3. Christian Ideals.
217.
War against the Christian ideal, against the doctrine of "blessedness" and "salvation" as the aims of life, against the supremacy of the fools, of the pure in heart, of the suffering and of the botched!
When and where has any man, of any note at all, resembled the Christian ideal?—at least in the eyes of those who are psychologists and triers of the heart and reins. Look at all Plutarch's heroes!
218.
Our claim to superiority: we live in an age of Comparisons; we are able to calculate as men have never yet calculated; in every way we are history become self-conscious. We enjoy things in a different way; we suffer in a different way: our instinctive activity is the comparison of an enormous variety of things. We understand everything; we experience everything, we no longer have a hostile feeling left within us. However disastrous the results may be to ourselves, our plunging and almost lustful inquisitiveness, attacks, unabashed, the most dangerous of subjects....
"Everything is good"—it gives us pain to say "nay" to anything. We suffer when we feel that we are sufficiently foolish to make a definite stand against anything.... At bottom, it is we scholars who to-day are fulfilling Christ's teaching most thoroughly.
219.
We cannot suppress a certain irony when we contemplate those who think they have overcome Christianity by means of modern natural science. Christian values are by no means overcome by such people. "Christ on the cross" is still the most sublime symbol—even now....