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The only reason I have alluded to this is that the ascetic ideal has, for the present, even in the most spiritual sphere, only one type of real enemy and injurer: these are the comedians of this ideal – because they arouse mistrust. Everywhere else where spirit is at work in a rigorous, powerful and honest way, it now completely lacks an ideal – the popular expression for this abstinence is ‘atheism’ –: except for its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, if you believe me, is that ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, completely eso- teric, totally stripped of externals, and thus not so much its remnant as its kernel. Unconditional, honest atheism (– its air alone is what we breathe, we more spiritual men of the age!) is therefore not opposed to the ascetic ideal as it appears to be; instead, it is only one of the ideal’s last phases of development, one of its final forms and inherent logical conclusions, – it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year discipline in truth-telling, which finally forbids itself the lie entailed in the belief in
127 ‘the religion of suffering’.
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Third essay
God. (The same process of development in India, completely independ- ently, which therefore proves something; the same ideal forcing the same conclusion; the decisive point was reached five centuries before the European era began, with Buddha or, more precisely: already with the Sankhya philosophy subsequently popularized by Buddha and made into a religion.) What, strictly speaking, has actually conquered the Christian God? The answer is in my Gay Science (section 357):128 ‘Christian moral- ity itself, the concept of truthfulness which was taken more and more seriously, the confessional punctiliousness of Christian conscience, trans- lated and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual rigour at any price. Regarding nature as though it were a proof of God’s goodness and providence; interpreting history in honour of divine reason, as a con- stant testimonial to an ethical world order and ethical ultimate purpose; explaining all one’s own experiences in the way pious folk have done for long enough, as though everything were providence, a sign, intended, and sent for the salvation of the soul: now all that is over, it has conscience against it, every sensitive conscience sees it as indecent, dishonest, as a pack of lies, feminism, weakness, cowardice, – this severity makes us good Europeans if anything does, and heirs to Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-overcoming!’ . . . All great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublimation: that is the law of life, the law of necessary ‘self-overcoming’ in the essence of life, – the lawgiver himself is always ultimately exposed to the cry: ‘patere legem, quam ipse tulisti’.129 In this way, Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as a morality must also be destroyed, – we stand on the threshold of this occurrence. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it will finally draw the strongest con- clusion, that against itself; this will, however, happen when it asks itself, ‘What does all will to truth mean?’ . . . and here I touch on my problem again, on our problem, my unknown friends (– because I don’t know of any friend as yet): what meaning does our being have, if it were not that that will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem in us? . . . Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope . . .
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