Read Beyond God and Evil Online

62. To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such
religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is
always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an
educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but
rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end,
and not a means along with other means. Among men, as among all other
animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating,
infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases,
among men also, are always the exception; and in view of the fact that
man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare
exception. But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the
greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the
law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests
itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of
men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult
to determine. What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions
above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour
to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the
religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle;
they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a
disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as
false and impossible. However highly we may esteem this indulgent and
preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied,
and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of
man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give a general appreciation
of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of
"man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD
HAVE PERISHED. One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is
sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation
of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe
hitherto! But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to
the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless,
and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual
penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they
to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good
conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which
means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE
EUROPEAN RACE? To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they
had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast
suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous,
manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the
highest and most successful type of "man"--into uncertainty, distress
of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the
earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and
earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and
was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value,
"unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one
sentiment. If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse
and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and
impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease
marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will
has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME
ABORTION of man? He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer
Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this
almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in
the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to
cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous
pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands?
How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed
to do!"--I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most
portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough,
to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men,
not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime
self-constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and
perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically
different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from
man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed
the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species
has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly,
mediocre, the European of the present day.