The Portable Nietzsche (75 page)

At this point I do not let myself off without a psychology of ‟faith,” of ‟believers”—precisely for the benefit of “believers,” as is fitting. If today there is no lack of people who do not know in what way it is
indecent
to ‟believe”—
or
a sign of decadence, of broken will to life—tomorrow they will already know it. My voice reaches even the hard of hearing.

Unless I have heard wrong, it seems that among Christians there is a kind of criterion of truth that is called the “proof of strength.” “Faith makes blessed:
hence
it is true.” Here one might object first that it is precisely the making blessed which is not proved but merely
promised:
blessedness tied to the condition of ‟faith”—one shall become blessed
because
one believes. But whether what the priest promises the believer in fact occurs in a “beyond” which is not subject to any test—how is that proved? The alleged “proof of strength” is thus at bottom merely another faith, namely, that the effect one expects from faith will not fail to appear. In a formula: “I believe that faith makes blessed; consequently it is true.” But with this we are already at the end. This “consequently” would be absurdity itself as the criterion of truth.

But let us suppose, with some leniency, that it was proved that faith makes blessed (not merely desired, not merely promised by the somewhat suspicious mouth of a priest): would blessedness—or more technically speaking,
pleasure
—ever be a proof of truth? This is so far from the case that it almost furnishes a counterproof; in any event, the greatest suspicion of a “truth” should arise when feelings of pleasure enter the discussion of the question “What is true?” The proof of “pleasure” is a proof of ‟pleasure”—nothing else: how in all the world could it be established that true judgments should give greater delight than false ones and, according to a pre-established harmony, should necessarily be followed by agreeable feelings?

The experience of all severe, of all profoundly inclined, spirits teaches the
opposite.
At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have
integrity
in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart, that one despises “beautiful sentiments,” that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies.

 

51

That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but
puts
mountains where there are none—a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.
Not,
to be sure, a priest: for he denies instinctively that sickness is sickness, that madhouse is madhouse. Christianity
needs
sickness just as Greek culture needs a superabundance of health—to
make
sick is the true, secret purpose of the whole system of redemptive procedures constructed by the church. And the church itself—is it not the catholic madhouse as the ultimate ideal? The earth altogether as a madhouse?

The religious man, as the church wants him, is a typical decadent; the moment when a religious crisis overcomes a people is invariably marked by epidemics of the nerves; the “inner world” of the religious man looks exactly like the “inner world” of the overexcited and the exhausted; the “highest” states that Christianity has hung over mankind as the value of all values are epileptoid forms—only madmen or great impostors have been pronounced holy by the church
in maiorem dei honorem.
I once permitted myself to designate the whole Christian repentance and redemption training (which today is best studied in England) as a methodically produced
folie circulaire,
as is proper, on soil prepared for it, that is to say, thoroughly morbid soil. Nobody is free to become a Christian: one is not ‟converted” to Christianity—one has to be sick enough for it.

We others who have the
courage
to be healthy and also to despise—how may we despise a religion which taught men to misunderstand the body! which does not want to get rid of superstitious belief in souls! which turns insufficient nourishment into something “meritorious”! which fights health as a kind of enemy, devil, temptation! which fancies that one can carry around a “perfect soul” in a cadaver of a body, and which therefore found it necessary to concoct a new conception of ‟perfection”—a pale, sickly, idiotic-enthusiastic character, so-called ‟holiness.” Holiness—merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, unnerved, incurably corrupted body.

The Christian movement, as a European movement, has been from the start a collective movement of the dross and refuse elements of every kind (these want to get power through Christianity). It does
not
express the decline of a race, it is an aggregate of forms of decadence flocking together and seeking each other out from everywhere. It is
not
, as is supposed, the corruption of antiquity itself, of
noble
antiquity, that made Christianity possible. The scholarly idiocy which upholds such ideas even today cannot be contradicted harshly enough. At the very time when the sick, corrupt chandala strata in the whole
imperium
adopted Christianity, the
opposite type
, nobility, was present in its most beautiful and most mature form. The great number became master; the democratism of the Christian instincts
triumphed.
Christianity was not “national,” not a function of a race—it turned to every kind of man who was disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. At the bottom of Christianity is the rancor of the sick, instinct directed
against
the healthy,
against
health itself. Everything that has turned out well, everything that is proud and prankish, beauty above all, hurts its ears and eyes. Once more I recall the inestimable words of Paul: “The
weak
things of the world, the
foolish
things of the world, the
base
and
despised
things of the world hath God chosen.”
⁵³
This was the formula;
in hoc signo
decadence triumphed.

God on the
cross
—are the horrible secret thoughts behind this symbol not understood yet? All that suffers, all that is nailed to the cross, is
divine.
All of us are nailed to the cross, consequently we are divine. We alone are divine. Christianity was a victory, a nobler outlook perished of it—Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.

 

52

Christianity also stands opposed to every
spirit
that has turned out well; it can use only sick reason as Christian reason, it sides with everything idiotic, it utters a curse against the spirit, against the
superbia
of the healthy spirit. Because sickness is of the essence of Christianity, the typical Christian state, ‟faith,” must also be a form of sickness, and all straight, honest, scientific paths to knowledge must be rejected by the church as forbidden paths. Even doubt is a sin.

The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest—betrayed by his eyes—is a consequence of decadence: one should observe hysterical females and children with a tendency to rickets to see how regularly instinctive falseness, the inclination to lie in order to lie, and the incapacity for straight glances and steps are the expression of decadence. “Faith” means not
wanting
to know what is true.

The pietist, the priest of both sexes, is false because he is sick: his instinct demands that truth not be conceded its right at any point. “Whatever makes sick is
good
; whatever comes out of fullness, out of superabundance, out of power, is
evil
”—thus feels the believer.
Having no choice but to lie
—from that I can see at a glance if a man is a predestined theologian. Another sign of the theologian is his
incapacity for philology
. What is here meant by philology is, in a very broad sense, the art of reading well—of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand. Philology as
ephexis
in interpretation—whether it is a matter of books, the news in a paper, destinies, or weather conditions, not to speak of the “salvation of the soul.” The manner in which a theologian, in Berlin as in Rome, interprets a “verse of Scripture” or an event—for example, a victory of the armies of the fatherland, in the higher light of the Psalms of David—is always so audacious that a philologist can only tear his hair. And what is he to do when pietists and other cows from Swabia, with the aid of the “finger of God,” transform the wretched everyday and the parlor smoke of their existence into a miracle of “grace,” of “providence,” of “experiences of salvation”? Even the most modest expenditure of spirit, not to speak of
decency
, would suffice to bring these interpreters to the point of convincing themselves of the utter childishness and unworthiness of such an abuse of the dexterity of the divine fingers. Possessing even the tiniest bit of piety in the body, we should find a god who cures a cold at the right time or who bids us enter a coach at the very moment when a violent rainstorm begins, such an absurd god that we should have to abolish him if he existed. A god as servant, as mailman, as calendar man—at bottom, a word for the most stupid of all accidents. “Divine providence” of the kind in which approximately every third person in “educated Germany” still believes would be an objection to God so strong that one simply could not imagine a stronger one. And in any case, it is an objection to the Germans!

 

53

That
martyrs
prove anything about the truth of a matter is so far from true that I would deny that any martyr ever had anything whatsoever to do with truth. The tone with which a martyr throws his considering-something-true into the face of the world expresses such a low degree of intellectual integrity, such an
obtuseness
for the question of truth, that one never needs to refute a martyr. Truth is not something which one person might have and another not have: only peasants and peasant apostles like Luther can think that way about truth. One may be sure that modesty,
moderation
in this matter, becomes greater in proportion to the degree of conscientiousness in matters of the spirit. To have
knowledge
of five matters, and to refuse with a gentle hand to have
other
knowledge.

“Truth,” as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free spirit, every socialist, every churchman, is a perfect proof that not even a beginning has been made with that discipline of the spirit, that self-overcoming which is needed if any small, however small, truth is to be found.

The deaths of the martyrs, incidentally, have been a great misfortune in history: they
seduced
. The inference of all idiots, woman and the people included, that there must be something to a cause for which someone goes to his death (or which even, like early Christianity, generates death-seeking epidemics)—this inference has immeasurably thwarted examination, the spirit of examination, and caution. The martyrs have
harmed
truth.

Even today it takes only the crudity of a persecution to give an otherwise completely indifferent sectarianism an honorable name. How? Does it change the value of a thing if someone gives his life for it? An error that becomes honorable is an error which is that much more seductive. Do you believe, my dear theologians, that we would give you an occasion to become martyrs for your lie? One refutes a matter by laying it respectfully on ice—that is how one also refutes theologians. This precisely was the world-historical stupidity of all persecutors, that they gave the opposing cause the appearance of being honorable—that they gave it the fascination of martyrdom as a gift. Even today woman lies on her knees before an error because she has been told that somebody died on the cross for it.
Is the cross an argument?
But about all these things, only one man has said the word which was needed for thousands of years—
Zarathustra:

They wrote signs of blood on the way they walked, and their folly taught that with blood one proved truth. But blood is the worst witness of truth; blood poisons even the purest doctrine and turns it into delusion and hatred of the heart. And if a man goes through fire for his doctrine—what does that prove? Verily, it is more if your own doctrine comes out of your own fire.
⁵⁴

 

54

One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength,
freedom
which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look
beneath
themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions
beneath
oneself—
behind
oneself.

A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom, from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength. Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a
means:
many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them—it knows itself sovereign.