48
It seems that Catholicism is much more inwardly bound up with the Latin races than all of Christianity is in general for us northerners and that, as a result, in Catholic countries unbelief means something entirely different from what it means in Protestant countries - namely, a form of rebellion against the spirit of the race; whereas, among us it means rather a turning back to the spirit (or non spirit) of the race. We northerners undoubtedly stem from races of barbarians, and this also holds with respect to our talent for religion. We are badly equipped for it. One can make the Celtic people an exception to that, and for this reason they also provided the best soil for the start of the Christian infection in the north: - in France the Christian ideal bloomed only as much as the pale northern sun permitted. How strangely devout for our taste even these recent French sceptics still are, to the extent they have some Celtic blood in their ancestry! How Catholic, how un-German, August Comte's sociology smells to us, with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that charming and clever cicerone [tour guide] from Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his hostility to the Jesuits! And then there's Ernest Renan: how inaccessible to us northerners the language of such a Renan sounds, in which at every moment some nothingness of religious tension destroys the equilibrium of his soul, which is, in a more refined sense, sensual and reclining comfortably! One should repeat after him these beautiful sentences - and how much malice and high spirits at once arise in response in our probably less beautiful and harder, that is, more German souls: "Let us then boldly assert that religion is a product of the normal man, that man is most in touch with truth when he is most religious and most assured of an infinite destiny . . . When he is good he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order, when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner he finds death revolting and absurd. How can we not assume that it is in those former moments that man sees best? . . ."4 These sentences are so entirely antithetical to my ears and habits that when I found them my initial rage wrote beside them "la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!" [the finest example of religious stupidity] - until my later anger grew to like them, these sentences which turn the truth on its head! It is so nice, so distinguished, to have one's very own antithesis!
Port Royal : an important French religious community in the seventeenth century which encouraged self-renunciation.
Sainte-Beuve : Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), a prominent French poet and literary critic.
Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a well-known French writer on Christianity. Nietzsche quotes the French: "disons donc hardiment que la religion est un produit de l'homme normal, que l'homme est le plus dans le vrai quand il est le plus religieux et le plus assuré d'une destiné infinie. . . . C'est quand il est bon qu'il veut que la vertu corresponde a un ordre éternel, c'est quand il contemple les choses d'une manière désinteressée qu'il trouve la mort révoltante et absurde. Comment ne pas supposer que c'est dans ces moments-la, que l'homme voit le mieux? . . ."
