Let me begin with a selection of sentences from this Chapter:
From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation.
The passion for God: there are peasant types … and sometimes an Oriental ecstasy worthy of a slave … and a womanly tenderness and lust ….
… God … seems incapable of clear communication ….
… beyond good and evil [no longer fits] under the spell and delusion of morality ….
[Most] … no longer even know what religions are good for and merely register their presence in the world with dumb amazement.
It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpretation of existence.
To ordinary human beings, finally – the vast majority who exist for service and then general advantage, and who may exist only for that – religion gives an inestimable contentment with their situation and type, manifold peace of heart, an ennobling of obedience, one further happiness and sorrow with their peers and something transfiguring and beautifying of a justification for the whole everyday character, the whole lowliness, the whole half-British poverty of their souls.
… one pays dearly and terribly when religions … insist on having their own sovereign way, when they themselves want to be the ultimate ends ….
Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet. [It has prevented men from seeing] the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man.
[The misperception] of equality before God [has produced] … a herd animal, something … sickly and mediocre ….
Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil in his late 30’s, his early 40’s, when he was at the height of intellectual power and a concomitant arrogance. He sees clearly how Christianity might become, and in the past did too often become, a vehicle for abuse and tyranny, but his primary criticism is that Christianity does not recognize a natural order of human beings — the “peasant types,” those “who exist for service and the general advantage,” that it obscures the “chasm of rank between man and man,” and in doing so has produced “a herd animal.” Explicit in all of this is the assertion that human beings naturally, that is, by breeding or spirit or intellect or audacity, are not one species. Some men are superior (women do not enter into this equation at all; Nietzsche is a misogynist*). Because these men are superior, they may move “beyond good and evil.” They do not have to labor under “the delusion of morality.” They do not belong to the “herd.”
It is no mystery where these ideas lead. The 20th Century showed us the consequences in stacks of bodies by the millions and in ideologies that asserted a hierarchy based on race or religion or class. Place that hierarchy at the center of human life and the results are concentration camps and mass murder. Men will create their own reality, and to support that reality, their own morality that flatters their vision of themselves as a species of “overman,” one of a new race who has transcended the boundaries of ordinary people. What may an “overman” do … in practical terms? Anything he wishes.
