m the concept of a god; when
he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a
sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the poor man's god, the
sinner's god, the invalid's god _par excellence_, and the attribute of
"saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential attribute of
divinity--just _what_ is the significance of such a metamorphosis?
what does such a _reduction_ of the godhead imply?--To be
sure, the "kingdom of God" has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only
his own people, his "chosen" people. But since then he has gone
wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given
up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home
everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan--until now he has the "great
majority" on his side, and half the earth. But this god of the "great
majority," this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god:
on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god
of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the
world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the
underworld, a _souterrain_ kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.... And he himself
is so pale, so weak, so _decadent_.... Even the palest of the pale are
able to master him--messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the
intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that finally he
was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another
metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old business of
spinning the world out of his inmost being _sub specie Spinozae_;
thereafter he became ever thinner and paler--became the "ideal," became
"pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the thing-in-itself."...
_The collapse of a god_: he became a "thing-in-itself."

18.

The Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the
god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most
corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably
touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God
degenerated into the _contradiction of life_. Instead of being its
transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on
nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander
upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! In him
nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!...

19.

The fact th