The Portable Nietzsche (70 page)

Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The power of illusion is at its peak here, as is the power to sweeten and transfigure. In love man endures more, man bears everything. A religion had to be invented in which one could love: what is worst in life is thus overcome—it is not even seen any more.

So much for the three Christian virtues: faith, love, hope—I call them the three Christian
shrewdnesses.
Buddhism is too late, too positivistic, to be shrewd in this way.

 

24

Here I merely touch on the problem of the
genesis
of Christianity. The
first
principle for its solution is: Christianity can be understood only in terms of the soil out of which it grew—it is
not
a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its very consequence, one inference more in its awe-inspiring logic. In the formula of the Redeemer: “Salvation is of the Jews.” The
second
principle is: the psychological type of the Galilean is still recognizable; but only in its complete degeneration (which is at the same time a mutilation and an overloading with alien features) could it serve as that for which it has been used—as the type of a redeemer of mankind.

The Jews are the strangest people in world history because, confronted with the question whether to be or not to be, they chose, with a perfectly uncanny deliberateness, to be
at any price:
this price was the radical
falsification
of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves sharply
against
all the conditions under which a people had hitherto been able to live, been
allowed
to live; out of themselves they created a counter-concept to
natural
conditions: they turned religion, cult, morality, history, psychology, one after the other, into an incurable
contradiction to their natural values.
We encounter this same phenomenon once again and in immeasurably enlarged proportions, yet merely as a copy: the Christian church cannot make the slightest claim to originality when compared with the “holy people.” That precisely is why the Jews are the
most catastrophic
people of world history: by their aftereffect they have made mankind so thoroughly false that even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he himself is
the ultimate Jewish consequence.

In my
Genealogy of Morals
I offered the first psychological analysis of the counter-concepts of a
noble
morality and a morality of
ressentiment
—the latter born of the No to the former: but this is the Judaeo-Christian morality pure and simple. So that it could say No to everything on earth that represents the ascending tendency of life, to that which has turned out well, to power, to beauty, to self-affirmation, the instinct of
ressentiment,
which had here become genius, had to invent another world from whose point of view this affirmation of life appeared as evil, as the reprehensible as such.

Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily and out of the most profound prudence of self-preservation, take sides with all the instincts of decadence—
not
as mastered by them, but because they divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against “the world.” The Jews are the antithesis of all decadents: they have had to
represent
decadents to the point of illusion; with a
non plus ultra
of histrionic genius they have known how to place themselves at the head of all movements of decadence (as the Christianity of
Paul
), in order to create something out of them which is stronger than any
Yes-saying
party of life. Decadence is only a
means
for the type of man who demands power in Judaism and Christianity, the
priestly
type: this type of man has a life interest in making mankind
sick
and in so twisting the concepts of good and evil, true and false, as to imperil life and slander the world.

 

25

The history of Israel is invaluable as the typical history of all
denaturing
of natural values. I indicate five points.

Originally, especially at the time of the kings, Israel also stood in the right, that is, the natural, relationship to all things. Its Yahweh was the expression of a consciousness of power, of joy in oneself, of hope for oneself: through him victory and welfare were expected; through him nature was trusted to give what the people needed—above all, rain. Yahweh is the god of Israel and therefore the god of justice: the logic of every people that is in power and has a good conscience. In the festival cult these two sides of the self-affirmation of a people find expression: they are grateful for the great destinies which raised them to the top; they are grateful in relation to the annual cycle of the seasons and to all good fortune in stock farming and agriculture.

This state of affairs long remained the ideal, even after it had been done away with in melancholy fashion: anarchy within, the Assyrian without. The people, however, clung to the vision, as the highest desirability, of a king who is a good soldier and severe judge: above all, that typical prophet (that is, critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.

But all hopes remained unfulfilled. The old god was no longer able to do what he once could do. They should have let him go. What happened? They changed his concept—they denatured his concept: at this price they held on to him. Yahweh the god of “justice”—no longer one with Israel, an expression of the self-confidence of the people: now a god only under certain conditions.

The concept of God becomes a tool in the hands of priestly agitators, who now interpret all happiness as a reward, all unhappiness as punishment for disobeying God, as “sin”: that most mendacious device of interpretation, the alleged “moral world order,” with which the natural concepts of cause and effect are turned upside down once and for all. When, through reward and punishment, one has done away with natural causality, an
anti-natural
causality is required: now everything else that is unnatural follows. A god who
demands
—in place of a god who helps, who devises means, who is at bottom the word for every happy inspiration of courage and self-confidence.

Morality
—no longer the expression of the conditions for the life and growth of a people, no longer its most basic instinct of life, but become abstract, become the antithesis of life—morality as the systematic degradation of the imagination, as the “evil eye” for all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian, morality? Chance done out of its innocence; misfortune besmirched with the concept of “sin”; well-being as a danger, a “temptation”; physiological indisposition poisoned with the worm of conscience.

 

26

The concept of God falsified, the concept of morality falsified: the Jewish priesthood did not stop there. The whole of the
history
of Israel could not be used: away with it! These priests accomplished a miracle of falsification, and a good part of the Bible now lies before us as documentary proof. With matchless scorn for every tradition, for every historical reality, they translated the past of their own people into religious terms, that is, they turned it into a stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh, and punishment; of piety before Yahweh, and reward. We would experience this most disgraceful act of historical falsification as something much more painful if the
ecclesiastical
interpretation of history had not all but deafened us in the course of thousands of years to the demands of integrity in
historicis.
And the church was seconded by the philosophers: the
lie
of the “moral world order” runs through the whole development of modern philosophy. What does “moral world order” mean? That there is a will of God, once and for all, as to what man is to do and what he is not to do; that the value of a people, of an individual, is to be measured according to how much or how little the will of God is obeyed; that the will of God manifests itself in the destinies of a people, of an individual, as the ruling factor, that is to say, as punishing and rewarding according to the degree of obedience.

The reality in place of this pitiful lie is this: a parasitical type of man, thriving only at the expense of all healthy forms of life, the priest, uses the name of God in vain: he calls a state of affairs in which the priest determines the value of things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means by which such a state is attained or maintained “the will of God”; with cold-blooded cynicism he measures peoples, ages, individuals, according to whether they profited or resisted the overlordship of the priests. One should see them at work: in the hands of the Jewish priests the great age in the history of Israel became an age of decay; the Exile, the long misfortune, was transformed into an eternal punishment for the great age—an age in which the priest was still a nobody. Depending on their own requirements, they made either wretchedly meek and sleek prigs or “godless ones” out of the powerful, often very bold, figures in the history of Israel; they simplified the psychology of every great event by reducing it to the idiotic formula, “obedience
or
disobedience to God.”

One step further: the “will of God” (that is, the conditions for the preservation of priestly power) must be
known:
to this end a “revelation” is required. In plain language: a great literary forgery becomes necessary, a “holy scripture” is discovered; it is made public with full hieratic pomp, with days of repentance and cries of lamentation over the long “sin.” The “will of God” had long been fixed: all misfortune rests on one's having become estranged from the “holy scripture.” The “will of God” had already been revealed to Moses. What happened? With severity and pedantry, the priest formulated once and for all, down to the large and small taxes he was to be paid (not to forget the tastiest pieces of meat, for the priest is a steak eater), what he wants to have, “what the will of God is.” From now on all things in life are so ordered that the priest is indispensable everywhere; at all natural occurrences in life, at birth, marriage, sickness, death, not to speak of “sacrifices” (meals), the holy parasite appears in order to denature them—in his language: to “consecrate.”

For one must understand this: every natural custom, every natural institution (state, judicial order, marriage, care of the sick and the poor), every demand inspired by the instinct of life—in short, everything that contains its value
in itself
is made altogether valueless,
anti
-valuable by the parasitism of the priest (or the “moral world order”): now it requires a sanction after the event—a
value-conferring
power is needed to negate what is natural in it and to
create
a value by so doing. The priest devalues,
desecrates
nature: this is the price of his existence. Disobedience of God, that is, of the priest, of “the Law,” is now called “sin”; the means for “reconciliation with God” are, as is meet, means that merely guarantee still more thorough submission to the priest: the priest alone “redeems.”

Psychologically considered, “sins” become indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are the real handles of power. The priest
lives
on sins, it is essential for him that people “sin.” Supreme principle: “God forgives those who repent”—in plain language: those who submit to the priest.

 

27

On such utterly
false
soil, where everything natural, every natural value, every
reality
was opposed by the most profound instincts of the ruling class,
Christianity
grew up—a form of mortal enmity against reality that has never yet been surpassed. The “holy people,” who had retained only priestly values, only priestly words for all things and who, with awe-inspiring consistency, had distinguished all other powers on earth from themselves as “unholy,” as “world,” as “sin”—this people produced an ultimate formula for its instinct that was logical to the point of self-negation: as
Christianity,
it negated even the last form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” the Jewish reality itself. This case is of the first rank: the little rebellious movement which is baptized with the name of Jesus of Nazareth represents the Jewish instinct once
more
—in other words, the priestly instinct which can no longer stand the priest as a reality: the invention of a still more abstract form of existence, of a still more unreal vision of the world than is involved in the organization of a church. Christianity
negates
the church.

Jesus has been understood, or
misunderstood
as the cause of a rebellion; and I fail to see against what this rebellion was directed, if it was not the Jewish church—“church” exactly in the sense in which we use the word today. It was a rebellion against “the good and the just,” against “the saints of Israel,” against the hierarchy of society—
not
against its corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, and formula; it was the
disbelief
in the “higher man,” the No to all that was priest or theologian. But the hierarchy which was thus questioned, even though for just a moment, was the lake-dwelling on which alone the Jewish people could continue to exist amid the “water”—the hard-won last chance of survival, the residue of its independent political existence. An attack on this was an attack on the deepest instinct of a people, on the toughest life-will which has ever existed in any people on earth. That holy anarchist who summoned the people at the bottom, the outcasts and “sinners,” the chandalas within Judaism, to opposition against the dominant order—using language, if the Gospels were to be trusted, which would lead to Siberia today too—was a political criminal insofar as political criminals were possible at all in an absurdly unpolitical community. This brought him to the cross: the proof for this is the inscription on the cross. He died for
his
guilt. All evidence is lacking, however often it has been claimed, that he died for the guilt of others.