“Especially nowadays,” answered the voluntary beggar: “at present, that is to say, when everything low hath become rebellious and exclusive and haughty in its manner—in the manner of the populace.
For the hour hath come, thou knowest it forsooth, for the great, evil, long, slow mob-and-slave-insurrection: it extendeth and extendeth!
Now doth it provoke the lower classes, all benevolence and petty giving; and the over-rich may be on their guard!
Whoever at present drip, like bulgy bottles out of all-too-small necks:—of such bottles at present one willingly breaketh the necks.
Wanton avidity, bilious envy, careworn revenge, populace-pride: all these struck mine eye. It is no longer true that the poor are blessed. The kingdom of heaven, however, is with the kine.”
“And why is it not with the rich?” asked Zarathustra temptingly, while he kept back the kine which sniffed familiarly at the peaceful one.
“Why dost thou tempt me?” answered the other. “Thou knowest it thyself better even than I. What was it drove me to the poorest, O Zarathustra? Was it not my disgust at the richest?
—At the culprits of riches, with cold eyes and rank thoughts, who pick up profit out of all kinds of rubbish—at this rabble that stinketh to heaven,
—At this gilded, falsified populace, whose fathers were pickpockets, or carrion-crows, or rag-pickers, with wives compliant, lewd and forgetful:—for they are all of them not far different from harlots—
Populace above, populace below! What are ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ at present! That distinction did I unlearn,—then did I flee away further and ever further, until I came to those kine.”
What the critics said
Ludovici identifies the voluntary beggar with the ideal Buddhist, a decadent religion whose values come from the higher rather than the lower classes, and sees in him Nietzsche's purified portrait of Christ, stripped of the spiteful traits added by apologists.