Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/275

Rh many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called; but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty; and base things of the world and things which are despised, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are." One who fails to catch the undertone of triumph and sublimated revenge in these words has hardly ears to hear. A kind of animus against and desire to humiliate the "noble and great" of the world—a spirit of refined cruelty to them—came to be a part of the Christian tradition; Nietzsche cites a striking passage from Tertullian (de spectac., 29 ff.). As gentle a soul as St. Francis of Assisi could say, "God has chosen me, because he could find no lower one, because he would turn to disgrace nobility, greatness, power, beauty, and the world's wisdom." undefined

Such is an abstract and meager statement of the historical process by which, as Nietzsche views the matter, the morality of the slave or subject class, the mass, established itself in the world—a poor substitute, I own, for his own vivid and telling descriptions. undefined He does not mean that kindness and mutual help and pity were unknown in the ancient world—or were unrecognized as a part of the moral code; to a certain extent sentiments and actions of this sort are necessary for the maintenance of any society—and he was well aware of it. He simply means that ideals of this description never obtained the supreme and dominant place which they now have in the world, never were made absolutely binding on all men, never were identified with morality itself, before prophetic Israel and Christianity played their part. It was the triumph of the common man, of the old-time slave class. Nietzsche speaks of it picturesquely as the "slave-insurrection." No one with the slightest understanding of him will imagine that he means by this anything spectacular