Part 6

In order rightly to understand the origin of ascetic ideals, we must, moreover, consider that the earliest generations of spiritual and contemplative natures lived under a fearful pressure of contempt on the part of the hunters and warriors. The unwarlike element in them was despicable. They had no other means of holding their own than that of inspiring fear. This they could only do by cruelty to themselves, mortification and self-discipline in a hermit's life. As priests, soothsayers and sorcerers they then struck superstitious terror into the masses. The ascetic priest is the unsightly larva from which the healthy philosopher has emerged. Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.

Nevertheless the self-contradiction we find in asceticism--life turned against life--is of course only apparent. In reality the ascetic ideal corresponds to a decadent life's profound need of healing and tending. It is an ideal that points to depression and exhaustion; by its help life struggles against death. It is life's device for self-preservation. Its necessary antecedent is a morbid condition in the tamed human being, a disgust with life, coupled with the desire to be something else, to be somewhere else, raised to the highest pitch of emotion and passion.

The ascetic priest is the embodiment of this very wish. By its power he keeps the whole herd of dejected, fainthearted, despairing and unsuccessful creatures, fast to life. The very fact that he himself is sick makes him their born herdsman. If he were healthy, he would turn away with loathing from all this eagerness to re-label weakness, envy, Pharisaism and false morality as virtue. But, being himself sick, he is called upon to be an attendant in the great hospital of sinners--the Church. He is constantly occupied with sufferers who seek the cause of their pain outside themselves; he teaches the patient that the guilty cause of his pain is himself. Thus he diverts the rancour of the abortive man and makes him less harmful, by letting a great part of his resentment recoil on himself. The ascetic priest cannot properly be called a physician; he mitigates suffering and invents consolations of every kind, both narcotics and stimulants.

The problem was to contend with fatigue and despair, which had seized like an epidemic upon great masses of men. Many remedies were tried. First, it was sought to depress vitality to the lowest degree: not to will, not to desire, not to work, and so on; to become apathetic (Pascal's Il faut s'abêtir). The object was sanctification, a hypnotising of all mental life, a relaxation of every purpose, and consequently freedom from pain. In the next place, mechanical activity was employed as a narcotic against states of depression: the "blessing of labour." The ascetic priest, who has to deal chiefly with sufferers of the poorer classes, reinterprets the task of the unfortunate drudge for him, making him see in it a benefit. Then again, the prescription of a little, easily accessible joy, is a favourite remedy for depression; such as gladdening others, helping them in love of one's neighbour. Finally, the decisive cure is to organise all the sick into an immense hospital, to found a congregation of them. The disinclination that accompanies the sense of weakness is thereby combated, since the mass feels strong in its inner cohesion.

But the chief remedy of the ascetic priest was, after all, his reinterpretation of the feeling of guilt as "sin." The inner suffering was a punishment. The sick man was the sinner. Nietzsche compares the unfortunate who receives this explanation of his qualms with a hen round which a chalk circle has been drawn: he cannot get out. Wherever we look, for century after century, we see the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, staring--in spite of Job--at guilt as the only cause of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience and the scourge and the hairy shirt and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the cry of "More pain! More pain!" Everything served the ascetic ideal. And then arose epidemics like those of St. Vitus's dance and the flagellants, witches' hysteria and the wholesale delirium of extravagant sects (which still lingers in otherwise beneficially disciplined bodies such as the Salvation Army).

The ascetic ideal has as yet no real assailants; there is no decided prophet of a new ideal. Inasmuch as since the time of Copernicus science has constantly tended to deprive man of his earlier belief in his own importance, its influence is rather favourable to asceticism than otherwise. At present the only real enemies and underminers of the ascetic ideal are to be found in the charlatans of that ideal, in its hypocritical champions, who excite and maintain distrust of it.

As the senselessness of suffering was felt to be a curse, the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning; a meaning which brought a new flood of suffering with it, but which was better than none. In our day a new ideal is in process of formation, which sees in suffering a condition of life, a condition of happiness, and which in the name of a new culture combats all that we have hitherto called culture.

Compare Lassalle's theory of the original religion of Rome. G. Brandes; Ferdinand Lassalle (London and New York, 1911), pp. 76 ff.

Among Nietzsche's works there is a strange book which bears the title, Thus Spake Zarathustra. It consists of four parts, written during the years 1883-85, each part in about ten days, and conceived chapter by chapter on long walks--"with a feeling of inspiration, as though each sentence had been shouted in my ear," as Nietzsche wrote in a private letter.

The central figure and something of the form are borrowed from the Persian Avesta. Zarathustra is the mystical founder of a religion whom we usually call Zoroaster. His religion is the religion of purity; his wisdom is cheerful and dauntless, as that of one who laughed at his birth; his nature is light and flame. The eagle and the serpent, who share his mountain cave, the proudest and the wisest of beasts, are ancient Persian symbols.

This work contains Nietzsche's doctrine in the form, so to speak, of religion. It is the Koran, or rather the Avesta, which he was impelled to leave--obscure and profound, high-soaring and remote from reality, prophetic and intoxicated with the future, filled to the brim with the personality of its author, who again is entirely filled with himself.

Among modern books that have adopted this tone and employed this symbolic and allegorical style may be mentioned Mickiewicz's Book of the Polish Pilgrims, Slowacki's Anheli, and The Words of a Believer, by Lamennais, who was influenced by Mickiewicz. A newer work, known to Nietzsche, is Carl Spitteler's Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881). But all these books, with the exception of Spitteler's, are biblical in their language. Zarathustra, on the other hand, is a book of edification for free spirits.

Nietzsche himself gave this book the highest place among his writings. I do not share this view. The imaginative power which sustains it is not sufficiently inventive, and a certain monotony is inseparable from an archaistic presentment by means of types.

But it is a good book for those to have recourse to who are unable to master Nietzsche's purely speculative works; it contains all his fundamental ideas in the form of poetic recital. Its merit is a style that from the first word to the last is full-toned, sonorous and powerful; now and then rather unctuous in its combative judgments and condemnations; always expressive of self-joy, nay, self-intoxication, but rich in subtleties as in audacities, sure, and at times great. Behind this style lies a mood as of calm mountain air, so light, so ethereally pure, that no infection, no bacteria can live in it--no noise, no stench, no dust assails it, nor does any path lead up.

Clear sky above, open sea at the mountain's foot, and over all a heaven of light, an abyss of light, an azure bell, a vaulted silence above roaring waters and mighty mountain-chains. On the heights Zarathustra is alone with himself, drawing in the pure air in full, deep breaths, alone with the rising sun, alone with the heat of noon, which does not impair the freshness, alone with the voices of the gleaming stars at night.

A good, deep book it is. A book that is bright in its joy of life, dark in its riddles, a book for spiritual mountain-climbers and dare-devils and for the few who are practised in the great contempt of man that loathes the crowd, and in the great love of man that only loathes so deeply because it has a vision of a higher, braver humanity, which it seeks to rear and train.

Zarathustra has sought the refuge of his cave out of disgust with petty happiness and petty virtues. He has seen that men's doctrine of virtue and contentment makes them ever smaller: their goodness is in the main a wish that no one may do them any harm; therefore they forestall the others by doing them a little good. This is cowardice and is called virtue. True, they are at the same time quite ready to attack and injure, but only those who are once for all at their mercy and with whom it is safe to take liberties. This is called bravery and is a still baser cowardice. But when Zarathustra tries to drive out the cowardly devils in men, the cry is raised against him, "Zarathustra is godless."

He is lonely, for all his former companions have become apostates; their young hearts have grown old, and not old even, only weary and slothful, only commonplace--and this they call becoming pious again. "Around light and liberty they once fluttered like gnats and young poets, and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles." They have understood their age. They chose their time well. "For now do all night-birds again fly abroad. Now is the hour of all that dread the light." Zarathustra loathes the great city as a hell for anchorites' thoughts. "All lusts and vices are here at home; but here are also the virtuous, much appointable and appointed virtue. Much appointable virtue with scribe-fingers and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh, blessed with little breast-stars and padded, haunchless daughters. Here is also much piety and much devout spittle-licking and honey-slavering before the God of hosts. For 'from on high' drippeth the star and the gracious spittle; and upward longeth every starless bosom."

And Zarathustra loathes the State, loathes it as Henrik Ibsen did and more profoundly than he.

To him the State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Its fundamental lie is that it is the people. No; creative spirits were they who created the people and gave it a faith and a love; thus they served life; every people is peculiar to itself, but the State is everywhere the same. The State is to Zarathustra that "where the slow suicide of all is called life." The State is for the many too many. Only where the State leaves oft does the man who is not superfluous begin; the man who is a bridge to the Superman.

From states Zarathustra has fled up to his mountain, into his cave.

In forbearance and pity lay his greatest danger. Rich in, the little lies of pity he dwelt among men.

"Stung from head to foot by poisonous flies and hollowed out like a stone by many drops of malice, thus did I sit among them, saying to myself: Innocent is everything petty of its pettiness. Especially they who call themselves the good, they sting in all innocence, they lie in all innocence; how could they be just towards me?

"He who dwelleth among the good, him teacheth pity to lie. Pity breedeth bad air for all free souls. For the stupidity of the good is unfathomable.

"Their stiff wise men did I call wise, not stiff. Their grave-diggers did I call searchers and testers--thus did I learn to confound speech. The grave-diggers dig for themselves diseases. From old refuse arise evil exhalations. Upon the mountains one should live."

And with blessed nostrils he breathes again the freedom of the mountains. His nose is now released from the smell of all that is human. There sits Zarathustra with old broken tables of the law around him and new half-written tables, awaiting his hour; the hour when the lion shall come with the flock of doves, strength in company with gentleness, to do homage to him. And he holds out to men a new table, upon which such maxims as these are written--

Spare not thy neighbour! My great love for the remotest ones commands it. Thy neighbour is something that must be surpassed.

Say not: I will do unto others as I would they should do unto me. What thou doest, that can no man do to thee again. There is no requital.