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The reader will already have conjectured what took place on the stage and behind the scenes of this drama. That will for self-torture, that inverted cruelty of the animal man, who, turned subjective and scared into introspection (encaged as he was in “the State,” as part of his taming process), invented the bad conscience so as to hurt himself, after the natural outlet for this will to hurt, became blocked—in other words, this man of the bad conscience exploited the religious hypothesis so as to carry his martyrdom to the ghastliest pitch of agonised intensity. Owing something to God: this thought becomes his instrument of torture. He apprehends in God the most extreme antitheses that he can find to his own characteristic and ineradicable animal instincts, he himself gives a new interpretation to these animal instincts as being against what he “owes” to God (as enmity, rebellion, and revolt against the “Lord,” the “Father,” the “Sire,” the “Beginning of the world”), he places himself between the horns of the dilemma, “God” and “Devil.” Every negation which he is inclined to utter to himself, to the nature, naturalness, and reality of his being, he whips into an ejaculation of “yes,” uttering it as something existing, living, efficient, as being God, as the holiness of God, the judgment of God, as the hangmanship of God, as transcendence, as eternity, as unending torment, as hell, as infinity of punishment and guilt. This is a kind of madness of the will in the sphere of psychological cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled:—man’s will to find himself guilty and blameworthy to the point of inexpiability, his will to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever being able to balance the guilt, his will to infect and to poison the fundamental basis of the universe with the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all any escape out of this labyrinth of “fixed ideas,” his will for rearing an ideal—that of the “holy God”—face to face with which he can have tangible proof of his own unworthiness. Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! What fantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental bestiality break out immediately, at the very slightest check on its being the beast of action. All this is excessively interesting, but at the same time tainted with a black, gloomy, enervating melancholy, so that a forcible veto must be invoked against looking too long into these abysses. Here is disease, undubitably, the most ghastly disease that has as yet played havoc among men: and he who can still hear (but man turns now deaf ears to such sounds), how in this night of torment and nonsense there has rung out the cry of love, the cry of the most passionate ecstasy, of redemption in love, he turns away gripped by an invincible horror—in man there is so much that is ghastly—too long has the world been a madhouse.
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Let this suffice once for all concerning the origin of the “holy God.” The fact that in itself the conception of gods is not bound to lead necessarily to this degradation of the imagination (a temporary representation of whose vagaries we felt bound to give), the fact that there exist nobler methods of utilising the invention of gods than in this self-crucifixion and self-degradation of man, in which the last two thousand years of Europe have been past masters—these facts can fortunately be still perceived from every glance that we cast at the Grecian gods, these mirrors of noble and grandiose men, in which the animal in man felt itself deified, and did not devour itself in subjective frenzy. These Greeks long utilised their gods as simple buffers against the “bad conscience”—so that they could continue to enjoy their freedom of soul: this, of course, is diametrically opposed to Christianity’s theory of its god. They went very far on this principle, did these splendid and lionhearted children; and there is no lesser authority than that of the Homeric Zeus for making them realise occasionally that they are taking life too casually. “Wonderful,” says he on one occasion—it has to do with the case of Aegistheus, a very bad case indeed—
“Wonderful how they grumble, the mortals against the immortals,
Only from us, they presume, comes evil, but in their folly,
Fashion they, spite of fate, the doom of their own disaster.”
Yet the reader will note and observe that this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being angry with them and thinking evil of them on this score. “How foolish they are,” so thinks he of the misdeeds of mortals—and “folly,” “imprudence,” “a little brain disturbance,” and nothing more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest, bravest period, have admitted to be the ground
