The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIn point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reenacted inhuman nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. Thesexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the moreadmiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies itsrulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the womanin turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty,and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar.Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, andthe rivalry of influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldlyideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life.For Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness and slavishness.He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate par excellence,the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put thehuman type in danger.“The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not thestronger, are the strong’s undoing. It is not fear of our fellow-man,which we should wish to see diminished; for fear rouses those whoare strong to become terrible in turn themselves, and preserves thehard-earned and successful type of humanity. What is to be dreadedby us more than any other doom is not fear, but rather the greatdisgust, not fear, but rather the great pity—disgust and pity for ourhuman fellows… . The morbid are our greatest peril—not the ‘bad’men, not the predatory beings. Those born wrong, the miscarried,the broken—they it is, the weakest who are undermining the vitalityof the race, poisoning our trust in life, and putting humanity inquestion. Every look of them is a sigh—’Would I were somethingother! I am sick and tired of what I am.’ In this swamp-soil of selfcontempt,every poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret,so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms ofsensitiveness and resentment, here the air smells odious with secrecy,with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven endlesslythe net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those whosuffer against those who succeed and are victorious; here the veryaspect of the victorious is hated—as if health, success, strength, pride,and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious, for whichone ought eventually to make bitter expiation. Oh, how these peoplewould themselves like to inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be332