194 NietzscheBy looking into the "bright mirror" of his image of God, his own nature
strikes him as "so dismal, so unusually contorted" (2,126; HHI § 132).
In his most secluded moments, however, he knows that this "bright mir-
ror" is nothing but a magnification of himself and that he is catching
sight of his own better potential, which both exalts and humbles him.
These reflections are one aspect of his "self-splitting" (2,76; HHI § 57),
leading man to become a religious as well as a moral being. Religious
"self-splitting" can take the radical form of self-sacrifice when "man
loves some aspect of himself, a thought, a desire, a creation more than
some other aspect of himself, causing him to split his being and sacri-
fice one part of himself to the other" (2,76). Ascetics, saints, and mar-
tyrs revel in humbling themselves, and they burst with pride in their
humility. 'This shattering of oneself, this mockery of one's own nature
... that religions have made so much of is actually a very high degree of
vanity. The entire morality of the Sermon on the Mount should be seen
in this context: man takes positive pleasure in violating himself with
excessive demands and afterward idolizing this tyrannically demanding
something in his soul. In every ascetic morality, man worships one part
of himself as a god and in doing so demonizes the other part" (2,131;
HHI § 137).
In his finest moments, the religious man wants what every artist
seeks: "powerful emotion." Both are intrepid enough to strain toward
"enormity" (2,132; HHI § 138), even if they feel devastated by it The
resultant destruction is their "peak of rapture of the wodd" (7,200).
Because surrender to enormity is a shared obsession of religion and art,
Nietzsche placed the chapter "From the Soul of Artists and Writers"
right after the chapter "Religious Life" in Human, All Too Human.
In religious sentiment and in art, "powerftd emotion" attains extraor-
dinary dimensions. It signals intensity and effort and at the same time
relaxation and the unleashing of creative powers. There is a euphoria of
success, strength streaming in and out In a word, it is a heightened state
of being, but—and this is Nietzsche's chilling antithesis—there is no
higher truth inherent in it We must not interpret a heightened religious