On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.22)

Wherever he achieved mastery, the ascetic priest has ruined spiritual health. As a result, he has also ruined taste in artibus et litteris [in arts and letters]—he is still ruining that. “As a result”?—I hope you will simply concede me this “as a result.” At least, I have no desire to demonstrate it first. A single indication: it concerns the fundamental text of Christian literature, its essential model, its “book in itself.” Still in the middle of the Graeco-Roman magnificence, which was also a magnificent time for books, faced with a ancient world of writing which had not yet declined and fallen apart, an age in which people could still read some books for which one would now exchange half of all literature, the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators—we call them the church fathers—already dared to proclaim, “We also have our classical literature. We don’t need Greek literature.”—And with that, they pointed with pride to books of legends, letters of the apostles, and little apologetic treatises, in somewhat the same way as nowadays the English “Salvation Army” with its related literature fights its war against Shakespeare and other “pagans.” I don’t like the “New Testament”—you will already have guessed as much. It almost disturbs me that I stand alone in my taste with respect to this most highly regarded and most overvalued written work (the taste of two thousand years is against me). But how can I help it! “Here I stand. I can do no other”*—I have the courage of my own bad taste. The Old Testament—now, that’s something totally different: all honour to the Old Testament! In that I find great men, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest of all elements on earth, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; even more—I find a people. In the New Testament, by contrast, I find nothing but small sectarian households, nothing but spiritual rococo, nothing but ornament, twisty little corners, oddities, nothing but conventional air, not to mention an occasional breeze of bucolic sweet sentimentality, which belongs to the age (and the Roman province), something not so much Jewish as Hellenistic. Humility and pomposity standing shoulder to shoulder; a chatting about feelings which are almost stupefying; vehement feelings but no passion, with awkward gestures. Here, it seems, there’s a lack of all good upbringing. How can people make such a fuss about their small vices, the way these devout little men do? No cock—and certainly not God—would crow about such things. Finally, they even want to possess “the crown of eternal life,” all these small people from the provinces. But what for? What for? It is impossible to push presumption any further. An “immortal” Peter: who could endure him? They have an ambition that makes one laugh: one of them spells out his most personal things, his stupidities, melancholy, and indolent worries, as if the essence of all things had a duty to worry about such matters. Another one never gets tired of wrapping up God himself in the smallest misery he finds himself stuck in. And the most appalling taste of this constant familiarity with God! This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, excessive importuning God with mouth and paw! . . . There are small despised “pagan people” in east Asia from whom these first Christians could have learned something important, some tact in their reverence. As Christian missionaries reveal, such people are not generally allowed to utter the name of their god. This seems to me sufficiently delicate. It was certainly too delicate not only for the “first” Christians. To sense the contrast, we should remember something about Luther, the “most eloquent” and most presumptuous peasant Germany ever had, and the tone Luther adopted as the one he most preferred in his conversations with God. Luther’s resistance to the interceding saints of the church (especially to “the devil’s sow, the Pope”) was undoubtedly, in the last analysis, the resistance of a lout irritated by the good etiquette of the church, that etiquette of reverence of the priestly taste, which lets only the more consecrated and the more discreet into the holy of holies and shuts the door against the louts, who in this particular place are never to speak. But Luther, the peasant, simply wanted something different—this situation was not German enough for him. Above all, he wanted to speak directly, to speak for himself, to speak “openly” with his God. Well, he did it.—You can conjecture easily enough that there has never been a place anywhere in which the ascetic ideal has been a school of good taste, even less of good manners—in the best cases, it was a school for priestly manners. That comes about because it carries something in its own body which is the deadly enemy of all good manners—it lacks moderation, it resists moderation, it is itself a “non plus ultra” [an ultimate extreme].

. . . no other”: This is one of Martin Luther’s most famous quotations, allegedly his reply when asked to take back his criticisms of the church, a response which launched the Reformation in 1521.