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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?27
Enough! Enough! Let`s leave these curiosities and complexities of the most modern spirit, which inspire as much laughter as irritation. Our problem can do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal. What has that to do with yesterday and today! I am going to approach these issues more fundamentally and more forcefully in another connection (under the title The History of European Nihilism. I refer to a work which I am preparing: The Will to Power: an Attempt To Re-evaluate all Values). What I have been dealing with here is only the following—to establish that the ascetic ideal has, for the time being, even in the spiritual sphere, only one kind of true enemy who can inflict harm, and that enemy is those who play-act this ideal - for they awaken distrust. Everywhere else, where the spirit nowadays is strong, powerful, and working without counterfeiting, it generally dispenses with the ideal - the popular expression for this abstinence is "atheism," except for its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of the ideal is, if people wish to believe me, that very ideal in its strongest, most spiritual formulation, thoroughly esoteric, stripped of all its outer structures, and thus nothing except a remnant, its kernel.
Consequently, absolutely unconditional atheism (-and that`s the only air we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!) does not stand opposed to this ideal, as it appears to do. It is much rather only one of its last stages of development, one of its concluding forms and innerly logical outcomes. It demands reverence, this catastrophe of two-thousand years of breeding for the truth which concludes by forbidding itself the lie of a faith in god. (The same process of development in India, which was fully independent of Europe and therefore proof of something - this same ideal forced things to a similar conclusion. The decisive point was reached five centuries before the European calendar, with Buddha, or more precisely, with the Sankhya philosophy. For this was popularized by Buddha and made into a religion.)
Putting the question as forcefully as possible, what really triumphed over the Christian God? The answer stands in my Gay Science, p. 290:
Christian morality itself, the increasingly strict understanding of the idea of truthfulness, the subtlety of the father confessor of the Christian conscience, transposed and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of a god, to interpret history in such a way as to honour divine reason, as a constant testament to a moral world order and moral intentions, to interpret one`s own experiences, as devout men have interpreted them for long enough, as if everything was divine providence, everything was a sign, everything was thought out and sent for the salvation of the soul out of love -now that`s over and done with. That has conscience against it. Among more sensitive consciences that counts as something indecent, dishonest, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice. With this rigour, if with anything, we are good Europeans and heirs to Europe`s longest and bravest overcoming of the self. . . .
All great things destroy themselves by an act of self-cancellation. That`s what the law of life wills, that law of the necessary "self-overcoming" in the essence of life - eventually the call always goes out to the law-maker himself, "patere legem, quam ipse tulisti" [submit to the law which you yourself have established]. That`s the way Christianity was destroyed as dogma by its own morality, that`s the way Christendom as morality must now be destroyed. We stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has come to a series of conclusions, it will draw its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself. However, this will occur when it poses the question: "What is the meaning of all will to truth?" . . . Here I move back again to my problem, to our problem, my unknown friends (- for I still don`t know anything about friends): what sense would our whole being have if not for the fact that in us that will to truth became aware of itself as a problem? . . . Because this will to truth from now on is growing conscious of itself, morality undoubtedly dies. That great spectacle in one hundred acts, which remains reserved for the next two centuries in Europe, that most fearful, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles . . .
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