Nietzsche went to the very foundation of the Christian edifice. He pointed to its morality and said: if we are going to measure the value of this religion, let us cease our petty quarrels concerning the truth or falsehood of such stories as the loss of the Gadarene swine, or the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and let us throw the whole of Christian morality into the scales and appraise its precise worth as a system of ethics. Nietzsche would have scorned to quarrel with the Church, as Huxley did; for much more important issues were at stake. The worth of a religion is measured by its morality; because by its morality it moulds and rears men and reveals the type of man who ultimately wishes to prevail by means of it.
With the metaphysics and the dogma of Christianity in ruins all around him, therefore, Nietzsche took a step very far in advance of the rationalistic iconoclasts of his age. He attacked Christian morals, and declared them to be, like all other morals, merely a weapon in the hands of a certain type of man, with which that type struggled for power.
But bold as this step was, it constituted but the first of a series, the next of which was to discover the type which had laid the foundations of the Christian ideal. If it could be proved that these Christian values had been created by a noble species with the object of perpetuating that species, then Christianity would come forth from the inquiry vindicated to the hilt, and fill the damage done to its dogma would not have deterred Nietzsche from standing by it and upholding it to his very last breath. Alas! Things turned out somewhat differently and Nietzsche was not by any means the least pained by the result. Pursuing the inquiry with his usual unflinching and uncompromising honesty, and avoiding no conclusion however unpleasant or fatal, Nietzsche, the scion of a profoundly religions house, the lover of order and tradition, with the blood of generations of earnest believers in his veins, finally found himself compelled to renounce and even to condemn, root and branch, the faith which had been the strength and hope of his forebears.
Before turning to the next chapter, where I shall explain how he came to regard this step as inevitable, it should be said concerning Nietzsche's philosophy in general, that it is essentially and through and through religious and almost prophetic in spirit. No careful reader of his works can doubt that Nietzsche was a deeply religious man. A glance at Thus Spake Zarathustra alone would convince any one of this; while in his constant references to religion throughout his works, as "a step to higher intellectuality,"[5] as "a means to invaluable contentedness,"[6] as "a measure of discipline,"[7] as a powerful social factor,[8] a more substantial confirmation of the fact is to be found.
It is well to bear in mind, however, throughout our study of Nietzsche, that he had a higher type always in view; that he was also well aware that this type could only be attained by the strict observance of a new morality, and that if he opposed other forms of morality—more particularly the Christian form—it was because he earnestly believed that they were rearing an undesirable and even despicable kind of man.
"Verily men have made for themselves all their good and evil. Verily they did not take it: they did not find it: it did not come down as a voice from heaven."[9]
"Behold, the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values; the breaker, the law-breaker: he, however, is the creator."[10]
"Verily a muddy stream is man. One must be at least a sea to be able to absorb a muddy stream without becoming unclean."
"Behold, I teach you Superman: he is that sea; in him your great contempt can sink."[11]
[1] See also D.D. Aph. 81.