49

The thing that astonishes one about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the unrestrained fullness of gratitude which streams out of it: - it is a very noble kind of man who stands before nature and life in this way! Later, as the rabble gained prominence in Greece, fear grew all over religion as well, and preparations were made for Christianity.

50

The passion for God: there are sincere, peasant, pushy types, like Luther's - all Protestantism lacks the southern delicatezza [delicacy] . There is an oriental way of existing beyond the self [Aussersichsein], as with a slave who, without deserving it, has been blessed or ennobled, for example, Augustine, who lacks in an offensive way all nobility of gestures and desires.⁵ There is some feminine tenderness and desire in it which pushes itself bashfully and ignorantly towards a unio mystica et physica [a mystical and physical union], as with Madame de Guyon.⁶ Strangely enough, in many cases it appears as a disguise for puberty in a young woman or man, and here and there even as the hysteria of an old spinster, also as her last ambition: - in such cases the church has often already declared the woman a saint.

51

Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? They sensed in him - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his frail and pathetic appearance - the superior power which wished to test itself in such a victory, the strength of the will, in which they knew how to recognize and honour their own strength and pleasure in mastery once more. They were honouring something in themselves when they revered the saint. It got to the point that the sight of a saint aroused a suspicion in them: such a monster of denial, something so contrary to nature, would not have been desired for no reason - that's what they said and questioned themselves about. Perhaps there is a reason for that, a really great danger, about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors might provide more precise information? In short, the powerful people of the earth learned from the saint a new fear; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy: - it was the "will to power" which compelled them to halt in front of the saint. They had to question him -

52

In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and speeches of such impressive style that the world of Greek and Indian literature has nothing to place beside them. We stand with fear and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what human beings once were and will in the process suffer melancholy thoughts about old Asia and its protruding peninsula of Europe, which, in marked contrast to Asia, would like to represent the "progress of man." Naturally, whoever is, in himself, only a weak, tame domestic animal and who knows only the needs of domestic animals (like our educated people nowadays, including the Christians of "educated" Christianity), among these ruins such a man finds nothing astonishing or even anything to be sad about - a taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small": - perhaps he finds the New Testament, that book of grace, still preferable to his heart (in it there is a good deal of the really tender, stifling smell of over-pious and small-souled people). To have glued together this New Testament, a sort of rococo of taste in all respects, with the Old Testament into a single book, as the "Bible," and "the essential book," that is perhaps the greatest act of daring and "sin against the spirit" which literary Europe has on its conscience.

53

Why atheism today? - "The father" in God has been fundamentally disproved, as well as "the judge," "the rewarder." Together with his "free will." He is not listening - and if he were to hear, he wouldn't know how to help anyway. The worst thing is this: he appears incapable of communicating clearly. Is he indistinct? - From a number of different conversations, asking and listening, this is what I have unearthed as the cause of the decline of European theism. It seems to me that the religious instinct is, in fact, growing powerfully - but that it is rejecting, with profound distrust, theistic satisfaction.