Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion§248 Christian moral quackery. Pity and contempt succeed each other at short intervals, and at the sight of them I feel as indignant as if I were in the presence of the most despicable crime. Here error is made a duty a — virtue; misapprehension has become a knack, the destructive instinct is systematised under the name of “redemption”; here every operation becomes a wound, an amputation of those very organs whose energy would be the prerequisite to a return of health. And in the best of cases no cure is achieved; all that is done is to exchange one set of evil symptoms for another set —
And this pernicious nonsense, this systematised profanation and castration of life, passes for holy and sacred; to be in its service, to be an instrument of this art of healing, that is to say, to be a priest, is to be rendered distinguished, reverent, holy and sacred. God alone could have been the Author of this supreme art of healing; redemption is only possible as a revelation, as an act of grace, as an unearned gift, made by the Creator Himself.
Proposition I: Spiritual healthiness is regarded as morbid and creates suspicion —
Proposition II: The prerequisites of a strong, exuberant life, strong desires and passions, are reckoned as objections against strong and exuberant life.
Proposition III: Everything which threatens danger to man and which can overcome and ruin him, is evil — and must be rejected and should be torn root and branch from his soul.
Proposition IV: Man converted into a weak creature, inoffensive to himself and others, crushed by humility and modesty and conscious of his weakness, in fact, the “sinner” — this is the desirable type and one which one can produce by means of a little spiritual surgery —