The peasant rebellion of the spirit. – We Europeans confront a world of tremendous ruins. A few things are still towering; much looks decayed and uncanny, while most things are already lying on the ground: picturesque enough – where has one ever seen more beautiful ruins? – and overgrown by large and small weeds. The Church is this city of decline: we see the religious society of Christianity shaken to its lowest foundations; faith in God has collapsed; faith in the Christian-ascetic ideal is still fighting its last battle. An edifice such as Christianity that had been built so carefully over such a long period – it was the last Roman construction! – could of course not be destroyed all at once. All kinds of earthquakes had to shake it; all kinds of minds (Geist) that drill, dig, gnaw, and moisten have had to help. But the oddest thing is: those who exerted themselves the most to preserve and conserve Christianity have become its best destroyers – the Germans. It seems that the Germans do not understand the nature of a church. Are they not spiritual enough for that? Not mistrustful enough? The edifice of the Church rests, at any rate, on a Southern freedom and liberality of the mind as well as on a Southern suspicion against nature, man, and spirit; it rests on an altogether different knowledge and experience of man than the North has had. The Lutheran Reformation was, in its whole breadth, the indignation of simplicity against ‘multiplicity’, to speak cautiously, a crude, naively narrow-minded misunderstanding in which there is much to forgive. One failed to understand the expression of a victorious church and saw only corruption; one misunderstood the noble scepticism, that luxury of scepticism and tolerance which every victorious, self-confident power permits itself…Today one overlooks easily enough how in all cardinal questions of power Luther was dangerously short-sighted, superficial, incautious – mainly as a man of the common people who lacked any inheritance from a ruling caste and instinct for power; thus his work, his will to restore that work of the Romans only became the beginning of a work of destruction, without his wanting and knowing it. With honest wrath he unravelled, he tore up what the old spider had woven so carefully for such a long time. He surrendered the holy books to everyone – thus they finally ended up in the hands of the philologists, who are the destroyers of every faith that rests on books. He destroyed the concept of the ‘Church’ by throwing away the belief in the inspiration of the church councils; for the concept of the ‘Church’ retains power only under the condition that the inspiring spirit that founded the Church still lives in, builds, and continues to build its house. He gave back to the priest sexual intercourse with a woman; but three-quarters of the reverence of which the people, especially the women of the people, are capable rests on the faith that a person who is an exception in this regard will be an exception in other regards as well – it is here precisely that the popular faith in something superhuman in man, in the miracle, in the redeeming god in man, finds its subtlest and most insidious advocate. Having given the priest woman, Luther had to take from him auricular confession; that was psychologically right, but with that development the Christian priest was basically abolished, since his deepest utility has always been that he was a holy ear, a silent well, a grave for secrets. ‘Everyone his own priest’ – behind such formulas and their peasant cunning was hidden in Luther the abysmal hatred of ‘the higher human beings’ and the dominion of ‘the higher human beings’ as conceived by the Church; he smashed an ideal that he could not attain, while he seemed to fight and abhor the degeneration of this ideal. Actually he, the impossible monk, pushed away the dominion of the *homines religiosi,*32 and thus he himself brought about within the ecclesiastical social order what in relation to the civil social order he attacked so intolerantly – a ‘peasants’ rebellion’. What grew out of his Reformation afterwards, good as well as bad, might be roughly calculated today; but who would be naive enough to praise or blame Luther on account of these consequences? He is innocent of everything; he did not know what he was doing. The flattening of the European mind, particularly in the North – its becoming more good-natured, if one prefers a moral term – advanced a large step with the Lutheran Reformation, there is no doubt; and owing to it also the flexibility and restlessness of the mind, its thirst for independence, its faith in a right to liberty, its ‘naturalness’. If in connection with this last point one wanted to give it the credit for having prepared and favoured what we today honour as ‘modern science’, one must surely add that it also shares the blame for the degeneration of the modern scholar, for his lack of reverence, shame, and depth, for the whole naive guilelessness and conventionality in matters of knowledge – in short for that plebeianism of the spirit that is peculiar to the last two centuries and from which even pessimism has not yet liberated us. ‘Modern ideas’ also belong to this peasant rebellion of the North against the colder, more ambiguous, mistrustful spirit of the South that built its greatest monument in the Christian Church. Let us not forget in the end what a church is, specifically as opposed to any ‘state’. A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank to the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all cruder instruments of force; and on that score alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state.