Part 3 — The Religious Mood

Nietzsche opens Part 3 not by arguing against the existence of God but by setting up the psychologist's frame: the human soul and its limits, its heights and depths, are the "preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist." What interests him is not theology but motivation: what does the religious man want? What does belief cost, and what does it buy? Section 46 on early Christian faith is precise: such faith required a "sacrifice of the intellect," and those who achieved it were, in a sense, the most heroic of men — the achievement of belief in the face of the evidence available required a tremendous expenditure of will.

Section 47 on the religious neurosis is diagnostic rather than dismissive. Wherever it appears on earth, Nietzsche notes, it is connected with three dangerous prescriptions: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. The prescription is always the same even when the theology varies. Something in the structure of the self that wants religious experience requires deprivation — the reduction of the body, the quieting of appetite, the withdrawal from the world. Nietzsche does not condemn this; he finds it philosophically interesting. What kind of self requires this of itself in order to feel contact with something higher?

Section 61 is the most politically consequential in the part: the philosopher of the future will use the religious mood the way a craftsman uses a tool. He will neither submit to it nor mock it. He will understand that the religious instinct is a real psychological phenomenon that can be directed toward or away from life-affirming ends. Nietzsche's target here is the free-thinking atheism of his contemporaries: they have rejected the content of religion without understanding the function of the religious impulse, and they have left a vacuum where something of value used to be. The philosopher of the future will be wiser about this.