everything that shattered, bowled over, crushed, enraptured, transported; the secrets of the torture chamber, the inventiveness of hell itself—all were henceforth discovered, divined, and exploited, all stood in the service of the sorcerer, all served henceforward to promote the victory of his ideal, the ascetic ideal.—“My kingdom is not of this world”—he continued to say, as before: but did he still have the right to say it?
Goethe claimed there were only thirty-six tragic situations: one could guess from that, if one did not know it anyway, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He—knows more.—
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It would be pointless to indulge in criticism of this kind of priestly medication, the “guilty” kind. Who would want to maintain that such orgies of feeling as the ascetic priest prescribed for his sick people (under the holiest names, as goes without saying, and convinced of the holiness of his ends) ever benefited any of them? At least we should be clear on the meaning of the word “benefit.” If one intends it to convey that such a system of treatment has improved men, I shall not argue: only I should have to add what “improved” signifies to me—the same thing as “tamed,” “weakened,” “discouraged,” “made refined,” “made effete,” “emasculated” (thus almost the same thing as harmed.) But when such a system is chiefly applied to the sick, distressed, and depressed, it invariably makes them sicker, even if it does “improve” them; one need only ask psychiatrists1 what happens to patients who are methodically subjected to the torments of repentance, states of contrition, and fits of redemption. One should also consult history: wherever the ascetic priest has prevailed with this treatment, sickness has spread in depth and breadth with astonishing speed. What has always constituted its “success”? A shattered nervous system added to any existing illness—and this on the largest as on the smallest scale, in individuals as in masses.
In the wake of repentance and redemption training we find tremendous epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to history, such as the St. Vitus’ and St. John’s dances of the Middle Ages; as another aftereffect we encounter terrible paralyses and protracted states of depression, which sometimes transform the temperament of a people or a city (Geneva, Basel) once and for all into its opposite; here we may also include the witch-hunt hysteria, something related to somnambulism (there were eight great epidemic outbreaks of this between 1564 and 1605 alone); we also find in its wake those death-seeking mass deliria whose dreadful cry “evviva la morte!2 was heard all over Europe, interspersed now with voluptuous idiosyncrasies, now with rages of destruction; and the same alternation of affects, accompanied by the same intermissions and somersaults, is to be observed even today whenever the ascetic doctrine of sin again achieves a grand success. (The religious neurosis appears as a form of evil; there is no doubt about that. What is it? Quaeritur.3) Broadly speaking, the ascetic ideal and its sublimely moral cult, this most ingenious, unscrupulous, and dangerous systematization of all the means for producing orgies of feeling under the cover of holy intentions, has inscribed itself in a fearful and unforgettable way in the entire history of man—and unfortunately not only in his history.
I know of hardly anything else that has had so destructive an effect upon the health and racial strength of Europeans as this ideal; one may without any exaggeration call it the true calamity in the history of European health. The only thing that can be compared with its influence is the specifically Teutonic influence: I mean the alcoholic poisoning of Europe, which has hitherto gone strictly in step with the political and racial hegemony of the Teutons (wherever they infused their blood they also infused their vice).—Third in line would be syphilis—magno sed proxima inter-vallo.4
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The ascetic priest has ruined psychical health wherever he has come to power; consequently he has also ruined taste in artibus et litteris1—he is still ruining it. “Consequently?” I hope I shall be granted this “consequently;” at any rate, I don’t want to bother to prove it. Just one pointer: it concerns the basic book of Christian literature, its model, its “book in itself.” Even in the midst of Graeco-Roman splendor, which was also a splendor of books, in the face of an ancient literary world that had not yet eroded and been ruined, at a time when one could still read some books for whose possession one would nowadays exchange half of some national literatures, the simplicity and vanity of Christian