The founder of a religion may be quite insignificant—a wax vesta and no more!
179.
Concerning the psychological problem of Christianity.—The driving forces are: resentment, popular insurrection, the revolt of the bungled and the botched. (In Buddhism it is different: it is not born of resentment. It rather combats resentment because the latter leads to action!)
This party, which stands for freedom, understands that the abandonment of antagonism in thought and deed is a condition of distinction and preservation. Here lies the psychological difficulty which has stood in the way of Christianity being understood: the force which created it, urges to a struggle against itself.
Only as a party standing for peace and innocence can this insurrectionary movement hope to be successful: it must conquer by means of excessive mildness, sweetness, softness, and its instincts are aware of this. The feat was to deny and condemn the force, of which man is the expression, and to press the reverse of that force continually to the fore, by word and deed.
180.
The pretence of youthfulness.—It is a mistake to imagine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful people rose against an old culture; the story goes that it was out of the lowest levels of society, where Christianity flourished and shot its roots, that the more profound source of life gushed forth afresh: but nothing can be understood of the psychology of Christianity, if it be supposed that it was the expression of revived youth among a people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is rather a typical form of decadence, of moral-softening and of hysteria, amid a general hotch-potch of races and people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and sick. The wonderful company which gathered round this master-seducer of the populace, would not be at all out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this crowd—the absence of a known duty, the feeling that everything is nearing its end, that nothing is any longer worth while, and that contentment lies in dolce far niente.
The power and certainty of the future in the Jew's instinct, its monstrous will for life and for power, lies in its ruling classes; the people who upheld primitive Christianity are best distinguished by this exhausted condition of their instincts. On the one hand, they are sick of everything; on the other, they are content with each other, with themselves and for themselves.
181.
Christianity regarded as emancipated Judaism (just as a nobility which is both racial and indigenous ultimately emancipates itself from these conditions, and goes in search of kindred elements....).