Character guide

the ascetic priest

major

Also known as The ascetic priest

He belongs to no race or class yet grows from all of them, a type life itself seems to need despite his hostility to it. His will is paradoxical: he uses power to dam the sources of power, seeking mastery over life's deepest conditions rather than any element within it. He matters because Nietzsche treats him as the engine of slave morality's spread, the figure whose valuation of existence shapes the whole genealogy the book unfolds.

Schopenhauer

supporting

As the philosopher who paid homage to ascetic ideals, he serves Nietzsche as both a personal case and a typical one, the most eloquent voice of philosophy's rancour toward sensuality. Without his enemies he would have run away from existence; his wrath was his balm, his recreation, his remedium against disgust. He matters because his pessimism lets Nietzsche ask what a philosopher really wants when he bows to ascetic ideals—and hints that he wishes to escape a torture.

Richard Wagner

supporting

Also known as Wagner

A former friend and the book's most painful case, Wagner is the artist whose late work drifts toward retrogression and conversion, his Parsifal trumpets sounding a secret will to preach salvation elsewhere. Nietzsche insists an artist must be separated from his work—the womb, soil, sometimes dung on which it grows—yet Wagner's velleity to trespass on reality cost him his most valuable friends. He matters because his decline lets Nietzsche diagnose modern artistic decadence and the ascetic ideal's seductive pull on even the strongest creators.

Luther

minor

Also known as Luther Comedy

Reformer whose rebellion against priestly authority is discussed in the context of ressentiment.

Kant

minor

Philosopher whose categorical imperative is criticized as a remnant of ascetic morality.

Spinoza

minor

Rationalist philosopher whose concept of self-preservation is contrasted with ascetic denial.

Plato

minor

Ancient philosopher whose idealism is linked to the ascetic priest's worldview.

the Germans

supporting

Also known as Germans, Young Germans, The Germans

They are the collective audience Wagner might have addressed with a bold 'Luther Comedy' praising both chastity and sensuality, since every good marriage transcends that antithesis. Instead, many among them turn chastity into a tragic opposition, worshipping the very contrast that exposes their own ruin. They matter because Nietzsche uses them to show how a culture's shame about the body feeds the ascetic ideal and prepares the ground for Parsifal's fraudulent Catholicism.

Israel

minor

Biblical nation discussed as the origin of slave morality and priestly power.

the Greeks

supporting

Also known as These Greeks

They stand as the ancient counter-image to Judeo-Christian valuation, a noble culture whose instincts are gratified by rank and organisation rather than wounded by them. Beneath every Greek oligarchy lurked the desire for tyranny, and each individual had to keep mastering it—a tension Plato shows in himself and his contemporaries. They matter because Nietzsche uses them to measure how far modern morality has inverted the aristocratic equation of good, beautiful, and happy.

Feuerbach

minor

Philosopher whose projection theory of religion is referenced in the critique of asceticism.

the Jews

supporting

Also known as Jews

A nation of priests nursing the most profound revengefulness, they launched the slave revolt in morals that has taken two millennia to achieve victory. From the trunk of their hate grew a new love, the most sublime of all loves, not as its negation but as its triumphant crown, circling wider in the sun while pursuing its goal of hatred. They matter because Nietzsche identifies this transvaluation as the origin of the moral world the book sets out to genealogize.

Thomas of Aquinas

minor

Medieval theologian whose philosophy exemplifies the ascetic ideal in Christianity.

Homer

minor

Epic poet whose works illustrate the noble morality of ancient Greece.

Dühring

minor

Also known as Eugen Dühring

Philosopher and critic whose anti-Semitic views are used as a foil for Nietzsche's analysis.

Heracleitus

minor

Pre-Socratic philosopher whose doctrine of flux is contrasted with ascetic denial of becoming.

Goethe

minor

Also known as Goethe a Faust

Poet and thinker praised as a model of healthy, life-affirming culture.

Nietzsche

major

Also known as Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche writes as a self-confessed stranger to himself, admitting that we knowers are unknown to ourselves and that our experiences strike us like noon bells we cannot count. He traces the genealogy of moral prejudices back through Human, All Too Human, insisting the thoughts have ripened over a decade into something sharper. His tension is intimate: he must distrust the very language and conscience he inherited, and that distrust is what makes the early treatises so unnervingly personal.

Dr. Paul Rée

minor

Also known as Dr. Rée, Paul the tentmaker

Philosopher and friend of Nietzsche, whose work on morality is debated in the preface.

Hesiod

minor

Ancient poet whose myth of the ages is referenced in the discussion of moral origins.

Dante

minor

Poet whose Divine Comedy is cited as an example of the ascetic ideal in art.

Wagnerian Parsifal

minor

Also known as Parsifal, the Wagnerian Parsifal, the Parsifal

Operatic character used to critique Wagner's turn to Christian asceticism.

Jesus of Nazareth

minor

Also known as Jesus

Central figure of Christianity, discussed as a symbol of priestly morality.

the German

minor

Also known as German

Generic national type critiqued for philosophical and cultural shortcomings.

the Ephesians

minor

Ancient community referenced in the context of early Christian moral conflicts.