Reading Nietzsche

Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Will, Prayer, Sin, and the Many Gods

Optional full-text route · Station 15 of 35

Read: Book III, §§126–143, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §126 and stop before §144.
Allow: About 55–75 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The eighteen sections total about 2,600 words in the free edition. Most are short; §§127, 135, and 143 are the longest. If you need two sittings, stop after §134.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §126 · §130 · §135 · §140 · §143.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here; this lesson has not been compared with Kaufmann’s text. Where a word drives the interpretation, this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text.

Before you read

The madman called the churches “the tombs and monuments of God.” These eighteen sections go inside the religions. They range from a one-sentence verdict on mysticism to longer accounts of will, prayer, and sin, and they end with a defence of polytheism. In the middle, §§135–141 make the book’s sharpest judgments about Judaism, the Jews, Jesus, and Paul.

Station 11 left a question open. §99 said that Wagner was unable to do justice to the Jews, “even in their greatest exploit,” and reminded the reader that they are “the inventors of Christianity.” These sections show what the book itself says about that invention.

The main question: How should these religious and Jewish/Christian judgments be tested—and what kind of claim is each one?

Use the marks with extra care in this station: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only. For each judgment, ask three things. Who speaks: the book’s “I” or “we,” an imagined speaker, or a quoted saying? What kind of claim is it? What evidence, if any, does it offer? Many of these sections offer none. Say so when that is the case, rather than supplying reasons the text does not give.

What to notice

  1. Taste. §132 says that “our taste,” no longer “our reason,” decides against Christianity. Ask what that makes of the arguments around it.
  2. Feeling, God, founder, people. §§135–141 move between claims about a religious feeling (sin), about a God, about the founder of Christianity, and about “the Jews” as a people. Mark which is which.
  3. The Greeks as the standard. §§135 and 139 measure Jewish and Christian feeling against the Greeks. Notice what the comparison assumes.

Close reading

One way to group the sections

These groups are this guide’s, not Nietzsche’s.

Will and prayer

§126 is one sentence: mystical explanations “do not even go the length of being superficial.” Mark it V. §127 is longer and more careful. The “thoughtless man” believes “that the Will is the only thing that operates,” simple and self-evident, and his belief in will as a cause is “the belief in magically operating forces.” The section then offers a history (H): because human beings for “immense periods of time believed only in persons,” belief in cause and effect became fundamental, “a piece of atavism of remotest origin.” Compare station 13’s §112 on cause and effect. §127, will as magic

Then the first person speaks. Schopenhauer “has set a primitive mythology on the throne,” and “I set the following propositions against those of Schopenhauer.” Will requires an idea of pleasure and pain; whether an excitation is felt as pleasure or pain is “the affair of the interpreting intellect”; and only in an intellectual being is there “pleasure, displeasure and Will.” Mark them P: claims a reader could test, stated without argument. §127, against Schopenhauer

§128 is contemptuous, and should be read as such. “Prayer has been devised for such men as have never any thoughts of their own.” Its examples run across religions: the Tibetan “om mane padme hum,” the name of Ram counted in Benares, Vishnu’s thousand names and Allah’s ninety-nine, prayer-wheels and the rosary. The founders of religions, it says, prescribed prayer so that such people “may not disturb.” Two further claims complicate the contempt: “in every religion the religious man is an exception,” and “to forbid them the prayer-babbling would mean to take their religion from them.” Mark it V and P. The contempt is for the many, and it is not reserved for Christians; the section also grants that the thoughtful have weary hours when “a mechanical, pious ritual does them good.” §128, prayer

§129 turns a saying it gives to Luther: “God himself cannot subsist without wise men,” but “God can still less subsist without unwise men,—good Luther did not say that!” The section cites no source for Luther’s words, and this guide has not traced one.

Five verdicts

§§130–134 are verdicts, most of them one or two sentences long. Read each for its kind of claim.

Hold §132 against the rest of the station. If taste now decides, the judgments that follow may be expressions of taste, or reasons already given, or both. The difficulty below returns to this.

Sin, the Jews, and the founder

§§135–141 are the station’s centre and its hardest pages. They make claims about a religious feeling, about a God, about Jesus and Paul, and about “the Jews” as a people. State each plainly. Do not soften them, and do not reduce them to simple hostility or simple admiration. On this guide’s reading, the book credits the Jews with great creative power and, in the same pages, generalizes about them in derogatory terms. Test that reading against the text.

Historical context, from this guide: the book appeared in 1882, while organized political antisemitism was gaining ground in Germany. One documented example is the Antisemites’ Petition of 1880–81 (German History in Documents and Images). It asked the imperial chancellor, among other things, to limit Jewish immigration and to exclude Jews from positions of authority; about 265,000 men signed it, and it was presented to Bismarck in April 1881. The book does not mention the petition, and this guide does not claim that these sections respond to it. In §99 (station 11), the book had called Wagner’s hatred of the Jews a failure of justice. Neither fact settles what §§135–141 mean. Both are reasons to read their generalizations about a people with care.

§135, “Origin of Sin,” makes three kinds of claim. The first is historical: sin, “as it is at present felt wherever Christianity prevails or has prevailed, is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention,” and Christianity has aimed at “Judaising” the whole world. The German word is verjüdeln, which Nietzsche puts in quotation marks. It is a colloquial, pejorative formation, harsher than Common’s “Judaising”; the quotation marks may set it off as borrowed or ironic, but they do not make it neutral. The evidence offered is a contrast: our continuing distance from Greek antiquity, “a world without the feeling of sin.” §135, the origin of sin

The second claim concerns the God this feeling presupposes: “a mighty being, an almighty being, and yet a revengeful being,” to whom sin is “an offence against him, not against mankind!” The section calls him “this honour-craving Oriental in heaven.” The third concerns a people’s feeling: “the Jewish feeling, to which all that is natural seems unworthy in itself.” The Greeks, by contrast, gave transgression dignity and “invented tragedy,” an art that “has remained alien to the Jew, in spite of all his poetic endowment and taste for the sublime.” Mark the section H and V. Notice one more speaker: an imagined Greek answers the formula “Only when thou repentest is God gracious to thee” with “Slaves may have such sentiments.” The book puts that verdict in a Greek’s mouth. §135, the God of sin

What can a reader test, and how far? The section claims that the God of this feeling treats sin only as an offence to his honour, “an offence against him, not against mankind,” and that tragedy, the art the Greeks invented, “has remained alien to the Jew.” Two biblical passages, chosen by this guide, show what a test can and cannot do. The paraphrases are this guide’s, checked against the King James Version.

Know the limit of these tests. Neither passage disproves the section’s narrower comparison: that the Greeks invented tragedy as an art, a way of giving transgression dignity, and that this art remained alien to the Jewish tradition. Prophetic protest and Job’s complaint are not Greek tragedy. Whether they express a tragic sense of life is a further question, and this guide leaves it open.

§136, “The Chosen People,” calls the Jews “the moral genius among the nations” and gives the reason in a parenthesis: “in virtue of their capacity for despising the human in themselves more than any other people.” The praise and the diagnosis are one phrase. The section then argues by analogy: the Jews take pleasure in their “divine monarch and saint” as the French nobility did in Louis XIV, exalting a power above themselves so as to look down on everything else. Mark it P and H. The only evidence offered is the analogy. §136, the chosen people

§137 is titled “Spoken in Parable”: “A Jesus Christ was only possible in a Jewish landscape,” under “the gloomy and sublime thunder-cloud of the angry Jehovah.” The title marks it as an image, not a historical argument; read it as the book asks.

§§138–141 turn to the founder of Christianity and to Paul. In §138 the founder thought that people suffered most from their sins: “it was his error, the error of him who felt himself without sin.” His pity (German Erbarmen) concerned a trouble that was rarely great “even among his own people, the inventors of sin.” In §139 Paul has “an evil eye for the passions,” while the Greeks “loved, elevated, embellished and deified them.” Common ends §139 with an exclamation, “Have they perhaps become Jews!” The German asks a hedged question, Sind sie es vielleicht geworden?; mark it ?. §139, Paul and the Greeks

§140, “Too Jewish”: “If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice.” Then: “The founder of Christianity showed too little of the finer feelings in this respect—being a Jew.” The German is als Jude, as a Jew. Common’s “being a Jew” makes the causal reading explicit; the German is terser but allows it. Either way, the section explains a failing it attributes to Jesus by his being Jewish. State that plainly: it is a generalization about a people used as an explanation. §140, too Jewish

§141, “Too Oriental,” attacks “A conditioned love as the feeling of an almighty God!”, a love that has not mastered “the sentiment of honour” and “the irritable desire for vengeance.” Notice that “Oriental,” like “Jewish,” works here as a term of reproach. The section ends with a line it quotes without naming a source: “If I love thee, what does it concern thee?” is “already a sufficient criticism of the whole of Christianity.” Common’s footnote glosses it: “true love does not look for reciprocity.” The line adapts Philine’s words to Wilhelm in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Book IV, chapter 9): und wenn ich dich liebhabe, was geht’s dich an? That identification is this guide’s, checked against the Project Gutenberg German text of the novel. §141, too Oriental

§142 sets Buddha against the churches. Repeat his saying, “Do not flatter thy benefactor!,” in a Christian church, and “it immediately purifies the air of all Christianity.” Compare §134, where the spread of Buddhism was a matter of diet.

The use of many gods

§143 closes the station with a defence of polytheism. For an individual “to set up his own ideal and derive from it his laws, his pleasures and his rights”: that, the section says, “has perhaps been hitherto regarded as the most monstrous of all human aberrations.” The German qualifies the claim too (das galt wohl bisher, that was presumably regarded so until now); mark it ?. The few who dared excused themselves: “Not I! not I! but a God, through my instrumentality!” Polytheism let that impulse discharge itself, and so became “the inestimable preliminary to the justification of the selfishness and sovereignty of the individual.” Monotheism, “the rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human being,” “has perhaps been the greatest danger of mankind in the past” (German vielleicht; mark this ? as well). Both of the section’s large historical judgments are hedged. The section ends: “it is for man alone, of all the animals, that there are no eternal horizons and perspectives.” Compare §124’s horizon of the infinite and §125’s sponge that wiped away the horizon. §143, the utility of polytheism

Two words need care. Common’s “supermen” renders Uebermenschen, here plural and listed with gods and heroes; in the German text used here, the word occurs nowhere else in the book. Do not read Zarathustra’s teaching, published from 1883, back into it. Common’s “undermen” renders Untermenschen. Here the word names mythical beings below the human, “dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils,” not the word’s later political use.

A difficulty

What would it mean for this book to do the Jews justice?

Station 11’s §99 faulted Wagner for being unable to do justice to the Jews “even in their greatest exploit,” and gave the reason: they are “the inventors of Christianity.” §§135–141 now say what that invention was: sin as a feeling, a God of honour and vengeance, a founder who erred “being a Jew.” The same pages call the Jews “the moral genius among the nations.”

Three readings are possible.

Decide which the text best supports. Name one sentence from §99 (station 11) and one from §§135–141. Then say whether §132, taste rather than reasons, changes your answer.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

What does Common’s “our reason” render in §132, and why does it matter?

Unsere Gründe, our reasons. The section does not say that the faculty of reason has abandoned the case against Christianity. It says that arguments no longer decide it; taste does.

What evidence does §135 offer that sin is a Jewish invention?

Mainly a contrast with the Greeks: our continuing distance from Greek antiquity, “a world without the feeling of sin,” and an imagined Greek’s response to the formula of repentance. It offers no historical documentation.

How does §136 explain the Jews’ sense of being chosen?

By an analogy with the French nobility under Louis XIV: a people exalts its divine monarch in order to look down on everything else. It calls the Jews “the moral genius among the nations” because of their capacity to despise the human in themselves.

Why should “supermen” in §143 not be read as Zarathustra’s teaching?

The German plural Uebermenschen stands in a list of invented beings, with gods, heroes, dwarfs, and satyrs, as products of polytheism. The book dates from 1882, before Zarathustra, and the word occurs nowhere else in it in the German text used here.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Choose one section from §§135–141. Sort its claims by kind, then test one of them.

A successful response states the claims plainly, neither softening nor inflating them; distinguishes the book’s judgment from your own evaluation; and does not treat an analogy or an imagined speaker as evidence.

Continue

Continue to station 16: Religious Wars, Reformations, and the Colours of the Past →

Read next: Book III, §§144–163. Its question: what do these brief historical and religious judgments assume?

Previous station: station 14, §§117–125. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised .

← Full-text routeTexts & translations