The Astuteness of moral castration.—How is war waged against the virile passions and valuations? No violent physical means are available; the war must therefore be one of ruses, spells, and lies—in short, a "spiritual war."
First recipe: One appropriates virtue in general, and makes it the main feature of one's ideal; the older ideal is denied and declared to be the reverse of all ideals. Slander has to be carried to a fine art for this purpose.
Second recipe: A type of man is set up as a general standard; and this is projected into all things, behind all things, and behind the destiny of all things—as God.
Third recipe: The opponents of one's ideal are declared to be the opponents of God; one arrogates to oneself a right to great pathos, to power, and a right to curse and to bless.
Fourth recipe: All suffering, all gruesome, terrible, and fatal things are declared to be the results of opposition to ones ideal—all suffering is punishment even in the case of one's adherents (except it be a trial, etc.).
Fifth recipe: One goes so far as to regard Nature as the reverse of one's ideal, and the lengthy sojourn amid natural conditions is considered a great trial of patience—a sort of martyrdom; one studies contempt, both in one's attitudes and one's looks towards all "natural things."
Sixth recipe: The triumph of anti-naturalism and ideal castration, the triumph of the world of the pure, good, sinless, and blessed, is projected into the future as the consummation, the finale, the great hope, and the "Coming of the Kingdom of God."
I hope that one may still be allowed to laugh at this artificial hoisting up of a small species of man to the position of an absolute standard of all things?
205.
What I do not at all like in Jesus of Nazareth and His Apostle Paul, is that they stuffed so much into the heads of paltry people, as if their modest virtues were worth so much ado. We have had to pay dearly for it all; for they brought the most valuable qualities of both virtue and man into ill repute; they set the guilty conscience and the self-respect of noble souls at loggerheads, and they led the braver, more magnanimous, more daring, and more excessive tendencies of strong souls astray—even to self-destruction.