The Religious Mood

⁴⁵ The preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist is the human soul and its limits.

He says despairingly to himself:

Psychologist

A single individual is a great virgin forest!"

He sends hundreds of his hunting assistants and hounds into the history of the human soul as HIS game.

He experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for the things he is curious about.

It is evil to send scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds.

For example, in order to determine the history of the problem of KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIENCE has hitherto had in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would need to have a profound, bruised, and immensely experienced intellectual conscience of Pascal.

Then he would still require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which from above would be able to oversee, arrange, and formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.

But who could:

• do me this service?
• have time to wait for such servants?

They:

• appear too rarely
• are so improbable at all times!

Eventually one must do everything ONESELF in order to know something – one has MUCH to do!

But a curiosity like mine is the most agreeable of vices. The love of truth has its reward in heaven, and already on earth.

⁴⁶ The Christian faith from the beginning, is the sacrifice of all freedom, pride, self-confidence of spirit.

It is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith.

It:

• is adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience
• takes for granted that:
  • the subjection of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL
  • all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form of which “faith” comes to it.

Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, “God on the Cross”.

Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula.

It promised a transvaluation of all ancient values.

It was the PROFOUND Orient, the Oriental slave who took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-minded toleration, on the Roman “Catholicism” of non-faith.

It was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them.

“Enlightenment” causes revolt, for the slave:

• desires the unconditioned
• understands only the tyrannous
• even in morals, loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness

His many HIDDEN sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to DENY suffering.

The skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the last great slave-insurrection which began with the French Revolution.

⁴⁷ Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared, it has been connected with 3 dangerous prescriptions:

1. Solitude
2. Fasting
3. Sexual abstinence

But it does not know which is cause and which is effect.

This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then with equal suddenness transforms into penitential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy?

But nowhere is it MORE obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has there grown such a mass of absurdity and superstition, no other type seems to have been more interesting to men and even to philosophers—perhaps it is time to become just a little indifferent here, to learn caution, or, better still, to look AWAY, TO GO AWAY—Yet in the background of the most recent philosophy, that of Schopenhauer, we find almost as the problem in itself, this terrible note of interrogation of the religious crisis and awakening.

How is the negation of will POSSIBLE?

How is the saint possible?

Schopenhauer became a philosopher by asking this.

His most convinced (and last) adherent was Richard Wagner.

Wagner ended his own life-work just here, and should finally put that terrible and eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vecu, and as it loved and lived, at the very time that the mad-doctors in almost all European countries had an opportunity to study the type close at hand, wherever the religious neurosis—or as I call it, “the religious mood”—made its latest epidemical outbreak and display as the “Salvation Army”—

The immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of the soul was regarded as morally antithetical.

It was believed here to be self-evident that a “bad man” was all at once turned into a “saint,” a good man.

The hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions of moral values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions into the text and facts of the case? What?

“Miracle” only an error of interpretation? A lack of philology?