The Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche

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for his sins. " Sin is of no account " is practically his chief standpoint. Sin, repentance, forgiveness, all this does not belong to Christianity ... it is Judaism or Paganism which has become mixed up with Christ s teaching.

      161. The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of the heart (of children it is written, " for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven "): it has nothing to do with superterrestrial things. The Kingdom of God " cometh," not chronologically or historically, not on a certain day in the calendar; it is not something which one day appears and was not previously there; it is a " change of feeling in the individual," it is something which may come at any time and which may be absent at any time. . . .

      162. The thief on the cross; When the criminal him self, who endures a painful death, declares: " the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without a murmur of revolt or enmity, graciously and resignedly, is the only right way," he assents to the gospel; and by this very fact he is in Paradise. . . .

      163. Jesus bids us: not to resist, either by deeds or in our heart, him who ill-treats us; He bids us admit of no grounds for separating ourselves from our wives; 135 He bids us make no distinction between foreigners and fellow-countrymen, strangers and familiars; He bids us show anger to no one, and treat no one with contempt; give alms secretly; not to desire to become rich; not to swear; not to stand in judgment; become reconciled with our enemies and forgive offences; not to worship in public. " Blessedness " is nothing promised: it is here, with us, if we only wish to live and act in a par ticular way.

      164. Subsequent Additions; The whole of the prophet- and thaumaturgist-attitudes and the bad temper; while the conjuring-up of a supreme tribunal of justice is an abominable corruption (see Mark vi. 1 1: " And whosoever shall not receive you. . . . Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha," etc.). The "fig tree" (Matt. xxi. 18, 19): "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee hence forward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away."

      165. The teaching of rewards and punishments has become mixed up with Christianity in a way which is quite absurd; everything is thereby spoilt. I3 6 In the same way, the practice of the first ecclesia militant, of the Apostle Paul and his attitude, is put forward as if it had been commanded or pre- determined. The subsequent glorification of the actual life and teaching of the first Christians: as if every thing had been prescribed beforehand and had been only a matter of following directions And as for the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies: how much of all that is more than forgery and cooking?

      166. Jesus opposed a real life, a life in truth, to ordinary life: nothing could have been more foreign to His mind than the somewhat heavy nonsense of an eternal Peter," of the eternal duration of a single person. Precisely what He combats is the exaggerated importance of the " person ": how can He wish to immortalise it? He likewise combats the hierarchy within the community; He never promises a certain propor tion of reward for a certain proportion of deserts: how can He have meant to teach the doctrine of punishment and reward in a Beyond?

      167. Christianity is an ingenuous attempt at bringing about a Buddhistic movement in favour of peace, sprung from the very heart of the resenting masses ... but transformed by Paul into a mysterious pagan cult, which was ultimately able to accord 137 with the whole of State organization . . . and which carries on war, condemns, tortures, conjures, and hates. Paul bases his teaching upon the need of mystery felt by the great masses capable of religious emotions: he seeks a victim a bloody phantasmagoria, which may be equal to a contest with the images of a secret cult: God on the cross, the drinking of blood, the unto mystica with the " victim." He seeks the prolongation of life after death (the blessed and atoned after-life of the individual soul) which he puts in causal relation with the victim already referred to (according to the type of Dionysos, Mithras, Osiris). He feels the necessity of bringing notions of guilt and sin into the foreground, not a new practice of life (as Jesus Himself demonstrated and taught), but a new cult,a newbelief,a beliefin a mira culous metamorphosis (" Salvation " through belief). He understood the great needs of the pagan world, and he gave quite an absolutely arbitrary picture of those two plain facts, Christ s life and death. He gave the whole a new accent, altering the equilibrium everywhere ... he was one of the most active destroyers of primitive Christianity. The attempt made on the life of priests and theo logians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priest hood and theology a ruling caste and a Church. The attempt made to suppress the fussy im portance of the " person," culminated in the belief in the eternal " personality " (and in the anxiety concerning " eternal salvation " . . .), and in the 138 most paradoxical exaggeration of individual egoism. This is the humorous side of the question tragic humour: Paul again set up on a large scale precisely what Jesus had overthrown by His life. At last, when the Church edifice was complete, it even sanctioned the existence of the State.

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

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

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

      171. Concerning the psychology of Paul. The im portant fact is Christ s death. This remains to be explained. . . . That there may be truth or error in an explanation never entered these people s heads: one day a sublime possibility strikes them, " His death might mean so and so " 14! and it forthwith becomes so and so. An hypo thesis is proved by the sublime ardour it lends to its discoverer. . . . " The proof of strength ": i.e., a thought is demonstrated by its effects (" by their fruits," as the Bible ingenuously says); that which fires en thusiasm must be true, what one loses one s blood for must be true In every department of this world of thought, the sudden feeling of power which

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