Beyond Good and Evil · Chapter
The Old Testament and the Scale of Man explained
The chapter contrasts the immense, fearsome scale of humanity presented in the Jewish Old Testament with the smaller, tamer spirit of modern Europe and the New Testament.
What happens
The chapter contrasts the immense, fearsome scale of humanity presented in the Jewish Old Testament with the smaller, tamer spirit of modern Europe and the New Testament. It posits taste for the Old Testament as a touchstone for greatness and condemns the binding of the two testaments into one Bible as Europe's great sin against the spirit.
Themes in this chapter
Nobility and Order of Rank
The Old Testament's 'immense scale' serves as a touchstone for distinguishing the 'great' from the 'small' or 'tame,' establishing a hierarchy of human types and cultural spirits.
Critique of Modernity
Modern 'cultured people,' including Christians, are depicted as diminished 'house-animals,' contrasting with the formidable humanity of the past, framing modernity as a decline in spiritual potency.
Characters to notice
- The Jews
Their Old Testament is presented as a work of divine justice and immense scale, a 'touchstone' for greatness that dwarfs European and modern sensibilities.
- Europeans
Criticized for their audacity in binding the Old and New Testaments together, committing a 'sin against the Spirit,' and for being 'slender, tame house-animals' compared to the old Asiatic spirit.
- Christianity
Specifically 'cultured' Christianity is associated with tame domesticity; the New Testament is described as a book of grace with an odor of the 'petty soul,' forming a problematic rococo pairing with the Old Testament.
Key passages
“the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to “great” and “small””
One's preference for the Old Testament reveals whether one possesses a great or a small spirit.
Establishes an aesthetic and moral criterion for evaluating human stature.
“To have bound up this New Testament... along with the Old Testament into one book, as the Bible... is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the Spirit” which literary Europe has upon its conscience.”
Combining the New Testament with the Old into a single Bible is Europe's most brazen crime against intellectual and spiritual integrity.
A severe condemnation of Christian syncretism and its obscuring of a more primordial, powerful form of life.