Thoughts out of Season, Part I: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer - Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
Thoughts out of Season, Part I: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer - Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.
Nietzsche · en
But it is so easy for me to be carried away by that favourite sport of
mine, of which I am the first inventor among the Jews--Christian
baiting. You must forgive this, however, in a Jew, who, while he has
been baited for two thousand years by you, likes to turn round now
that the opportunity has come, and tries to indulge on his part also
in a little bit of that genial pastime. I candidly confess it is
delightful, and I now quite understand your ancestors hunting mine as
much as they could--had I been a Christian, I would, probably, have
done the same; perhaps have done it even better, for no one would now
be left to write any such impudent truisms against me--rest assured
of that! But as I am a Jew, and have had too much experience of the
other side of the question, I must try to control myself in the midst
of victory; I must judge things calmly; I must state fact honestly; I
must not allow myself to be unjust towards you. First of all, then,
this rebelling faculty of yours is a Jewish inheritance, an
inheritance, however, of which you have made a more than generous, a
truly Christian use, because you did not keep it niggardly for
yourselves, but have distributed it all over the earth, from Nazareth
to Nishni-Novgorod, from Jerusalem to Jamaica, from Palestine to
Pimlico, so that every one is a rebel and an anarchist nowadays. But,
secondly, I must not forget that in every Anarchist, and therefore in
every Christian, there is also, or may be, an aristocrat--a man who,
just like the anarchist, but with a perfectly holy right, wishes to
obey no laws but those of his own conscience; a man who thinks too
highly of his own faith and persuasion, to convert other people to it;
a man who, therefore, would never carry it to Caffres and Coolis; a
man, in short, with whom even the noblest and exclusive Hebrew could
shake hands. In Friedrich Nietzsche this aristocratic element which
may be hidden in a Christian has been brought to light, in him the
Christian's eternal claim for freedom of conscience, for his own
priesthood, for justification by his own faith, is no longer used for
purposes of destruction and rebellion, but for those of command and
creation; in him--and this is the key to the character of this
extraordinary man, who both on his father's and mother's side was the
descendant of a long line of Protestant Parsons--the Christian and
Protestant spirit of anarchy became so strong that he rebelled even
against his own fellow-Anarchists, and told them that Anarchy was a
low and contemptible thing, and that Revolution was an occupation fit
only for superior slaves. But with this event the circle of
Christianity has become closed, and the exclusive House of Israel is
now under the delightful obligation to make its peace with its once
lost and now reforming son.