know something thereof already.
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56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some
enigmatical 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
an 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 de capo, not only
to himself, but to the whole piece and play; and not only
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?
57. The distance, and as it were the space around man,
grows with the strength of his intellectual vision and
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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 conceptions 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
vulgarizes body and soul—is not quite unfamiliar? And
that consequently the modern, noisy, time-engrossing,
conceited, foolishly proud laboriousness educates and
prepares for ‘unbelief’ more than anything else? Among
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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
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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 pious, or merely
church-going people, there is seldom any idea of HOW
MUCH good-will, 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 deference 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
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indifference to religious matters in the midst of which he
has been born and brought up, usually sublimates itself in
his case into circumspection 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
naivete, for the discovery of which other ages may envy it:
and how much naivete—adorable, childlike, and
boundlessly foolish naivete is involved in this belief of the
scholar in his superiority, in the good conscience of his
tolerance, 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
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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 among 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 interpretation 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 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 superficial, so iridescent, and so good, that his
appearance no longer offends.
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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 proportion, its delicacy, its
gram 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!
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 contemporary political and
economic conditions. The selecting and disciplining
influence—destructive, as well as creative and
fashioning—which can be exercised 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
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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 agitation. The Brahmins, for instance, understood
this fact. With the help of a religious organization, they
secured to themselves the power of nominating 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
opportunity 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 delight in self-control are
on the increase. To them religion offers sufficient
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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 upwards 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 contentedness with their lot and condition,
peace of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional
social happiness and sympathy, with something of
transfiguration and embellishment, something of
justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness,
all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Religion,
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
perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and
Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to
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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.
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 excessive 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
necessarily 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 exception. 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
