On priestly psychology per Nietzsche

In the first essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche spends some time talking about the psychology of the priest. 

Think, for example, of certain forms of diet (abstinence from meat), of fasting, of sexual continence, of flight "into the wilderness" ...: add to these the entire antisensualistic metaphysic of the priests that makes men indolent and overrefined, their autohypnosis in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins ... and finally the only-too-comprehensible satiety with all this, together with the radical cure for it, nothingness (or God—the desire for a unio mystica with God is the desire of the Budhist for nothingness, Nirvana—and no more!).  [Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 6.]

What is the source of this priestly intensity? Why should priests be the ones in society whose behavior tends to extremes, the ones who are most likely to become fanatics? (As an aside, I'm not sure if priests really are the natural extremists, at any rate in today's society. But for Nietzsche they were.)

Nietzsche himself tries to answer this question by looking at diet and habits. But there is another answer that he misses, but which fits in exactly with the kinds of explanation he allows.*

Consider that part of a priest's regular job is prayer, and that prayer often takes the form of asking God for something. But we all know that God is not a vending machine; if you ask God for stuff, the odds are that sometimes you'll get it and sometimes you won't. Many volumes of theology and theodicy have been written to account for this outcome from the perspective of faith. (Meanwhile it's easy to explain it from the perspective of atheism. If God doesn't exist, then prayer is wasted effort; in that case, whether you get the thing you prayed for is a matter of random chance, which turns up now Heads and later Tails.)

But a priest's ongoing service of God generates a kind of relationship with God. And there is a huge literature in the field of psychology about the phenomenon of intermittent reinforcement in relationships. For a sample of what is out there, just now I did a quick Google search, and the following articles were among the first to show up: here, here, here, here, and here.

Briefly, intermittent reinforcement is a classic element of abusive or alcoholic relationships. It consistently results in the dependent partner becoming addicted to the intermittently reinforcing one, abandoning all other interests and any kind of self-care in order to get the love and attention that have proven so unreliable. What's more, if the dependent partner finds that a certain behavior increases the odds of getting the reinforcement they need, even by a little bit, she will repeat and exaggerate that behavior over and over, in ever more frantic efforts to tease out the needed reinforcement.

Isn't this an exact description of a priestly psychology, taking the form of a "crazy fool for God"? And doesn't this mechanism offer a simple, elegant—and, to qualify in Nietzschean terms, completely materialistic—explanation for the growth of priestly asceticism (and ultimately fanaticism) over time?

I think it does. If Nietzsche had known about this result, I think he would have mentioned it.

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* What follows is fleshed out from a Post-It note that I left in my copy of Walter Kaufmann's translation of this work, Vintage Books, p. 32. The note is dated 1992-10-12. So I've been sitting on it for a while, it seems.