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Wherever a culture points to anything as evil, it betrays its fear and therefore weakness.
Thesis: everything good is the evil of yore which has been rendered serviceable. Standard: the more terrible and the greater the passions may be which an age, a people, and an individual are at liberty to possess, because they are able to use them as a means, the higher is their culture: the more mediocre, weak, submissive, and cowardly a man may be, the more things he will regard as evil: according to him the kingdom of evil is the largest. The lowest man will see the kingdom of evil (i.e. that which is forbidden him and which is hostile to him) everywhere.
1026.
It is not a fact that "happiness follows virtue"—but it is the mighty man who first declares his happy state to be virtue.
Evil actions belong to the mighty and the virtuous: bad and base actions belong to the subjected.
The mightiest man, the creator, would have to be the most evil, inasmuch as he makes his ideal prevail over all men in opposition to their ideals, and remoulds them according to his own image.
Evil, in this respect, means hard, painful, enforced.
Such men as Napoleon must always return and always settle our belief in the self-glory of the individual afresh: he himself, however, was corrupted by the means he had to stoop to, and had lost noblesse of character. If he had had to prevail among another kind of men, he could have availed himself of other means; and thus it would not seem necessary that a Csar must become bad.
1027.
Man is a combination of the beast and the super-beast; higher man a combination of the monster and the superman:[7] these opposites belong to each other. With every degree of a man's growth towards greatness and loftiness, he also grows downwards into the depths and into the terrible: we should not desire the one without the other;—or, better still: the more fundamentally we desire the one, the more completely we shall achieve the other.
[7] The play on the German words: "Unthier" and "berthier," "Unmensch" and "bermensch," is unfortunately not translatable.—Tr.
1028.
Terribleness belongs to greatness: let us not deceive ourselves.
1029.
I have taught the knowledge of such terrible things, that all "Epicurean contentment" is[Pg 406] impossible concerning them. Dionysian pleasure is the only adequate kind here: I was the first to discover the tragic. Thanks to their superficiality in ethics, the Greeks misunderstood it. Resignation is not the lesson of tragedy, but only the misunderstanding of it! The yearning for nonentity is the denial of tragic wisdom, its opposite!
1030.
A rich and powerful soul not only gets over painful and even terrible losses, deprivations, robberies, and insults: it actually leaves such dark infernos in possession of still greater plenitude and power; and, what is most important of all, in possession of an increased blissfulness in love. I believe that he who has divined something of the most fundamental conditions of love, will understand Dante for having written over the door of his Inferno: "I also am the creation of eternal love."
1031.
To have travelled over the whole circumference of the modern soul, and to have sat in all its corners—my ambition, my torment, and my happiness.
Veritably to have overcome pessimism, and, as the result thereof, to have acquired the eyes of a Goethe—full of love and goodwill.
1032.
The first question is by no means whether we are satisfied with ourselves; but whether we are[Pg 407] satisfied with anything at all. Granting that we should say yea to any single moment, we have then affirmed not only ourselves, but the whole of existence. For nothing stands by itself, either in us or in other things: and if our soul has vibrated and rung with happiness, like a chord, once only and only once, then all eternity was necessary in order to bring about that one event,—and all eternity, in this single moment of our affirmation, was called good, was saved, justified, and blessed.
1033.
The passions which say yea. I ride, happiness, health, the love of the sexes, hostility and war, reverence, beautiful attitudes, manners, strong will, the discipline of lofty spirituality, the will to power, and gratitude to the Earth and to Life: all that is rich, that would fain bestow, and that refreshes, gilds, immortalises, and deifies Life—the whole power of the virtues that glorify—all declaring things good, saying yea, and doing yea.
1034.
We, many or few, who once more dare to live in a world purged of morality, we pagans in faith, we are probably also the first who understand what a pagan faith is: to be obliged to imagine higher creatures than man, but to imagine them beyond good and evil; to be compelled to value all higher existence as immoral existence. We believe in Olympus, and not in the "man on the cross."
1035.
The more modern man has exercised his idealising power in regard to a God mostly by moralising the latter ever more and more—what does that mean?—nothing good, a diminution in man's strength.
As a matter of fact, the reverse would be possible: and indications of this are not wanting. God imagined as emancipation from morality, comprising the whole of the abundant assembly of Life's contrasts, and saving and justifying them in a divine agony. God as the beyond, the superior elevation, to the wretched cul-de-sac morality of "Good and Evil."
1036.
A humanitarian God cannot be demonstrated from the world that is known to us: so much are ye driven and forced to conclude to-day. But what conclusion do ye draw from this? "He cannot be demonstrated to us": the scepticism of knowledge. You all fear the conclusion: "From the world that is known to us quite a different God would be demonstrable, such a one as would certainly not be humanitarian"—and, in a word, you cling fast to your God, and invent a world for Him which is unknown to us.
1037.
Let us banish the highest good from our concept of God: it is unworthy of a God. Let us[Pg 409] likewise banish the highest wisdom: it is the vanity of philosophers who have perpetrated the absurdity of a God who is a monster of wisdom: the idea was to make Him as like them as possible. No! God as the highest power—that is sufficient!—Everything follows from that, even—"the world"!
1038
And how many new Gods are not still possible! I, myself, in whom the religious—that is to say, the god-creating instinct occasionally becomes active at the most inappropriate moments: how very differently the divine has revealed itself every time to me! ... So many strange things have passed before me in those timeless moments, which fall into a man's life as if they came from the moon, and in which he absolutely no longer knows how old he is or how young he still may be! ... I would not doubt that there are several kinds of gods.... Some are not wanting which one could not possibly imagine without a certain halcyonic calm and levity.... Light feet perhaps belong to the concept "God". Is it necessary to explain that a God knows how to hold Himself preferably outside all Philistine and rationalist circles? also (between ourselves) beyond good and evil? His outlook is a free one—as Goethe would say.—And to invoke the authority of Zarathustra, which cannot be too highly appreciated in this regard: Zarathustra goes as far as to confess, "I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance ..."
