On Apostates

1

Ah, does everything already lie withered and gray that only lately stood green and many-colored on this meadow? And how much honey of hope I carried from here into my beehives!

These young hearts have all grown old already—and not even old! only tired, common, comfortable:—they call it “We have become pious again.”

Only lately I saw them run out in the early morning on brave feet: but their feet of knowledge grew tired, and now they even slander their morning bravery!

Truly, many a one of them once lifted his legs like a dancer; the laughter in my wisdom beckoned to him:—then he thought better of it. Just now I saw him, bent—crawling to the cross.

Around light and freedom they once fluttered like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already they are obscurantists and mumblers and stove-squatters.

Did their hearts lose courage, perhaps, because solitude swallowed me like a whale? Did their ears listen longingly for a long time, in vain, for me and my trumpet and herald calls?

—Ah! There are always only a few whose hearts have a long courage and high spirits; and in such as these the spirit too stays patient. But the rest are cowardly.

The rest: they are always by far the most, the everyday, the superfluity, the many-too-many—all of these are cowardly!—

Whoever is of my kind will also run into the experiences of my kind: so that his first companions must be corpses and buffoons.

But his second companions—they will call themselves his believers: a lively swarm, much love, much foolishness, much beardless veneration.

Whoever among human beings is of my kind should not bind his heart to these believers; whoever knows the fleeting, cowardly human kind should not believe in these springtimes and many-colored meadows!

If they could do otherwise, they would also will otherwise. Half-and-halfs spoil everything whole. That leaves wither—what is there to lament in that!

Let them go and fall, O Zarathustra, and do not lament! Rather blow among them with rustling winds—

—blow among these leaves, O Zarathustra: so that everything withered runs away from you all the faster!—

2

“We have become pious again”—so these apostates confess; and some of them are still too cowardly to confess as much.

I look them in the eye—I say it to their faces and to the red of their cheeks: you are such as pray again!

But it is a disgrace to pray! Not for everyone, but for you and me and whoever has his conscience in his head too. For you it is a disgrace to pray!

You know it well: your cowardly devil within you, who would like to fold his hands and lay them in his lap and have it easier:—this cowardly devil persuades you: “There is a God!”

But with that you belong to the light-shy kind, whom light never leaves in peace; now you must stick your head deeper into night and fog every day!

And truly, you chose the hour well: for just now the night birds are flying out again. The hour has come for all light-shy folk, the hour of evening and of rest, when they do not—“rest.”

I hear it and smell it: their hour has come for hunting and processions, not, to be sure, for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, sniffing hunt of soft-steppers and soft-prayers—

—for a hunt for soulful sneaks: all the mousetraps of the heart are set up again now! And wherever I lift a curtain, a little moth comes tumbling out.

Was it squatting there together with another little moth, perhaps? For everywhere I smell little hidden congregations; and wherever there are closets, there are new prayer-brothers in them, and the fug of prayer-brothers.

They sit together through long evenings and say: let us become again as little children and say “dear God”!—their mouths and stomachs ruined by the pious confectioners.

Or they spend long evenings watching a cunning, lurking cross spider, which preaches prudence to the spiders themselves and teaches thus: “Under crosses it is good spinning!”

Or they sit all day with fishing rods by swamps and think themselves deep for it; but whoever fishes where there are no fish I do not even call superficial!

Or they learn, piously glad, to play the harp with a songwriter who would like to harp his way into the hearts of young little women:—for he has grown tired of the old little women and their praises.

Or they learn to shudder with a learned half-madman who waits in dark rooms for the spirits to come to him—and the spirit runs off altogether!

Or they listen to an old, drifting whistler of purrs and growls who learned the gloom of tones from gloomy winds; now he whistles after the wind and preaches gloom in gloomy tones.

And some of them have even become night watchmen: they now know how to blow horns and to go about at night and wake up old things that fell asleep long ago.

Five words about old things I heard last night at the garden wall: they came from such old, gloomy, dried-up night watchmen.

“For a father he does not care enough about his children: human fathers do this better!”—

“He is too old! He no longer cares about his children at all”—so the other night watchman answered.

“Has he any children, then? No one can prove it if he does not prove it himself! I have long wished he would prove it thoroughly for once.”

“Prove? As if he had ever proved anything! Proving comes hard to him; he sets great store by people believing him.”

“Yes! Yes! Faith makes him blessed, faith in him. That is just the way of old people! It is the same with us!”—

—Thus the two old night watchmen and light-scarers spoke to each other, and then they tooted gloomily on their horns: so it happened last night at the garden wall.

But my heart writhed with laughter and wanted to break and did not know where to go? and sank into my diaphragm.

Truly, this will yet be my death, that I choke with laughter when I see donkeys drunk and hear night watchmen doubting God like this.

Is it not long over for all such doubts too? Who may still wake up such old, sleeping, light-shy things!

With the old gods it came to an end long ago, after all:—and truly, they had a good, merry gods’ end!

They did not “twilight” themselves to death—that is a lie people tell! Rather: one day they—laughed themselves to death!

That happened when the most godless word came from a god himself—the word: “There is one God! You shall have no other god before me!”—

—an old grim-beard of a god, a jealous one, forgot himself in this way:

And all the gods laughed then and rocked on their chairs and cried: “Is just this not godliness, that there are gods but no God?”

Whoever has ears, let him hear.—

Thus spoke Zarathustra in the town that he loved and that is called the Motley Cow. For from here he had only two more days to walk before he would be back in his cave and with his animals; and his soul exulted constantly at the nearness of his homecoming.—