The Philosophy of Friedrich NietzscheMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900; Philosophy, German -- 19th century
In every treatise upon Christian ethics and "natural theology," so
called, you will find these rules of "natural morality" in the first
chapter. Thomas Aquinas called them "the eternal law." Even the Greeks
and Romans, for all their skepticism in morals, had a sneaking belief
in them. Aristotle tried to formulate them and the Latin lawyers
constantly assumed their existence. Most of them are held in firm faith
today by all save a small minority of the folk of Christendom. The
most familiar of them, perhaps, is the rule against murder--the sixth
commandment. Another is the rule against the violation of property
in goods, wives and cattle--the eighth and tenth commandments. A
third is the rule upon which the solidity of the family is based, and
with it the solidity of the tribe--the fifth commandment. The theory
behind these rules is, not only that they are wise, but that they are
innate and sempiternal, that every truly enlightened man recognizes
their validity intuitively, and is conscious of sin when he breaks
them. To them Christianity added an eleventh commandment, a sort of
infinite extension of the fifth, "that ye love one another"[5]--and
in two thousand years it has been converted from a novelty into a
universality. That is to say, its point of definite origin has been
lost sight of, and it has been moved over into the group of "natural
virtues," of "eternal laws." When Christ first voiced it, in his
discourse at the Last Supper, it was so far from general acceptance
that he named a belief in it as one of the distinguishing marks of his
disciples, but now our moralists tell us that it is in the blood of
all of us, and that we couldn't repudiate it if we would. Brotherhood,
indeed, is the very soul of Christianity, and the only effort of the
pious today is to raise it from a universal theory to a universal fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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