56

The apostate of the free spirit.  Who could possibly feel an aversion for pious people strong in their faith? To the contrary, do we not regard them with a silent respect and take pleasure in them, with a profound regret that these excellent people do not feel as we do? But whence comes that sudden deep repugnance without apparent cause which we feel for him who once had all freedom of spirit and in the end became 'a believer'? If we recall it, it is as if we had beheld some disgusting sight which we want to expunge from our soul as quickly as we can! Would we not turn our back even upon the person we most revered if he became suspicious to us in this respect? And not at all on account of a moral prejudice, but out of a sudden disgust and horror! Why do we feel so strongly about it? Perhaps we shall be given to understand that at bottom we are not altogether sure of ourselves? That we planted thorn-bushes of the most pointed contempt around us in good time, so that at the decisive moment, when old age has made us weak and forgetful, we should not be able to climb out over our own contempt?  Quite honestly, this supposition is erroneous, and he who makes it knows nothing of that which moves and determines the free spirit: how little contemptible does he find his changes of opinion in themselves! How greatly, on the contrary, does he honour in the capacity to change his opinions a rare and high distinction, especially when it extends into old age! And his ambition (not his pusillanimity) reaches up even to the forbidden fruits of spernere se sperni and spernere se ipsum²⁶: certainly he does not feel in the face of these things the fear experienced by the vain and complacent! Besides which, he counts the theory of the innocence of all opinions as being as well founded as the theory of the innocence of all actions: how then could he appear before the apostate of spiritual freedom in the role of judge and hangman! The sight of him would, rather, touch him as the sight of someone with a repulsive disease touches a physician: physical disgust at something fungous, mollified, bloated, suppurating, momentarily overpowers reason and the will to help. It is in this way that our goodwill is overcome by the idea of the tremendous dishonesty which must have prevailed in the apostate of the free spirit: by the idea of a general degeneration reaching even into the skeleton of his character.

57

Other fears, other securities.  Christianity had brought into life a quite novel and limitless perilousness, and therewith quite novel securities, pleasures, recreations and evaluations of all things. Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation, evaluation! It even drags them into its noblest arts and philosophies! How worn out and feeble, how insipid and awkward, how arbitrarily fanatical and, above all, how insecure all this must appear, now that that fearful antithesis to it, the omnipresent fear of the Christian for his eternal salvation, has been lost!

58

Christianity and the affects.  Within Christianity there is audible also a great popular protest against philosophy: the reason of the sages of antiquity had advised men against the affects, Christianity wants to restore them. To this end, it denies to virtue as it was conceived by the philosophers  as the victory of reason over affect  all moral value, condemns rationality in general, and challenges the affects to reveal themselves in their extremest grandeur and strength: as love of God, fear of God, as fanatical faith in God, as the blindest hope in God.

59

Error as comfort.  You can say what you like: Christianity wanted to free men from the burden of the demands of morality by, as it supposed, showing a shorter way to perfection: just as some philosophers thought they could avoid wearisome and tedious dialectics and the collection of rigorously tested facts by pointing out a 'royal road to truth'. It was an error in each case  yet nonetheless a great comfort to the exhausted and despairing in the wilderness.

60

All spirit in the end becomes bodily visible.  Christianity has embraced within itself all the spirit of countless people who joy in submission, all those coarse and subtle enthusiasts for humility and worship, and has thereby emerged from a rustic rudeness  such as is very much in evidence, for example, in the earliest likeness of the apostle Peter  into a very spirited religion, with a thousand wrinkles, reservations and subterfuges in its countenance; it has made European humanity sharp-witted, and not only theologically cunning. From this spirit, and in concert with the power and very often the deepest conviction and honesty of devotion, it has chiselled out perhaps the most refined figures in human society that have ever yet existed: the figures of the higher and highest Catholic priesthood, especially when they have descended from a noble race and brought with them an inborn grace of gesture, the eye of command, and beautiful hands and feet. Here the human face attains to that total spiritualisation produced by the continual ebb and flow of the two species of happiness (the feeling of power and the feeling of surrender) after a well considered mode of life has tamed the beast in man; here an activity which consists in blessing, forgiving sins and representing the divinity keeps awake the feeling of a suprahuman mission in the soul, and indeed also in the body; here there reigns that noble contempt for the fragility of the body and of fortune's favour which pertains to born soldiers; one takes pride in obeying, which is the distinguishing mark of all aristocrats; in the tremendous impossibility of one's task lies one's excuse and one's ideal. The surpassing beauty and refinement of the princes of the church has always proved to the people the truth of the church; a temporary brutalisation of the priesthood (as in the time of Luther) has always brought with it a belief in the opposite.  And is this human beauty and refinement which is the outcome of a harmony between figure, spirit and task also to go to the grave when the religions come to an end? And can nothing higher be attained, or even imagined?