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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters21
So much for a brief and rough preface concerning the connection between the ideas "guilt" and "obligation" with religious assumptions. Up to this point I have deliberately set aside the actual moralizing of these ideas (the repression of them into the conscience, or more precisely, the complex interaction between a bad conscience and the idea of god). At the end of the previous section I even talked as if there was no such thing as this moralizing and thus as if now these ideas had necessarily come to an end after the collapse of their presuppositions, the faith in our "creditor," in God. But to a terrible extent the facts indicate something different. The moralizing of the ideas of debt and duty, with their repression into bad conscience, actually gave rise to the attempt to reverse the direction of the development I have just described, or at least to bring its motion to a halt. Now, in a fit of pessimism, the prospect of a final instalment must once and for all be denied. Now, our gaze is to bounce off and ricochet back despairingly off an iron impossibility, now those ideas of "debt" and "duty" are supposed to turn back. But against whom?
There can be no doubt: first of all against the "debtor," in whom from this point on bad conscience, firmly set in him, eating into him and spreading out like a polyp, grows wide and deep, until finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people think up the idea of the impossibility of removing the penance, the idea that the debt cannot be paid off ("eternal punishment"). Finally however, those ideas of "debt" and "duty" turn back even against the "creditor." People should, in this matter, now think about the causa prima [first cause] of humanity, about the beginning of the human race, about their ancestor who from now on is loaded down with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "no freedom for the will,") or about nature from whose womb human beings arose and into whom from now on the principle of evil is inserted ("the demonizing of nature") or about existence in general, which remains something without value in itself (nihilistic turning away from existence, longing for nothingness, or a desire for its "opposite," in an alternate state of being, Buddhism and things like that) - until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity - God`s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem - the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! . . .
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