most ancient and the most modern philosophers: they all fail to realise the extent of the need of a justification on the part of the Will for Truth — here is a gap in every philosophy — what is it caused by? Because up to the present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"? From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists a new problem: the problem of the value of truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique— let us define by these words our own task — the value of truth is tentatively to be called in question.... (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend the reader to peruse again that passage from the Joyful Wisdom which bears the title, ''How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and best of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to The Dawn of Day.
25.
No! You can't get round me with science, when I search for the natural antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: "Where is the opposed will in which the opponent ideal expresses itself?" Science is not by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power which creates values, and in whose service it can believe in itself — science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself antagonistic: speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and dogmatising — it makes the life in the ideal free once more, while it repudiates its superficial elements. These two phenomena, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same basis — I have already made this clear — the basis, I say, of the same over-appreciation of truth (more accurately the same belief in the impossibility of valuing and of criticising truth), and consequently they are necessarily allies, so that, in the event of their being attacked, they must always be attacked and called into question together. A valuation of the ascetic ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch it! (Art, I am speaking provisionally, for I will treat it on some other occasion in greater detail, — art, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this — Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism — on the one side, the whole-hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic corruption that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter as of the former— add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life). Consider the periods in a nation in which the learned man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of decay — the effervescing strength, the confidence in life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderence of the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. (Science handled as a problem! what is the meaning of science? — upon this point the Preface to the Birth of Tragedy.) No! this "modern science" — mark you this well — is at times the best ally for the ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that it is the ally which is most unconscious, most automatic, most secret, and most subterranean! They have been playing into each other's hands up to the present, have these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (take care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis of this ideal, that they are the rich in spirit — that they are not; I have called them the hectic in spirit). As for these celebrated victories of science; there is no doubt that they are victories — but victories over what? There was not for a single minute any victory among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was it made stronger, that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main fortress and disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does any one seriously suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the downfall of that ideal? — Has, perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone — he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane — he rolls faster and faster away from the centre — whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"? — Well! this would be the straight way — to the old ideal? — All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as unnatural— by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason — nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's contempt of himself, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to counteract the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's victory over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)? — And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game — they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck! — he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query as God? (Xaver Doudan talks somewhere of the ravages which l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu [Google translate: the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of being simply the unknown] has produced — the ancients, he thinks, must have been exempt from those ravages.) Supposing that everything, "known" to man, fails to satisfy his desires, and on the contrary contradicts and horrifies them, what a divine way out of all this to be able to look for the responsibility, not in the "desiring" but in "knowing"! — "There is no knowledge. Consequently there is a God"; what a novel elegantia syllogismi! what a triumph for the ascetic ideal!
26.
Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its loftiest pretension is now to be a mirror; it repudiates all teleology; it will have no more "proving"; it disdains to play the judge, and thereby shows its good taste — it asserts as little as it denies, it fixes, it "describes." All this is to a high degree ascetic, but at the same time it is to a much greater degree nihilistic; make no mistake about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but determined gaze, — an eye that looks out as an isolated North Pole explorer looks out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?) -- there is snow — here is life silenced, the last crows which caw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada" — here nothing more flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg and the "pity" of Tolstoi. But as for that other school of historians a perhaps still more "modern" school, a voluptuous and lascivious school which ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour, which uses the word "artist" as a glove, and has nowadays established a "corner" for itself, in all the praise given to contemplation; oh, what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for ascetics and winter landscapes! Nay! The devil take these "contemplative" folk! How much liefer would I wander with those historical Nihilists through the gloomiest, grey, cold mist! — nay, I shall not mind listening (supposing I have to choose) to one who is completely unhistorical and anti-historical (a man, like Duhring for instance, over whose periods a hitherto shy and unavowed species of "beautiful souls" has grown intoxicated in contemporary Germany, the species anarchistica within the educated proletariate). The "contemplative" are a hundred times worse — I never knew anything which produced such intense nausea as one of those "objective" chairs [6] one of those scented mannikins-about-town of history, a thing half-priest, half-satyr (Renan parfum), which betrays by the high, shrill falsetto of his applause what he lacks and where he lacks it, who betrays where in this case the Fates have plied their ghastly shears, alas: in too surgeon-like a fashion! This is distasteful to me, and irritates my patience; let him keep patient at such sights who has nothing to lose thereby, — such a sight enrages me, such spectators embitter me against the "play," even more than does the play itself (history itself, you understand); Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature, who gave to the steer its horn, to the lion its , for what purpose did Nature give me my foot? — To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely to run away! To trample on all the worm-eaten "chairs," the cowardly contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence on my part to the ascetic ideal, in so far as it is honourable! So long as it believes in itself and plays no pranks on us! But I like not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition to smell of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life; I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look "objective"; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes, who hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I like not the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and the priest, and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not, again, these newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites, who nowadays roll their eyes in the patent Christian-Aryan-man-of-honour fashion, and by an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so cheap as to exhaust any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead elements in the populace (the invariable success of every kind of intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with the almost indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the German mind, whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above everything," [7] and finally the paralysis agitans of "modern ideas"). Europe nowadays is, above all, wealthy and ingenious in means of excitement; it apparently has no more crying necessity than stimulantia and alcohol. Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most fiery spirits of the mind; hence too the repulsive, evil-smelling, perjured, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I should like to know how many cargoes of imitation idealism, of hero-costumes and high falutin' clap-trap, how many casks of sweetened pity liqueur (Firm: la religion de la souffrance), how many crutches of righteous indignation for the help of these flat-footed intellects, how many comedians of the Christian moral ideal would need to-day to be exported from Europe, to enable its air to smell pure again. It is obvious that, in regard to this over-production, a new trade possibility lies open; it is obvious that there is a new business to be done in little ideal idols and obedient "idealists"— don't pass over this tip! Who has sufficient courage? We have in our hands the possibility of idealising the whole earth. But what am I talking about courage? we only need one thing here — a hand, a free, a very free hand.
27.
Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can certainly do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal — what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day? those things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in another connection (under the title "A Contribution to the History of European Nihilism," I refer for this to a work which I am preparing: The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values). The only reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere, only one real kind of enemies and damagers: these are the comedians of this ideal — for they awake mistrust. Everywhere otherwise, where the mind is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it dispenses altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for this abstinence is "Atheism") — with the exception of the will for truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its severest and cleverest formulation, esoteric through and through, stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so much its remnant as its kernel. Unqualified honest atheism (and its air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual men of this age) is not opposed to that ideal, to the extent that it appears to be; it is rather one of the final phases of its evolution, one of its syllogisms and pieces of inherent logic — it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself the lie of the belief in God. (The same course of development in India — quite independently, and consequently of some demonstrative value — the same ideal driving to the same conclusion the decisive point reached five hundred years before the European era, or more precisely at the time of Buddha — it started in the Sankhyam philosophy, and then this was popularised through Buddha, and made into a religion.)
What, I put the question with all strictness, has really triumphed over the Christian God? The answer stands in my Joyful Wisdom, Aph. 357: "the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was with increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral order of the world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained them, as though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now done away with, all this has the conscience against it, and is regarded by every subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice — by means of this severity, if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, good Europeans and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-mastery." ... All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary "self-mastery" even in the essence of life — ever is the law-giver finally exposed to the cry, "patere legem quam ipse tulisti [Google translate: he was open to the law that you have taken off]"; in thus wise did Christianity go to ruin as a dogma, through its own morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as a morality — we are standing on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it finally draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this, however, happens, when it puts the question, "what is the meaning of every will for truth?" And here again do I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness as a problem? — By reason of this attainment of self-consciousness on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward — there is no doubt about it — goes to pieces: this is that great hundred-act play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all plays.
28.
If you except the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man had no meaning. His existence on earth contained no end; "What is the purpose of man at all?" was a question without an answer; the will for man and the world was lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a refrain a still greater "Vanity!" The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something was lacking, that a tremendous void encircled man — he did not know how to justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was in the main a diseased animal; but his problem was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying question, "To what purpose do we suffer?" Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. Not suffering, but the senselessness of suffering was the curse which till then lay spread over humanity — and the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning! It was up till then the only meaning; but any meaning is better than no meaning; the ascetic ideal was in that connection the "faute de mieux [Google translate: lack of a better]" par excellence that existed at that time. In that ideal suffering found an explanation; the tremendous gap seemed filled; the door to all suicidal Nihilism was closed. The explanation — there is no doubt about it — brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more penetrating, more venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt; but in spite of all that — man was saved thereby, he had a meaning, and from henceforth was no more like a leaf in the wind, a shuttle-cock of chance, of nonsense, he could now "will" something — absolutely immaterial to what end, to what purpose, with what means he wished: the will itself was saved. It is absolutely impossible to disguise what in point of fact is made clear by complete will that has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hate of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get right away from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing and even desiring — all this means — let us have the courage to grasp it — a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains a will! — and to say at the end that which I said at the beginning — man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.
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Notes:
1. An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William Tell.
2. Mistress Sly. — Tr.
3. In the German text "Heiland." This has the double meaning of "healer" and "saviour."— H. B. S.
4. "Horrible beast."
5. "Here I stand! I cannot help myself. God help me! Amen" — were Luther's words before the Reichstag at Worms. — H. B. S.
6. E.g. Lectureships.
7. An illusion to the well-known patriotic song. — H. B. S.