219

Moral judgment and condemnation are the favourite revenge of the spiritually limited against those who are less limited, as well as a form of compensation for the fact that Nature has thought ill of them, and finally a chance to acquire some spirit and become refined: - spiritualized malice. Deep in their hearts they feel good that there is a standard before which even those plentifully endowed with spiritual wealth and privilege stand, just like them: - they fight for the "equality of all before God" and almost require a faith in God just for that purpose. Among them are the most powerful opponents of atheism. Anyone who said to them "A high spirituality cannot be compared with any of the solidity and respectability of a man who is merely moral" would make them furious: - I'll be careful about doing this. I'd much prefer to flatter them with my principle that a high spirituality itself arises only as the final offspring of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all those conditions which are ascribed to the "merely moral" man, after they have been acquired one by one through long discipline and practice, perhaps through an entire chain of generations, that the high spirituality is simply the spiritualization of justice and that kind severity which knows that its task is to maintain the order of rank in the world, not only among human beings, but even among things.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Part VII - Aphorism # 219

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