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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?22
Wherever he achieved mastery, the ascetic priest has ruined spiritual health. As a result, he has also ruined taste in artibus et litteris [in arts and letters]. He is still ruining that. "As a result"? - I hope you will concede me this "as a result." At least, I have no desire to demonstrate it. A single indication: it concerns the fundamental text of Christian literature, its essential model, its "book in itself." In the middle of the Graeco-Roman magnificence, which was also a magnificent time for books, faced with a ancient world of writing which had not yet declined and fallen apart, an age in which people could still read some books for which one would now exchange half of all literature, the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators - we call them the church fathers - dared to proclaim, "We also have our classical literature. We don`t need the Greeks." With that, they pointed with pride to books of legends, letters of the apostles, and little apologetic treatises, in somewhat the same way as nowadays the English "Salvation Army" with its related literature fights a war against Shakespeare and other pagans.
I don`t like the "New Testament" - you will already have guessed as much. It almost disturbs me that I stand so alone in my taste with respect to this most highly regarded and overvalued written work (the taste of two thousand years is against me). How I can help that! "Here I stand. I can`t do otherwise." I have the courage of my own bad taste. The Old Testament - now, that`s something quite different. All honour to the Old Testament! In that I find great men, a heroic landscape and something of the rarest of all elements on earth, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart. Even more - I find a people. In the New Testament, by contrast, I find nothing but small sectarian households, nothing but spiritual rococo, nothing but ornament, twisty little corners, oddities, nothing but conventional air, not to mention an occasional breeze of bucolic sweet sentimentality, which belongs to the age (and the Roman province) - something not so much Jewish as Hellenic. Humility and pomposity standing shoulder to shoulder; a chatting about feelings which are almost stupefying; vehement feelings but no passion, with awkward gestures. Here, it seems, there`s a lack of a good upbringing.
How can people make such a fuss about their small vices, the way these devout little men do? No one - and certainly not God - could care less about it. Finally, they even want to possess "the crown of eternal life," all these small people from the provinces. But what for? What for? It`s impossible to push presumption any further. An "immortal" Peter - who could endure him? They have an ambition that makes one laugh: they spell out their most personal things - their stupidity, melancholy, and their indolent worries - as if the essence of all things had a duty to worry about such things. They never get tired of wrapping up God himself in the smallest misery they find themselves in. And the most appalling taste of this constant familiarity with God! This Jewish - and not merely Jewish - excessive importuning God with mouth and paw! . .
There were small despised "pagan people" in east Asia from whom these first Christians could have learned something important, some tact in their reverence. As Christian missionaries reveal, such people were not generally allowed to utter the name of their god. This seems to me sufficiently delicate. But it was certainly too delicate for the first Christians, and not just for them. To sense the contrast, we should remember something about Luther, the "most eloquent" and most presumptuous peasant Germany ever had, and the tone Luther adopted as the one he most preferred in his conversations with God. Luther`s resistance to the interceding saints of the church (especially to "the devil`s sow, the Pope") was undoubtedly, in the last analysis, the resistance of a lout irritated by the good etiquette of the church, that etiquette of reverence of the priestly taste, which lets only the more consecrated and the more discreet into the holy of holies and shuts the door against the louts, who in this particular place are not to be heard. But Luther, the peasant, simply wanted something different - this situation was not German enough for him. Above all, he wanted to speak directly, to speak for himself, to speak "openly" with his God. . . So he did it.-
You can conjecture easily enough that there has never been a place anywhere in which the ascetic ideal has been a school of good taste, even less of good manners. In the best cases, it was a school for priestly manners. That comes about because it carries something in its own body which is the deadly enemy of all good manners - it lacks moderation, it resists moderation, it is itself a "non plus ultra" [an ultimate extreme]
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