03 - The Religious Mood - Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

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1:03That's why you should ask your doctor about a simple urine test called UACR. Most miss the signal for hidden kidney disease and related heart risk. You shouldn't. Visit detectthesos.com today to learn more. Chapter 3. The Religious Moot. 45. The human soul and its limits. The range of a man's inner experiences. Rather to attain the heights, depths and distances of these experiences. The entire history of the soul up to the present time and it's still un-exhausted possibilities. This is the preordained hunting domain for born psychologist and lover of a big hunt. But how often must he say despairingly to himself, a single individual alas only a single individual and this great forest, this virgin forest? So he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants and find trained hounds

2:08that he could send into the history of the human soul to drive his game together. In vain, again and again he experiences profoundly and bitterly. How difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all the things that directly excite his curiosity. The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting domains were courage, sagacity and subtlety in every sense are required, is that there are no longer serviceable just when the big hunt and also the great danger commences. It is precisely then that they lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for instance, to define and determine what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience has hitherto had in the souls of Homenes Relogycee, a person would perhaps

3:08himself have to process a profound as bruised as immense an experience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal. And then he would still require that widespread heaven of clear wicked spirituality, which from above would be able to oversee a range and effectively formalize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences. But who would do me this service and who would have time to wait for such servants? They evidently appear too rarely, they are so improbable at all times. Eventually one must do everything oneself in order to know something, which means that one has much to do. But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices, pardon me, I mean to say that the love of truth has its reward in heaven and already upon earth.

4:1446. Faith, such as early Christianity, desired and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southerly free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it. Everything besides the education intolerance, which the Imperium Romanum gave. This faith is not that sincere, austere slave faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity. It is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason, a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow. The Christian faith from the beginning is sacrifice, the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride,

5:18all self-confidence of spirit. It is the same time, subjection, self-derision and self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious finitionism in this faith, which is adapted to a tender, many-sided and very fastidious conscience. It takes for granted that the subjection of the spirit isn't describably painful, that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdism in the form of which faith comes to it. Other men with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, God on the cross. Hither too, there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at one so dreadful, questioning and questionable as this formula.

6:24It promised a transvaluation of all ancient values. It was the Orient, the profound Orient. It was the Oriental slave who thus took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-minded toleration. On the Roman Catholicism of non-faith, and it was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them. Enlightenment causes revolt. For the slave desires the unconditioned, he understands nothing but the tyrannis even in morals. He loves as he hates without nuance, to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Jamba.

7:24Jump in at JambaCasino.com. Let's Jamba. No purchase necessary. BTW Group. Boy, we're prohibited by law. CCNC. 21 Plus. Sponsored by JambaCasino. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a long-time reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love romcoms? Do you wish you could talk about Christmas movies year round? Then we have the perfect podcast for you. Throughout the year, we cover all things romance, holiday and whole mark, including recaps of every homework show, like when calls the heart and the way home.

8:24You can also get loads of bonus content covering shows like Bridgerton, Sweet Magnolia, and and just like that. We are an all-female group of friends who are passionate for these shows and movies and give our honest opinions as well as gosh over what we love so much. So that's not all. Every Monday, there are interviews with all your favorite actors, writers, directors and more. Check out Home Merkies Podcasts on all your podcast providers and on YouTube. That's Home Merkies Podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts. His many hidden sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to deny suffering. The skepticism with regard to suffering fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic morale was not the least of the causes, also the last great slave insurrection which began with the French Revolution. 47. Whenever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen,

9:34solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. But without its 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 civilized peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then with equal suddenness transforms into penitential peroxams, 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 their grown such a massive absurdity and superstition. No other type seems to have been more interesting to men and even to philosophers.

10:36Perhaps 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 have sharpened our, we find most as the problem in itself, this terrible note of interrogation of the religious crisis and awakening. How is the negation of will possible? How is the same possible? That seems to have been the very question with which Schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher. And thus it was genuine Schopenhorean 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 stages' country, type Veku.

11:37And it is 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 outbreak and display as the Salvation Army. If it be in 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 antithical. It was believed here to be self-evident that the bad man was all at once turned into a saint, a good man. The hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point.

12:37It is not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals because it believed that oppositions of moral values and saw, read and interpreted these oppositions into the text and facts of the case. What? Miracle only in error of interpretation? A lack of philology? 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 undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races.

13:40Even 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 there to forefurnished also the best soil for 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 skeptics, wherever there is any Celtic blood in their origin. How Catholic, how un-German does Auguste comps sociology seem to us with the Roman logic of its instincts. How Jesuitical, that amiable and true cisterone of Port Royal, St. Booth in spite of all his hostility to Jesuits, and even Ernest Rennon. How inaccessible to us northerners does the language of such a Rennon appear in whom every instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws his refined voluptuous and comfortable couching soul off its balance.

14:52Let us repeat after him these fine sentences, and what wickedness and haughtiness is immediately aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but harder souls. That is to say in our more German souls. The souls don't harry men, que la religion est un produt de la home normal. Que les hommes les plus dans les bras quantilest. Les plus religioucs, les plus assur d'un testifini. Ces quantilest bon qu'ils votent, que la vertout correspondent à un ordain éternal, c'est quantil contempler les choses d'une manière. D'estressi, qu'il trove la mort revolote, et absurd, comment ne pas supposer que c'est dans ces monstres la que l'on voit le mieux.

15:55These 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 nacerre religieuse par excellence. Until in my later rage I 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 irrespectable 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 populist got the upper hand in Greece, fear became so rampant also in religion and Christianity was preparing itself.

16:5750. The Passion for God, there are churlish, honest-hearted, and in portune kinds of it. Like that of Luther, the whole of Protestantism lats the southern de la Cateza. There is an oriental exaltation of the mind in it, like that of an undeservedly favored or elevated slave. As in the case of St. Augustine for incidents, 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 an uniomistica at fisica, as in the case of Madame de Guine. In many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a girl's or a youth's puberty. Here and there, even in the hysteria of an old maid, also as her last ambition.

17:57The church has frequently canonized the woman in such a case. 51. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with Chumba by my side. Race to chumpacacino.com. Let's Chumba. No purchase necessary. VTW Group, voidware prohibited by law. CTNC's, 21 Plus, sponsored by ChumbaCacino. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your podcasts. This is Mike Voilo of Lexicon Valley.

18:57And I'm Bob Garfield. Are you one of those people who sometimes uses words? Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know, language? Hey, us too. So join us on Lexicon Valley to true over the history, culture, and many mysteries of English. Plus some ice cracks. Find us on one of those apps where people listen to podcasts. The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before the saint. As the Ignigma of self-subjugation and other 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 test itself by such a subjugation. The strength of will in which they recognized their own strength and love of power and knew how to honor it.

19:58They honored something in themselves when they honored 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 ecstatic might wish to be more accurately informed through his secret into locutors and visitors. In a word, the mighty ones of the 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 hope 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

21:01that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about Old Asia and its little outpushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the progress of mankind. To be sure he who himself, only a slender, tame house animal, and knows only the wants of a house animal, like our cultured people of today, including the Christians of cultured Christianity, need neither be amazed nor even sad 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.

22:04There is much of the odor of the genuine tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it. To have bound up this New Testament, a kind of Rococo of taste and ever 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 conscience. 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,

23:06to be the cause of the client of European Theism. It appears to me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth, it rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust. 54. What does all modern philosophy do? Since they cart and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure, an atentat 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 it is to say, an atentat on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as an epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly anti-Christian, although for keener ears be it said, by no means anti-religious.

24:06Formerly, 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 marvelous tenacity 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 conditioned, I therefore only a synthesis which has been made by thinking itself. Can't really wish 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.

25:10The thought that once in immense power on earth as the vendetta philosophy. Fifty-five. There is a great ladder of religious cruelty with many rounds, but three of these are the most important. Once on a time men sacrifice human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they love 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 immoral epoch of mankind, they sacrifice their God the strongest instincts they possess, their nature. This festival joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and antinatural fanatics, finally what still remain to be sacrificed, was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything,

26:17comforting, 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, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God from nothingness, this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation. We all know something, therefore already. 56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatic desire, has long endeavored 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. However, with an asiatic and super-asiatic eye, has actually looked inside and into the most world-renouncing of all possible modes of thought,

27:25beyond 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 arranged with that which was and is, but wishes to have it again as it was and is, for all eternally, insatiably calling out to Kapo not only to himself, but to the whole peace and play, and not only the play, but actually to him who requires the play, and makes it necessary, because he always requires himself a new, and makes himself necessary. What? And this would not be, circulous, vicious days, 57.

28:29The distance, and as it were, the space around man grows with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight. His world become profounder, new stars, new igno-thomas, and notions are ever coming into view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised his 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 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 be then necessary once more for the old man, always childish enough, and eternal child. Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness or semi-idleness is necessary to a religious life?

29:35A light for its favorite microscopic labor 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 dishonoring, that it vulgarizes the body and soul, is it 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 these, for instance, who are at present living apart from a religion in Germany, I find free thinkers of diversified species in origin, but above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness, from generation to generation, was 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.

30:45They 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, without much curiosity or discomfort. They live too much apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a four or against in such matters.

31:45Among those in different persons may be recognized the majority of German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the great laborious centers 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 Pius or merely church-going people, there 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 workmen like 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 anyone still professes to belong to the church.

32:50It 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 difference in religious presence of religions. But even when his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them, he is 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 supplements itself in his case into circumspension and cleanliness, which shuns contact with religious men and things. And it may just be 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,

34:02in 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 men, the sedulously alert, head and hand-drudge of ideas of modern ideas. 59 Hi, this is Alex Cantrowicz, I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a long-time reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC.

35:06And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it. Asking where this is all going, to come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The sun shining, birds are singing and all feels right in the world. Until the season changes, and suddenly you lose your motivation to get out of bed. In fact, one in five people experience some form of depression no matter the season or time of year. At the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy nation for all. Because we want you to live your best life and be your best you all year round. Please visit mentallyhealthination.org to learn more. Whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial.

36:11It is their preservative instinct that teaches them to be flighty, light some 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 birth children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to falsify its image, as if taking wear some 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, altruified and deified. One might reckon that hominous relogacy 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.

37:20The fear of the instinct which divides a truth might be attained too soon before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artists 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 artists' adoration and artists' 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. Paragraph 60 To love mankind for God's sake, this has so far been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained.

38:25That love to mankind without any redeeming intention to 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 abergies from an entire 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. Paragraph 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.

39:27The selecting and disciplining influence, the 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 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 inner most 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.

40:29Religion 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 incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silencing of solitude.

41:36A seticism in puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race, which seems to rise above its heredity, 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 contentiveness with their lot and condition, piece of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification of all commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semi-annual 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 indurable to them.

42:36It operates upon them as the Epicurian 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 hollowing and vindicating it. There is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to 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 difficult being necessary. Paragraph 62. To be sure to make also the bad counter reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers, the causes 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.

43:42Among 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 of man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will succeed, the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifest 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 endeavor to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved.

44:47In fact, as the religions for sufferers, they take the part of theities upon principle. They are always in favor of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would feign treat every other experience of life as false and impossible. However, highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care, and as much as in applying to others, it has supplied 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 principle causes which have kept the type of man upon a lower level. They have preserved 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 should be oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into covenants and spiritual penitentiaries that broken hardened and distracted,

46:02what 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 indeed in truth to work for the deterioration of the European race, to reverse all estimates 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-destruction. For soot to invert all love of the earth, 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, uncentuousness, and higher man, fused into one sentiment.

47:14If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurian God, I should think one would never cease marveling and laughing. Does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for 18 centuries in order to make a sublime abortion of man? He, however, who with opposite requirements no longer Epicurian, and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration, 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. O 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?

48:25I should say that Christianity has here thereto been the most portentious of presumptions. Men not great enough, nor hard enough to be entitled as artists, to take part in fashioning men, men not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to allow with sublime self-constraint. The obvious law of the thousandfold failures and passions to prevail, men not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man. Such men, with their quality before God, have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe. Until at last adorft, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obligingly sickly meyoker, the European of the present day. End of chapter 3

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