Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion§240 Supposing it were impossible to disprove Christianity, Pascal thinks, in view of the terrible possibility that it may be true, that it is in the highest degree prudent to be a Christian. As a proof of how much Christianity has lost of its terrible nature, today we find that other attempt to justify it, which consists in asserting, that even if it were a mistake, it nevertheless provides the greatest advantages and pleasures for its adherents throughout their lives: it therefore seems that this belief should be upheld owing to the peace and quiet it ensures not owing to the terror of a threatening possibility, but rather out of fear of a life that has lost one of its charms. This hedonistic turn of thought, which uses happiness as a proof, is a symptom of decline: it takes the place of the proof resulting from power or from that which to the Christian mind is most terrible — namely, fear. With this new interpretation, Christianity is, as a matter of fact, nearing its stage of exhaustion. People are satisfied with a Christianity which is an opiate, because they no longer have the strength to seek, to struggle, to dare, to stand alone, nor to take up Pascal’s position and to share that gloomily brooding self-contempt, that belief in human unworthiness and that anxiety which believes that it “may be damned”. But a Christianity the chief object of which is to soothe diseased nerves, does not require the terrible solution consisting of a “God on the cross”; which is why Buddhism is silently gaining ground all over Europe.