On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.19)

Bad conscience is a sickness—there’s no doubt about that—but a sickness the way pregnancy is a sickness. Let’s look for the conditions in which this illness has arrived at its most terrible and most sublime peak:—in this way we’ll see what really brought about its entry into the world at the start. But that requires a lot of endurance—and we must first go back once more to an earlier point of view. The relationship in civil law between the debtor and his creditor, which I have reviewed extensively already, has been interpreted once again in an extremely remarkable and dubious historical manner into a relationship which we modern men are perhaps least capable of understanding, namely, into the relationship between those people presently alive and their ancestors. Within the original tribal cooperatives—we’re talking about primeval times—the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe (and this was in no way merely a sentimental obligation: the latter is something we could even reasonably claim was, in general, absent for the longest period of the human race). Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe exists at all only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors—and that people have to pay them back with sacrifices and achievements. In this people recognize a debt which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this gratuitously? But there is no “gratuitously” for those raw and “spiritually destitute” ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals, chapels, signs of honour, above all, obedience—for all customs, as work of one’s ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows. From time to time it forcefully requires a huge wholesale redemption, something immense as a repayment to the “creditor” (the notorious sacrifice of the first born, for example, blood, human blood in any case). The fear of ancestors and their power, the awareness of one’s debt to them, according to this kind of logic, necessarily increases directly in proportion to the increase in the power of the tribe itself, as the tribe finds itself constantly more victorious, more independent, more honoured, and more feared. It’s not the other way around! Every step towards the decline of the tribe, all conditions of misery, all indications of degeneration, of approaching dissolution, rather lead to a constant lessening of the fear of the spirit of its founder and give a constantly smaller image of his wisdom, providence, and powerful presence. If we think this crude form of logic through to its conclusion, then the ancestors of the most powerful tribes must, because of the fantasy of increasing fear, finally have grown into something immense and have been pushed back into the darkness of a divine mystery, something beyond the powers of imagination, so that finally the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god. Here perhaps lies even the origin of the gods, thus an origin out of fear! . . . And the man to whom it seems obligatory to add “But also out of piety” could hardly claim to be right for the longest period of the human race, for his primaeval age. Of course, he would be all the more correct for the middle period, in which the noble tribes developed—those who in fact paid back to their founders, their ancestors (heroes, gods), with interest, all the characteristics which in the meantime had become manifest in themselves, the noble qualities. Later we will have another look at the process by which the gods were ennobled and exalted (which is naturally not at all the same thing as their becoming “holy”). But now, for the moment, let’s follow the path of this whole development of the consciousness of guilt to its conclusion.