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49. That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient
Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it pours
forth--it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an attitude
towards nature and life.--Later on, when the populace got the upper hand
in Greece, FEAR became rampant also in religion; and Christianity was
preparing itself.

50. The passion for God: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and
importunate kinds of it, like that of Luther--the whole of Protestantism
lacks the southern DELICATEZZA. There is an Oriental exaltation of the
mind in it, like that of an undeservedly favoured or elevated slave, as
in the case of St. Augustine, for instance, who lacks in an offensive
manner, all nobility in bearing and desires. There is a feminine
tenderness and sensuality in it, which modestly and unconsciously longs
for a UNIO MYSTICA ET PHYSICA, as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In
many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a girl's
or youth's puberty; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid,
also as her last ambition. The Church has frequently canonized the woman
in such a case.

51. The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before
the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter voluntary
privation--why did they thus bow? They divined in him--and as it were
behind the questionableness of his frail and wretched appearance--the
superior force which wished to test itself by such a subjugation; the
strength of will, in which they recognized their own strength and
love of power, and knew how to honour it: they honoured something
in themselves when they honoured the saint. In addition to this, the
contemplation of the saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an
enormity of self-negation and anti-naturalness will not have been
coveted for nothing--they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a
reason for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might
wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors and
visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new
fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered
enemy:--it was the "Will to Power" which obliged them to halt before the
saint. They had to question him.

52. In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are
men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian
literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and
reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and
one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little out-pushed peninsula
Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the
"Progress of Mankind." To be sure, he who is himself only a slender,
tame house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like
our cultured people of today, including the Christians of "cultured"
Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins--the
taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and
"small": perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace,
still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the
genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound
up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along
with the Old Testament into one book, as the "Bible," as "The Book in
Itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the Spirit"
which literary Europe has upon its conscience.