The Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche

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idea imparts to him who is responsible for it, is placed to the credit of that idea: and as there seems no other way of honoring an idea than by calling it true, the first epithet it is honored with is the word true, . , . How could it have any effect other wise? It was imagined by some power: if that power were not real, it could not be the cause of anything. . . . The thought is then understood as inspired: the effect it causes has something of the violent nature of a demoniacal influence A thought which a decadent like Paul could not resist and to which he completely yields, is thus " proved " true All these holy epileptics and visionaries did not possess a thousandth part of the honesty in self-criticism with which a philologist, nowadays, reads a text, or tests the truth of an historical event. . . . Beside us, such people were moral cretins.

      172. whet) provided it be effective: total absence of intellectual It matters little whether a thing be true, 142 uprightness. Everything is good, whether it be lying, slander, or shameless " cooking," provided it serve to heighten the degree of heat to the point at which people " believe." We are face to face with an actual school for the teaching of the means wherewith men are seduced to a belief: we see systematic contempt for those spheres whence contradiction might come (that is to say, for reason, philosophy, wisdom, doubt, and caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the teaching, with continual refer ences to the fact that it was God who presented us with it that the apostle signifies nothing. that no criticism is brooked, but only faith, ac ceptance; that it is the greatest blessing and favour to receive such a doctrine of salvation; that the state in which one should receive it, ought to be one of the profoundest thankfulness and humility. . . . The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though they were the mean ing and salt of the earth. Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the 143 teaching; it is sufficient to take note of the means it uses in order to be aware of the nature of the phenomenon one is examining. It identified itself with virtue, it appropriated the whole of the fasci nating power of virtue, shamelessly, for its own purposes ... it availed itself of the power of paradox, and of the need, manifested by old civilisation, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed and revolted at the same time; it provoked per secutions and ill-treatment. It is the same kind of vdl-thought-out meanness with which the Jewish priesthood established their power and built up their Church. . . . One must be able to discern: (i)that warmth of passion " love " (resting on a base of ardent sensuality); (2) the thoroughly ignoble character of Christianity: the continual exaggeration and verbosity; the lack of cool intellectuality and irony; the unmilitary character of all its instincts; the priestly prejudices against manly pride, sensuality, the sciences, the arts.

      173. Paul: seeks power against ruling Judaism, his attempt is too weak. . . . Revaluation of the notion " Jew ": the " race " is put aside: but that means denying the very basis of the whole struc ture. The " martyr," the " fanatic," the value of all strong belief. Christianity is fat form of decay of the old world, after the latter s collapse, and it is characterised by the fact that it brings all the most sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top. 144 THE WILL T0 POWER. Consequently other instincts had to step into the foreground, in order to constitute an entity, a power able to stand alone in short, a condition of tense sorrow was necessary, like that out of which the Jews had derived their instinct of self-preserva tion. . . . The persecution of Christians was invaluable for this purpose. Unity in the face of danger; the conversion of the masses becomes the only means of putting an end to the persecution of the individual. (The notion " conversion " is therefore made as elastic as possible.)

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

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

      176. The reaction of paltry people: Love provides the feeling of highest power. It should be under stood to what extent, not man in general, but only a certain kind of man is speaking here. " We are godly in love, we shall be the children of God; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love "; that is to say: all morality, obedi ence, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does; a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone. Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living senti ment of unity felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, caring for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success, the * Vieles kann ich ertragen. Die meisten beschwerlichen Dinge Duld ich mit ruhigem Mut, wie es ein Gott mir gebeut. Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider; Viere: Rauch des Tabaks, Wanzen, und Knoblauch und J. Goethe s Venetian Epigrams, No. 67. Much can I bear. Things the most irksome I endure with such patience as comes from a god. Four things, however, repulse me like venom: Tobacco smoke, garlic, bugs, and the cross. (TRANSLATOR

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