There is a defiance of oneself among whose most sublimated expressions some forms of asceticism belong. For certain human beings have such a great need to exercise their force and lust to rule that, lacking other objects, or because they have always failed elsewhere, they finally have recourse to tyrannizing certain parts of their own nature, as it were sections or stages of themselves

Thus some thinkers profess views that evidently do not serve to increase or improve their reputations; some practically conjure up the disrespect of others for them, although it would be easy for them to remain highly respected, simply by keeping still. Others recant former opinions and are not afraid of henceforth being called inconsistent: on the contrary, they exert themselves to that end and behave like exuberant riders who like their horse best when it has gone wild, is covered with sweat, and shying.

Thus man ascends the highest mountains on dangerous paths, to laugh scornfully at his anxiety and his trembling knees; thus the philospher professes views of asceticism, humility, and sanctity in breaking of oneself, this mockery of one’s own nature, this scorn of one’s being scorned of which religions have made so much, is really a very high degree of vanity. The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs here: man experiences a veritable voluptiousness in violating himself by means of exaggerated demands and in them deifying this tyrannically demanding force in his soul.

In every ascetic morality man adores part of himself as God and to that end needs to diabolicize the rest.

To sum up what has been said here: the state of the sould which the holy man or the man who is becoming holy enjoys is composed of elements which all of us know quite well; they merely take on a different coloring when they are influenced by nonreligous ideas, and then they are usually reproached by men just as much as they can count–or at least could count in former times-on admiration, even worship, when associated with religion and the ultimate meaning of existence.

Sometimes the holy man practices that defiance against himself which is closely related to the lust to rule at any price and which gives even the loneliest the feeling of power; sometimes his swollen feeling changes from the craving to let his passions run their course into the craving to make them collapse like wild horses under the powerful pressure of a proud soul; sometimes he wants the complete cessation of all feelings that disturb, torment, provoke - a wakeful sleep, an enduring rest in the lap of a dumb, animal or plant-like indolence; sometimes he seeks a fight and inflames it within himself because boredom fixes him with a yawning countenance: he scourges his self-deification with self-contempt and cruelty, he delights in the wild rebellion of his desires, in the sharp pain of sin, even in the idea that he is lost; he knows how to lay a snare for his affects, that of the most extreme lust to rule, for example, so that it changes into the most extreme humiliation and this contrast completely unbalances his hounded soul; and finally: if he should crave visions or conversation with the dead or with divine beings, this is at bottom a rare kind of voluptuousness that he desires, but perhaps that voluptuousness in which all the others are tied up into one knot. Novalis, one of th eauthorities on questions of holiness, both by experience and by instinct, once expressed the whole secret with a naive joy: “It is marvelous enough that the association of voluptuousness, religion, and cruelty has not long attracted the attention of men to their close kinship and common tendency.”

Not what the holy man is but what he signifies in the eyes of those who are not holy gives him his world-historical value. It was because one was wrong about him, because one misinterpreted the states of his soul and drew as sharp a line as possible between oneself and him, as if he were something utterly incomparable and strangely superhuman - that he gained that extraordinary power with which he could dominate the imagination of the whole peoples and ages. He did not know himself; he understood the writing of his moods, inclinations, and actions according to an art of interpretation which was just as extravagant and artificial as the pneumatic interpretation of the Bible. What was eccentric and sick in his nature, with its fusion of spiritual poverty, faulty knowledge, spoilt health, and overexcited nerves remained concealed from his own eyes and from the eyes of those who looked at him. He was not an especially good person, even less an especially wise person; but he signified something that exceeded all human measure of goodness and wisdom. The faith in him supported the faith in the divine and miraculous, in a religious meaning of all existences, in an impending final day of judgment. In the evening splendor of the world-end’s sunset that illuminated the Christian peoples, the shadowy figure of the holy man grew into something enormous - indeed, to such a height that even inour time, which no longer believes in God, there are still thinkers who believe in the holy man.

It scarcely needs saying that this sketch of the holy man, being drawn after the average of the whole species, can be countered with many sketches that tend to produce a more agreeable feeling. Single exceptions stand out from the species, whether by virtue of great mildness and humanitarianism or by the magic of unusual energy; others are attractive in the highest degree because certain delusions inundate their whole nature with light - as is the case, for example with the celebrated founder of Christianity who considered himself the inborn son of God and therefore felt he was without sin; thus, by virtue of an illusion - which should not be judged too harshly, for the whole of antiquity was full of sons of gods - he attained the same goal, the feeling of complete freedom from sin, complete lack of responsibility, which is now available to everybody by means of science!

I have also ignored the holy men of India who occupy an intermediate stage between the Christian holy man and the Greek philosopher, and thus do not represent a pure type: knowledge, science - insofar as science existed - raising oneself above the other men through the logical discipline and training of thought, were just as much demanded among the Buddhists, as a sign of holiness, as the same qualities were repudiated and pronounced heretical in the Christian world where they were held to be signs of unholiness

- excerpted from “Human, All-Too-Human, Seventy-Five Aphorisms” by Frederick Nietzche, “Basic Writings of Nietzche” Translated and edited, with commentaries by Walter Kaufmann, The Modern Library - New York