The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified ;--but even here Jewish
priest craft did not stop. The
whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!--These priests
accomplished that miracle of
falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the documentary evidence; with a
degree of contempt unparalleled,
and in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of
their people into religious terms,
which is to say, they converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all
offences against Jahveh were
punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard this act of historical
falsification as something far
more shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history for
thousands of years had not blunted
our inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And the philosophers support the church:
the lie about a "moral order
of the world" runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the
meaning of a "moral order of the
world"? That there is a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time,
determines what man ought to do
and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is
to he measured by the extent
to which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an
individual arecontrolled by this will
of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.--In
place of all that pitiable lie
reality has this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at
the cost of every sound view of
life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he
himself determines the value of
all things "the kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby that state of
affairs is attained "the will of God"; with
cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent
of their subservience or
opposition to the power of the priestly order. One observes him at work: under the hand of
the Jewish priesthood
the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its long series of
misfortunes, was transformed into
a punishment for that great age-during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out
of the powerful and
wholly free heroes of Israel's history they fashioned, according to their changing needs,
either wretched bigots and
hypocrites or men entirely "godless." They reduced every great event to the
idiotic formula: "obedient or
disobedient to God."--They went a step further: the "will of God" (in other
words some means necessary for
preserving the power of the priests) had to be determined--and to this end they had to
have a "revelation." In plain
English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and "holy scriptures"
had to be concocted--and so, with the
utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of
"sin" now ended, they
were duly published. The "will of God," it appears, had long stood like a rock;
the trouble was that mankind had
neglected the "holy scriptures". . . But the ''will of God'' had already been
revealed to Moses. . . . What
happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the
strictest meticulousness, what
tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most
appetizing cuts of meat, for
the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he
wanted, what "the will of
God" was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became
indispensable everywhere; at
all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to
say at the "sacrifice" (that is,
at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize
it--in his own phrase, to
"sanctify" it. . . . For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every
natural institution (the state, the
administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything
demanded by the life-instinct,
in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness
and even made the reverse of
valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral order of the
world"). The fact requires a
sanction--a power to grant values becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such
values is by denying
nature. . . . The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that
he can exist at
all.--Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest, to "the law," now
gets the name of "sin"; the means
prescribed for "reconciliation with God" are, of course, precisely the means
which bring one most effectively under
the thumb of the priest; he alone can "save". Psychologically considered,
"sins" are indispensable to every society
organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the
priest lives upon sins; it is
necessary to him that there be "sinning". . . . Prime axiom: "God forgiveth
him that repenteth"--in plain English,
him that submitteth to the priest.
27.
Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural
value, every reality was
opposed by the deepest instincts of the ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the
death upon reality, and as
such it has never been surpassed. The "holy people," who had adopted priestly
values and priestly names for all
things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth
as "unholy," "worldly,"
"sinful"--this people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to
the point of self-annihilation:
asChristianity it actually denied even the last form of reality, the "holy
people," the "chosen people," Jewish
reality itself. The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small
insurrectionary movement which took
the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus--in other words, it
is the priestly instinct come
to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a
state of existence even more
fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that necessary to
an ecclesiastical
organization. Christianity actually denies the church...
I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to have been led
(whether rightly or wrongly)
by Jesus, if it was not the Jewish church--"church" being here used in exactly
the same sense that the word has
today. It was an insurrection against the "good and just," against the
"prophets of Israel," against the whole
hierarchy of society--not against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order,
formalism. It was unbelief in
"superior men," a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood
for. But the hierarchy that was called
into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which,
above everything, was
necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the midst of the "waters"--it
represented theirlast possibility of
survival; it was the final residuum of their independent political existence; an attack
upon it was an attack upon the
most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to live, that has ever
appeared on earth. This saintly
anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the
Chandala of Judaism, to rise in
revolt against the established order of things--and in language which, if the Gospels are
to be credited, would get
him sent to Siberia today--this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far
as it was possible to be one in
so absurdly unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the cross: the proof
thereof is to be found in the
inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins--there is not the
slightest ground for believing, no
matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.--
28.
As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction--whether, in fact, this was
the only contradiction he
was cognizant of--that is quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon
the problem of the psychology
of the Saviour.--I confess, to begin with, that there are very few books which offer me
harder reading than the
Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned
curiosity of the German mind to
achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other
young scholars, enjoyed with
all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable
Strauss.5At that time I was
twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the
contradictions of "tradition"?
How can any one call pious legends "traditions"? The histories of saints present
the most dubious variety of
literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in the entire absence
of corroborative documents,
seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start--it is simply learned idling.
29.
What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might be depicted in
the Gospels, in however
mutilated a form and however much overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in spite
of the Gospels; just as
the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends. It is
not a question of mere truthful
evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the question is,
whether his type is still
conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us.--All the attempts that I know of to
read the history of a "soul"
in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable psychological levity. M. Renan, that
mountebank in
psychologicus, has contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of
explaining the type of Jesus: the
notion of the genius and that of the hero ("heros"). But if there is anything
essentially unevangelical, it is surely
the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all
heroic struggle, of all
taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something
moral: ("resist not evil !"--the
most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the
blessedness of peace, of
gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of "glad
tidings"?--The true life, the life eternal has
been found--it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies
in love free from all retreats and
exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God--Jesus claims
nothing for himself alone--as
the child of God each man is the equal of every other man. . . .Imagine making Jesus a
hero!--And what a
tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word "genius"! Our whole conception
of the "spiritual," the whole
conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived
in. In the strict sense of the
physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here. . . . We all know that there
is a morbid sensibility of the
tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from
every effort to grasp a solid
object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an
instinctive hatred of all reality, a
flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste
for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and
space, for everything established--customs, institutions, the church--; a feeling of being
at home in a world in which
no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world,
an "eternal" world. . . . "The Kingdom of God
is withinyou". . . .
30.
The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain
and irritation--so great that
merely to be "touched" becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.
The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and distances in
feeling: the consequence of an
extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as
unbearable anguish (--that is to say, as harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of
self-preservation), and regards
blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer resistance to
anybody or anything,
however evil or dangerous--love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life. . .
These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation
has sprung. I call them a
sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands
most closely related to
them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism,
the theory of salvation of
paganism. Epicurus was a typical decadent: I was the first to recognize him.--The fear of
pain, even of infinitely
slight pain--the end of this can be nothing save a religion of love. . . .
31.
I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption
that the type of the Saviour
has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there
are many reasons why a type
of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions. The
milieu in which this
strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by
the history, the
destiny, of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the
type retrospectively with
characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda.
That strange and
sickly world into which the Gospels lead us--a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in
which the scum of society,
nervous maladies and "childish" idiocy keep a tryst--must, in any case, have
coarsened the type: the first disciples,
in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and
incomprehensibilities into
their own crudity, in order to understand it at all--in their sight the type could take on
reality only after it had been
recast in a familiar mould.... The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of
morals, the worker of
wonders, John the Baptist--all these merely presented chances to misunderstand it . . . .
Finally, let us not
underrate the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to
erase from the venerated
objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange--it does
not even see them. It is greatly to
be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting
decadent--I mean some one
who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and
the childish. In the last
analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex
and contradictory: such a
possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against
it, for in that case tradition
would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming
the contrary.
Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the
sea-shore and the fields, who
appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike India's, and the aggressive fanatic, the
mortal enemy of
theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's malice as "le grand
maitre en ironie." I myself
haven't any doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself
into the concept of the Master
only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all know the
unscrupulousness of sectarians
when they set out to turn their leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early
Christians had need of an
adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other
theologians, they created a "god"
that met that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas that
were necessary to them but
that were utterly at odds with the Gospels--"the second coming," "the last
judgment," all sorts of expectations and
promises, current at the time.--
32.
I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the
figure of the Saviour: the very
word imperieux, used by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What the "glad
tidings" tell us is simply that
there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith
that is voiced here is no
more an embattled faith--it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of
recrudescent childishness of the
spirit. The physiologists, at all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete
puberty in the living
organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not
denounce, it does not defend
itself: it does not come with "the sword"--it does not realize how it will one
day set man against man. It does not
manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by
"scriptures": it is itself, first and last, its own
miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own "kingdom of God." This faith
does not formulate itself--it simply
lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of
educational background
gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only
concepts of a
Judaeo--Semitic character (--that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to
this category--an idea which,
like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful
not to see in all this
anything more than symbolical language, semantics6 an opportunity to speak in parables. It
is only on the theory
that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set
down among Hindus he would
have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,7and among Chinese he would have employed those
of Lao-tse 8--and in
neither case would it have made any difference to him.--With a little freedom in the use
of words, one might actually
call Jesus a "free spirit"9--he cares nothing for what is established: the word
killeth,10 a whatever is established
killeth. 'The idea of "life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands
opposed to his mind to every sort of
word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: "life" or
"truth" or "light" is his word for the
innermost--in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language,
has significance only as sign,
as allegory. --Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the
temptations lying in Christian, or
rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all
religion, all notions of worship,
all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all
psychology, all books, all
art--his "wisdom" is precisely a pure ignorance11 of all such things. He has
never heard of culture; he doesn't
have to make war on it--he doesn't even deny it. . . The same thing may be said of the
state, of the whole
bourgeoise social order, of labour, of war--he has no ground for denying" the
world," for he knows nothing of the
ecclesiastical concept of "the world" . . . Denial is precisely the thing that
is impossible to him.--In the same way he
lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a
"truth," may be established by proofs
(--his proofs are inner "lights," subjective sensations of happiness and
self-approval, simple "proofs of power"--).
Such a doctrine cannot contradict: it doesn't know that other doctrines exist, or can
exist, and is wholly incapable of
imagining anything opposed to it. . . If anything of the sort is ever encountered, it
laments the "blindness" with
sincere sympathy--for it alone has "light"--but it does not offer objections . .
.
33.
In the whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt and punishment
are lacking, and so is that of
reward. "Sin," which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is
abolished--this is precisely the
"glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with
conditions: it is conceived as the only
reality--what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.
The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the special
evangelical way of life. It is
not a "belief" that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different
mode of action; he acts differently. He
offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He
draws no distinction between
strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles ("neighbour," of course, means
fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry
with no one, and he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds
their mandates ("Swear
not at all") .12 He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has
proofs of her infidelity.--And
under all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.--
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life--and so was his
death. . . He no longer needed
any formula or ritual in his relations with God--not even prayer. He had rejected the
whole of the Jewish doctrine of
repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel
one's self "divine,"
"blessed," "evangelical," a "child of God."Not by
"repentance,"not by "prayer and forgiveness" is the way to
God: only the Gospel way leads to God--it is itself "God!"--What the Gospels
abolished was the Judaism in the
concepts of "sin," "forgiveness of sin," "faith,"
"salvation through faith"--the wholeecclesiastical dogma of the
Jews was denied by the "glad tidings."
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is
"in heaven" and is
"immortal," despite many reasons for feeling that he isnot "in
heaven": this is the only psychological reality in
"salvation."--A new way of life, not a new faith.
34.
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded
only subjective realities as
realities, as "truths"--hat he saw everything else, everything natural,
temporal, spatial and historical, merely as
signs, as materials for parables. The concept of "the Son of God" does not
connote a concrete person in history, an
isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological symbol
set free from the concept of time. The
same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the
"kingdom of God," and of
the "sonship of God." Nothing could he more un-Christian than the crude
ecclesiastical notions of God as a person,
of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven"
beyond, and of a "son of God" as the second
person of the Trinity. All this--if I may be forgiven the phrase--is like thrusting one's
fist into the eye (and what an
eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism. . .
.But it is nevertheless
obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "Father" and "Son"--not,
of course, to every one--: the word "Son"
expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things
(beatitude), and "Father"
expresses that feeling itself--the sensation of eternity and of perfection.--I am ashamed
to remind you of what the
church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story13 at the threshold
of the Christian "faith"?
And a dogma of "immaculate conception" for good measure? . . --And thereby it
has robbed conception of its
immaculateness--
The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come
"beyond the world" or "after death." The
whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a
passing; it is absent because it
belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The
"hour of death" isnot a
Christian idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no
existence for the bearer of "glad tidings." . . .
The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and
no day after tomorrow, it is not
going to come at a "millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is
everywhere and it is nowhere. . . .
35.
This "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taught--not to "save
mankind," but to show mankind how to live.
It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before
the officers, before his
accusers--his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights;
he makes no effort to ward
off the most extreme penalty--more, he invites it. . . And he prays, suffers and loves
with those, in those, who do
him evil . . . Not to defend one's self, not to show anger, not to lay blames. . . On the
contrary, to submit even to the
Evil One--to love him. . . .
36.
--We free spirits--we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding
what nineteen centuries have
misunderstood--that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy
lie" even more than upon all
other lies. . . Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality,
from that discipline of the
spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men
always sought, with
shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial
of the Gospels. . . .
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great drama of existence
would find no small
indication thereof in the stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That
mankind should be on its knees
before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the
Gospels--that in the concept of the
"church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad
tidings" regards as beneath him and
behind him--it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical
irony-- next page
