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53. Why Atheism nowadays? "The father" in God is thoroughly refuted;
equally so "the judge," "the rewarder." Also his "free will": he does
not hear--and even if he did, he would not know how to help. The worst
is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he
uncertain?--This is what I have made out (by questioning and listening
at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of
European theism; it appears to me that though the religious instinct is
in vigorous growth,--it rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound
distrust.

54. What does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes--and
indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure--an
ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old
conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject
and predicate conception--that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the
fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy,
as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN,
although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious.
Formerly, in effect, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in
grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, "I" is the condition,
"think" is the predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for
which one MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made,
with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out
of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: "think" the
condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only a synthesis
which has been MADE by thinking itself. KANT really wished to prove
that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved--nor
the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT EXISTENCE of the
subject, and therefore of "the soul," may not always have been strange
to him,--the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the
Vedanta philosophy.

55. There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rounds; but
three of these are the most important. Once on a time men sacrificed
human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the
best--to this category belong the firstling sacrifices of all primitive
religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the
Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of all Roman
anachronisms. Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed
to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their "nature";
THIS festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and
"anti-natural" fanatics. Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed?
Was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything
comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in
future blessedness and justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God
himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity,
gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness--this
paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the
rising generation; we all know something thereof already.

56. Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire, has long
endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of pessimism and free it
from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and stupidity in which
it has finally presented itself to this century, namely, in the form of
Schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever, with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic
eye, has actually looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of
all possible modes of thought--beyond good and evil, and no longer
like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of
morality,--whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby, without
really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the opposite ideal: the
ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant, and vivacious man, who has
not only learnt to compromise and arrange with that which was and
is, but wishes to have it again AS IT WAS AND IS, for all eternity,
insatiably calling out da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole
piece and play; and not only the play, but actually to him who requires
the play--and makes it necessary; because he always requires
himself anew--and makes himself necessary.--What? And this would not
be--circulus vitiosus deus?

57. The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with the
strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world becomes
profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever coming into
view. Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised
its acuteness and profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise,
something of a game, something for children and childish minds. Perhaps
the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and
suffering, the conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of
no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to
an old man;--and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then
be necessary once more for "the old man"--always childish enough, an
eternal child!