Human, All-Too-Human: A Book For Free Spirits; Part II

The Most Noble Virtue. – In the first era of the higher humanity courage is accounted the most noble virtue, in the next justice, in the third temperance, in the fourth wisdom. In which era do we live? In which do you live?

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A Necessary Preliminary. – A man who will not become master of his irritability, his venomous and vengeful feelings, and his lust, and attempts to become master in anything else, is as stupid as the farmer who lays out his field beside a torrent without guarding against that torrent.

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What is Truth? —Schwarzert (Melanchthon): We often preach our faith when we have lost it, and leave not a stone unturned to find it – and then we often do not preach worst!

Luther: Brother, you are really speaking like an angel to-day.

Schwarzert: But that is the idea of your enemies, and they apply it to you.

Luther: Then it would be a lie from the devil's hind-quarters.

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The Habit of Contrasts. – Superficial, inexact observation sees contrasts everywhere in nature (for instance, “hot and cold”), where there are no contrasts, only differences of degree. This bad habit has induced us to try to understand and interpret even the inner nature, the intellectual and moral world, in accordance with such contrasts. An infinite amount of cruelty, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, and coldness has entered into human emotion, because men imagined they saw contrasts where there were only transitions.

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Can We Forgive? – How can we forgive them at all, if they know not what they do? We have nothing to forgive. But does a man ever fully know what he is doing? And if this point at least remains always debatable, men never have anything to forgive each other, and indulgence is for the reasonable man an impossible thing. Finally, if the evil-doers had really known what they did, we should still only have a right to forgive if we had a right to accuse and to punish. But we have not that right.

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Habitual Shame. – Why do we feel shame when some virtue or merit is attributed to us which, as the saying goes, “we have not deserved”? Because we appear to have intruded upon a territory to which we do not belong, from which we should be excluded, as from a holy place or holy of holies, which ought not to be trodden by our foot. Through the errors of others we have, nevertheless, penetrated to it, and we are now swayed partly by fear, partly by reverence, partly by surprise; we do not know whether we ought to fly or to enjoy the blissful moment with all its gracious advantages. In all shame there is a mystery, which seems desecrated or in danger of desecration through us. All favour begets shame. – But if it be remembered that we have never really “deserved” anything, this feeling of shame, provided that we surrender ourselves to this point of view in a spirit of Christian contemplation, becomes habitual, because upon such a one God seems continually to be conferring his blessing and his favours. Apart from this Christian interpretation, the state of habitual shame will be possible even to the entirely godless sage, who clings firmly to the basic non-responsibility and non-meritoriousness of all action and being. If he be treated as if he had deserved this or that, he will seem to have won his way into a higher order of beings, who do actually deserve something, who are free and can really bear the burden of responsibility for their own volition and capacity. Whoever says to him, “You have deserved it,” appears to cry out to him, “You are not a human being, but a God.”

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The Most Unskilful Teacher. – In one man all his real virtues are implanted on the soil of his spirit of contradiction, in another on his incapacity to say “no” – in other words, on his spirit of acquiescence. A third has made all his morality grow out of his pride as a solitary, a fourth from his strong social instinct. Now, supposing that the seeds of the virtues in these four cases, owing to mischance or unskilful teachers, were not sown on the soil of their nature, which provides them with the richest and most abundant mould, they would become weak, unsatisfactory men (devoid of morality). And who would have been the most unskilful of teachers, the evil genius of these men? The moral fanatic, who thinks that the good can only grow out of the good and on the soil of the good.

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The Cautious Style. —A. But if this were known to all, it would be injurious to the majority. You yourself call your opinions dangerous to those in danger, and yet you make them public?

B. I write so that neither the mob, nor the populi, nor the parties of all kinds can read me. So my opinions will never be “public opinions.”

A. How do you write, then?

B. Neither usefully nor pleasantly – for the three classes I have mentioned.

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Divine Missionaries. – Even Socrates feels himself to be a divine missionary, but I am not sure whether we should not here detect a tincture of that Attic irony and fondness for jesting whereby this odious, arrogant conception would be toned down. He talks of the fact without unction – his images of the gadfly and the horse are simple and not sacerdotal. The real religious task which he has set himself – to test God in a hundred ways and see whether he spoke the truth – betrays a bold and free attitude, in which the missionary walked by the side of his God. This testing of God is one of the most subtle compromises between piety and free-thinking that has ever been devised. – Nowadays we do not even need this compromise any longer.

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Honesty in Painting. – Raphael, who cared a great deal for the Church (so far as she could pay him), but, like the best men of his time, cared little for the objects of the Church's belief, did not advance one step to meet the exacting, ecstatic piety of many of his patrons. He remained honest even in that exceptional picture which was originally intended for a banner in a procession – the Sistine Madonna. Here for once he wished to paint a vision, but such a vision as even noble youths without “faith” may and will have – the vision of the future wife, a wise, high-souled, silent, and very beautiful woman, carrying her first-born in her arms. Let men of an older generation, accustomed to prayer and devotion, find here, like the worthy elder on the left, something superhuman to revere. We younger men (so Raphael seems to call to us) are occupied with the beautiful maiden on the right, who says to the spectator of the picture, with her challenging and by no means devout look, “The mother and her child – is not that a pleasant, inviting sight?” The face and the look are reflected in the joy in the faces of the beholders. The artist who devised all this enjoys himself in this way, and adds his own delight to the delight of the art-lover. As regards the “messianic” expression in the face of the child, Raphael, honest man, who would not paint any state of soul in which he did not believe, has amiably cheated his religious admirers. He painted that freak of nature which is very often found, the man's eye in the child's face, and that, too, the eye of a brave, helpful man who sees distress. This eye should be accompanied by a beard. The fact that a beard is wanting, and that two different ages are seen in one countenance, is the pleasing paradox which believers have interpreted in accordance with their faith in miracles. The artist could only expect as much from their art of exposition and interpretation.

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Prayer. – On two hypotheses alone is there any sense in prayer, that not quite extinct custom of olden times. It would have to be possible either to fix or alter the will of the godhead, and the devotee would have to know best himself what he needs and should really desire. Both hypotheses, axiomatic and traditional in all other religions, are denied by Christianity. If Christianity nevertheless maintained prayer side by side with its belief in the all-wise and all-provident divine reason (a belief that makes prayer really senseless and even blasphemous), it showed here once more its admirable “wisdom of the serpent.” For an outspoken command, “Thou shalt not pray,” would have led Christians by way of boredom to the denial of Christianity. In the Christian ora et labora ora plays the rôle of pleasure. Without ora what could those unlucky saints who renounced labora have done? But to have a chat with God, to ask him for all kinds of pleasant things, to feel a slight amusement at one's own folly in still having any wishes at all, in spite of so excellent a father – all that was an admirable invention for saints.

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A Holy Lie. – The lie that was on Arria's lips when she died (Paete, non dolet[19 - The wife of the Stoic Thrasea Paetus, when their complicity in the great conspiracy of 65 a. d. against Nero was discovered, is reported to have said as she committed suicide, “It doesn't hurt, Paetus.” —Tr.]) obscures all the truths that have ever been uttered by the dying. It is the only holy lie that has become famous, whereas elsewhere the odour of sanctity has clung only to errors.

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The Most Necessary Apostle. – Among twelve apostles one must always be hard as stone, in order that upon him the new church may be built.

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Which is more Transitory, the Body or the Spirit? – In legal, moral, and religious institutions the external and concrete elements – in other words, rites, gestures, and ceremonies – are the most permanent. They are the body to which a new spirit is constantly being superadded. The cult, like an unchangeable text, is ever interpreted anew. Concepts and emotions are fluid, customs are solid.

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The Belief in Disease qua Disease. – Christianity first painted the devil on the wall of the world. Christianity first brought the idea of sin into the world. The belief in the remedies, which is offered as an antidote, has gradually been shaken to its very foundations. But the belief in the disease, which Christianity has taught and propagated, still exists.

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Speech and Writings of Religious Men. – If the priest's style and general expression, both in speaking and writing, do not clearly betray the religious man, we need no longer take his views upon religion and his pleading for religion seriously. These opinions have become powerless for him if, judging by his style, he has at command irony, arrogance, malice, hatred, and all the changing eddies of mood, just like the most irreligious of men – how far more powerless will they be for his hearers and readers! In short, he will serve to make the latter still more irreligious.

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The Danger in Personality. – The more God has been regarded as a personality in himself, the less loyal have we been to him. Men are far more attached to their thought-images than to their best beloved. That is why they sacrifice themselves for State, Church, and even for God – so far as he remains their creation, their thought, and is not too much looked upon as a personality. In the latter case they almost always quarrel with him. After all, it was the most pious of men who let slip that bitter cry: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

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Worldly Justice. – It is possible to unhinge worldly justice with the doctrine of the complete non-responsibility and innocence of every man. An attempt has been made in the same direction on the basis of the opposite doctrine of the full responsibility and guilt of every man. It was the founder of Christianity who wished to abolish worldly justice and banish judgment and punishment from the world. For he understood all guilt as “sin” – that is, an outrage against God and not against the world. On the other hand, he considered every man in a broad sense, and almost in every sense, a sinner. The guilty, however, are not to be the judges of their peers – so his rules of equity decided. Thus all dispensers of worldly justice were in his eyes as culpable as those they condemned, and their air of guiltlessness appeared to him hypocritical and pharisaical. Moreover, he looked to the motives and not to the results of actions, and thought that only one was keen-sighted enough to give a verdict on motives – himself or, as he expressed it, God.

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An Affectation in Parting. – He who wishes to sever his connection with a party or a creed thinks it necessary for him to refute it. This is a most arrogant notion. The only thing necessary is that he should clearly see what tentacles hitherto held him to this party or creed and no longer hold him, what views impelled him to it and now impel him in some other directions. We have not joined the party or creed on strict grounds of knowledge. We should not affect this attitude on parting from it either.

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Saviour and Physician. – In his knowledge of the human soul the founder of Christianity was, as is natural, not without many great deficiencies and prejudices, and, as physician of the soul, was addicted to that disreputable, laical belief in a universal medicine. In his methods he sometimes resembles that dentist who wishes to heal all pain by extracting the tooth. Thus, for example, he assails sensuality with the advice: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” – Yet there still remains the distinction that the dentist at least attains his object – painlessness for the patient – although in so clumsy a fashion that he becomes ridiculous; whereas the Christian who follows that advice and thinks he has killed his sensuality, is wrong, for his sensuality still lives in an uncanny, vampire form, and torments him in hideous disguises.

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Prisoners. – One morning the prisoners entered the yard for work, but the warder was not there. Some, as their manner was, set to work at once; others stood idle and gazed defiantly around. Then one of them strode forward and cried, “Work as much as you will or do nothing, it all comes to the same. Your secret machinations have come to light; the warder has been keeping his eye on you of late, and will cause a terrible judgment to be passed upon you in a few days' time. You know him – he is of a cruel and resentful disposition. But now, listen: you have mistaken me hitherto. I am not what I seem, but far more – I am the son of the warder, and can get anything I like out of him. I can save you – nay, I will save you. But remember this: I will only save those of you who believe that I am the son of the prison warder. The rest may reap the fruits of their unbelief.” “Well,” said an old prisoner after an interval of silence, “what can it matter to you whether we believe you or not? If you are really the son, and can do what you say, then put in a good word for us all. That would be a real kindness on your part. But have done with all talk of belief and unbelief!” “What is more,” cried a younger man, “I don't believe him: he has only got a bee in his bonnet. I'll wager that in a week's time we shall find ourselves in the same place as we are to-day, and the warder will know nothing.” “And if the warder ever knew anything, he knows it no longer,” said the last of the prisoners, coming down into the yard at that moment, “for he has just died suddenly.” “Ah ha!” cried several in confusion, “ah ha! Sir Son, Sir Son, how stands it now with your title? Are we by any chance your prisoners now?” “I told you,” answered the man gently, “I will set free all who believe in me, as surely as my father still lives.” – The prisoners did not laugh, but shrugged their shoulders and left him to himself.

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The Persecutors of God. – Paul conceived and Calvin followed up the idea that countless creatures have been predestined to damnation from time immemorial, and that this fair world was made in order that the glory of God might be manifested therein. So heaven and hell and mankind merely exist to satisfy the vanity of God! What a cruel, insatiable vanity must have smouldered in the soul of the first or second thinker of such a thought! – Paul, then, after all, remained Saul – the persecutor of God.

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