The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
7.
Christianity is called the religion of _pity_.--Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.
Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (--in every _superior_ moral system it appears as a weakness--); going still further, it has been called _the_ virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield _the denial of life_ was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made _worthy of denial_--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the rôle of _protector_ of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of _décadence_--pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the _true_ life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears _a good deal less innocent_ when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to _destroy life_. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue....
Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary _décadence_, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged.... Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors _here_, to be unmerciful _here_, to wield the knife _here_--all this is _our_ business, all this is _our_ sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!--
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.