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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?21
So far as this whole sort of priestly medication is concerned, the "guilty" sort, any word of criticism is too much. Who would really wish to defend the truth of the claim that an excess of feeling of the sort the ascetic priest habitually prescribes for his sick people (under the holiest of names, as is obvious, while convinced of the sanctity of his purpose) has truly been of use to some invalid? At least we should come to an understanding of that phrase "been of use." If with those words people wish to assert that such a system of treatment has improved human beings, then I won`t contradict them. I would only add what "improved" indicates to me - something like "tamed," "weakened," "disheartened," "refined," "mollycoddled" (hence, almost equivalent to damaged . . . )
But the main thing to consider about sick, upset, and depressed people is that such a system, even conceding that it makes them "better," always makes sick people sicker. You only have to ask psychiatrists what a methodical application of the torments of repentance, remorse, and convulsions of redemption always brings with it. We should also consult history: wherever the ascetic priest has put in place these ways of dealing with the sick, illness has always spread far and wide at terrific speed. And what has its "success" always involved? A shattered nervous system in the person who was already ill - and that occurs on the largest and smallest scale, among individuals and among masses of people. As a consequence of a training in repentance and redemption, we witness huge epidemics of epilepsy, the greatest known to history, as in the St. Vitus` and St. John`s dances in the Middle Ages. We find its repercussions in other forms of fearful paralysis and enduring depression, with which, under certain circumstances, the temperament of an entire people or city (Geneva, Basel) is changed into its opposite once and for all. With these belong also the witch crazes, something related to sleep walking (eight major epidemics of this broke out between 1564 and 1605). Among its consequences we also find that death-seeking mass hysteria whose horrific cry "eviva la morte" [long live death] was heard far across all of Europe, interrupted by idiosyncratic outbursts - sometimes of lust, sometimes of destructive frenzies, just as the same alternation of emotional affect, with the same intermissions and reversals, can also be observed nowadays in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin once again enjoys a great success (religious neurosis appears as a form of an "evil nature" - that`s indisputable. What is it? Quaeritur [that`s what we need to ask]).
Generally speaking, the ascetic ideal and its cult of moral sublimity, this supremely clever, unthinking, and most dangerous systematization of all the ways to promote an excess of emotion under the protection of holy purposes, has etched itself into the entire history of human beings in a dreadful and unforgettable manner - and, alas, not only into their history. . . Apart from this ideal, there`s scarcely anything else I know which had such a destructive effect on the health and racial power of Europeans. Without exaggerating, we can call it the true disaster in the history of the health of European people. At most, the specifically German influence might be comparable: I refer to the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which up to now has marched in step with the political and racial superiority of the Germans (wherever they have infused their blood, they have also infused their vices). The third in line would be syphilis—magno sed proxima intervallo [next in line, but after a large gap].
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