anathema - Autocracy, despotism and democracy

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Autocracy, despotism and democracy
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bet | 5/46 | Sana | 01.04.2020 | Hajmi | 1,31 Mb. | | #9514 |
anathema.
“2. If anyone will say& that the blessed Peter in his pre-eminence over the whole Church does not have an unbroken line of successors, or that the Roman high priest is not the successor of the blessed Peter in this pre-eminence, let him be anathema.
“3. If anyone will say that the Roman high priest has only the privilege of supervising or directing, and not complete or supreme jurisdiction in the Universal Church not only in matters that relate to faith and morals, but even also in those which relate to discipline and the administration of the Church, which is spread throughout the world; or that he has only the most important parts, but not the whole fullness of this supreme power; or that this power is not ordinary and immediate, both over each and every church, and over each and every pastor and member of the faithful, let him be anathema.
“4. Faithfully following the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, we teach and define that the following dogma belongs to the truths of Divine revelation. The Pope of Rome, when he speaks from his see (ex cathedra), that is when, while fulfilling his duties as teacher and pastor of all Christians, who defines, by dint of his supreme apostolic power, that a certain teaching on questions of the faith and morals must be accepted by the Church, he enjoys the Divine help promised to him in the person of St. Peter, that infallibility which the Divine Redeemer deigned to bestow on His Church, when it defines teaching on questions of faith and morality. Consequently, these definitions of the Pope of Rome are indisputable in and of themselves, and not because of the agreement of the Church. If anyone were to have the self-opinion, which is not pleasing to God, to condemn this, he must be consigned to anathema."
It is interesting to note that in this last sentence the Pope admits the possibility that in his definitions of the faith he might be right and the Church wrong. In other words, he denied St. Paul's words that it is precisely the Church, and not any individual man, that is "the pillar and foundation of the truth" (I Timothy 3.15).
The new dogma was a complete surprise and shock to all the assembled bishops except those belonging to the Inquisition; and at first only a small minority - 50 out of the 1,084 bishops eligible to attend and vote - was in favour of it. However, Pius now proceeded to apply threats and intimidation. And so "by the time it came to a vote, the Papacy's strong-arm tactics had tipped the balance decisively. In the first vote, on 13 July 1870, 451 declared themselves in favour and eighty-four opposed. Four days later, on 17 July, fifty-five bishops officially stated their opposition but declared that, out of reverence for the Pope, they would abstain from the vote scheduled for the following day. All of them then left Rome, as a good many others had already done. The second and final vote occurred on 18 July. The number of those supporting the Papacy's position increased to 535. Only two voted against, one of them Bishop Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas. Of the 1,084 bishops eligible to vote on the issue of Papal infallibility, a total of 535 had finally endorsed it - a 'majority' of just over 49 per cent. By virtue of this 'majority', the Pope, on 18 July 1870, was formally declared infallible in his own right and 'not as a result of the consent of the Church'. As one commentator has observed, 'this removed all conciliarist interpretations of the role of the Papacy'."63
And so the Council finally consented to the false dogma, declaring: "The Pope is a divine man and a human god... The Pope is the light of faith and reflection of truth."
And yet, if the Pope was infallible, what was the point of the Council? For, as Fr. Sergius Bulgakov wrote, "how could a Council be expected to pass the resolution if it has no power to decide anything on which the Pope alone has the right of final judgement? How could the Council have consented even to debate such an absurdity? It can, of course, be argued that the Vatican Council had to carry out the Pope's behest from obedience, regardless of content. But even as infallible, the Pope cannot do meaningless and self-contradictory things, such as submitting to a Council's decision a motion when the power to decide belongs not to it, but to him."64
Bishop Joseph Georg Strossmayer of Diakovar, in Croatia, was one of the few bishops who opposed the dogma of infallibility. "In 1871," writes Fr. Alexey Young, "he wrote to a friend that he would rather die than accept this false teaching, adding: 'Better to be exposed to every humiliation than to bend my knee to Baal, to arrogance incarnate.' But apparently the humiliations and threats imposed on him by Rome proved, after ten long years, too much to oppose. He finally submitted to the new teaching in 1881."65
For a time Pastor Aeternus looked destined to create a schism as devastating as that of the Protestants. As Peter de Rosa writes: "Absolute power had fashioned an absolute 'truth'; and other Christians found one more sky-high barrier between themselves and the Roman church."66
“In Italy,” writes John Cornwell, “processions and outdoor services were banned, communities of religious dispersed, Church property confiscated, priests conscripted into the army. A catalogue of measures, understandably deemed anti-Catholic by the Holy See, streamed from the new capital: divorce legislation, secularization of the schools, the dissolution of numerous holy days.
“In Germany, partly in response to the ‘divisive’ dogma of infallibility, Bismarck began his Kulturkampf (‘culture struggle’), a policy of persecution against Catholicism. Religious instruction came under state control and religious orders were forbidden to teach; the Jesuits were banished; seminaries were subjected to state interference; Church property came under the control of lay committees; civil marriage was introduced in Prussia. Bishops and clergy resisting Kulturcampf legislation were fined, imprisoned, exiled. In many parts of Europe, it was the same: in Belgium, Catholics were ousted from the teaching profession; in Switzerland, religious orders were banned; in Austria, traditionally a Catholic country, the state took over schools and passed legislation to secularize marriage; in France, there was a new wave of anticlericalism…”67
De Rosa writes: "The English-speaking world, too, was far from unanimous in accepting papal infallibility. In 1822, Bishop Barnes, the English Vicar Apostolic, said: 'Bellarmine and other divines, chiefly Italian, have believed the pope infallible when proposing ex cathedra an article of faith. But in England and Ireland I do not believe any Catholic maintains the infallibility of the pope.' Later still, Cardinal Wiseman, who in 1850 headed the restored hierarchy of England and Wales, said: 'The Catholic church holds a dogma often proclaimed that, in defining matters of faith, she (that is, the church, not the pope) is infallible.' He went on: 'All agree that infallibility resides in the unanimous suffrage of the church.' John Henry Newman, a convert and the greatest theologian of the nineteenth century, said two years before Vatican I: ‘I hold the pope’s infallibility, but as a theological opinion; that is, not as a certainty but as a probability.’
“In the United States, prior to Vatican I, there was in print the Reverend Stephen Keenan’s very popular Controversial Catechism. It bore the Imprimatur of Archbishop Hughes of New York. Here is one extract. ‘Question: Must not Catholics believe the pope himself to be infallible? Answer: This is a Protestant invention, it is no article of the Catholic faith; no decision of his can bind on pain of heresy, unless it be received and enforced by the teaching body, that is, the bishops of the church.’ It was somewhat embarrassing when, in 1870, a ‘Protestant invention’ became defined Catholic faith. The next edition of the Catechism withdrew this question and answer without a word of explanation.” 68
"In the face of such reactions, the Papacy simply became more aggressive. All bishops were ordered to submit in writing to the new dogma; and those who refused were penalised or removed from their posts. So, too, were rebellious teachers and professors of theology. Papal nuncios were instructed to denounce defiant ecclesiastics and scholars as heretics. All books and articles challenging, or even questioning, the dogma of Papal infallibility were automatically placed on the Index. On at least one occasion, attempts were made to suppress a hostile book through bribery. Many records of the Council itself were confiscated, sequestered, censored or destroyed. One opponent of the new dogma, for example, Archbishop Vicenzo Tizzani, Professor of Church History at the Papal University of Rome, wrote a detailed account of the proceedings. Immediately after his death, his manuscript was purchased by the Vatican and has been kept locked away ever since.”69
As Archimandrite Justin (Popovich) writes: "Through the dogma of infallibility the pope usurped for himself, that is for man, the entire jurisdiction and all the prerogatives which belong only to the Lord God-man. He effectively proclaimed himself as the Church, the papal church, and he has become in her the be-all and end-all, the self-proclaimed ruler of everything. In this way the dogma of the infallibility of the pope has been elevated to the central dogma (vsedogmat) of the papacy. And the pope cannot deny this in any way as long as he remains pope of a humanistic papacy. In the history of the human race there have been three principal falls: that of Adam, that of Judas, and that of the pope."70
Again, Archimandrite Charalampos Vasilopoulos writes, "Papism substituted the God-man Christ with the man Pope! And whereas Christ was incarnate, the Pope deincarnated him and expelled Him to heaven. He turned the Church into a worldly kingdom. He made it like an earthly state... He turned the Kingdom of God into the kingdom of this world."71
Indeed, although the Pope calls himself "the vicar of Christ", we should rather say, writes Nikolaos Vasileiades, "that the Pope is Christ's representative on earth and Christ... the Pope's representative in heaven".72
European individualism since Gregory VII has been of three distinct types: papist individualism which decrees the maximum rights - and knowledge - for one person, the Pope; liberal individualism, which decrees the maximum rights for every person; nationalist individualism, which decrees the maximum rights for one nation or every nation, depending on the country concerned. Papist individualism had tended to recede into the background as first liberal individualism, and then nationalist individualism caught the imagination of the European and American continents. But now, having already anathematised the main propositions of liberalism in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864, and having stubbornly resisted the triumph of nationalism in his native Italy73, the Papacy reiterated with extra force and fanaticism its own variant of the fundamental European heresy - the original variant, and the maddest of them all. For is it not madness to regard oneself, a mortal and sinner and as in need of redemption as any other man, as the sole depository and arbiter of absolute truth?!
However, Divine retribution was swift for this act of pagan man-worship in the midst of Europe's ancient religious and political capital. On the very next day after the decree on Papal infallibility, July 19, the papacy's secular protector, Emperor Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia and withdrew his troops from Rome.
In September Napoleon’s army was defeated at Sedan and forced to abdicate, in spite of the fact that he had won a resounding victory in a plebiscite only four months before.74
Napoleon's sudden fall from grace was caused by a sudden withdrawal of support by the Freemasons. Thus Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: "H.K. Gris, who was at that time Russian consul in Berne (Switzerland), and later minister of foreign affairs (chancellor) of Alexander III, in accordance with the duties of his office observed and carefully studied the activity of the Masonic centre in Berne. To it came encoded despatches from French Masons with exact dates about the movements, deployment and military plans of the French armies. These were immediately transferred through Masonic channels to the Prussian command. The information came from Masonic officers of the French army. And so France was doomed! No strategy and tactics, no military heroism could save her. It turned out that international Masonry had 'sentenced' France to defeat beforehand, and that the French 'brother-stone-masons' had obediently carried out the sentence on their own country (fatherland!). Here is a vivid example of Masonic cooperation with the defeat of their own government with the aim of overthrowing it and establishing an authority pleasing to the Masons. But when this republican parliamentary power was established, it was forced to take account of the national feeling of the French people, deeply wounded by the defeat and the seizing by Germany of Alsace and Lorraine."75
Sedan was an historic milestone in more ways than one. Not only did it reverse the decision and the result of the French victory over the Prussians at Valmy in 1792, when the Masons had supported the French against the Prussians. The protector-client relationship between France and the Roman papacy, which had begun when Pope Stephen had crossed the Alps to seek to anoint the Frankish King Pippin in the eighth century, was also now about to end. For, with the French no longer able to support the Papacy, as Christopher Duggan writes, "there was little to stop the Italian government seizing the historic capital. On 20 September, less than three weeks after the Battle of Sedan, Italian troops blew a hole in the Leonine walls at Porta Pia and marched into the city. Pius IX was left with the small enclave of the Vatican. A law was passed in May 1871 that guaranteed the safety of the pope, provided him with an annual grant, and gave him the full dignities and privileges of a sovereign; but Pius IX rejected it out of hand. The rift between the liberal state and the Church was now broader and deeper than ever."76
With the exception of the Vatican, the unification of Italy was now complete. The state's new constitution was, like Louis Philippe's of 1830 and Napoleon III's of 186277, a strange mixture of Christian and antichristian. W.M. Spellmann writes: "Under the terms of the first constitution (one actually issued in 1848 by Victor Emmanuel's father Charles Albert to his subjects in Piedmont-Sardinia) the monarch ruled 'by the grace of God' as well as 'by the will of the people'. A bicameral assembly was established with members of the upper house chosen by the king and the lower house elected on the basis of a very restricted franchise..."78
The nationalists were disgusted, writes Adam Zamoyski, that "the process... hailed as the Risorgimento, the national resurgence,... was nothing of the sort: a handful of patriots had been manipulated by a jackal monarchy and its pragmatic ministers. And the last act of 1870 had been the most opportunistic of all."79 Thus "it was a different Italy that I had dreamed of all my life," said Garibaldi a couple of years before his death. "I had hoped to evoke the soul of Italy," wrote Mazzini from exile, "and instead find merely her inanimate corpse."80
And yet they had gained not only the unification of Italy but also the humiliation of the Papacy, of which Machiavelli had said: "The nearer people are to the Church of Rome, which is the head of our religion, the less religious they are... Her ruin and chastisement is near at hand... We Italians owe to the Church of Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and bad; but we owe her a still greater debt, and one that will be the cause of our ruin, namely that the Church has kept and still keeps our country divided."81
To others, however, and not only Papists, the "ruin and chastisement" of the Church of Rome was no cause of rejoicing. Thus the Russian diplomat, Constantine Nikolaevich Leontiev, lamented: The Pope a prisoner! The first man of France [President Carnot] not baptised!"82 The reason for his alarm was not far to find: for all its vices, and its newest heresies, the papacy was still one of the main forces in the West restraining the liberal-socialist revolution as it descended ever more rapidly down the slippery slope towards atheism.
Pius IX died in 1878 died in self-imposed exile, having refused to set foot on Italian soil. And in 1881, as he was being carried to his burial-place, mobs gathered and yelled: "Long Live Italy! Death to the Pope!"...83
8. NIETZSCHE: (1) THE WILL TO POWER
One of the acutest critics of the new Germany was Friedrich Nietzsche, a bad man who later went mad, but who understood many things. He spoke of "the bad and dangerous consequences" of the German victory in 1871, and feared "the defeat - yes, the extirpation of the German spirit in favour of the 'German Reich'."84 Nietzsche broke with his former idol, Wagner, because the latter rejected his former cosmopolitanism, made peace with the new Reich, and even, in his last opera Parsifal affected a return to Christianity.
But Nietzsche was no revolutionary like Marx or Bakunin, and had no specifically political programme. As Golo Mann writes: "Prophesying war and glorifying power as he did, he should have been a supporter of the new Germany; this he was not at all. He loved the old Germany, the Germany of Goethe, not of Bismarck. He thought that the German nation was becoming politically conscious at the expense of it old virtues. 'The price of coming to power is even greater; power makes people stupid... the Germans - once they were called the nation of thinkers - do they think at all today?85 The Germans are bored by intellect, politics swallow up all their interest in really intellectual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, I fear, was the end of German philosophy... "Are there any German philosophers, are there any German poets, are there any good German books?" - I am asked abroad. I blush, but with the bravado which is mine even in desperate circumstances I reply: "Yes, Bismarck."' Elsewhere he says: 'This is the age of the masses, they kowtow to everything "mass". This happens also in politicis. A statesman who raises them a new tower of Babel, some monstrosity of an empire and of power is 'great' to them. What does it matter that those of us who are more careful and reticent for the time being cling to the old belief that it is only a great idea which lends greatness to an action or a cause. Assuming a statesman were to put his nation in a position where it becomes involved in a grand political game for which it is by nature neither fitted nor prepared, so that it must sacrifice its old and more tested qualities for a new and questionable mediocrity; assuming that a statesman condemned his nation to become politically minded generally, though this nation has so far had better things to do and in its heart of hearts cannot rid itself of a cautious distaste for the restlessness, emptiness and noisy petulance of politically minded peoples; assuming that such a statesman whips up the dormant passions and lusts of his people, blames it for its former timidity and wish not to get involved, accuses it of hankering after foreign things and of a secret desire for the infinite, that he makes light of its dearest fancies, warps its conscience and makes it narrow-minded and nationalistic in its tastes - how can a statesman who did all these things, and whom his nation would have to do penance for all eternity, if it has a future at all, how can such a statesman be called great?'"86
So Nietzsche would presumably have rejected Hitler as he rejected Bismarck and Kaiser William II. And he rejected antisemitism: "How much mendacity and squalor are needed to raise race questions in today's hotch-potch Europe." "Maxim: no social intercourse with anybody involved in the lie of racialism."87 And yet it is not difficult to see why the founders of Nazism seized upon Nietzsche's philosophy as confirming their own.
Nietzsche's political philosophy owed much to Hegel's critique of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy. In his early years, Hegel had regarded democracy as the best political system, but for reasons that were subtly and importantly different from those of the Anglo-Saxon theorists. These differences, according to the Harvard political scientist Francis Fukuyama, can be seen more clearly in the context of the psychological bases of the two models.
The Anglo-Saxon model is based on Plato's distinction between three basic elements of human nature: reason, desire and thymos (anger or "spirit"). Reason is the handmaid of desire and thymos; it is that element which distinguishes us from the animals and enables the irrational forces of desire and thymos to be satisfied in the real world. Desire includes the basic needs for food, sleep, shelter and sex. Thymos is usually translated as "anger" or "courage"; but Fukuyama defines it as that desire which "desires the desire of other men, that is, to be wanted by others or to be recognized".88
Most liberal theorists in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, such as Hobbes and Locke, focused on desire as the fundamental force in human nature because on its satisfaction depends the survival of the human race itself. They saw thymos, or the need for recognition, as an ambiguous force which should rather be suppressed than expressed; for it is thymos that leads to tyrannies, wars and all those conflicts which endanger "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The American Constitution with its system of checks and balances was designed above all to prevent the emergence of tyranny, which is the clearest expression of what we may call "megalothymia".
Now the early Hegel valued democracy, not simply because it attained the satisfaction of desire better than any other system, but also, and primarily, because it gave expression to thymos in the form of isothymia - that is, it allowed each citizen to express his thymos to an equal degree. For whereas in pre-democratic societies the satisfaction of thymos in one person led to the frustration of thymos for many more, thereby dividing the whole of society into one or a few masters and a great many slaves, as a result of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century the slaves overthrew their masters and achieved equal recognition in each other's eyes. Thus through the winning of universal human rights everyone, in effect, became a master.
Hegel's philosophy was an explicit challenge to the Christian view of freedom and slavery, which regarded the latter as a secondary evil that could be turned into a great good if used for spiritual ends. "For he that is called in the Lord," said St. Paul, "being a servant, is the Lord's freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant" (I Corinthians 7.22). So "live as free men," said St. Peter, "yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God" (I Peter 2.16). But since this doctrine offended Hegel's pride, his thymos, he rejected it as unworthy of the dignity of man. And he rejected Anglo-Saxon liberalism for similar reasons, insofar as he saw liberalism's placing of self-preservation as the main aim of life and society as effete and degrading. In fact, towards the end of his life he transferred his political allegiance from democracy to Prussian autocracy.
Nietzsche took Hegel's concept of thymos and gave it a much broader meaning, encompassing all the desiring faculty of man. Combining it with the desiring faculty, he called it the will to power, recalling Schopenhauer's very similar concept: "A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results."89 This will to power encompassed "pride, joy, health, sexual love, enmity and war."
By subordinating everything to the will to power Nietzsche completed a revolution in German philosophy. For Kant had emphasised the "disinterestedness" of the moral and aesthetic ideal, its basis in knowledge and independence from desire. Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea had then restored desire (will) to its rightful place in philosophy, and in fact gave precedence to it over knowledge. But his moral ideal was still the ascetic one of abstention from desire and its illusory pleasures. Nietzsche, who admired Schopenhauer but could not accept his attempt to renounce will through asceticism, completed the revolution in German idealism by rejecting asceticism and the whole system of values involved in it.90 87
He did this by distinguishing between the morality of the master and the morality of the slave. The morality of the master is the morality of the superman, whose superiority consists in the greater uninhibitedness of his will to power, which impresses itself upon others and forces them to acknowledge it, making them thereby his slaves. He is the aristocrat par excellence, who embraces life in its fullness, and fears neither suffering nor death. Historically speaking, he belongs to the master races that have conquered others - the Romans, the Vikings, the Aryans.
"One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory."91
The morality of the slave is a kind of defence mechanism against the morality of the master. Based on ressentiment, that is, vengefulness against his master, the morality of the slave justifies his subservience and allows him to live with it by repressing his will to power or by sublimating it into other channels - Christian good works, for example, or a philosophy of human rights that protects the slave against his master and his fellow-slave. Thus "in every ascetic morality man adores part of himself as God [the inversion or sublimation of the will to power] and to that end needs to diabolicize the rest [the will to power itself]."92
And so "'love of the neighbor' is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous drives, like an enterprising spirit, foolhardiness, vengefulness, craftiness, rapacity, and the lust to rule, which had so far not merely been honoured insofar as they were socially useful - under different names, to be sure, from those chosen here - but had to be trained and cultivated to make them great (because one constantly needed them in view of the dangers to the whole community, against the enemies of the community), are now experienced as doubly dangerous, since the channels to divert them are lacking, and, step by step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander.
"Now the opposite drives and inclinations receive moral honors; step by step, the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, in an opinion, in a state or affect, in a will, in a talent - that now constitutes the moral perspective: here, too, fear is again the mother of morals."93
Historically, the leader in this revanche of the slave against his master was the priest, who "alters the direction of ressentiment". The first priestly people was the Jews.94 The Christians followed the Jews and refined the morality of the slave still further, adding to it a whole metaphysics of salvation.
"All that has been done on earth against 'the noble', 'the powerful', 'the masters', 'the rulers', fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies' values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed
priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocraticvalue-equation (good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=God-beloved) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying 'the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone - and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed and damned!'... One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation... In connection with the tremendous and most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on a previous occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, section 195) - that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because it - has been victorious...
"[As for] this Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this 'Redeemer' who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners - was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this 'Redeemer', this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that 'all the world', namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the 'holy cross', that ghastly paradox of a 'God on the cross', that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?
"What is certain, at least is that sub hoc signo [under the sign of the Cross] Israel, with its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals..."95
For this reason, Nietzsche was scornful of the Christian position of his contemporary Dostoyevsky, with whom he is often compared - although (or perhaps because) he is strongly reminiscent of one of Dostoyevsky's more manic characters. He "held Dostoyevsky in contempt for his 'morbid moral tortures', his rejection of 'proper pride'. He accused him of 'sinning to enjoy the luxury of confession', which Nietzsche considered a 'degrading prostration'. Dostoyevsky was, in Nietzsche's words, one of the victims of the 'conscience-vivisection and self-crucifixion of two thousand years' of Christianity."96
The most common form of slave-morality in modern times has been democracy-socialism with its anti-aristocratic, herd-animal ethos: "The democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement."97 "I add immediately," writes Nietzsche, "that in all the higher and more mixed [i.e. racially mixed] cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpretation and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other - even in the same human being, within a single soul. The moral discrimination of values has originated either among a ruling group whose consciousness of its difference from the ruled group was accompanied by delight - or among the ruled, the slave and dependents of every degree.
"In the first case, when the ruling group determines what is 'good', the exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order of rank. The noble human being separates from himself those in whom the opposite of such exalted, proud states finds expression: he despises them. It should be noted immediately that in this first type of morality the opposition of 'good' and 'bad' means approximately the same as 'noble' and 'contemptible'. (The opposition of 'good' and 'evil' has a different origin.) One feels contempt for the cowardly, the anxious, the petty, those intent on narrow utility; also for the suspicious with their unfree glances, those who humble themselves, the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated, the begging flatterers, above all the liars: it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. 'We truthful ones' - thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.
"It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions. Therefore it is a gross mistake when historians of morality start from such questions as: why was the compassionate act praised? The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'; it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things; it is value-creating. Everything it knows as part of itself it honors: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow: the noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from pity, but prompted more by an urge begotten by excess of power. The noble human being honors himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness. 'A hard heart Wotan put in my breast,' says an old Scandinavian saga: a fitting poetic expression, seeing that it comes from the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is actually proud of the fact that he is not made for pity, and the hero of the saga therefore adds as a warning: 'If the heart is not hard in youth it will never harden.' Noble and courageous human beings who think that way are furthest removed from that morality which finds the distinction of morality precisely in pity, or in acting for others, or in désintéressement; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony against 'selflessness' belong just as definitely to noble morality as does a slight disdain and caution regarding compassionate feelings and a 'warm heart."98
However, "the slave's eye is not favourable to the virtues of the powerful: he is sceptical and suspicious, subtly suspicious, of all the 'good' that is honoured there - he would like to persuade himself that even their happiness is not genuine. Conversely, those qualities are brought out and flooded with light which serve to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness are honoured - for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility.
"One last fundamental difference: the longing for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the subtleties of the feeling of freedom belong as necessarily to slave morality and morals as artful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are the regular symptom of an aristocratic way of thinking and evaluating."99
However, this pagan aristocratic type which is clearly Nietzsche's ideal has been gradually worn down into the plebeian democratic and socialist type, partly (since strength or weakness of the will to power is transmitted genetically as well as culturally) by intermarriage between the master and slave races - "the slowly arising democratic order of things (and its cause, the intermarriage of masters and slaves)"100, - and partly by the overcoming of the masters by the slaves.101 This mixing of masters and slaves, those of strong will with those of weak will, has resulted in a sickness of the will which "is spread unevenly over Europe: it appears strongest and most manifold where culture has been at home longest [France]; it disappears to the extent to which the 'barbarian' still - or again - claims his rights under the loose garments of Western culture."102
Intriguingly, Nietzsche found the greatest strength of will in Russia, whose triumph would stimulate Europe's regeneration and political unification.103
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