The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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The point that concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might be contained in the gospels, in spite of the gospels, and however much it may have been mutilated, or overladen with foreign features: just as that of Francis of Assisi is contained in his legends in spite of his legends. It is _not_ a question of the truth concerning what he has done, what he has said, and how he actually died; but whether his type may still be conceived in any way, whether it has been handed down to us at all?—The attempts which to my knowledge have been made to read the _history_ of a “soul” out of the gospels, seem to me to point only to disreputable levity in psychological matters. M. Renan, that buffoon _in psychologies,_ has contributed the two most monstrous ideas imaginable to the explanation of the type of Jesus: the idea of the _genius_ and the idea of the _hero_ (“_héros_”). But if there is anything thoroughly unevangelical surely it is the idea of the hero.
It is precisely the reverse of all struggle, of all consciousness of taking part in the fight, that has become instinctive here: the inability to resist is here converted into a morality (“resist not evil,” the profoundest sentence in the whole of the gospels, their key in a certain sense), the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, of not _being able_ to be an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad tidings”?—True life, eternal life has been found—it is not promised, it is actually here, it is in _you;_ it is life in love, in love free from all selection or exclusion, free from all distance. Everybody is the child of God—Jesus does not by any means claim anything for himself alone,—as the child of God everybody is equal to everybody else.... Fancy making Jesus a _hero!_—And what a tremendous misunderstanding the word “genius” is! Our whole idea of “spirit,” which is a civilised idea, could have had no meaning whatever in the world in which Jesus lived. In the strict terms of the physiologist, a very different word ought to be used here.... We know of a condition of morbid irritability of the sense of _touch,_ which recoils shuddering from every kind of contact, and from every attempt at grasping a solid object. Any such physiological _habitus_ reduced to its ultimate logical conclusion, becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the “intangible,” into the “incomprehensible”; a repugnance to all formulæ, to every notion of time and space, to everything that is established such as customs, institutions, the church; a feeling at one’s ease in a world in which no sign of reality is any longer visible, a merely “inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal” world.... “The Kingdom of God is within you”...
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.