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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters20
As history teaches us, the consciousness of being in debt to the gods did not in any way come to an end after the downfall of communities organized on the basis of blood relationships. Just as humanity inherited the ideas of "good and bad" from the nobility of the tribe (together with its fundamental psychological tendency to set up orders of rank), so people also inherited, as well as the divinities of the tribe and extended family, the pressure of as yet unpaid debts and the desire to be relieved of them. (The transition is made with those numerous slave and indentured populations which adapted themselves to the divine cults of their masters, whether through compulsion or through obsequiousness and mimicry; from them this inheritance overflowed in all directions). The feeling of being indebted to the gods did not stop growing for several thousands of years—always, in fact, in direct proportion to the extent to which the idea of god and the feeling for god grew and was carried to the heights.
(The entire history of ethnic fighting, victory, reconciliation, mergers - everything which comes before the final rank ordering of all the elements of a people in that great racial synthesis - is mirrored in the tangled genealogies of its gods, in the sagas of their fights, victories, and reconciliations. The progress towards universal kingdoms is at the same time always also the progress toward universal divinities. In addition, despotism, with its overthrow of the independent nobles always builds the way to some variety of monotheism).
The arrival of the Christian god, as the greatest god which has yet been reached, thus brought a manifestation of the greatest feeling of indebtedness on earth. Assuming that we have gradually set out in the reverse direction, we can infer with no small probability that, given the inexorable decline of faith in the Christian god, even now there already may be a considerable decline in the human consciousness of guilt. Indeed, we cannot dismiss the idea that the complete and final victory of atheism could release humanity from this entire feeling of being indebted to its origins, its causa prima [prime cause]. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.
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