Ascetic priest Character Analysis

Nietzsche characterizes an ascetic priest as a person who believes that it’s good to be humble, chaste, and poor by denying psychological urges and aspects of life that are emotional, bodily, and materialistic. Ascetic priests include Christian religious leaders who believe that holding back from life’s sensual, emotional, and material aspects to practice “poverty, chastity, and humility” will lead people to “bliss” in heaven. Nietzsche thinks that religious ascetic priests depict themselves as leaders who help people, but really, they only exert power over the disenfranchised and make them suffer for believing natural human urges are “sinful.” Ascetic priests also include nonreligious figures like scientists and philosophers who also value the quiet life: they like to think, and they believe intellectual ideas are more evolved than emotional and bodily sensations, which they denigrate in their theories as primitive. The ascetic priest is Nietzsche’s central rival. Nietzsche thinks that ascetic priests—whether they’re religious or secular—are pathological and perverse, because they endorse the ascetic ideal of withdrawing from life’s messy day-to-day aspects. To Nietzsche, ascetic priests make people suffer, because they make people feel guilty for having natural bodily and emotional urges (which people can’t help, as it’s part of human nature). They advocate limiting people’s exposure to all the things that make life joyful, such as love, sex, friendship, success, and wealth.