Origin of sin. – Sin, as it is now experienced wherever Christianity reigns or once reigned: sin is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention; and given that this is the background of all Christian morality, Christianity can be said to have aimed at ‘Judaizing’ the whole world. The extent to which this has succeeded in Europe is best brought out by how alien Greek antiquity – a world without feelings of sin – strikes our sensibility as being, despite all the good will expended by entire generations and many excellent individuals to approach and incorporate this world. ‘Only when you repent does God have mercy on you’ – to a Greek, that is an object of ridicule and an annoyance; he would say, ‘Maybe slaves feel that way.’ What is here being presupposed is a being who is powerful, supremely powerful and yet enjoys revenge: his power is so great that no harm whatsoever can be done unto him except in matters of honour. Every sin is an injury of respect, a crimen laesae majestatis divinae16 – and nothing further! Feeling spiritually crushed, degraded, wallowing in the dust – that is the first and last condition of his grace; in sum, restoration of his divine honour! Whether the sin has done any other harm; whether it has planted some deep, growing calamity that seizes and strangles one person after another like a disease; this honour-craving Oriental couldn’t care less: sin is an assault on him, not on humanity! He gives those to whom he grants his grace also this same nonchalance about the natural consequences of sin. God and humanity are here conceived as so separate and opposite that there can basically be no sin against humanity – every deed is supposed to be considered only with respect to its supernatural consequences, not with respect to its natural consequences; that is what Jewish feeling, to which everything natural is indignity itself, demands. The Greeks, by contrast, were closer to the thought that even sacrilege can have dignity – even theft, as in the case of Prometheus;17 even the slaughter of cattle as the expression of an insane envy, as in the case of Ajax:18 in their need to incorporate into and devise some dignity for sacrilege, they invented tragedy – an art form and a pleasure that has remained utterly and profoundly foreign to the Jew, despite all his poetic talent and inclination towards the sublime.