Result: when man experiences the conditions of power, the imputation is that he not their cause, that he is not responsible for them: they come without being willed, consequently we are not their author: the will that is not free (i.e., the consciousness that we have been changed without having willed it) needs an external will.
Consequence: man has not dared to credit himself with all his strong and surprising impulses—he has conceived them as “passive,” as “suffered,” as things imposed upon him: religion is the product of a doubt concerning the unity of the person, an alteration of the personality: in so far as everything great and strong in man has been conceived as superhuman and external, man has belittled himself—he has separated the two sides of himself, one very paltry and weak, one very strong and astonishing, into two spheres, and called the former “man,” the latter “God.”
He has continued to think in this way; in the period of the moral idiosyncrasy he did not interpret his exalted and sublime moral states as “willed,” as “work” of the person. The Christian too divides his person into a mean and weak fiction which he calls man, and another which he calls God (redeemer, savior)—
Religion has debased the concept “man”; its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through an act of grace—
— Nietzsche, The Will to Power
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