CE? To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they
had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast
suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous,
manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the
highest and most successful type of "man"--into uncertainty, distress
of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the
earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and
earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and
was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value,
"unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one
sentiment. If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse
and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and
impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease
marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will
has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME
ABORTION of man? He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer
Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this
almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in
the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to
cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous
pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands?
How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed
to do!"--I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most
portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough,
to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men,
not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime
self-constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and
perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically
different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from
man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed
the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species
has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly,
mediocre, the European of the present day.

CHAPTER IV. APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES

63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously--and even
himself--only in relation to his pupils.

64. "Knowledge for its own sake"--that is the