The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
23.
Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to _justify_ its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply says, as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to _why_ he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.-- At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is _believed_ to be true. Truth and _faith_: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically _opposite_ worlds--the road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to _make_ one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any _pleasure_ out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is _not_ necessary for him to be actually sinful, but merely to _feel_ sinful. But when _faith_ is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road.--Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful _stimulans_ to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.
Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it--so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can _satisfy_ it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most _malign_ of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil.)[3]--In order that _love_ may be possible, God must become a person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin. These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon _chastity_ greatly strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are _not_. The force of illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for _transfiguring_. When a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer is overcome--it is scarcely even noticed.--So much for the three Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian _ingenuities_.--Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.-- [3] That is, in Pandora's box.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.