Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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In all its essential points, this book (1886) is a criticism of _modernity,_ embracing the modern sciences, arts, even politics, together with certain indications as to a type which would be the reverse of modern man, or as little like him as possible, a noble and yea-saying type. In this last respect the book is a _school for gentlemen_--the term _gentleman_ being understood here in a much more spiritual and radical sense than it has implied hitherto. All those things of which the age is proud,--as, for instance, far-famed "objectivity," "sympathy with all that suffers," "the historical sense," with its subjection to foreign tastes, with its lying-in-the-dust before _petits faits,_ and the rage for science,--are shown to be the contradiction of the type recommended, and are regarded as almost ill-bred. If you remember that this book follows upon _Zarathustra,_ you may possibly guess to what system of diet it owes its life. The eye which, owing to tremendous constraint, has become accustomed to see at a great distance,--_Zarathustra_ is even more far-sighted than the Tsar,--is here forced to focus sharply that which is close at hand, the present time, the things that lie about him.
In all the aphorisms and more particularly in the form of this book, the reader will find the same _voluntary_ turning away from those instincts which made a _Zarathustra_ a possible feat. Refinement in form, in aspiration, and in the art of keeping silent, are its more or less obvious qualities; psychology is handled with deliberate hardness and cruelty,--the whole book does not contain one single good-natured word.... All this sort of thing refreshes a man. Who can guess the kind of recreation that is necessary after such an expenditure of goodness as is to be found in _Zarathustra_? From a theological standpoint--now pay ye heed; for it is but on rare occasions that I speak as a theologian--it was God Himself who, at the end of His great work, coiled Himself up in the form of a serpent at the foot of the tree of knowledge. It was thus that He recovered from being a God.... He had made everything too beautiful.... The devil is simply God's moment of idleness, on that seventh day.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.