Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsthe believer of the old stamp feels towards his God. In these pages atleast the scientific spirit is certainly not in evidence: but we couldwish for a little more strength and naturalness of faith! For what is soextremely striking is the artificiality of the procedures our author hasto adopt in order to convince himself he still possesses a faith and areligion at all: as we have seen, he has to resort to jabbing -andcudgelling. It creeps weakly along, this stimulated faith: we freeze atthe sight of it.Strauss promises in his introduction to test whether this new faithis capable of doing for the new believer what the old faith does forthe believer of the old stamp, but in the end he himself comes tothink he has promised too much. For when he deals with the subjecthe does so in a quite offhand, indeed almost embarrassed manner,in a couple of pages (pp. 366f.), even resorting to the desperate ploy:'whoever cannot help himself here is beyond help and is not yet ripefor our point of view' (p. 366) . Consider with what weight of convictionthe Stoic of antiquity believed in the cosmos and in therationality of the cosmos, and contrst with it even the claim tooriginality which Strauss makes for his faith! But, as we have said,whether it is new or old, original or imitated, would be a matter ofindifference if only it exhibited naturalness, health and strength.Strauss himself leaves this distilled emergency faith in the lurchwhenever the claims of knowledge constrain him to do so and inorder to present his newly acquired scientific perception to his 'we'with a quieter conscience. The timidity with which he speaks of hisfaith is matched by his loud orotundity whenever he cites thegreatest benefactor of most recent mankind, Darwin: here hedemands faith, not merely in the new Messiah, but in himself, thenew apostle, too; for example when, dealing with the most intricatetheme of natural science, he pronounces with a truly antique pride:'I shall be told I am speaking of things I do not understand. Good;but others will come who understand them and who have alsounderstood me.' From this it seems almost as though the celebrated'we' are to be obligated to a faith, not only in the cosmos, but inStrauss the natural scientist too; in that case all we would ask is thatthe latter faith should not require for its realization such cruel andpainful procedures as the former did. Or can it be that in thisinstance the 'religious reaction' which is the mark of the 'new faith'will be produced in the believer by the jabbing and cudgelling, notof the believer himself, but of the object of the belief? If so, how weshould profit from the religiosity of these 'we'!42