ascal, the supreme
type of the Christian Philosopher!

It must be further realized--for after all what are words and
phrases?--that it was really nothing but the "Christian conscience" in
him that forced him on so desperately to kick against the pricks. It
was the "Christian conscience" in him--has he not himself analysed
the voluptuous cruelty of that?--which drove him to seek something--if
possible--nobler, austerer, gayer, more innocently wicked, than
Christianity!

It was not in the interests of Truth that he fought it. True Christian,
as he was, at heart, he never cared greatly for Truth as Truth. It was
in the interest of a Higher Ideal, a more exacting, less human Ideal,
that he crushed it down. The Christian spirit, in him set him upon
strangling the Christian spirit--and all in the interest of a madness of
nobility, itself perforated with Christian conscience!

Was Nietzsche really Greek, compared with--Goethe, let us say?
Not for a moment. It was in the desperation of his attempt to be so,
that he seized upon Greek tragedy and made it dance to Christian
cymbals! This is, let it be clearly understood, the hidden secret of his
mania for Dionysus--Dionysus gave him his opportunity. In the
worship of this god--also a wounded god, be it remarked;--he was
able to satisfy his perverted craving for "ecstasy of laceration" under
the shadow of another Name.

But after all--as Goethe says--"feeling is all in all; the name is sound
and smoke." What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of a
Mystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name you
call them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative passion of the
human heart that sends them Both forth upon their warfaring.

Is any one simple enough to think that whatever Secret Cosmic
Power melts into human ecstasy, it waits to be summoned by certain
particular syllables? That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ in
him never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragic
messages he sent to Cosima Wagner from "the aristocratic city of
Turin" when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Those
messages resembled arrows of fire, shot into space; and on one was
written the words "The Crucified" and on the other the word
"Dionysus."

The grand and heart-breaking appeal of this lonely Victim of his
own merciless scourge, does not depend, for its effect upon us, upon
any of the particular "ideas" he announced. The idea of the "Ete