Notes on Humility V

Of course, Nietzsche hated the humility of Christianity and derided it as servile, base, low and disgusting. Oh, and womanly. It was ignoble, and not worthy of the great-souled individual.

1 Peter specifically addresses wives and slaves and asks that they be humbly submissive. That much perhaps we may have expected - isn't this cringing debasement precisely what is most natural to women and slaves (to channel N for a minute? But it also enjoins all citizens to submit to the emperor; and young men to submit to elders in the church.

How Nietzschean is contemporary culture? Well certainly I think it has adopted a belief that only through the spirited action of the great souled individual will humanity ever be truly free. Perhaps we are more democratised than he would have been. But still, the desire to soar, to be great, and glorious: is this not Nietzchean?

As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: 'The noble soul has reverence for itself'. I don't think he means a cringing vanity here, nor even that bizarre self-reflexivity you encounter when sportspeople refer to themselves in the third person: rather, the noble soul is in thrall to its own destiny to the point of religious fervour. This is more worshipful a reverence...