32
To repeat, I am against any attempt to introduce the fanatic into the Redeemer type: the word impérieux, which Renan uses, is alone enough to annul the type. The “glad tidings” are precisely that there are no longer any opposites; the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children; the faith which finds expression here is not a faith attained through struggle—it is there, it has been there from the beginning; it is, as it were, an infantilism that has receded into the spiritual. The case of puberty being retarded and not developing in the organism, as a consequence of degeneration, is well known, at least to physiologists. Such a faith is not angry, does not reproach, does not resist: it does not bring “the sword”—it simply does not foresee how it might one day separate. It does not prove itself either by miracle or by reward and promise, least of all “by scripture”: at every moment it is its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own “kingdom of God.” Nor does this faith formulate itself: it lives, it resists all formulas. Of course, the accidents of environment, of language, of background determine a certain sphere of concepts: the earliest Christianity uses only Jewish-Semitic concepts (the eating and drinking at the Last Supper belong here, that concept which, like everything Jewish, has been misused so badly by the church). But one should beware of finding more than a sign language in this, a semeiology, an occasion for parables. For this anti-realist, that not a word is taken literally is precisely the presupposition of being able to speak at all. Among Indians he would have availed himself of Sankhya concepts; among the Chinese, of those of Lao-tse—without having felt any difference. Using the expression somewhat tolerantly, one could call Jesus a “free spirit”—he does not care for anything solid: the word kills, all that is solid kills. The concept, the experience of “life” in the only way he knows it, resists any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. He speaks only of the innermost: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—all the rest, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, has for him only the value of a sign, a simile.
Make no mistake at this point, however seductive the Christian, in other words, the ecclesiastical, prejudice may be: such a symbolist par excellence stands outside all religion, all cult concepts, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “knowledge” is pure foolishness precisely concerning the fact that such things exist. Culture is not known to him even by hearsay, he does not need to fight it—he does not negate it. The same applies to the state, to the whole civic order and society, to work, to war—he never had any reason to negate “the world”; the ecclesiastical concept of “world” never occurred to him. To negate is the very thing that is impossible for him. Dialectic is equally lacking; the very idea is lacking that a faith, a “truth,” might be proved by reasons (his proofs are inner “lights,” inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, all of them “proofs of strength”). Such a doctrine is also incapable of contradicting: it does not even comprehend that there are, that there can be, other doctrines; it cannot even imagine a contradictory judgment. Where it encounters one, from innermost sympathy it will mourn over “blindness”—for it sees the “light”—but it will offer no objection.
33
In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”—any distance separating God and man—is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it.
The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently: by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and not-Jew (“the neighbor” —really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody; by not permitting himself to be seen or involved at courts of law (“not swearing”); by not divorcing his wife under any circumstances, not even if his wife has been proved unfaithful. All of this, at bottom one principle; all of this, consequences of one instinct.
The life of the Redeemer was nothing other than this practice—nor was his death anything else. He no longer required any formulas, any rites for his intercourse with God—not even prayer. He broke with the whole Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation; he knows that it is only in the practice of life that one feels “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” at all times a “child of God.” Not “repentance,” not “prayer for forgiveness,” are the ways to God: only the evangelical practice leads to God, indeed, it is “God”! What was disposed of with the evangel was the Judaism of the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “redemption through faith”—the whole Jewish ecclesiastical doctrine was negated in the “glad tidings.”
The deep instinct for how one must live, in order to feel oneself “in heaven,” to feel “eternal,” while in all other behavior one decidedly does not feel oneself “in heaven”—this alone is the psychological reality of “redemption.” A new way of life, not a new faith.
34
If I understand anything about this great symbolist, it is that he accepted only inner realities as realities, as “truths”—that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical, only as signs, as occasions for parables. The concept of “the son of man” is not a concrete person who belongs in history, something individual and unique, but an “eternal” factuality, a psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time. The same applies once again, and in the highest sense, to the God of this typical symbolist, to the “kingdom of God,” to the “kingdom of heaven,” to the “filiation of God.” Nothing is more unchristian than the ecclesiastical crudities of a god as person, of a “kingdom of God” which is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, of a “son of God” as the second person in the Trinity. All this is—forgive the expression—like a fist in the eye—oh, in what an eye!—of the evangel—a world-historical cynicism in the derision of symbols. But what the signs “father” and “son” refer to is obvious—not to everyone, I admit: the word “son” expresses the entry into the over-all feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness); the word “father” expresses this feeling itself, the feeling of eternity, the feeling of perfection. I am ashamed to recall what the church has made of this symbolism: Has it not placed an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” on top of that? But with that it has maculated conception.
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something that is to come “above the earth” or “after death.” The whole concept of natural death is lacking in the evangel: death is no bridge, no transition; it is lacking because it belongs to a wholly different, merely apparent world, useful only insofar as it furnishes signs. The “hour of death” is no Christian concept—an “hour,” time, physical life and its crises do not even exist for the teacher of the “glad tidings.” The “kingdom of God” is nothing that one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in “a thousand years”—it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.
35
This “bringer of glad tidings” died as he had lived, as he had taught—not to “redeem men” but to show how one must live. This practice is his legacy to mankind: his behavior before the judges, before the catchpoles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn—his behavior on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step which might ward off the worst; on the contrary, he provokes it. And he begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible—but to resist not even the evil one—t
o love him.
36
Only we, we spirits who have become free, have the presuppositions for understanding something that nineteen centuries have misunderstood: that integrity which, having become instinct and passion, wages war against the “holy lie” even more than against any other lie. Previous readers were immeasurably far removed from our loving and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the unriddling of such foreign, such tender things: with impudent selfishness they always wanted only their own advantage; out of the opposite of the evangel the church was constructed.
If one were to look for signs that an ironical divinity has its fingers in the great play of the world, one would find no small support in the tremendous question mark called Christianity. Mankind lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel; in the concept of “church” it has pronounced holy precisely what the “bringer of the glad tidings” felt to be beneath and behind himself—one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historical irony.
37
Our age is proud of its historical sense: How could it ever make itself believe the nonsense that at the beginning of Christianity there stands the crude fable of the miracle worker and Redeemer—and that everything spiritual and symbolical represents only a later development? On the contrary: the history of Christianity, beginning with the death on the cross, is the history of the misunderstanding, growing cruder with every step, of an original symbolism. With every diffusion of Christianity to still broader, still cruder masses of people, more and more lacking in the presuppositions to which it owed its birth, it became more necessary to vulgarize, to barbarize Christianity: it has swallowed doctrines and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum as well as the nonsense of all kinds of diseased reason. The destiny of Christianity lies in the necessity that its faith had to become as diseased, as base and vulgar, as the needs it was meant to satisfy were diseased, base, and vulgar. In the church, finally, diseased barbarism itself gains power—the church, this embodiment of mortal hostility against all integrity, against all elevation of the soul, against all discipline of the spirit, against all frank and gracious humanity. Christian values—noble values: only we, we spirits who have become free, have restored this contrast of values, the greatest that there is!
38
At this point I do not suppress a sigh. There are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous. The man of today—I suffocate from his unclean breath. My attitude to the past, like that of all lovers of knowledge, is one of great tolerance, that is, magnanimous self-mastery: with gloomy caution I go through the madhouse world of whole millennia, whether it be called “Christianity,” “Christian faith,” or “Christian church”—I am careful not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling changes, breaks out, as soon as I enter modern times, our time. Our time knows better.
What was formerly just sick is today indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here begins my nausea. I look around: not one word has remained of what was formerly called “truth”; we can no longer stand it if a priest as much as uses the word “truth.” If we have even the smallest claim to integrity, we must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope, not merely is wrong in every sentence he speaks, but lies— that he is no longer at liberty to lie from “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest too knows as well as anybody else that there is no longer any “God,” any “sinner,” any “Redeemer”—that “free will” and “moral world order” are lies: seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of the spirit, no longer permits anybody not to know about this.
All the concepts of the church have been recognized for what they are, the most malignant counterfeits that exist, the aim of which is to devalue nature and natural values; the priest himself has been recognized for what he is, the most dangerous kind of parasite, the real poison-spider of life. We know, today our conscience knows, what these uncanny inventions of the priests and the church are really worth, what ends they served in reducing mankind to such a state of self-violation that its sight can arouse nausea: the concepts “beyond,” “Last Judgment,” “immortality of the soul,” and “soul” itself are instruments of torture, systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master.
Everybody knows this, and yet everything continues as before. Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, an otherwise quite unembarrassed type of man, anti-Christians through and through in their deeds, still call themselves Christians today and attend communion? A young prince at the head of his regiments, magnificent as an expression of the selfishness and conceit of his people—but, without any shame, confessing himself a Christian! Whom then does Christianity negate? What does it call “world”? That one is a soldier, that one is a judge, that one is a patriot; that one resists; that one sees to one’s honor; that one seeks one’s advantage; that one is proud. Every practice of every moment, every instinct, every valuation that is translated into action is today anti-Christian: what a miscarriage of falseness must modern man be, that he is not ashamed to be called a Christian in spite of all this!
39
I go back, I tell the genuine history of Christianity. The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding: in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “evangel” died on the cross. What has been called “evangel” from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived: “ill tidings,” a dysangel. It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in a “faith,” for instance, in the faith in redemption through Christ: only Christian practice , a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian.
Such a life is still possible today, for certain people even necessary: genuine, original Christianity will be possible at all times.
Not a faith, but a doing; above all, a not doing of many things, another state of being. States of consciousness, any faith, considering something true, for example —every psychologist knows this—are fifth-rank matters of complete indifference compared to the value of the instincts: speaking more strictly, the whole concept of spiritual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, Christianism, to a matter of considering something true, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to negate Christianism. In fact, there have been no Christians at all. The “Christian,” that which for the last two thousand years has been called a Christian, is merely a psychological self-misunderstanding. If one looks more closely, it was, in spite of all “faith,” only the instincts that ruled in him—and what instincts!
“Faith” was at all times, for example, in Luther, only a cloak, a pretext, a screen behind which the instincts played their game—a shrewd blindness about the dominance of certain instincts. “Faith”—I have already called it the characteristic Christian shrewdness—one always spoke of faith, but one always acted from instinct alone.
In the Christian world of ideas there is nothing that has the least contact with reality—and it is in the instinctive hatred of reality that we have recognized the only motivating force at the root of Christianity. What follows from this? That in psychologicis too, the error here is radical, that it is that which determines the very essence, that it is the substance. One concept less, one single reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity hurtles down into nothing.
Viewed from high above, this strangest of all facts— a religion which is not only dependent on errors but which has its inventiveness and even its genius only in harmful errors, only in errors which poison life and the heart—is really a spectacle for gods, for those gods who are at the same time philosophers and whom I have encountered, for example, at those famous dialogues on Naxos. The moment nausea leaves them (and us!), th
ey become grateful for the spectacle of the Christian: perhaps the miserable little star that is called earth deserves a divine glance, a divine sympathy, just because of this curious case. For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the ape—regarding Christians, a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment.
40
The catastrophe of the evangel was decided with the death—it was attached to the “cross.” Only the death, this unexpected, disgraceful death, only the cross which was generally reserved for the rabble—only this horrible paradox confronted the disciples with the real riddle: “Who was this? What was this?” Their profoundly upset and insulted feelings, and their suspicion that such a death might represent the refutation of their cause, the terrible question mark, “Why in this manner?”—this state is only too easy to understand. Here everything had to be necessary, had to have meaning, reason, the highest reason; a disciple’s love knows no accident. Only now the cleft opened up: “Who killed him? Who was his natural enemy?” This question leaped forth like lightning. Answer: ruling Jewry, its highest class. From this moment one felt oneself in rebellion against the existing order, and in retrospect one understood Jesus to have been in rebellion against the existing order. Until then this warlike, this No-saying, No-doing trait had been lacking in his image; even more, he had been its opposite.