Spiritual Nausea and Tyranizing Kairos

Take some time to apply this quote to church, culture, and self. Then and only then, check the source. (Hint: Tony Campolo was right again.):


"The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered profoundly—it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer—his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been “at home” in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing”—this spiritual and silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates...

..A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle--or as a temporary resting place. His characteristic high-grade graciousness toward his fellow men becomes possible only once he has attained his height and rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until then he is always condemned to comedy--for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means conceals the end--spoil all of his relations to others: this type of man knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it...

...Genius is perhaps not so rare after all-but the five hundred hands it requires to tyranize the kairos, the 'right time,' seizing chance by its forlock."


-Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, sayings 270, 273
(Not a bad quote for someone who writes a book called The Antichrist—and who identifies with the title..)