On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.16)

By now you will have guessed what, according to my ideas, the healing artistic instinct for life at least has attempted with the ascetic priest and why he had to use a temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and illogical ideas, like “guilt,” “sins,” “sinfulness,” “degeneration,” and “damnation”: to make sick people to a certain extent harmless, to enable the incurable to destroy themselves by their own actions, to redirect the ressentiment of the mildly ill sternly back onto themselves (“there’s one thing necessary”—), and in this manner to utilize the bad instincts of all suffering people to serve the purpose of self-discipline, self-monitoring, self-conquest. As is obvious, this kind of “medication,” a merely emotional medication, has nothing at all to do with a real cure for an illness, in a physiological sense. We are never entitled to assert that the instinct for life has any sort of chance or intention to heal itself in this way. A kind of pressure to come together and organize the invalids on one side (—the word “church” is the popular name for this), some form of temporary guarantee for the more healthy successful people, the ones more completely fulfilled, on another side, and in the process the creation of rift between the healthy and sick—for a long time that’s all there was. And that was a lot! It was a great deal! (In this essay, as you see, I proceed on an assumption which, so far as the readers I require are concerned, I do not have to prove first—that the “sinfulness” of human beings is not a matter of fact, but much rather only the interpretation of a factual condition, that is, of a bad psychological mood—with the latter seen from a moral-religious perspective, something which is no longer binding on us.—The fact that someone feels himself “guilty” or “sinful” does not in itself yet demonstrate clearly that he is justified in feeling like that, just as the mere fact that someone feels healthy does not mean that he is healthy. People should remember the famous witch trials: at that time the most perspicacious and philanthropic judges had no doubt that they were dealing with guilt; the “witches” themselves had no doubts about that point—nonetheless, there was no guilt.—To express that assumption in broader terms: I consider that “spiritual pain” itself is not, in general, a fact, but only an interpretation (a causal interpretation) of facts which up to that point have not been precisely formulated, and thus something that is still completely up in the air and not scientifically binding —essentially a fat word set in place of a very spindly question mark. To put the matter crudely, when someone cannot cope with a “spiritual pain,” that has nothing to do with his “soul”; it’s more likely something to do with his belly (speaking crudely, as I said: but in saying that I’m not expressing the slightest wish to be crudely heard or crudely understood . . .). A strong and successful man digests his experiences (his actions, including his evil actions) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow down some hard mouthfuls. If he is “unable to finish with” an experience, this kind of indigestion is just as much a physiological matter as that other one—and in many cases, in fact, only one of the consequences of that other one.—With such an view, a person can, just between ourselves, still be the strongest opponent of all materialism. . . .)