This chapter addresses three themes in Genealogy III: the role of the ascetic priest in the creation of values; the persistence of the ascetic ideal in the overvaluation of truth by modern scientists and scholars; and the claim that the ascetic ideal gains its power by giving a meaning to suffering. The treatment of the ascetic priest as both identifying with the weak and being a case of will to power is shown as complex but not contradictory. In the discussion of science and scholarship as manifestations of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche questions not the possibility of truth but the unconditional valuation of truth, which he interprets as ultimately a moral valuation. The final part of the Genealogy argues that the ascetic ideal, by interpreting human existence as an unworthy ‘nothingness’ in contrast with supposed higher values, has given meaning to existence, and in particular to the suffering it contains.
Keywords: ascetic priest, nothingness, suffering, science, scholarship