The Portable Nietzsche (71 page)

 

28

It is a completely different question whether any such opposition ever entered his consciousness—whether he was not merely experienced by others as representing this opposition. And it is only at this point that I touch on the problem of the
psychology of the Redeemer.

I confess that I read few books with as many difficulties as the Gospels. These difficulties are different from those whose demonstration has provided the scholarly curiosity of the German spirit with one of its most unforgettable triumphs. The time is long past when I too, like every young scholar, slowly drew out the savor of the work of the incomparable Strauss, with the shrewdness of a refined philologist. I was twenty years old then: now I am too serious for that. What do I care about the contradictions in the “tradition”? How can one call saints' legends “tradition” in the first place? The biographies of saints are the most ambiguous kind of literature there is: to apply scientific methods to them,
in the absence of any other documents,
strikes me as doomed to failure from the start—mere scholarly idleness.

 

29

What concerns
me
is the psychological type of the Redeemer. After all, this could be contained in the Gospels despite the Gospels, however mutilated or overloaded with alien features: as Francis of Assisi is preserved in his legends, despite his legends.
Not
the truth concerning what he did, what he said, how he really died; but the question
whether
his type can still be exhibited at all, whether it has been “transmitted.”

The attempts I know to read the
history
of a “soul” out of the Gospels seem to me proof of a contemptible psychological frivolity. M. Renan, that buffoon in
psychologicis
, has introduced the two most inappropriate concepts possible into his explanation of the Jesus type: the concept of
genius
and the concept of the
hero (“héros”).
But if anything is unevangelical it is the concept of the hero. Just the opposite of all wrestling, of all feeling-oneself-in-a-struggle, has here become instinct: the incapacity for resistance becomes morality here (“resist not evil”—the most profound word of the Gospels, their key in a certain sense), blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in not
being able
to be an enemy. What are the “glad tidings”? True life, eternal life, has been found—it is not promised, it is here, it is
in you
: as a living in love, in love without subtraction and exclusion, without regard for station. Everyone is the child of God—Jesus definitely presumes nothing for himself alone—and as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone. To make a
hero
of Jesus! And even more, what a misunderstanding is the word “genius”! Our whole concept, our cultural concept, of “spirit” has no meaning whatever in the world in which Jesus lives. Spoken with the precision of a physiologist, even an entirely different word would still be more nearly fitting here—the word
idiot.
⁴⁸

We know a state in which the
sense of touch
is pathologically excitable and shrinks from any contact, from grasping a solid object. One should translate such a physiological
habitus
into its ultimate consequence—an instinctive hatred of every reality, a flight into “what cannot be grasped,” “the incomprehensible,” an aversion to every formula, to every concept of time and space, to all that is solid, custom, institution, church; a being at home in a world which is no longer in contact with any kind of reality, a merely “inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal” world. “The kingdom of God is
in you.
”

 

30

The instinctive hatred of reality:
a consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and excitement which no longer wants any contact at all because it feels every contact too deeply.

The instinctive exclusion of any antipathy, any hostility, any boundaries or divisions in man's feelings:
the consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and excitement which experiences any resistance, even any compulsion to resist, as unendurable
displeasure
(that is, as
harmful
, as something against which the instinct of self-preservation
warns
us); and finds blessedness (pleasure) only in no longer offering any resistance to anybody, neither to evil nor to him who is evil—love as the only, as the
last
possible, way of life.

These are the two
physiological realities
on which, out of which, the doctrine of redemption grew. I call this a sublime further development of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid basis. Most closely related to it, although with a generous admixture of Greek vitality and nervous energy, is Epicureanism, the pagan doctrine of redemption. Epicurus, a
typical decadent
—first recognized as such by me. The fear of pain, even of infinitely minute pain—that can end in no other way than in a
religion of love
.

 

31

I have already given my answer to the problem. Its presupposition is that the Redeemer type is preserved for us only in extensive distortion. This distortion is very probable in any case; for several reasons, such a type could not remain pure, whole, free from accretions. He must show traces of the milieu in which he moved as a foreign figure; and even more of the history, the
fate
of the first Christian community, from which the type was enriched, retroactively, with features which are comprehensible only in terms of later polemics and propaganda purposes.

That queer and sick world into which the Gospels introduce us—as in a Russian novel, a world in which the scum of society, nervous disorders, and “childlike” idiocy seem to be having a rendezvous—must at all events have
coarsened
the type: in order to be able to understand anything of it, the first disciples, in particular, first translated into their own crudity an existence which was wholly embedded in symbols and incomprehensibilities—for them the type did not
exist
until it had been reshaped in better-known forms. The prophet, the Messiah, the future judge, the moral teacher, the miracle man, John the Baptist—each another chance to misconstrue the type.

Finally, let us not underestimate the
proprium
of all great, and especially sectarian, veneration: it blots out the original, often painfully strange features and idiosyncrasies of the venerated being—
it does not even see them.
It is regrettable that a Dostoevski did not live near this most interesting of all decadents—I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

A final consideration: as a type of decadence, the type
might
actually have been peculiarly manifold and contradictory. Such a possibility cannot be excluded altogether. Nevertheless, everything speaks against this: precisely the tradition would have to be curiously faithful and objective in this case—and we have reasons for supposing the opposite. Meanwhile there is a gaping contradiction between the sermonizer on the mount, lake, and meadow, whose appearance seems like that of a Buddha on soil that is not at all Indian, and that fanatic of aggression, that mortal enemy of theologians and priests, whom Renan's malice has glorified as
le grand maître en ironie
. I myself have no doubt that the generous dose of gall (and even of
esprit
) first flowed into the type of the Master from the excited state of Christian propaganda; after all, the unscrupulousness of all sectarians, when it comes to constructing their own
apology
out of their master, is only too well known. When the first community needed a judging, quarreling, angry, malignantly sophistical theologian,
against
theologians, it
created
its “God” according to its needs—just as it put into his mouth, without any hesitation, those wholly unevangelical concepts which now it cannot do without: “the return,” the “Last Judgment,” every kind of temporal expectation and promise.

 

32

To repeat, I am against any attempt to introduce the fanatic into the Redeemer type: the word
impérieux,
which Renan uses, is alone enough to annul the type. The “glad tidings” are precisely that there are no longer any opposites; the kingdom of heaven belongs to the
children;
the faith which finds expression here is not a faith attained through struggle—it is there, it has been there from the beginning; it is, as it were, an infantilism that has receded into the spiritual. The case of puberty being retarded and not developing in the organism, as a consequence of degeneration, is well known, at least to physiologists. Such a faith is not angry, does not reproach, does not resist: it does not bring “the sword”—it simply does not foresee how it might one day separate. It does not prove itself either by miracle or by reward and promise, least of all “by scripture”: at every moment it is its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own “kingdom of God.” Nor does this faith formulate itself: it
lives,
it resists all formulas. Of course, the accidents of environment, of language, of background determine a certain sphere of concepts: the earliest Christianity uses only Jewish-Semitic concepts (the eating and drinking at the Last Supper belong here, that concept which, like everything Jewish, has been misused so badly by the church). But one should beware of finding more than a sign language in this, a semeiology, an occasion for parables. For this anti-realist, that not a word is taken literally is precisely the presupposition of being able to speak at all. Among Indians he would have availed himself of Sankhya concepts; among the Chinese, of those of Lao-tse—without having felt any difference. Using the expression somewhat tolerantly, one could call Jesus a “free spirit”—he does not care for anything solid: the word kills, all that is solid kills. The concept, the
experience
of “life” in the only way he knows it, resists any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. He speaks only of the innermost: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—all the rest, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, has for him only the value of a sign, a simile.

Make no mistake at this point, however seductive the Christian, in other words, the
ecclesiastical
, prejudice may be: such a symbolist par excellence stands outside all religion, all cult concepts, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “knowledge” is
pure foolishness
precisely concerning the fact that such things exist.
Culture
is not known to him even by hearsay, he does not need to fight it—he does not negate it. The same applies to the state, to the whole civic order and society, to work, to war—he never had any reason to negate “the world”; the ecclesiastical concept of “world” never occurred to him. To negate is the very thing that is impossible for him. Dialectic is equally lacking; the very idea is lacking that a faith, a “truth,” might be proved by reasons (his proofs are inner “lights,” inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, all of them “proofs of strength”). Such a doctrine is also incapable of contradicting: it does not even comprehend that there are, that there
can
be, other doctrines; it cannot even imagine a contradictory judgment. Where it encounters one, from innermost sympathy it will mourn over “blindness”—for it sees the “light”—but it will offer no objection.

 

33

In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”—any distance separating God and man—is abolished:
precisely this is the “glad tidings.”
Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it.

The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian
acts
, he is distinguished by acting
differently:
by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and not-Jew (“the neighbor” —really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody; by not permitting himself to be seen or involved at courts of law (“not swearing”); by not divorcing his wife under any circumstances, not even if his wife has been proved unfaithful. All of this, at bottom one principle; all of this, consequences of one instinct.

The life of the Redeemer was nothing other than
this
practice—nor was his death anything else. He no longer required any formulas, any rites for his intercourse with God—not even prayer. He broke with the whole Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation; he knows that it is only in the
practice
of life that one feels “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” at all times a “child of God.” Not “repentance,” not “prayer for forgiveness,” are the ways to God:
only the evangelical practice
leads to God, indeed, it is “God”! What was disposed of with the evangel was the Judaism of the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “redemption through faith”—the whole Jewish
ecclesiastical
doctrine was negated in the “glad tidings.”

The deep instinct for how one must
live
, in order to feel oneself “in heaven,” to feel “eternal,” while in all other behavior one decidedly does not feel oneself “in heaven”—this alone is the psychological reality of “redemption.” A new way of life, not a new faith.