The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche
Читать онлайн книгу.
His teaching at the lowest classes of Jewish society and intelligence. They understood Him only according to the limitations of their own spirit. ... It was a disgrace to concoct a history of salvation, a personal God, a personal Saviour, a personal immortality, and to have retained all the meanness of the " person," and of the "history" of a doctrine which denies the reality of all that is personal and historical. The legend of salvation takes the place of the symbolic " now " and " all time," of the symbolic "here" and "everywhere"; and miracles appear instead of the psychological symbol.
199. Nothing is less innocent than the New Testa ment. The soil from which it sprang is known. These people, possessed of an inflexible will to assert themselves, and who, once they had lost all natural hold on life, and had long existed without any right to existence, still knew how to prevail by means of hypotheses which were as unnatural as they were imaginary (calling them selves the chosen people, the community of saints, the people of the promised land, and the " Church "): these people made use of their pia fraus with such skill, and with such "clean consciences," that one cannot be too cautious when they preach morality. When Jews step forward as the personification of innocence, the danger must be great. While reading the New Testament a man should have his small fund of intelligence, mistrust, and wickedness constantly at hand. People of the lowest origin, partly mob, out casts not only from good society, but also from respectable society; grown away from the atmosphere of culture, and free from discipline; ignorant, without even a suspicion of the fact that conscience can also rule in spiritual matters; in a word the Jews: an instinctively crafty people, able to create an advantage, a means of seduction out of every conceivable hypothesis of superstition, even out of ignorance itself.
200. I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed as the greatest and most impious lie: I can discern the !6 4 last sprouts and branches of its ideal beneath every form of disguise, I decline to enter into any compromise or false position in reference to it- I urge people to declare open war with it. The morality of paltry people as the measure of all things: this is the most repugnant kind of degeneracy that civilisation has ever yet brought into existence. And this kind of ideal is hanging still, under the name of "God," over men s heads! !
201. However mo dest one s demands may be concerning intellectual cleanliness, when one touches the New Testament one cannot help experiencing a sort of inexpressible feeling of dis comfort; for the unbounded cheek with which the least qualified people will have their say in its pages, in regard to the greatest problems of existence, and claim to sit in judgment on such matters, exceeds all limits. The impudent levity with which the most unwieldy problems are spoken of here (life, the world, God, the purpose of life), as if they were not problems at all, but the most simple things which these little bigots know all about.
202. This was the most fatal form of insanity that has ever yet existed on earth: when these little lying abortions of bigotry begin laying claim to the words "God," "last judgment," "truth," Move," "wisdom," "Holy Spirit," and thereby distinguishing themselves from the rest of the world; when such men begin to revalue values to suit themselves, as though they were the sense the salt, the standard, and the measure of all things; then all that one should do is this: build lunatic asylums for their incarceration. To persecute them was an egregious act of antique folly: this was taking them too seriously; it was making them serious. The whole fatality was made possible by the fact that a similar form of megalomania was already in existence, the Jewish form (once the gulf separating the Jews from the Christian-Jews was bridged, the Christian-Jews were compelled to employ those self-preservative measures afresh which were discovered by the Jewish instinct for their own self-preservation, after having accent uated them); and again through the fact that Greek moral philosophy had done everything that could be done to prepare the way for moral-fanaticism, even among Greeks and Romans, and to render it palatable. . . . Plato, the great importer of corruption, who was the first who refused to see Nature in morality, and who had already deprived the Greek gods of all their worth by his notion "good? was already tainted with Jewish bigotry (in Egypt? ).
203. These small virtues of gregarious animals do not by any means lead to eternal life ": to put them on the stage in such a way, and to use them for one s own purpose is perhaps very smart; but to him who keeps his eyes open, even here it remains, in spite of all, the most ludicrous performance. A man by no means deserves privileges, either on earth or in heaven, because he happens to have attained to perfection in the art of behaving like a good-natured little sheep; at best, he only remains a dear, absurd little ram with horns provided, of course, he does not burst with vanity or excite indignation by assuming the airs of a supreme judge. What a terrible glow of false coloring here floods the meanest virtues as though they were the reflection of divine qualities! The natural purpose and utility of every virtue is systematically hushed up it can only be valuable in the light of a divine command or model, or in the light of the good which belongs to a beyond or a spiritual world. (This is magnificent! As if it were a question of the salvation of the soul , but it was a means of making things bearable here with as many beautiful sentiments as possible.)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.