The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Christianity also stands opposed to everything happily constituted in the _mind,_—it can make use only of morbid reason as Christian reason; it takes the side of everything idiotic, it utters a curse upon “intellect,” upon the _superbia_ of the healthy intellect. Since illness belongs to the essence of Christianity, the typically Christian state, “faith,” _must_ also be a form of illness, and all straight, honest and scientific roads to knowledge must be repudiated by the Church as forbidden.... Doubt in itself is already a sin.... The total lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest, which reveals itself in his look, is a _result_ of decadence. Hysterical women, as also children with scrofulous constitutions, should be observed as a proof of how invariably instinctive falsity, the love of lying for the sake of lying, and the in ability either to look or to walk straight, are the expression of decadence. “Faith” simply means the refusal to know what is true. The pious person, the priest of both sexes, is false because he is ill: his instinct _demands_ that truth should not assert its right anywhere. “That which makes ill is good: that which proceeds from abundance, from superabundance and from power, is evil”: that is the view of the faithful.
The _constraint to lie_—that is the sign by which I recognise every predetermined theologian.—Another characteristic of the theologian is his lack of _capacity_ for _philology._ What I mean here by the word philology is, in a general sense to be understood as the art of reading well, of being able to take account of facts _without_ falsifying them by interpretation, without losing either caution, patience or subtlety owing to one’s desire to understand. Philology as _ephexis_[8] in interpretation, whether one be dealing with books, newspaper reports, human destinies or meteorological records,—not to speak of the “salvation of the soul.” ... The manner in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, interprets a verse from the “Scriptures,” or an experience, or the triumph of his nation’s army for instance, under the superior guiding light of David’s Psalms, is always so exceedingly _daring,_ that it is enough to make a philologist’s hair stand on end. And what is he to do, when pietists and other cows from Swabia explain their miserable every-day lives in their smoky hovels by means of the “Finger of God,” a miracle of “grace,” of “Providence,” of experiences of “salvation”!
The most modest effort of the intellect, not to speak of decent feeling, ought at least to lead these interpreters to convince themselves of the absolute childishness and unworthiness of any such abuse of the dexterity of God’s fingers. However small an amount of loving piety we might possess, a god who cured us in time of a cold in the nose, or who arranged for us to enter a carriage just at the moment when a cloud burst over our heads, would be such an absurd God, that he would have to be abolished, even if he existed.[9] God as a domestic servant, as a postman, as a general provider,—in short, merely a word for the most foolish kind of accidents.... “Divine Providence,” as it is believed in to-day by almost every third man in “cultured Germany,” would be an argument against God, in fact it would be the strongest argument against God that could be Imagined. And in any case it is an argument against the Germans.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.