aight and walking straight are symptoms of _decadence_. "Faith"
means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of
either sex, is a fraud _because_ he is sick: his instinct _demands_ that
the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever
makes for illness is _good_; whatever issues from abundance, from
superabundance, from power, is _evil_": so argues the believer. The
_impulse to lie_--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained
theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his _unfitness
for philology_. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense,
the art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts
_without_ interpreting them falsely, and _without_ losing caution,
patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as
_ephexis_[24] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with
newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather
statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul."... The way in
which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain,
say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the
national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of
David, is always so _daring_ that it is enough to make a philologian run
up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from
Suabia[25] use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably
commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a
"providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise
of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to
convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness
of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our
piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the
head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very
instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that
he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant,
as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man--at bottom, he is a mere name for
the stupidest sort of chance.... "Divine Providence," which every third
man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong an argument
against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in
any case it is an argument against Germans!...

[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the G