The Genealogy of Morals: The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Genealogy of Morals: The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Ethics
Let us come to a conclusion. The two _opposing values_, "good and bad,"
"good and evil," have fought a dreadful, thousand-year fight in the
world, and though indubitably the second value has been for a long time
in the preponderance, there are not wanting places where the fortune
of the fight is still undecisive. It can almost be said that in the
meanwhile the fight reaches a higher and higher level, and that in the
meanwhile it has become more and more intense, and always more and more
psychological; so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark
of the _higher nature_, of the more psychological nature, than to be in
that sense self-contradictory, and to be actually still a battleground
for those two opposites. The symbol of this fight, written in a writing
which has remained worthy of perusal throughout the course of history
up to the present time, is called "Rome against Judæa, Judæa against
Rome." Hitherto there has been no greater event than _that_ fight,
the putting of _that_ question, _that_ deadly antagonism. Rome found
in the Jew the incarnation of the unnatural, as though it were its
diametrically opposed monstrosity, and in Rome the Jew was held to
be _convicted of hatred_ of the whole human race: and rightly so, in
so far as it is right to link the well-being and the future of the
human race to the unconditional mastery of the aristocratic values, of
the Roman values. What, conversely, did the Jews feel against Rome?
One can surmise it from a thousand symptoms, but it is sufficient to
carry one's mind back to the Johannian Apocalypse, that most obscene
of all the written outbursts, which has revenge on its conscience.
(One should also appraise at its full value the profound logic of the
Christian instinct, when over this very book of hate it wrote the name
of the Disciple of Love, that self-same disciple to whom it attributed
that impassioned and ecstatic Gospel--therein lurks a portion of
truth, however much literary forging may have been necessary for
this purpose.) The Romans were the strong and aristocratic; a nation
stronger and more aristocratic has never existed in the world, has
never even been dreamed of; every relic of them, every inscription
enraptures, granted that one can divine _what_ it is that writes the
inscription. The Jews, conversely, were that priestly nation of
resentment par excellence, possessed by a unique genius for popular
morals: just compare with the Jews the nations with analogous gifts,
such as the Chinese or the Germans, so as to realise afterwards what is
first rate, and what is fifth rate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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