Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Religious Wars, Reformations, and the Colours of the Past

Optional full-text route · Station 16 of 35

Read: Book III, §§144–163, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §144 and stop before §164.
Allow: About 45–65 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The twenty sections total about 1,750 words in the free edition; §§149 and 152 are the longest, and §§154–163 are very short. If you need two sittings, stop after §149.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §144 · §149 · §152 · §154.

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 longer sections of Book III end here. These twenty move from religion among the masses to the Reformation, the origin of religion, and the lost colours of a believing world. The last ten are very short and lead into the miniatures of stations 17–19.

The main question: What do these brief historical and religious judgments assume—and are the assumptions stated, argued, or taken for granted?

Keep using the marks: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only. Most of these sections are H, short histories of religion, nations, and culture, and few give evidence. For each, name what would have to be true for the claim to hold.

What to notice

1. Masses and individuals. §144 calls religious war the masses’ greatest advance; §149 ends with masses and slavery. Track what the book says the masses need.
2. Narcotics. §§145 and 147 call diets and religions narcotics. Compare station 15’s §134.
3. Colour. §152 says, “The lustre and the hues of all things have changed!” Compare the shadows of §108 and the horizon of §125.

Close reading

One way to group the sections

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

• Religion, the masses, and narcotics: §§144, 145, 147.
• Germans, Luther, and the Reformation: §§146, 148, 149.
• Saints, religion’s origin, and the lost colours: §§150, 151, 152, 153.
• Toward the miniatures: §§154–163.

Religion and the masses

§144 opens with a provocation: “The greatest advance of the masses hitherto has been religious war, for it proves that the masses have begun to deal reverently with conceptions of things.” It gives a reason. Religious wars arise only when sectarian disputes have refined “human reason generally,” so that even the populace thinks “the ‘eternal salvation of the soul’ may depend upon minute distinctions of concepts.” The phrase “eternal salvation of the soul” appeared in §123, among the things the book said Leo X placed above all science. Mark it V and H. §144, religious wars

§§145 and 147 call diets and religions narcotics. In §145 rice-eating “impels to the use of opium and narcotics,” as potato-eating impels to brandy, and “those Indian teachers” praise a vegetable diet in order to create the need they can satisfy. In §147, what do “savage tribes” accept first from Europeans? “Brandy and Christianity, the European narcotics.” And “by what means are they fastest ruined?—By the European narcotics.” Mark both H. §145 continues §134’s dietary explanations and generalizes about Indian teachers without evidence. §147 uses the colonial vocabulary of its time (German wilde Völkerschaften) to bring a charge against Europe. §145, rice and narcotics · §147, question and answer

Germans, Luther, and the Reformation

§146, “German Hopes,” begins with a claim about names: “the names of peoples are generally names of reproach.” The Chinese, it says, called the Tartars “the dogs,” and “Deutschen” originally meant “heathen,” following Ulfilas’s Gothic Bible. This guide has not checked the claim about the Tartars. The second claim has a basis. In Ulfilas’s Galatians 2:14, þiudos renders the Greek ta ethnē, the nations or gentiles, and þiudisko renders ethnikōs, like a gentile. That supports a link between the Gothic word and the nations; it does not by itself show that the German name originally meant heathen. Mark it H. §146, German hopes

The hope follows. “It might still be possible” for the Germans to make “an honourable name ultimately out of their old name of reproach, by becoming the first non-Christian nation of Europe,” and so to complete the work of Luther, “who taught them to be anti-Roman.” Mark it V: a hope, not a prediction.

§§148 and 149 explain the Reformation, and not in the same way. §148 says the church was “least of all corrupt in Germany,” so the Reformation began there because even the beginnings of corruption were felt to be unendurable; “no people was ever more Christian than the Germans at the time of Luther.” §149 reads the history as a sign of culture. The repeated failure of new Greek religions “testifies to the higher culture of the Greeks”: a people with many different individuals cannot be cured “by a single recipe of faith and hope.” Pythagoras and Plato tried to found religions, “perhaps also Empedocles” (mark ?), and founded only sects. Where a reformation fails and sects arise, the people “has begun to free itself from the gross herding instincts.” Luther’s success in the north, by contrast, “is a sign that the north had remained backward.” §148, where reformations begin · §149, failed reformations

Then come two passages to state plainly. First, there would have been no Christianising of Europe “if the culture of the old world of the south had not been gradually barbarized by an excessive admixture of the blood of German barbarians.” The German is germanischem Barbarenblut, Germanic barbarian blood. The section explains a cultural history by blood, and offers no evidence. Second, a general rule: “Where there is ruling there are masses: where there are masses there is need of slavery. Where there is slavery the individuals are but few, and have the instincts and conscience of the herd opposed to them.” The German, ein Bedürfniss nach Sclaverei, does not say whose need it is: the rulers’, the masses’, or the culture’s. Mark both H and V. §149, masses and slavery

Saints, origins, and colours

§150 defines a term: “A virtue with such an effect I call brutal.” It means the virtue of the saints, who “only endured life with the thought that at the sight of their virtue self-contempt might seize every man.” Mark it V; the “I” speaks. §151 corrects Schopenhauer again: “The metaphysical requirement is not the origin of religions,” but “a later sprout from them.” When religion is destroyed, the habit of “another world” leaves a void, and a metaphysical other world grows in its place. Compare §108: a shadow outlives its source. The origin itself, the section says, was “an error in the interpretation of certain natural phenomena, a difficulty of the intellect.” Mark it H. §151, the origin of religion

§152, “The greatest Change,” changes the tone. “The lustre and the hues of all things have changed!” Earlier people lived among dreams, oracles, and fear of divine retribution, and “our ‘death’ is an entirely different death.” Here Common again writes “events” where the German has Erlebnisse, experiences, as in §114 (station 13): “All events were of a different lustre, for a God shone forth in them.” Read it as a claim about how life was experienced. “‘Truth’ was conceived in quite a different manner, for the insane could formerly be regarded as its mouthpiece,” a thing “which makes us shudder, or laugh.” Compare §125: there the German calls the madman der tolle Mensch; here the word is der Wahnsinnige. The section ends in praise of the believing past: “what have we been able to do hitherto in comparison with the splendid colouring of that old master!—I mean ancient humanity.” Mark it H and V. §152, the greatest change

§153, “Homo poeta,” is spoken entirely in quotation marks, by a poet who has written “this tragedy of tragedies” himself: “I have already in the fourth act killed all the Gods—for the sake of morality! What is now to be done about the fifth act?” The poet appeals to Horace, whose Art of Poetry asks for five acts and forbids a god to intervene unless the knot is worthy of such a deliverer. The poet ends, “Must I now think about a comic dénouement?” Who is the poet? The title suggests the human being as maker, and the fourth act recalls the deed of §125. Keep the fifth act in mind for the end of Book IV, whose last section is titled “Incipit Tragœdia” (§342, station 25). §153, Homo poeta

Toward the miniatures

§§154–163 are one to four sentences each. Read them straight through, then use the method of stations 17–19: mark each, star three, and group them. A few notes:

• §154 sets “you,” who run through life “as if intoxicated,” against “we others”: “we are made of glass.”
• §156: resisting “the whole spirit of his age” must exert an influence. “It is indifferent whether he wishes to exert an influence; the point is that he can.”
• §157, “Mentiri”: “he reflects: he will have a lie ready immediately.” Mentiri is the Latin verb for lying; the section leaves you to consider what the Romans expressed by it.
• §159, “Every Virtue has its Time”: inflexibility is “the virtue of a time different from that in which honesty prevails” (German Redlichkeit, as in §§107 and 114).
• §161: “The runaway priest and the liberated criminal” want “a look without a past.”
• §162: “Egoism is the perspective law of our sentiment”: the near looks large. Compare §143’s perspectives.
• §163: the best thing in a great victory is that “it deprives the conqueror of the fear of defeat.”

A difficulty

Can the book prize many individuals and accept a need for slavery?

Station 15’s §143 praised polytheism for first letting individuals claim their own ideals. §149 praises the Greeks for containing “a multitude of dissimilar individuals,” and praises failed reformations as signs that a people is freeing itself from “the gross herding instincts.” Yet the same section ends: “where there are masses there is need of slavery,” and the individuals “are but few.”

Three readings are possible.

• Consistent. Individuality is for the few, and the few stand above masses. §149 states the condition openly.
• Tension. §143’s freedom, “given to the individual himself,” is general; §149 limits it to a few. The two sections pull in different directions.
• Diagnosis, not endorsement. §149 describes where individuals stand under ruling and slavery, opposed by “the instincts and conscience of the herd,” without saying that the arrangement is good.

Decide which the text best supports. Name one sentence from §143 or §149, and say which word in §149 your reading depends on.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Choose one section from §§144–152. Name the assumption its claim depends on. Is that assumption stated, argued, or taken for granted?

• Quote no more than two short phrases.
• Say whether the claim is historical (H), a valuation (V), or both.
• Name one kind of evidence that would support or weaken it.

A successful response states the claim plainly, including any appeal to blood, diet, or slavery; separates the section’s claim from your own evaluation; and marks a hedge only where the text hedges.

Continue

End of Book III’s longer sections. Stations 17–19 finish Book III with its shortest aphorisms.

Continue to station 17: Thirty-Eight Miniatures: Solitude, the Herd, and Laughing →

Read next: Book III, §§164–201. Its question: which short judgments of solitude and society resist each other?

Previous station: station 15, §§126–143. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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