light of intellect, but simply as common promptings of the senses. However passionate may be the signs of Suffering in these lower natures, its conscious record in the downtrod intellect will be comparatively feeble; on the contrary it is just the strength of consciousness of Suffering, that can raise the intellect of higher natures to knowledge of the meaning of the world. Those natures in which the completion of this lofty process is evidenced by a corresponding deed, we call Heroic.” [1087W-{6-8/81}Herodom and Christendom – 3rd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 276-277]
[1088W-{6-8/81}Herodom and Christendom – 3rd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 277-278]
[P. 277] “The plainnest type of heroism is that evolved by the Hellenic sagas in their Herakles. Labours put upon him to destroy him, he executes in proud obedience, and frees the world thereby from direst plagues. Seldom, in fact scarcely ever, do we find the hero otherwise than in a state of suffering prepared for him by fate: Herakles is persecuted by Hera out of jealousy of his divine begetter, and kept in menial subjection. In this main trait we surely should not do wrong to recognise an allusion to [P. 278] that school of arduous labours in which the noblest Aryan stems and races throve to grandeur of demigods … . (…) Like Herakles and Siegfried, they were conscious of divine descent: a lie to them was inconceivable, and a free man meant a truthful man. (…) The accident of their becoming masters of the great Latino-Semite realm was fatal to them. Pride is a delicate virtue and brooks no compromise, such as crossing of breed: but the Germanic race without this virtue has – naught to tell us. For this Pride is the soul of the truthful, of the free though serving. He knows no fear (Furcht), but respect (Ehrfurcht) – a virtue whose very name, in its proper sense, is known to none save those oldest Aryan peoples; whilst honour (Ehre) itself is the sum of all personal worth, and therefore can neither be given nor received, as is our practice to-day … . From Pride and Honour sprang the rule that, not property ennobles man, but man this property … .” [1088W-{6-8/81}Herodom and Christendom – 3rd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 277-278]
[1089W-{6-8/81}Herodom and Christendom – 3rd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 279-280]
[P. 279] {SCHOP} “ … we now must seek the Hero where he turns against the ruinof his race, the downfall of its code of honour, and girds his erring will to horror:the hero wondrously become divine – the Saint!
{FEUER} {anti-FEUER/NIET} It was a weighty feature of the ChristianChurch, that none but sound and healthy persons were admitted to the vow of total world-renunciation; any bodily defect, not to say mutilation, unfitted them. [* Translator’s Footnote: “Cf. ‘Doch buessen wollt er [Klingsor] nun, ja heilig werden. Ohnmaechtig in sich selbst die Suende zu ertoedten, an sich legt er die Frevlerhand, die nun, dem Grale zugewandt, verachtungsvoll dess’ Hueter von sich stiess’ – Parsifal, act I.”] Manifestly this vow was to be regarded as issuing from the most heroic of all possible resolves, and he who sees in it a ‘cowardly self-surrender’ – as someone [Nietzsche in ‘Daybreak’] recently suggested, -- may bravely exult in his own self-retention, but had best not meddle any further with things that don’t concern him. Granted that different causes moved different men to so completely turn their will
