George Nathan - The Collected Works of H. L. Mencken

In his efforts to account for the origin of Christianity, Nietzsche was less happy, and indeed came very near the border-line of the ridiculous. The faith of modern Europe, he said, was the result of a gigantic effort on the part of the ancient Jews to revenge themselves upon their masters. The Jews were helpless and inefficient and thus evolved a slave-morality. Naturally, as slaves, they hated their masters, while realizing, all the while, the unmanliness of the ideals they themselves had to hold to in order to survive. So they crucified Christ, who voiced these same ideals, and the result was that the outside world, which despised the Jews, accepted Christ as a martyr and prophet and thus swallowed the Jewish ideals without realizing it. In a word, the Jews detested the slave-morality which circumstances thrust upon them, and got their revenge by foisting it, in a sugar-coated pill, upon their masters.

It is obvious that this idea is sheer lunacy. That the Jews ever realized the degenerating effect of their own slave-morality is unlikely, and that they should take counsel together and plan such an elaborate and complicated revenge, is impossible. The reader of Nietzsche must expect to encounter such absurdities now and then. The mad German was ordinarily a most logical and orderly thinker, but sometimes the traditional German tendency to indulge in wild and imbecile flights of speculation cropped up in him.

1. Vide the chapter on "Crime and Punishment."

2." Der Antichrist ," § 62.

3.St. Mark XIV, 63, 64.

4.Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89), who is not to be confused with Nietzsche's teacher at Bonn and Leipsic. Ritschl founded what is called the Ritschlian movement in theology. This has for its object the abandonment of supernaturalism and the defence of Christianity as a mere scheme of living. It admits that the miracle stories are fables and even concedes that Christ was not divine, but maintains that his teachings represent the best wisdom of the human race. See Denny: "Studies in Theology," New York, 1894.

5.Ph. IV, 6: "Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God."

6.Deut. XXXII, 4: "He is the rock, his work is perfect." See also a hundred similar passages in the Old and New Testaments.

7.Isaiah XLIV, 8: "Now, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand."

8."The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States," pp. 16 to 20: Philadelphia, 1841.

9.To the end of his days Huxley believed that, to the average human being, even of the highest class, some sort of faith would always be necessary. "My work in the London hospitals," he said, "taught me that the preacher often does as much good as the doctor." It would be interesting to show how this notion has been abandoned in recent years. The trained nurse, who was unknown in Huxley's hospital days, now takes the place of the confessor, and as Dr. Osler has shown us in "Science and Immortality," men die just as comfortably as before.

10." Der Antichrist ," § 5.

11." Der Antichrist ," § 6.

12." Der Antichrist ," § 7.

13.Alfred Russell Wallace: "Darwinism," London, 1889.

14.Alexander Tille, introduction to the Eng. tr. of "The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche," vol. XI; New York, 1896.

15.John Fiske: "The Destiny of Man;" London, 1884.

16.Romanes Lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," 1893.

17.As a matter of fact this dualism still lives. Thus it was lately defended by a correspondent of the New York Sun: "If there can be such a thing as an essential difference there surely is one between the animal evolution discovered by Darwin and the self-culture, progress and spiritual aspiration of man." Many other writers on the subject take the same position.

18.See the article on "Monism" in the New International Encyclopedia.

19.A. J. Balfour: "Fragment on Progress;" London, 1891.

20.He was a monist, indeed, as early as 1873, at which time he had apparently not yet noticed Darwin's notion that the human race could successfully defy the law of natural selection. "The absence of any cardinal distinction between man and beast," he said, "is a doctrine which I consider true." (" Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen ," I, 189.) Nevertheless, in a moment of sophistry, late in life, he undertook to criticize the law of natural selection and even to deny its effects ( vide "Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher," § 14, in "The Twilight of the Idols"). It is sufficient to say, in answer, that the law itself is inassailable and that all of Nietzsche's work, saving this single unaccountable paragraph, helps support it. His frequent sneers at Darwin, in other places, need not be taken too seriously. Everything English, toward the close of his life, excited his ire, but the fact remains that he was a thorough Darwinian and that, without Darwin's work, his own philosophy would have been impossible.

21.This observation is as old as Montaigne, who said: "After all, the stoics were actually stoical, but where in all Christendom will you find a Christian?"

Table of Contents

At the bottom of all philosophy, of all science and of all thinking, you will find the one all-inclusive question: How is man to tell truth from error? The ignorant man solves this problem in a very simple manner: he holds that whatever he believes, he knows; and that whatever he knows is true. This is the attitude of all amateur and professional theologians, politicians and other numbskulls of that sort. The pious old maid, for example, who believes in the doctrine of the immaculate conception looks upon her faith as proof, and holds that all who disagree with her will suffer torments in hell. Opposed to this childish theory of knowledge is the chronic doubt of the educated man. He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.

At different times in the history of man, various methods of solving or evading the riddle have been proposed. In the age of faith it was held that, by his own efforts alone, man was unable, even partly, to distinguish between truth and error, but that he could always go for enlightenment to an infallible encyclopedia: the word of god, as set forth, through the instrumentality of inspired scribes, in the holy scriptures. If these scriptures said that a certain proposition was true, it was true, and any man who doubted it was either a lunatic or a criminal. 1This doctrine prevailed in Europe for many years and all who ventured to oppose it were in danger of being killed, but in the course of time the number of doubters grew so large that it was inconvenient or impossible to kill all of them, and so, in the end, they had to be permitted to voice their doubts unharmed.

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The first man of this new era to inflict any real damage upon the ancient churchly idea of revealed wisdom was Nicolas of Cusa, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, who lived in the early part of the fifteenth century. 2Despite his office and his time, Nicolas was an independent and intelligent man, and it became apparent to him, after long reflection, that mere belief in a thing was by no means a proof of its truth. Man, he decided was prone to err, but in the worst of his errors, there was always some kernel of truth, else he would revolt against it as inconceivable. Therefore, he decided, the best thing for man to do was to hold all of his beliefs lightly and to reject them whenever they began to appear as errors. The real danger, he said, was not in making mistakes, but in clinging to them after they were known to be mistakes.