‘Humanitarianism’ in fact puts itself forward as a philosophy founded on the idea that man is good; but to believe that man is good is almost always to believe that God is bad, or that He would be bad ‘if He existed’; and as modern men believe less and less in God – apart from a totally inoperative scientific ‘deism’ – they pour out over God’s representatives the resentment that they would like to show against God Himself: man is good, they think, but religions are bad; priests, who have invented religions in order to bolster up their own interests and perpetuate their privileges, are bad, and so on. It is the satanic inversion of the traditional axiom that God is good and man is bad: God can be called ‘good’ because all possible goodness derives from Him and every quality expresses – in an ‘indirectly direct’ manner – His Essence, and not only such and such a function; and man is bad because his will no longer conforms to the profound nature of things, hence to the divine ‘Being’, and his false ‘instinct of self-preservation’ makes itself the advocate of every passion and every terrestrial illusion. [GTUFS: GnosisDW, Vicissitudes of Different Spiritual Temperaments]

No doubt some will say that humanitarianism, far from being materialistic by definition, aims at reforming human nature by education and legislation; now it is contradictory to want to reform the human outside the divine since the latter is the essence of the former; to make the attempt is in the end to bring about miseries far worse than those from which one was trying to escape. Philosophical humanitarianism underestimates the immortal soul by the very fact that it overestimates the human animal; it is somewhat obliged to denigrate saints in order to better whitewash criminals; the one seems unable to go without the other. From this results oppression of the contemplatives from their most tender years: in the name of humanitarian egalitarianism, vocations are crushed and geniuses wasted, by schools in particular and by official worldliness in general; every spiritual element is banished from professional and public life* and this amounts to removing from life a great part of its content and condemning religion to a slow death. The modern leveling – which may call itself “democratic” – is the very antipodes of the theocratic equality of the monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the theomorphism of man, but on his animality and his rebellion. (* On the other hand, by a kind of compensation, professional life more and more assumes a “religious” air in the sense that it claims the whole of man, his soul as well as his time, as though the sufficient reason for the human condition were some economic enterprise and not immortality.) [GTUFS: LSelf, The Meaning of Caste]