Notes about Sexuality and Religion

Nietzsche, 1887
TRANSLATED BY CAROL DIETHE Cambridge Uni Press, 2nd edition 2006

He brings ointments and balms with him, of course; but first he has to wound so that he can be the doctor; and whilst he soothes the pain caused by the wound, he poisons the wound at the same time – for that is what he is best trained to do, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, whose mere presence necessarily makes everything healthy, sick, and everything sick, tame. Actually, he defends his sick herd well enough, this strange shepherd, – he even defends it against itself and against the wickedness, deceit, malice and everything else characteristic of all those who are diseased and sick, all of which smoulders in the herd itself, he carries out a clever, hard and secret struggle against anarchy and the ever-present threat of the inner disintegration of the herd, where that most dangerous of blasting and explosive materials, ressentiment, continually piles up. His particular trick, and his prime use, is to detonate this explosive material without blowing up either the herd or the shepherd; if we wanted to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest formula, we would immediately say: the priest is the direction-changer of ressentiment. For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit who is receptive to distress, – in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions…

page 76
For we must not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who actually treated sexuality as a personal enemy (including its tool, woman, that ‘instrumentum diaboli’ [74], needed enemies to stay cheerful;

FN: 74 Cf. Schopenhauer’s famous misogynous essay ‘Über die Weiber’ in the second volume of his Parerga et Paralipomena.

So much with regard to the most personal aspect in Schopenhauer’s case; on the other hand, he is typical in one way, – and here, at last, we come back to our problem. Undeniably, as long as there are philosophers on earth and whenever there have been philosophers (from India to England ,to take the opposite poles of a talent for philosophy),there exists a genuine philosophers’ irritation and rancour against sensuality – Schopenhauer is just the most eloquent and, if you have an ear for it, he is also the most fascinating and delightful eruption amongst them –; similarly there exists a genuine partiality and warmth among philosophers with regard to the whole ascetic ideal, there should be no illusions on this score. Both these features belong, as I said, to the type; if both are lacking in a philosopher, he is always just a ‘so-called’ philosopher – you can be sure of that.

page 82
Marriage, for example, was for a long time viewed as a crime against the rights of the community; people used to have to pay a fine for being so presumptuous as to claim one particular woman for themselves (there we include, for example, jus primae noctis, [83] still, in Cambodia, the prerogative of priests, those custodians of ‘good old customs’).

FN: 83 Right of spending the first night of marriage with the bride.

page 93
…determined to sow suffering, division and self-contradiction on this ground wherever he can, and only too certain of his skill at being master of the suffering at any time. He brings ointments and balms with him, of course; but first he has to wound so that he can be the doctor; and whilst he soothes the pain caused by the wound, he poisons the wound at the same time – for that is what he is best trained to do, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, whose mere presence necessarily makes everything healthy, sick, and everything sick, tame. Actually, he defends his sick herd well enough, this strange shepherd, – he even defends it against itself and against the wickedness, deceit, malice and everything else characteristic of all those who are diseased and sick, all of which smoulders in the herd itself, he carries out a clever, hard and secret struggle against anarchy and the ever-present threat of the inner disintegration of the herd, where that most dangerous of blasting and explosive materials, ressentiment, continually piles up. His particular trick, and his prime use, is to detonate this explosive material without blowing up either the herd or the shepherd; if we wanted to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest formula, we would immediately say: the priest is the direction-changer of ressentiment. For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit who is receptive to distress, – in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some pretext or other: because the release of emotions is the greatest attempt at relief, or should I say, at anaesthetizing on the part of the sufferer, his involuntarily longed for narcotic against pain of any kind.

page 94
The sufferers, one and all, are frighteningly willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful emotions; they even enjoy being mistrustful and dwelling on wrongs and imagined slights: they rummage through the bowels of their past and present for obscure, questionable stories that will allow them to wallow in tortured suspicion, and intoxicate themselves with their own poisonous wickedness – they rip open the oldest wounds and make themselves bleed to death from scars long-since healed, they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and anyone else near to them. ‘I suffer: someone or other must be guilty’ – and every sick sheep thinks the same. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, ‘Quite right, my sheep! Somebody must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it, you yourself alone are to blame for yourself’ . . . That is bold enough, wrong enough: but at least one thing has been achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is, as I said – changed.

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