7.

One calls Christianity the religion of pity. Pity stands in contrast to the tonic affects, which increase the energy of the feeling of life: it acts depressively. One loses strength when one pities. Through pity, the loss of strength that suffering brings to life in itself is increased and multiplied. Suffering itself becomes contagious through pity; under certain circumstances, a total loss of life and life-energy can be achieved with it that stands in an absurd relation to the quantity of the cause (- the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first point of view; but there is an even more important one. Suppose one measures pity according to the value of the reactions it tends to produce, its life-threatening character appears in a much brighter light. On the whole, pity crosses the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction, it defends the disinherited and condemned of life, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect through the abundance of all kinds of botched lives that it holds onto. One has dared to call pity a virtue (- in every noble morality it is considered a weakness -); one has gone further, one has made it the virtue, the foundation and origin of all virtues, - only, to be sure, what one must always keep in view, from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, that wrote the negation of life on its shield. Schopenhauer was in his right with this: through pity, life is denied, made more worthy of denial, - pity is the practice of nihilism. Stated again: this depressive and contagious instinct crosses those instincts that aim at the preservation and value-enhancement of life: it is a main tool for the increase of décadence decline/decay, both as a multiplier of misery and as a preserver of everything miserable - pity persuades one toward nothingness! ... One does not say "Nothingness": one says instead "Beyond"; or "God"; or "the true life"; or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness... This innocent rhetoric from the realm of religious-moral idiosyncrasy appears immediately much less innocent when one grasps what tendency here wraps itself in the cloak of sublime words: the life-hostile tendency. Schopenhauer was life-hostile: therefore, pity became a virtue to him... Aristotle saw, as is known, a morbid and dangerous condition in pity, which one would do well to overcome here and there through a purgative: he understood tragedy as a purgative. From the instinct of life, one would indeed have to seek a means to strike a blow against such a morbid and dangerous accumulation of pity as is represented by the case of Schopenhauer (and unfortunately also by our entire literary and artistic décadence from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner): so that it bursts... Nothing is unhealthier, in the midst of our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be a doctor here, to be inexorable here, to wield the knife here - that belongs to us, that is our kind of love of humanity, with that we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans! - - -

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