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– A further step in the psychology of conviction, of ‘belief. I suggested long ago that convictions might be more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. This time I should like to pose the decisive question: is there any difference whatever between a lie and a conviction? – All the world believes there is, but what does all the world not believe! – Every conviction has its history, its preliminary forms, its tentative shapes, its blunders: it becomes a conviction after not being one for a long time, after hardly being one for an even longer time. What? could the lie not be among these embryonic forms of conviction? – Sometimes it requires merely a change in persons: in the son that becomes conviction which in the father was still a lie. – I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it: whether the lie takes place before witnesses or without witnesses is of no consequence. The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception. – Now this desiring not to see what one sees, this desiring not to see as one sees, is virtually the primary condition for all who are in any sense party: the party man necessarily becomes a liar. German historiography, for example, is convinced that Rome was despotism, that the Teutons brought the spirit of freedom into the world: what difference is there between this conviction and a lie? Is there any further need to be surprised if all parties, German historians included, instinctively have the big moral words in their mouths – that morality continues to exist virtually because the party man of every sort has need of it every moment? – ‘This is our conviction: we confess it before all the world, we live and die for it – respect everything that has convictions!’ – I have heard this kind of thing even from the lips of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite is certainly not made more decent by the fact that he lies on principle…. The priests, who are subtler in such things and understand very well the objection that can be raised to the concept of a conviction, that is to say mendaciousness on principle because serving a purpose, have taken over from the Jews the prudence of inserting the concept ‘God’, ‘the will of God’, ‘the revelation of God’ in its place. Kant too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same road: his reason became practical in this matter. – There are questions whose truth or untruth cannot be decided by man; all the supreme questions, all the supreme problems of value are beyond human reason…. To grasp the limits of reason – only this is truly philosophy…. To what end did God give mankind revelation? Would God have done anything superfluous? Mankind cannot of itself know what is good and what evil, therefore God taught mankind his will…. Moral: the priest does not lie – the question ‘true’ or ‘untrue’ does not arise in such things as priests speak of; these things do not permit of lying at all. For in order to lie one would have to be able to decide what is true here. But this is precisely what mankind cannot do; the priest is thus only God’s mouthpiece. – This kind of priestly syllogism is by no means only Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewdness of a ‘revelation’ pertains to the type priest, to priests of décadence as much as to priests of paganism (– pagans are all who say Yes to life, to whom ‘God’ is the word for the great Yes to all things). – The ‘Law’, the ‘will of God’, the ‘sacred book’, ‘inspiration’ – all merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power, by which he maintains his power, these concepts are to be found at the basis of all priestly organizations, all priestly or priestly-philosophical power-structures. The ‘holy lie’ – common to Confucius, the Law-Book of Manu, Mohammed, the Christian Church – : it is not lacking in Plato. ‘The truth exists’: this means, wherever it is heard, the priest is lying…
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– Ultimately the point is to what end a lie is told. That ‘holy’ ends are lacking in Christianity is my objection to its means. Only bad ends: the poisoning, slandering, denying of life, contempt for the body, the denigration and self-violation of man through the concept sin – consequently its means too are bad. – It is with an opposite feeling that I read the Law – Book of Manu, an incomparably spiritual and superior work, so much as to name which in the same breath as the Bible would be a sin against the spirit. One sees immediately that it has a real philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an ill – smelling Jewish acidity compounded of rabbinism and superstition – it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to bite on. Not forgetting the main thing, the basic difference from any sort of Bible: it is the means by which the noble orders, the philosophers and the warriors, keep the mob under control; noble values everywhere, a feeling of perfection, an affirmation of life, a triumphant feeling of well-being in oneself and of goodwill towards life – the sun shines on the entire book. – All the things upon which Christianity vents its abysmal vulgarity, procreation for example, woman, marriage, are here treated seriously, with reverence, with love and trust. How can one actually put into the hands of women and children a book containing the low-minded saying: ‘To avoid fornication let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband… for it is better to marry than burn’?* And is it allowable to be a Christian as long as the origin of man is Christianized, that is to say dirtied, with the concept of the immaculata conceptio?… I know of no book in which so many tender and kind remarks are addressed to woman as in the Law-Book of Manu; these old greybeards and saints have a way of being polite to women which has perhaps never been surpassed. ‘A woman’s mouth’ – it says in one place – ‘a girl’s breast, a child’s prayer, the smoke of a sacrifice are always pure’. Another passage: ‘There is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow of a cow, air, water, fire and a girl’s breath.’ A final passage – perhaps also a holy lie – : ‘All the openings of the body above the navel are pure, all below impure. Only in the case of a girl is the whole body pure.’
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One catches the unholiness of the Christian means in flagranti when one compares the Christian purpose with the purpose of the Manu Law-Book – when one throws a bright light on this greatest of antitheses of purpose. The critic of Christianity cannot be spared the task of making Christianity contemptible. – Such a law-book as that of Manu originates as does every good law-book: it summarizes the experience, policy and experimental morality of long centuries, it settles accounts, it creates nothing new. The precondition for a codification of this sort is the insight that the means of endowing with authority a truth slowly and expensively acquired are fundamentally different from those by which one would demonstrate it. A law-book never tells of the utility of a law, of the reason for it, of the casuistry which preceded it: for in that way it would lose the imperative tone, the ‘thou shalt’, the precondition of being obeyed. The problem lies precisely in this. – At a certain point in the evolution of a people its most enlightened, that is to say most reflective and far-sighted, class declares the experience in accordance with which the people is to live – that is, can live – to be fixed and settled. Their objective is to bring home the richest and completest harvest from the ages of experimentation and bad experience. What, consequently, is to be prevented above all is the continuation of experimenting, the perpetuation in infinitum of the fluid condition of values, tests, choices, criticizing of values. A two-fold wall is erected against this: firstly revelation, that is the assertion that the reason for these laws is not of human origin, was not sought and found slowly and with many blunders, but, being of divine origin, is whole, perfect, without history, a gift, a miracle, merely communicated…. Then tradition, that is, the assertion that the law has already existed from time immemorial, that it is impious, a crime against the ancestors, to call it in question. The authority of the law is established by the thesis: God gave it, the ancestors lived it. – The higher rationale of such a procedure lies in the intention of gradually making the way of life recognized as correct (that is demonstrated by a tremendous amount of finely-sifted experience) unconscious: so that a complete automatism of instinct is achieved – the precondit
ion for any kind of mastery, any kind of perfection in the art of living. To set up a law-book of the kind of Manu means to concede to a people the right henceforth to become masterly, to become perfect – to be ambitious for the highest art of living. To that end the law must be made unconscious: this is the purpose of every holy lie. – The order of castes, the supreme, the dominating law, is only the sanctioning of a natural order, a natural law of the first rank over which no arbitrary caprice, no ‘modern idea’ has any power. In every healthy society, there can be distinguished three types of man of divergent physiological tendency which mutually condition one another and each of which possesses its own hygiene, its own realm of work, its own sort of mastery and feeling of perfection. Nature, not Manu, separates from one another the predominantly spiritual type, the predominantly muscular and temperamental type, and the third type distinguished neither in the one nor the other, the mediocre type – the last as the great majority, the first as the élite. The highest caste – I call it the very few – possesses, as the perfect caste, also the privileges of the very few: among them is that of representing happiness, beauty, benevolence on earth. Only the most spiritual human beings are permitted beauty, beautiful things: only in their case is benevolence not weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum: the good is a privilege. On the other hand, nothing is more strictly forbidden them than ugly manners or a pessimistic outlook, an eye that makes ugly – to say nothing of indignation at the collective aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; pessimism likewise. ‘The world is perfect’ – thus speaks the instinct of the most spiritual, the affirmative instinct – : ‘imperfection, everything beneath us, distance between man and man, the pathos of this distance, the Chandala themselves pertain to this perfection’. The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct. They consider the hard task a privilege, to play with vices which overwhelm others a recreation…. Knowledge – a form of asceticism. – They are the most venerable kind of human being: this does not exclude their being the most cheerful, the most amiable. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second in rank. – The second in rank: these are the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security; the noble warriors; above all the king as the highest formula of warrior, judge and upholder of the law. The second in rank are the executives of the most spiritual order, the closest to them who relieve them of everything coarse in the work of ruling – their following, their right hand, their best pupils. – In all this, to say it again, there is nothing capricious, nothing ‘artificial’; whatever is different from this is artificial – nature is then confounded…. The order of castes, order of rank, only formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, for making possible higher and higher types – inequality of rights is the condition for the existence of rights at all. – A right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights – the coldness increases, the responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The crafts, trade, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in a word the entire compass of professional activity, are in no way compatible with anything other than mediocrity in ability and desires; these things would be out of place among the élite, the instinct pertaining to them is as much opposed to aristocracy as it is to anarchy. To be a public utility, a cog, a function, is a natural vocation, it is not society, it is the kind of happiness of which the great majority are alone capable, which makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre it is happiness to be mediocre; mastery in one thing, specialization, is for them a natural instinct. It would be quite unworthy of a more profound mind to see an objection in mediocrity as such. It is even the prime requirement for the existence of exceptions; a high culture is conditional upon it. When an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself or his equals, this is not mere politeness of the heart* – it is simply his duty…. Whom among today’s rabble do I hate the most? The Socialist rabble, the Chandala apostles who undermine the worker’s instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his little state of being – who make him envious, who teach him revengefulness…. Injustice never lies in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to ‘equal’ rights…. What is bad? But I have already answered that question: everything that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revengefulness. – The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin…
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It does indeed make a difference for what purpose one lies: whether one preserves with a lie or destroys with it. One may assert an absolute equivalence between Christian and anarchist: their purpose, their instinct is set only on destruction. For the proof of this proposition one has only to read history, which displays it with frightful clarity. If we have just now examined a religious legislation the purpose of which was to ‘eternalize’ a grand organization of society, the supreme condition for the prosperity of life – Christianity discovered its mission in making an end of just such an organization because life prospered within it. There the revenue of reason from long ages of experimentation and uncertainty was to be employed for the benefit of the most distant future and the biggest, richest, most complete harvest possible brought home: here, on the contrary, the harvest was poisoned overnight…. That which stood aere perennius, the Imperium Romanum, the most grandiose form of organization under difficult conditions which has hitherto been achieved, in comparison with which everything before and everything since is patchwork, bungling, dilettantism – these holy anarchists made it an ‘act of piety’ to destroy ‘the world’, that is to say the Imperium Romanum, until not one stone was left standing on another – until even Teutons and other such ruffians could become master of it…. The Christian and the anarchist: both décadents, both incapable of producing anything but dissolution, poisoning, degeneration, both bloodsuckers, both with the instinct of deadly hatred towards everything that stands erect, that towers grandly up, that possesses duration, that promises life a future…. Christianity was the vampire of the Imperium Romanum – the tremendous deed of the Romans in clearing the ground for a great culture which could take its time was undone overnight by Christianity. – Is this still not understood? The Imperium Romanum which we know, which the history of the Roman province teaches us to know better and better, this most admirable of all works of art in the grand style, was a beginning, its structure was calculated to prove itself by millennia – to this day there has never been such building, to build in such a manner sub specie aeterni has never been so much as dreamed of! – This organization was firm enough to endure bad emperors: the accident of persons must have no effect on such things – first principle of all grand architecture. But it was not firm enough to endure the corruptest form of corruption, to endure the Christian…. These stealthy vermin which, shrouded in night, fog and ambiguity crept up to every individual and sucked seriousness for real things, the instinct for realities of any kind, out of him, this cowardly, womanish and honeyed crew gradually alienated the ‘souls’ of this tremendous structure – those precious, those manly-noble natures who found their own cause, their own seriousness, their own pride in the cause of Rome. This underhanded bigotry, conventicle secrecy, gloomy concepts such as Hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, such as the unio mystica in blood-drinking, above all the slowly stirred-up fire of revengefulness, of Chandala revengefulness – that is what became master of Rome, the same species of religion on whose antecedent form Epicurus had already made war. One must read Lucretius to understand what it was Epicurus opposed: not paganism
but ‘Christianity’, which is to say the corruption of souls through the concept of guilt, punishment and immortality. – He opposed the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity – to deny immortality was already in those days a real redemption. – And Epicurus would have won, every mind of any account in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean: then Paul appeared…. Paul, Chandala hatred against Rome, against ‘the world’, become flesh and genius, the Jew, the eternal Jew* par excellence…. What he divined was that with the aid of the little sectarian movement on the edge of Judaism one could ignite a ‘world conflagration’, that with the symbol ‘God on the Cross’ one could sum up everything down-trodden, everything in secret revolt, the entire heritage of anarchist agitation in the Empire into a tremendous power. ‘Salvation is of the Jews.’ – Christianity as the formula for outbidding all the subterranean cults, those of Osiris, of the Great Mother, of Mithras for example – and for summing them up: it is in this insight that the genius of Paul consists. His instinct in this matter was so sure that, doing ruthless violence to the truth, he took the ideas by which those Chandala religions exercised their fascination and placed them in the mouth of the ‘Saviour’ he had invented, and not only in his mouth – so as to make of him something even a priest of Mithras could understand…. This was his vision on the road to Damascus: he grasped that to disvalue ‘the world’ he needed the belief in immortality, that the concept ‘Hell’ will master even Rome – that with the ‘Beyond’ one kills life…. Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme,* and do not merely rhyme…
Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ (Penguin Classics) Page 19
