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To think a thing evil means to make it evil.  The passions become evil and malicious if they are regarded as evil and malicious. Thus Christianity has succeeded in transforming Eros³⁶ and Aphrodite³⁷  great powers capable of idealisation  into diabolical kobolds³⁸ and phantoms by means of the torments it introduces into the consciences of believers whenever they are excited sexually. Is it not dreadful to make necessary and regularly recurring sensations into a source of inner misery, and in this way to want to make inner misery a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon in every human being! In addition to which it remains a misery kept secret and thus more deeply rooted: for not everyone possesses the courage of Shakespeare to confess his Christian gloominess on this point in the way he did in his Sonnets.  Must everything that one has to combat, that one has to keep within bounds or on occasion banish totally from one's mind, always have to be called evil! Is it not the way of common souls always to think an enemy must be evil! And ought one to call Eros an enemy? The sexual sensations have this in common with the sensations of sympathy and worship, that one person, by doing what pleases him, gives pleasure to another person  such benevolent arrangements are not to be found so very often in nature! And to calumniate such an arrangement and to ruin it through associating it with a bad conscience!  In the end this diabolising of Eros acquired an outcome in comedy: thanks to the dark secretiveness of the church in all things erotic, the 'devil' Eros gradually became more interesting to mankind than all the saints and angels put together: the effect has been that, to this very day, the love story is the only thing which all circles find equally interesting  and with an exaggeratedness which antiquity would have found incomprehensible and which will one day again elicit laughter. All our thinking and poetising, from the highest to the lowest, is characterised, and more than characterised, by the excessive importance attached to the love story: on this account it may be that posterity will judge the whole inheritance of Christian culture to be marked by something crackbrained and petty.