The Priest

This chapter argues that the genius of bad conscience is not the person of ressentiment, but the priest who organizes and pacifies hatred by fixing it historically and giving it a moral-psychological meaning. By reconstructing how the pastoral type manages to incorporate us until today, it also demonstrates how the mainstream recoinings of ressentiment are already virtually implied in senso negativo in Nietzsche's late polemical books. The first three sections reconstruct the slave revolt as a dialectical sequence in which nihilism constantly undergoes mutations that must be redirected back onto themselves. It distinguishes first- and second-order negations in the Jewish hermeneutics of punishment and reward; a third-order negation in Christ; a fourth-order negation in the Christian priest (Paul); and a fifth-order negation that secularizes Christian egalitarianism in social science, mass media, and technocratic governance. The last three sections extend this sequence into a critique of Tocqueville, Scheler, and Girard. These authors reverse the causality between ressentiment and modernity, arguing that ressentiment only becomes explosive in the egalitarian cultivation of a limitless envy. Their (neo-)conservatism culminates in a sixth-order negation that seeks to protect democracy from itself in a romantic return to authoritarian institutions and Oedipal internalization.