The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
27.
Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can certainly do without them, the problem of _meaning_ of the ascetic ideal--what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day? those things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in another connection (under the title "A Contribution to the History of European Nihilism," I refer for this to a work which I am preparing: _The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values_). The only reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere, only one real kind of enemies and _damagers_: these are the comedians of this ideal--for they awake mistrust. Everywhere otherwise, where the mind is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it dispenses altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for this abstinence is "Atheism")--_with the exception of the will for truth_. But this will, this _remnant_ of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its severest and cleverest formulation, esoteric through and through, stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so much its remnant as its _kernel_. Unqualified honest atheism (and its air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual men of this age) is _not_ opposed to that ideal, to the extent that it appears to be; it is rather one of the final phases of its evolution, one of its syllogisms and pieces of inherent logic--it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself _the lie of the belief in God_. (The same course of development in India--quite independently, and consequently of some demonstrative value--the same ideal driving to the same conclusion the decisive point reached five hundred years before the European era, or more precisely at the time of Buddha--it started in the Sankhyam philosophy, and then this was popularised through Buddha, and made into a religion.)
_What_, I put the question with all strictness, has really _triumphed_ over the Christian God? The answer stands in my _Joyful Wisdom_, Aph. 357: "the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was with increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral order of the world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained them, as though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now done away with, all this has the conscience _against_ it, and is regarded by every subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice--by means of this severity, if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, _good Europeans_ and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-mastery.". .. All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary "self-mastery" even in the essence of life--ever is the law-giver finally exposed to the cry, "_patere legem quam ipse tulisti_"; in thus wise did Christianity _go to ruin as a dogma_, through its own morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as a morality--we are standing on the threshold of this event.
After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it finally draws its _strongest conclusion_, its conclusion against itself; this, however, happens, when it puts the question, "_what is the meaning of every will for truth?_" And here again do I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet _I know_ of no friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness _as a problem_?---By reason of this attainment of self-consciousness on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward--there is no doubt about it--goes _to pieces_: this is that great hundred-act play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all plays.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.