(Paul, 1 Corinthians i, 20ff.[20])--In order to _understand_ this passage, a first-rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for the first time, the antagonism between a _noble_ morality and a morality born of _ressentiment_ and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge...[20] Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.
46.
--_What follows, then?_ That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them...Neither has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward--the instinct for _cleanliness_ is lacking...Only _evil_ instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: "_è tutto festo_"--immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound...These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation.
They attack, but everything they attack is thereby _distinguished_.
Whoever is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely _not_ befouled...On the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."...Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early Christians" _dared_ to make!--After all, they were the _privileged_, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last Christian," _whom I may perhaps live to see_--is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights."...Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every _other_ criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--_evil in itself_...Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but _whoever_ he hates, _whatever_ he hates, has real _value_...The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a _criterion of values_.
--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a _solitary_ figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio _seriously_--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less--what did it matter?...The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying _that has any value_--and that is at once its criticism and its _destruction_: "What is truth?..."
47.
--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a _crime against life_...We deny that God is God...If any one were to _show_ us this Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula: _deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio_.--Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of _science_--and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and _cry down_ all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes science--_in praxi_, lying at any price...Paul _well knew_ that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute _determination_ to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, _thora_--that is essentially Jewish. Paul _wants_ to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the _good_ philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a _philologian_ or a physician without being also _Antichrist_. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees _behind_ the "holy books," and as a physician he sees _behind_ the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud."...48.
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of _science_?...No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book _par excellence_ opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: _he_ faces only one great danger; _ergo_, "God" faces only one great danger.-- The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] What does he do? He creates man--man is entertaining...But then he notices that man is also bored.
God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things! Woman was the _second_ mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. _Ergo_, she is also to blame for _science_...It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his _greatest_ blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men _godlike_--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--_Moral_: science is the forbidden _per se_; it alone is forbidden. Science is the _first_ of sins, the germ of all sins, the _original_ sin. _This is all there is of morality._--"Thou shall _not_ know":--the rest follows from that.--God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to _protect_ one's self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man _must_ not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, _sickness_--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't _allow_ him to think...Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents _war_; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war...). War--among other things, a great disturber of science!--Incredible! Knowledge, _deliverance from the priests_, prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--_there is no help for it: he must be drowned!_"...[21] A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even gods struggle in vain."
49.
--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the _whole_ psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect.
But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must have an _overflowing_ intellect, in order to "know."..."_Therefore_, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just _what_, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:--"_sin_."...The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up _against_ science--_against_ the deliverance of man from priests...Man must _not_ look outward; he must look inward. He must _not_ look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must _suffer_...And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians! _What is needed is a Saviour._--The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--_lies_ through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's _sense of causality_: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!--And _not_ an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of _priests_!
An attack of _parasites_! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!...When the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--_then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated_.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration _par excellence_, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest _rules_ through the invention of sin.-- 50.
--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief," of the "believer," for the special benefit of "believers." If there remain any today who do not yet know how _indecent_ it is to be "believing"--_or_ how much a sign of _décadence_, of a broken will to live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power." "Faith makes blessed: _therefore_ it is true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely _promised_: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one _shall_ be blessed _because_ one believes...But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is _that_ to be demonstrated?--The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness--_therefore_, it is true."...But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be _absurdum_ itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--_not_ merely hoped for, and _not_ merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, _could_ blessedness--in a technical term, _pleasure_--ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof _of_ "pleasure"--nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that _true_ judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches _the contrary_. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to.
Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of _integrity_ in things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed: _therefore_, it lies...51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an _idée fixe_ by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead _raises them up_ where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a _lunatic asylum_. _Not_, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_ people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _décadent_; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_...Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of _training_[22] in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it...We others, who have the _courage_ for health _and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation!
that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!...The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _décadence_ products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of _noble_ antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole _imperium_ were Christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, _triumphed_...Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere.
Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the _healthy_, against _health_. Everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_ things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the _décadence_ triumphed.--_God on the cross_--is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_...We all hang on the cross, consequently _we_ are divine...We alone are divine...Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.-- [22] The word _training_ is in English in the text.
52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all _intellectual_ well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it _can_ use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the _superbia_ of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of "faith" _must_ be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge _must_ be banned by the church as _forbidden_ ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start...The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon _resulting_ from _décadence_,--one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of _décadence_. "Faith" means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud _because_ he is sick: his instinct _demands_ that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever makes for illness is _good_; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is _evil_": so argues the believer. The _impulse to lie_--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his _unfitness for philology_. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts _without_ interpreting them falsely, and _without_ losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as _ephexis_[24] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul."...The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so _daring_ that it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia[25] use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man--at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance..."Divine Providence," which every third man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong an argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument against Germans!...[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism.
[25] A reference to the University of Tübingen and its famous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination, David 53.
--It is so little true that _martyrs_ offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such _insensibility_ to the problem of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his _discretion_, on this point. To _know_ in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything _further_..."Truth," as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.--The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have _misled_...The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have _damaged_ the truth...Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?--An error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?--One best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians...This was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom...Women are still on their knees before an error because they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. _Is the cross, then, an argument?_--But about all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years--_Zarathustra_.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning![26] [26] The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of Priests."
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical.
Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the _freedom_ which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, _manifest_ themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is _below_ them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions _beneath_ him--and _behind_ him...A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction _belongs_ to strength, and to an independent point of view...That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not _begrudge_ him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of something unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of _weakness_. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit _himself_ as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself.
The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be _used up_; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity.
Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement...When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, _slavery_, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To _avoid_ seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are _antagonists_ of the truthful man--of the truth...The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on _this_ point would work his instant downfall.
The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong, _emancipated_ spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these _sick_ intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to _reasons_...
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)[27] This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?--All the world believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--Every conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it _becomes_ a conviction only after having been, for a long time, _not_ one, and then, for an even longer time, _hardly_ one. What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it _as_ it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.--Now, this will _not_ to see what one sees, this will _not_ to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its very _survival_ to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?--"This is _our_ conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for it--let us respect all who have convictions!"--I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more respectable because he lies on principle...The priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle _because_ it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the will of God" and "the revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was his _practical_ reason.[28] There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is _not_ for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason...To know the limits of reason--_that_ alone is genuine philosophy...Why did God make a revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man _could_ not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught him His will...Moral: the priest does _not_ lie--the question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary to know _what_ is true. But this is more than man _can_ know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouthpiece of God.--Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the _shrewd dodge_ of "revelation" belong to the general priestly type--to the priest of the _décadence_ as well as to the priest of pagan times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God" is a word signifying acquiescence in all things).--The "law," the "will of God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these things are merely words for the conditions _under_ which the priest comes to power and _with_ which he maintains his power,--these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy lie"--common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this means, no matter where it is heard, _the priest lies_...[27] The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
[28] A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft" (Critique of Practical Reason).
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the _end_ of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is _my_ objection to the means it employs. Only _bad_ ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--_therefore_, its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the _intelligence_ to so much as _name_ in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, _in_ it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, _not_ to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the _nobles_, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life--the _sun_ shines upon the whole book.--All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband;...it is better to marry than to burn"?[29] And is it _possible_ to be a Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, _befouled_, by the doctrine of the _immaculata conceptio_?...I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."
57.