as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137
“Kierkegaard … likes to quote the church father Lactantius, who said that the virtues of paganism were glittering vices. Nietzsche's response is that the virtues of the Christians are splendid vices. They are splendid because they represent no small spiritual achievement; but they are doubly vices first because they mask a self-centered will to power that by their own criteria is the essence of immorality, and second, because in hiding this fact from themselves and from others, the votaries of the "virtues" engage in systematic self-deception and hypocrisy. Here again Nietzsche invokes his principle: "To become moral is not in itself moral," meaning that the act of adopting certain values need not be an act instantiating those values but can just as easily violate them. "Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral."”
Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism, pp. 246-247
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Merold Westphal 14
1940Related quotes
Page 32.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)
“Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”
“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.”
Source: Romeo and Juliet