Nietzsche On Original Sin

Quotes, sayings and books by Nietzsche

From my earliest days I’ve had a problem with the idea that man is responsible for the nature of sin and bringing evil into the world. The game was rigged from the start. God created man, and created him fallible. There was no way we could not have sinned. When I was in my twenties I discovered Nietzsche.

I must admit that he was instrumental in throwing off the pathological chains of fear, shame, and guilt that my Christian upbringing had shackled around my neck. This is a section from his “The Antichrist” that still, in part, rings true to me:

Has anybody ever really understood the celebrated story which stands at the beginning of the Bible, concerning God’s deadly panic over science? Nobody has understood it. This essentially sacerdotal book naturally begins with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he knows only one great dange, consequently God has only one great danger.

The old God, entirely spirit, a high priest through and through, and wholly perfect, is wandering in a leisurely fashion round his garden; but he is bored.Against boredom even the gods themselves struggle in vain. What does he do? He invents man, man is entertaining….But, behold, even man begins to be bored. God’s compassion for the only form of misery which is perculiar to all paradises, exceeds all bounds: so forthwith he creates yet other animals. God’s firs mistake: man did not think animals entertaining, he dominated them, he did not even wish to be an animal.

Consequently God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment, but many other things ceased as well! Woman in her innermost nature is a serpent, Heva- every priest knows this: “all evil came into this world through woman”- every priest knows this too. Consequently science also comes from woman. Only through woman did man learn to taste of the tree of knowledge.

What had happened? Panic had seized the old God. man himself had been his greatest mistake, he had created a rival for himself, science makes you equal to God, it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific! Moral: science is the most prohibited thing of all, it alone, is forbidden. Science is the first, the germ of all sins, the original sin.

This alone is morality. “Thou shalt not know”: the rest follows as a matter of course. God’s panic did not deprive him of his intelligence. How can one guard against science? For ages this was his principal problem. Reply: man must be kicked out of paradise! Happiness, leisure leads to thinking, all thoughts are bad thoughts…Man must not think.

And the priest-per-say proceeds to invent distress, death, the vital danger of pregnancy, every kind of misery, decrepitude, and affliction, and above all disease, all these are but weapons employed in the struggle with science! Trouble prevents man from thinking…. And notwithstanding all these precautions! Oh, horror! The work of science towers aloft, it storms heaven itself, it rings the death-knell of the gods, what’s to be done?

The old god invents war, he separates the nations, and contrives to make men destroy each oyher mutually. War, among other things, is a great distuber of science! Incredible! Knowledge, the rejection of the sacerdotal yoke, nevertheless increases. So the old God arrives at this final decision: “Man has become scientific, there is no help for it, he must be drowned!’…

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