In honour of the priestly type: – I think that what the people mean by wisdom (and who today is not ‘people’?) – that prudent, cowlike serenity, piety and country parson meekness which lies in the meadow and earnestly and ruminantly observes life – is also that from which precisely the philosophers have always felt the most remote, probably because they were not ‘people’ enough, not country parsons enough. They will presumably also be the last to learn to believe that the people might come to understand something of that which is most remote from them, something of the great passion of the knowledge-seeker who steadfastly lives, must live, in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the weightiest responsibilities (and thus in no way as an observer, outside, indifferent, secure, objective…). The people venerate quite another type of person when they construct for themselves an ideal of the ‘sage’, and they have a thousandfold right to adore just this type of person with the best words and honours – the mild, serious/simple-minded and chaste priestly natures and whatever is related to them: they are the ones who are the objects of approbation when the common people reveres wisdom. And towards whom would the people have more reason to show themselves grateful than these men, who belong to and come from them, though as consecrated, chosen, sacrificed for the common good – they believe themselves sacrificed to God – , to whom the people can spill their hearts with impunity and get rid of their secrets, worries and worse (– for he who ‘unbosoms’ himself is relieved of himself, and he who has ‘confessed’, forgets). Here reigns a great necessity: drainages and their clean, cleansing waters are needed also for the spiritual refuse; swift streams of love are needed, and strong, humble, pure hearts who prepare and sacrifice themselves for such an office of non-public health care – for it is a sacrifice; a priest is and remains a human sacrifice…The people see such sacrificed, subdued, serious persons of ‘faith’ as wise, that is, as having become knowing, as ‘certain’ in relation to their own uncertainty; and who would want to deprive them of this word and of their awe? But as is conversely fair, among philosophers a priest, too, is considered to be one of ‘the people’ and not a knower, primarily because philosophers do not themselves believe in ‘men of knowledge’ and already smell ‘the people’ in this belief and superstition. It was modesty that in Greece coined the word ‘philosopher’ and left the extraordinary insolence of calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit – the modesty of such monsters of pride and conceit as Pythagoras, as Plato –.