The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
916.
The things which have become _spoilt_ through having been abused by the Church:-- (1) _Asceticism._--People have scarcely got the courage yet to bring to light the natural utility and necessity of asceticism for the purpose of the _education of the will._ Our ridiculous world of education, before whose eyes the useful State official hovers as an ideal to be striven for, believes that it has completed its duty when it has instructed or trained the brain; it never even suspects that something else is first of all necessary --the education of _will-power;_ tests are devised for everything except for the most important thing of all: whether a man can _will,_ whether he can _promise;_ the young man completes his education without a question or an inquiry having been made concerning the problem of the highest value of his nature. (2) _Fasting:_--In every sense--even as a means of maintaining the capacity for taking pleasure in all good things (for instance, to give up reading for a while, to hear no music for a while, to cease from being amiable for a while: one ought also to have fast days for one's virtues). (3) _The monastery._--Temporary isolation with severe seclusion from all letters, for instance; a kind of profound introspection and self-recovery, which does not go out of the way of "temptations," but out of the way of "duties"; a stepping out of the daily round of one's environment; a detachment from the tyranny of stimuli and external influences, which condemns us to expend our power only in reactions, and does not allow it to gather volume until it bursts into spontaneous activity (let anybody examine our scholars closely: they only think reflexively, _i.e._ they must first read before they can think).
(4) _Feasts._--A man must be very coarse in order not to feel the presence of Christians and Christian values as oppressive, so oppressive as to send all festive moods to the devil. By feasts we understand: pride, high-spirits, exuberance; scorn of all kinds of seriousness and Philistinism; a divine saying of Yea to one's self, as the result of physical plenitude and perfection--all states to which the Christian cannot honestly say Yea. _A feast is a pagan thing par excellence._ (5) The _courage of ones own nature: dressing-up in morality,_--To be able to call one's passions good without the help of a moral formula: this is the standard which measures the extent to which a man is able to say Yea to his own nature, namely, how much or how little he has to have recourse to morality. (6) _Death._--The foolish physiological fact must be converted into a moral necessity. One should live in such a way that _one may have the will to die at the right time_!
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.