The Portable Nietzsche (10 page)

If one considers, on the other hand, that every original community requires a high degree of fearlessness in its members in other respects, then it becomes clear that what is to be feared in the case of morality must inspire fear in the very highest degree. Therefore mores have been introduced everywhere as functions of a divine will, hiding under the fearfulness of gods and demonic means of punishment—and being immoral would then mean: not fearing the infinitery fearful.

Of anyone who denied the gods one expected anything: he was automatically the most fearsome human being, whom no community could suffer because he tore out the roots of fear on which the community had grown. It was supposed that in such a person desire raged unlimited: one considered every human being without such fear infinitely evil. . . .

The more peaceful a community has become, the more cowardly the citizens become; the less accustomed they are to standing pain, the more will worldly punishments suffice as deterrents, the faster will religious threats become superfluous. . . . In highly civilized peoples, finally, even punishments should become highly superfluous deterrents; the mere fear of shame, the trembling of vanity, is so continually effective that immoral actions are left undone. The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings. One would like ever so much to live in such a way as to do nothing except what causes others
agreeable
feelings, and even to take pleasure in nothing any more that does not also fulfill this condition.

(x, 372-75)

One hardly dares speak any more of the will to power: it was different in Athens.

(x, 414)

The reabsorption of semen by the blood is the strongest nourishment and, perhaps more than any other factor, it prompts the stimulus of power, the unrest of all forces toward the overcoming of resistances, the thirst for contradiction and resistance. The feeling of power has so far mounted highest in abstinent priests and hermits (for example, among the Brahmins).

(x, 414
f
.)

Another collection of aphorisms, first published in 1881.

 

[16]

First principle of civilization
. Among crude peoples there is a species of customs, the intent of which appears to be custom as such: fastidious and at bottom useless ordinances (as, for example, on Kamchatka, never to scrape the snow off the shoes with a knife, never to spear a coal with a knife, never to put any iron into a fire—and death to him who transgresses in such matters!) which, however, keep in the consciousness the perpetual nearness of custom, the relentless compulsion to live up to custom. To confirm the great principle with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom.

 

[68]

The first Christian
. All the world still believes in the authorship of the “Holy Spirit” or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for “edification.” . . . That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul—who knows this, except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity; we should scarcely have heard of a small Jewish sect whose master died on the cross. Of course, if this story had been understood in time; if Paul's writings had been read not as revelations of the “Holy Spirit” but with an honest and free spirit of one's own, and without at the same time thinking of all our personal troubles, if they had
really been read
—and for a millennium and a half there were no such readers—then Christianity would have been done for long ago: so much do these pages of the Jewish Pascal expose the origin of Christianity, just as the pages of the French Pascal expose its destiny and that of which it will perish.

That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans—that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea—or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never resting question: what about the Jewish law? and particularly the fulfillment of this law? In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it, with a ravenous hunger for this highest distinction which the Jews could conceive—this people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime, and who alone succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this holiness. Paul became the fanatical defender of this god and his law and guardian of his honor; at the same time, in the struggle against the transgressors and doubters, lying in wait for them, he became increasingly harsh and evilly disposed to them, and inclined toward the most extreme punishments. And now he found that—hot-headed, sensual, melancholy, malignant in his hatred as he was—he was himself unable to fulfill the law; indeed, and this seemed strangest to him, his extravagant lust to domineer provoked him continually to transgress the law, and he had to yield to this thorn.

Is it really his “carnal nature” that makes him transgress again and again? And not rather, as he himself suspected later, behind it the law itself, which must constantly prove itself unfulfillable and which lures him to transgression with irresistible charm? But at that time he did not yet have this way out. He had much on his conscience—he hints at hostility, murder, magic, idolatry, lewdness, drunkenness, and pleasure in dissolute carousing—and . . . moments came when he said to himself: “It is all in vain; the torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome.” Luther may have had similar feelings when, in his monastery, he wanted to become the perfect man of the spiritual ideal: and just as Luther one day began to hate the spiritual ideal and the Pope and the saints and the whole clerisy with a true, deadly hatred—all the more the less he could own it to himself—so it was with Paul. The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! how he resented it! how he searched for some means to annihilate it—not to fulfill it any more himself!

And finally the saving thought struck him, together with a vision—it could scarcely have happened otherwise to this epileptic. . . . Paul heard the words: “Why dost thou persecute
me?
” The essential occurrence, however, was this: his
head
had suddenly seen a light: “It is
unreasonable,”
he had said to himself, “to persecute this Jesus! Here after all is the way out; here is the perfect revenge; here and nowhere else I have and hold
the annihilator of the law!”.
. . Until then the ignominious death had seemed to him the chief argument against the Messianic claim of which the adherents of the new doctrine spoke: but what if it were necessary to get rid of the law?

The tremendous consequences of this idea, of this solution of the riddle, spin before his eyes; at one stroke he becomes the happiest man; the destiny of the Jews —no, of all men—seems to him to be tied to this idea, to this second of its sudden illumination; he has the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; it is around him that all history must revolve henceforth. For he is from now on the teacher of the
annihilation of the law. . . .

This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity. Until then there were only a few Jewish sectarians.

 

[76]

Thinking evil means making evil.
The passions become evil and insidious when they are considered evil and insidious. Thus Christianity has succeeded in turning Eros and Aphrodite—great powers, capable of idealization—into hellish goblins. . . . In themselves the sexual feelings, like those of pity and adoration, are such that one human being thereby gives pleasure to another human being through his delight; one does not encounter such beneficent arrangements too frequently in nature. And to slander just such a one and to corrupt it through bad conscience! To associate the procreation of man with bad conscience!

In the end this transformation of Eros into a devil wound up as a comedy: gradually the “devil” Eros became more interesting to men than all the angels and saints, thanks to the whispering and the secret-mongering of the Church in all erotic matters: this has had the effect, right into our own time, of making the
love story
the only real interest shared by
all
circles—in an exaggeration which would have been incomprehensible in antiquity and which will yet be laughed at someday. . . .

 

[84]

The philology of Christianity.
How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be seen pretty well from the writings of its scholars: they advance their conjectures as blandly as dogmas and are hardly ever honestly perplexed by the exegesis of a Biblical verse. Again and again they say, “I am right, for it is written,” and the interpretation that follows is of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist is stopped in his tracks, torn between anger and laughter, and keeps asking himself: Is it possible? Is this honest? Is it even decent?

What dishonesties of this sort are still perpetrated from Protestant pulpits today, how crudely the preachers exploit the advantage that nobody can interrupt them, how the Bible is pricked and pulled and
the art of reading badly
formally inculcated upon the people—all this will be underestimated only by those who go to church either never or always.

In the end, however, what are we to expect of the aftereffects of a religion that enacted during the centuries of its foundation that unheard-of philological farce about the Old Testament? I refer to the attempt to pull away the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews—with the claim that it contains nothing but Christian doctrines and
belongs
to the Christians as the
true
Israel, while the Jews had merely usurped it. And now the Christians yielded to a rage of interpretation and interpolation, which could not possibly have been accompanied by a good conscience. However much the Jewish scholars protested, everywhere in the Old Testament there were supposed to be references to Christ and only to Christ, and particularly to his cross. Wherever any piece of wood, a switch, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, or a staff is mentioned, this was supposed to indicate a prophecy of the wood of the cross. . . .

Has anybody who claimed this ever
believed
it? . . .

 

[97]

One becomes moral—not because one is moral.
Submission to morality can be slavish or vain or selfish or resigned or obtusely enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of desperation, like submission to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral.

 

[101]

Doubtful.
To accept a faith just because it is customary, means to be dishonest, to be cowardly, to be lazy. And do dishonesty, cowardice, and laziness then appear as the presupposition of morality?

 

[123]

Reason
. How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle.

 

[164]

Perhaps premature. . . .
There is no morality that alone makes moral, and every ethic that affirms itself exclusively kills too much good strength and costs humanity too dearly. The deviants, who are so frequently the inventive and fruitful ones, shall no longer be sacrificed; it shall not even be considered infamous to deviate from morality, in thought and deed; numerous new experiments of life and society shall be made; a tremendous burden of bad conscience shall be removed from the world—these most general aims should be recognized and promoted by all who are honest and seek truth.