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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?15
If you`ve gasped the full profundity of this (and I require that you grasp deeply right here, and understand profoundly), of the extent to which it simply cannot be the task of healthy people to attend to the sick, to make sick people well, then there`s one more necessary matter you understand - the necessity for doctors and nurses who are themselves ill.
Now we understand the meaning of the ascetic priest - we`re holding it in both hands. We need to look on the ascetic priest as the preordained healer, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd. In that way we can, for the first time, understand his immense historical mission. Ruling over suffering people is his kingdom. His instinct instructs him to do that, and in that he has his very own art, his mastery, his sort of success. He must be sick himself. He must be fundamentally related to the sick and those who go astray, in order to understand them, in order to be understood by them. But he must also be strong, master over himself even more than over others, that is, undamaged in his will to power, so that he inspires confidence and fear from the invalids, so that he can be their support, resistance, protection, compulsion, discipline, tyrant, and god.
He has to defend his herd, but against whom? Against the healthy people undoubtedly, but also against their envy of the healthy. He has to be the natural opponent and critic of all rough, stormy, unchecked, hard, violent, predatory health and power. The priest is the first form of the more refined animal which despises more easily than it hates. He will not be spared having to conduct wars with predatory animals, wars of cunning (of the "spirit") rather than of force, as is obvious. For that purpose, in certain circumstances it will be necessary for him to develop himself into a new type of beast of prey, or at least to represent himself as such a beast, with a new animal ferocity in which the polar bear, the sleek, cold, and patient tiger, and, not least of all, the fox seem to be combined in a unity which attracts as well as inspires fear. If need compels him to do this, he will walk even in the midst of the other predatory animals with the seriousness of a bear, venerable, clever, cold, and with a duplicitous superiority, as the herald and oracle of more mysterious forces, determined to sow this ground, where he can, with suffering, conflict, self-contradiction, and only too sure of his art, to become the master over the suffering at all times.
There`s no doubt he brings with him ointments and balm. But in order to be a doctor, he first has to inflict wounds. Then, while he eases the pain caused by the wound, at the same time he poisons the wound - for that is, above all, what he knows how to do, this magician and animal trainer, around whom everything healthy necessarily becomes ill and everything sick necessarily becomes tame. In fact, he defends his sick herd well enough, this strange shepherd - he protects them against themselves, against the smouldering wickedness, scheming, and maliciousness in the herd itself, against all those addictions and illnesses characteristic of their dealings with each other. He fights shrewdly, hard, and secretly against the anarchy and self-dissolution which start up all the time within the herd, in which the most dangerously explosive stuff, resentment, is constantly piling and piling up. To detonate this explosive material in such a way that it does not blow up the herd and its shepherd, that is his essential work of art and also his most important function.
If we want to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest slogan, we could at once put it like this: the priest is the person who alters the direction of resentment. For every suffering person instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, or, more precisely, an agent, or, even more precisely, a guilty agent capable of suffering - in short, he seeks some living person on whom he can, on some pretext or other, unload his feelings, either in fact or in effigy. For the discharge of feelings is the most important way a suffering man seeks relief (that is, some anaesthetic) - it`s his instinctively desired narcotic against all sorts of torments. In my view, only here can we find the true physiological cause of resentment, revenge, and things related to them, in a longing for some anaesthetic against pain through one`s emotions.
People usually look for this cause, most incorrectly, in my view, in the defensive striking back, a merely reactive protective measure, a "reflex movement" in the event of some sudden damage and threat, of the sort a decapitated frog still makes in order to get rid of corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental: in one case, people want to prevent suffering further damage; in the other case, people want to deaden a tormenting, secret pain which is becoming unendurable by means of a more violent emotion of some kind and, for the moment at least, to drive it from their consciousness. For that they need some emotional affect, as unruly an emotional affect as possible, and, in order to stimulate that, they need the best pretext available. "Someone or other must be guilty of the fact that I am bad." This sort of conclusion is characteristic of all sick people—all the more so if the real cause of their sense that they are bad, the physiological cause, remains hidden (it can lie somewhere in an illness of the nervus sympathicus [sympathetic nerves], or in an excessive secretion of gall or in a lack of potassium sulphate and phosphate in the blood, or in some pressure in the lower abdomen, which blocks the circulation, or in a degeneration of the ovaries, and so on).
Suffering people all have a horrible willingness and capacity for inventing pretexts for painful emotional feelings. They already enjoy their suspicions, their brooding over bad actions and apparent damage. They ransack the entrails of their past and present, looking for dark and dubious stories, in which they are free to feast on an agonizing suspicion and to get intoxicated on their own poisonous anger. They rip open the oldest wounds, they bleed themselves to death from long-healed scars. They turn friends, wives, children, and anyone else who is closest to them into criminals. "I am suffering. Someone or other must be to blame for that" - that how every sick sheep thinks. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him: "That`s right, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for that. But you yourself are this very person. You yourself are the only one to blame. You alone are to blame for yourself!" . . . That is clever enough, and false enough. But one thing at least is attained by that, as I have said, the direction of resentment has been changed.
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