THE ANTICHRIST
By Friedrich Nietzsche
(Transl.) H.L. Mencken
Quickjump Index
PREFACE
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is
yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my
"Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those who are now
sprouting ears?--First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men
are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily
understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my
seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the
verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and
to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as
beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the
truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must
have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the
courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the
labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music.
New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have
hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand
manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for
self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.....
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my
readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?--The rest are merely
humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in
loftiness of soul,--in contempt.
FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.
1.
--Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well
enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will you
find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in his day, knew that
much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death--our life,
our happiness...We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we
got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who
else has found it?--The man of today?--"I don't know either the way out
or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way
in"--so sighs the man of today...This is the sort of modernity that made
us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole
virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur
of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands"
everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among
modern virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough;
we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding
out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us
fatalists. Our fate--it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of
powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far
as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation" . . .
There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became
overcast--for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our
happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal...
2.
What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to
power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?--The feeling that power increases--that resistance is
overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not
virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue
free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.
And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy for the botched
and the weak--Christianity...
3.
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the
order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must
be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of
life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but
always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately
willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it
has been almost the terror of terrors ;--and out of that terror the
contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic
animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian. . .
4.
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or
stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress"
is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of
today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the
Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean
elevation, enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various
parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in
these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which,
compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such
happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain
possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and
nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.
5.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to
the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of
evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as
the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken
the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out
of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it
has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are
intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual
values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most
lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his
intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually
destroyed by Christianity!--
6.
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn
back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is
at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation
against humanity. It is used--and I wish to emphasize the fact
again--without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the
rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters
where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and
"godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the
sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind
now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its
instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A
history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and it is
possible that I'll have to write it--would almost explain why man is so
degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for
survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will
to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest
values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that the values of
decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
7.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands in opposition
to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of
aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through
pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a
thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain
circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living
energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause
(--the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it;
there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the
effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its
character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity
thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural
selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on
the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining
life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a
gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue
(--in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness--); going
still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation
of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from
the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose
shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this:
that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial--pity is
the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious
instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the
preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the
miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence--pity
persuades to extinction....Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one
says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana,
salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of
religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one
reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the
tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why
pity appeared to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as every one knows,
saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which
was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The
instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any
such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing
in Schopenhauer's case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary
decadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that
it may burst and be discharged. . . Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all
our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to
be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here--all this is our business,
all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we
Hyperboreans !--
8.
It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists:
theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins--this
is our whole philosophy. . . . One must have faced that menace at close
hand, better still, one must have had experience of it directly and
almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly
(--the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems
to me to be a joke--they have no passion about such things; they have
not suffered--). This poisoning goes a great deal further than most
people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who
regard themselves as "idealists"--among all who, by virtue of a higher
point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look
upon it with suspicion. . . The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries
all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (--and not only in his hand!);
he launches them with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "the
senses," "honor," "good living," "science"; he sees such things as
beneath him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which "the soul"
soars as a pure thing-in-itself--as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a
word, holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all
imaginable horrors and vices. . . The pure soul is a pure lie. . . So
long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner
of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer
to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head
when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its
representative.
9.
Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it
everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and
dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this
condition is called faith: in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's
self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood.
People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this
false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty
vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once
they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation"
and "eternity." I unearth this theological instinct in all directions:
it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to
be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false:
there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of
self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any
way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is
felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts "true" and
"false" are forced to change places: what ever is most damaging to life
is there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves
it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called "false."...
When theologians, working through the "consciences" of princes (or of
peoples--), stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt
as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic
will exerts that power...
10.
Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological
blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the
grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum
originale. Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of
Christianity--and of reason. ... One need only utter the words "Tubingen
School" to get an understanding of what German philosophy is at
bottom--a very artful form of theology. . . The Suabians are the best
liars in Germany; they lie innocently. . . . Why all the rejoicing over
the appearance of Kant that went through the learned world of Germany,
three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of preachers and
teachers--why the German conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a
change for the better? The theological instinct of German scholars made
them see clearly just what had become possible again. . . . A backstairs
leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the "true world,"
the concept of morality as the essence of the world (--the two most
vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle
and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no
longer refutable... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so
far. . . Out of reality there had been made "appearance"; an absolutely
false world, that of being, had been turned into reality. . . . The
success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and
Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity, already far from
steady.--
11.
A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention;
it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case
it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces
it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of
"virtue," as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue," "duty," "good
for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of
universal validity--these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only
an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese
spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most
profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man
find hisown virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to
pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty.
Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every
"impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.--To
think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as
dangerous to life!...The theological instinct alone took it under
protection !--An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is
a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that
Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as
an objection . . . What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think
and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire,
without pleasure--as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for
decadence, and no less for idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.--And such a
man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs
passed for the German philosopher--still passes today! . . . I forbid
myself to say what I think of the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant see in the
French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic
form to the organic? Didn't he ask himself if there was a single event
that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in
man, so that on the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the
good" could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That is
revolution." Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a
revolt against nature, German decadence as a philosophy--that is
Kant!----
12.
I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of
philosophy: the rest haven't the slightest conception of intellectual
integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and
prodigies--they regard "beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving
breast" as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the
criterion of truth. In the end, with "German" innocence, Kant tried to
give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of
intellectual conscience, by calling it "practical reason." He
deliberately invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it
was desirable not to trouble with reason--that is, when morality, when
the sublime command "thou shalt," was heard. When one recalls the fact
that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development
from the old type of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this
fraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable. When a man feels that he has a
divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind--when a
man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the
mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives--when such a mission in. flames
him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely
reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified
by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! . . . What
has a priest to do with philosophy! He stands far above it!--And
hitherto the priest has ruled!--He has determined the meaning of "true"
and "not true"!
13.
Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits,
are already a "transvaluation of all values," a visualized declaration
of war and victory against all the old concepts of "true" and "not
true." The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the
most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All the methods,
all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets
for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined
to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people--he passed
as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." As
a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala2... We have had the whole
pathetic stupidity of mankind against us--their every notion of what the
truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be--their
every "thou shalt" was launched against us. . . . Our objectives, our
methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner--all appeared to them
as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.--Looking back, one may
almost ask one's self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic
sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was
picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their
senses. It was our modesty that stood out longest against their
taste...How well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God!
14.
We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every way.
We no longer derive man from the "spirit," from the "god-head"; we have
dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the
beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his
intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit
which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second
thought in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything
but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at
similar stages of development... And even when we say that we say a bit
too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the
animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from
his instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most
interesting!--As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first
had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole
of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine.
Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we
know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have
regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his
inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free
will"; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer
describes anything that we can understand. The old word "will" now
connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows
inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious
stimuli--the will no longer "acts," or "moves." . . . Formerly it was
thought that man's consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his
high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised,
tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly
things, to shuffle off his mortal coil--then only the important part of
him, the "pure spirit," would remain. Here again we have thought out the
thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom
of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping,
a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force un
necessarily--we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it
is done consciously. The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity:
take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal
shell," and the rest is miscalculation--that is all!...
15.
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of
contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul,"
"ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary
effects ("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of
sins"). Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits,"
"souls"); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a total denial
of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology
(misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or
disagreeable general feelings--for example, of the states of the nervus
sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical
balderdash--, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the
devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology (the "kingdom of
God," "the last judgment," "eternal life").--This purelyfictitious
world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the
world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former
falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of "nature"
had been opposed to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily
took on the meaning of "abominable"--the whole of that fictitious world
has its sources in hatred of the natural (--the real!--), and is no more
than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . .
This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way
out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality
one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over
pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but
such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence...
16.
A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same
conclusion.--A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its
own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to
survive, to its virtues--it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of
power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will
give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make
sacrifices. . . Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A
man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.--Such
a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able
to play either friend or foe--he is wondered at for the good he does as
well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all nature, of
such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to
human inclination. Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for
a good god; it doesn't have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism
for its own existence. . . . What would be the value of a god who knew
nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had
perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of
destruction? No one would understand such a god: why should any one want
him?--True enough, when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels
its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when
it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of
submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its
god. He then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels
"peace of soul," hate-no-more, leniency, "love" of friend and foe. He
moralizes endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the
god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan. . .
Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything
aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is
simply the good god...The truth is that there is no other alternative
for gods: either they are the will to power--in which case they are
national gods--or incapacity for power--in which case they have to be
good.
17.
Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is
always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The
divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions,
is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the
weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call
themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate the moments
in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god
first became possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to
reduce their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to
eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make
revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's god.--The
good god, and the devil like him--both are abortions of decadence.--How
can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join
in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god
of Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of
all goodness, is to be described as progress?--But even Renan does this.
As if Renan had a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in
the face. When everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is
strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the
concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff
for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he be comes the
poor man's god, the sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and
the attribute of "saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential
attribute of divinity--just what is the significance of such a
metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of the godhead imply?--To be
sure, the "kingdom of God" has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only
his own people, his "chosen" people. But since then he has gone
wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given
up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home
everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan--until now he has the "great
majority" on his side, and half the earth. But this god of the "great
majority," this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god:
on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god
of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the
world! . . His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the
underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom. . . And he himself
is so pale, so weak, so decadent . . . Even the palest of the pale are
able to master him--messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the
intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that finally he
was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another
metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old business of
spinning the world out of his inmost being sub specie Spinozae;
thereafter he be came ever thinner and paler--became the "ideal," became
"pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the thing-in-itself." . .
. The collapse of a god: he became a "thing-in-itself."
18.
The Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the
god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most
corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably
touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God
degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its
transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on
nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander
upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! In him
nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! . . .
19.
The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this
Christian god does little credit to their gift for religion--and not
much more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of
such a moribund and worn-out product of the decadence. A curse lies upon
them because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude
and contradiction a part of their instincts--and since then they have
not managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come and
gone--and not a single new god! Instead, there still exists, and as if
by some intrinsic right,--as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the
power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind--this pitiful
god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay, conjured
up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the
instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul
find their sanction!--
20.
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a
related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to
Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions--they
are both decadence religions--but they are separated from each other in
a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at
all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of
India.--Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity--it is
part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively
and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical
speculation. The concept, "god," was already disposed of before it
appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be
encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which
is a strict phenomenalism) --It does not speak of a "struggle with sin,"
but, yielding to reality, of the "struggle with suffering." Sharply
differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception
that lies in moral concepts be hind it; it is, in my phrase,beyond good
and evil.--The two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and
upon which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive
sensitiveness to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined
susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a
too protracted concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the
influence of which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion
of the "impersonal." (--Both of these states will be familiar to a few
of my readers, the objectivists, by experience, as they are to me).
These physiological states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to
combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the
open, a life of travel; moderation in eating and a careful selection of
foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing
any of the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood;
finally, no worry, either on one's own account or on account of others.
He encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good
cheer--he finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. He understands
good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health. Prayer
is not included, and neither is asceticism. There is no categorical
imperative nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery
(--it is always possible to leave--). These things would have been
simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned.
For the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers;
his teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion,
ressentiment (--"enmity never brings an end to enmity": the moving
refrain of all Buddhism. . .) And in all this he was right, for it is
precisely these passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose,
are unhealthful. The mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly
displayed in too much "objectivity" (that is, in the individual's loss
of interest in himself, in loss of balance and of "egoism"), he combats
by strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego.
In Buddha's teaching egoism is a duty. The "one thing needful," the
question "how can you be delivered from suffering," regulates and
determines the whole spiritual diet. (--Perhaps one will here recall
that Athenian who also declared war upon pure "scientificality," to wit,
Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality) .
21.
The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of
great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must
get its start among the higher and better educated classes.
Cheerfulness, quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata,
and they are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is
merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.--Under
Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed come to
the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their
salvation in it. Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for
boredom is the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of
conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called "God") is pumped
up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a
gift, as "grace." Here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and
the darkened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is
denounced as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness
(--the first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed
the public baths, of which there were 270 in Cordova alone) . Christian,
too; is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of
unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in
the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most
respectable names are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to
engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian,
again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the
"aristocratic"--along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (--one
resigns one's "body" to them--one wantsonly one's "soul" . . . ). And
Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage of
freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the
senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general . . .
22.
When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest
orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power
among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men,
but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self torture--in
brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the
Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is
not merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on
the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a
tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas.
Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to
obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the
sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the
disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms,
whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a
religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that
have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet
ripe for it--): it is a summons 'that takes them back to peace and
cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain
hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey;
its modus operandi is to make them ill--to make feeble is the Christian
recipe for taming, for "civilizing." Buddhism is a religion for the
closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears
before civilization has so much as begun--under certain circumstances it
lays the very foundations thereof.
23.
Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more
objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to
suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply says,
as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in
itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an
explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny
his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word
"devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible
enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such
an enemy.
--At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong
to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little
consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed to
be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of
ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds--the road to the one and
the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact
thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage.
The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows
it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he
has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually
sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is thus exalted above
everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and
patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a
forbidden road.--Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more
powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.
Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict
with actuality can dash it--so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can
satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of
this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks
regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most malign of evils; it
remained behind at the source of all evil.)3--In order that love may be
possible, God must become a person; in order that the lower instincts
may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of
the woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy
that of the men there must be a virgin. These things are necessary if
Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some
aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion as to what
a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly strengthens the
vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it makes the cult
warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--Love is the state in which man
sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of illusion
reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for
transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any other
time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which
would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer
is overcome--it is scarcely even noticed.--So much for the three
Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three
Christian ingenuities.--Buddhism is in too late a stage of development,
too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.--
24.
Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The
first thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to
be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it is not
a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it
is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the
words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." 4--The second thing to
remember is this: that the psychological type of the Galilean is still
to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is
at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve
in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Saviour of
mankind.
--The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world,
for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be,
they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price:
this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all
naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the
outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which,
hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to
live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct
opposition to natural conditions--one by one they distorted religion,
civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a
contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same
phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a
copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows a
complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the
Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their
influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that
today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it
is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
In my "Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation
of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble
morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere
product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system
belongs to the second division, and in every detail. In order to be able
to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of
life--that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval--the
instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent
an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil
and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people
gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found
themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily,
and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those
instincts which make for decadence--not as if mastered by them, but as
if detecting in them a power by which "the world" could be defied. The
Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply been forced
into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the
non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves
at the head of all decadent movements (--for example, the Christianity
of Paul--), and so make of them something stronger than any party
frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for power
under Judaism and Christianity,--that is to say, to the priestly
class-decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have
a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of
"good" and "bad," "true" and "false" in a manner that is not only
dangerous to life, but also slanders it.
25.
The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt
to denaturize all natural values: I point to five facts which bear this
out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel
maintained the right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural
attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power,
its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for
victory and salvation and through him they expected nature to give them
whatever was necessary to their existence--above all, rain. Jahveh is
the god of Israel, and consequently the god of justice: this is the
logic of every race that has power in its hands and a good conscience in
the use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of
this self-approval stand revealed. The nation is grateful for the high
destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the
benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its
herds and its crops.--This view of things remained an ideal for a long
while, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows:
anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained,
as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who
was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge--a vision best
visualized in the typical prophet (i.e., critic and satirist of the
moment), Isaiah. --But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no
longer could do what he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But
what actually happened? simply this: the conception of him was
changed--the conception of him was denaturized; this was the price that
had to be paid for keeping him.--Jahveh, the god of "justice"--he is in
accord with Israel no more, he no longer visualizes the national egoism;
he is now a god only conditionally. . . The public notion of this god
now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who
interpret all happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment
for obedience or disobedience to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of
all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is
set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on
their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by
doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of unnatural causation
becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature
follow it. A god who demands--in place of a god who helps, who gives
counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of
courage and self-reliance. . . Morality is no longer a reflection of the
conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people;
it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become
abstract and in opposition to life--a fundamental perversion of the
fancy, an "evil eye" on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian
morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the
idea of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a "temptation"; a
physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience...
26.
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified ;--but
even here Jewish priest craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel
ceased to be of any value: out with it!--These priests accomplished that
miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the
documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the
face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the
past of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they
converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all
offences against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was
rewarded. We would regard this act of historical falsification as
something far more shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical
interpretation of history for thousands of years had not blunted our
inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And the philosophers support
the church: the lie about a "moral order of the world" runs through the
whole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a "moral
order of the world"? That there is a thing called the will of God which,
once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought
not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is
to he measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God;
that the destinies of a people or of an individual arecontrolled by this
will of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of
obedience manifested.--In place of all that pitiable lie reality has
this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only
at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain:
he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the
value of all things "the kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby
that state of affairs is attained "the will of God"; with cold-blooded
cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the
extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly
order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood
the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its
long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that
great age-during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of
the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel's history they fashioned,
according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites
or men entirely "godless." They reduced every great event to the idiotic
formula: "obedient or disobedient to God."--They went a step further:
the "will of God" (in other words some means necessary for preserving
the power of the priests) had to be determined--and to this end they had
to have a "revelation." In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had
to be perpetrated, and "holy scriptures" had to be concocted--and so,
with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much
lamentation over the long days of "sin" now ended, they were duly
published. The "will of God," it appears, had long stood like a rock;
the trouble was that mankind had neglected the "holy scriptures". . .
But the ''will of God'' had already been revealed to Moses. . . . What
happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time
and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to
him, from the largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most
appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of
beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what "the
will of God" was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that
the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural
events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say
at the "sacrifice" (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in
his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it--in his own phrase, to
"sanctify" it. . . . For this should be noted: that every natural habit,
every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice,
marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by
the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is
reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable
by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral order of
the world"). The fact requires a sanction--a power to grant values
becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such values is by
denying nature. . . . The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it
is only at this price that he can exist at all.--Disobedience to God,
which actually means to the priest, to "the law," now gets the name of
"sin"; the means prescribed for "reconciliation with God" are, of
course, precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the
thumb of the priest; he alone can "save". Psychologically considered,
"sins" are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical
basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives
upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning". . . . Prime
axiom: "God forgiveth him that repenteth"--in plain English, him that
submitteth to the priest.
27.
Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything
natural, every natural value, every reality was opposed by the deepest
instincts of the ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the death
upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. The "holy
people," who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all
things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected
everything of the earth as "unholy," "worldly," "sinful"--this people
put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the point of
self-annihilation: as Christianity it actually denied even the last form
of reality, the "holy people," the "chosen people," Jewish reality
itself. The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small
insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is
simply the Jewish instinct redivivus--in other words, it is the priestly
instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as
a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic
than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that
necessary to an ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actually
denies the church...
I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to
have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the
Jewish church--"church" being here used in exactly the same sense that
the word has today. It was an insurrection against the "good and just,"
against the "prophets of Israel," against the whole hierarchy of
society--not against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order,
formalism. It was unbelief in "superior men," a Nay flung at everything
that priests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy that was
called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the
structure of piles which, above everything, was necessary to the safety
of the Jewish people in the midst of the "waters"--it represented their
last possibility of survival; it was the final residuum of their
independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon
the most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to
live, that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who
aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the
Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of
things--and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would
get him sent to Siberia today--this man was certainly a political
criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly
unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the cross: the
proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the
cross. He died for his own sins--there is not the slightest ground for
believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins
of others.--
28.
As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction--whether,
in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of--that is
quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the
problem of the psychology of the Saviour.--I confess, to begin with,
that there are very few books which offer me harder reading than the
Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled
the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most
unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young
scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious
philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.5At that time I was
twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I
care for the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious
legends "traditions"? The histories of saints present the most dubious
variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific
method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents, seems to me to
condemn the whole inquiry from the start--it is simply learned idling.
29.
What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type
might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and
however much overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in spite of
the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his
legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of mere truthful
evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the
question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been
handed down to us.--All the attempts that I know of to read the history
of a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable
psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has
contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining
the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero
("heros"). But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is
surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is
precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict:
the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something
moral: ("resist not evil !"--the most profound sentence in the Gospels,
perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of
gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of "glad
tidings"?--The true life, the life eternal has been found--it is not
merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in
love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of
distances. Every one is the child of God--Jesus claims nothing for
himself alone--as the child of God each man is the equal of every other
man. . . .Imagine making Jesus a hero!--And what a tremendous
misunderstanding appears in the word "genius"! Our whole conception of
the "spiritual," the whole conception of our civilization, could have
had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of
the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here. . . . We
all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which
causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from
every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion,
such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all
reality, a flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a
distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for
everything established--customs, institutions, the church--; a feeling
of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a
merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal" world. . . . "The
Kingdom of God is withinyou". . . .
30.
The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme
susceptibility to pain and irritation--so great that merely to be
"touched" becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.
The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and
distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to
pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (--that is to say, as
harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and
regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer
necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or
dangerous--love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life. . .
These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the
doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime
super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What
stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of
Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation
of paganism. Epicurus was a typical decadent: I was the first to
recognize him.--The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain--the
end of this can be nothing save a religion of love. . . .
31.
I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is
the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a
greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many
reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure
form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange
figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been
imprinted by the history, the destiny, of the early Christian
communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type
retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving
the purposes of war and of propaganda. That strange and sickly world
into which the Gospels lead us--a world apparently out of a Russian
novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and "childish"
idiocy keep a tryst--must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the
first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an
existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their
own crudity, in order to understand it at all--in their sight the type
could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar
mould.... The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of
morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist--all these merely
presented chances to misunderstand it . . . . Finally, let us not
underrate the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian
veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its
original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange--it does
not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky
lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent--I mean
some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of
the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the
type, as a type of the decadence, may actually have been peculiarly
complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight
of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that
case tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective,
whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a
contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore
and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike
India's, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and
ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's malice as "le grand
maitre en ironie." I myself haven't any doubt that the greater part of
this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the
Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda:
we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn
their leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians
had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle
theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a "god" that met
that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain
ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the
Gospels--"the second coming," "the last judgment," all sorts of
expectations and promises, current at the time.--
32.
I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the
fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the very word imperieux, used by
Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What the "glad tidings" tell
us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of
heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an
embattled faith--it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a
sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at
all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in
the living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is
not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does
not come with "the sword"--it does not realize how it will one day set
man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by
rewards and promises, or by "scriptures": it is itself, first and last,
its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own "kingdom of
God." This faith does not formulate itself--it simply lives, and so
guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment,
of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain
sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a
Judaeo--Semitic character (--that of eating and drinking at the last
supper belongs to this category--an idea which, like everything else
Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not
to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics6 an
opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work
is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all.
Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of
Sankhya,7and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse
8--and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.--With a
little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a
"free spirit"9--he cares nothing for what is established: the word
killeth,10 a whatever is established killeth. 'The idea of "life" as an
experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to
every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of
inner things: "life" or "truth" or "light" is his word for the
innermost--in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all
nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
--Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the
temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices:
such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions
of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience,
all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art--his
"wisdom" is precisely a pure ignorance11 of all such things. He has
never heard of culture; he doesn't have to make war on it--he doesn't
even deny it. . . The same thing may be said of the state, of the whole
bourgeoise social order, of labour, of war--he has no ground for
denying" the world," for he knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept
of "the world" . . . Denial is precisely the thing that is impossible to
him.--In the same way he lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief
that an article of faith, a "truth," may be established by proofs (--his
proofs are inner "lights," subjective sensations of happiness and
self-approval, simple "proofs of power"--). Such a doctrine cannot
contradict: it doesn't know that other doctrines exist, or can exist,
and is wholly incapable of imagining anything opposed to it. . . If
anything of the sort is ever encountered, it laments the "blindness"
with sincere sympathy--for it alone has "light"--but it does not offer
objections . . .
33.
In the whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt and
punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. "Sin," which means
anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished--this is
precisely the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor
is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only
reality--what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.
The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of
life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a "belief" that
marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of
action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or
in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction
between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles ("neighbour," of
course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he
despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds
their mandates ("Swear not at all") .12 He never under any circumstances
divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity.--And under
all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.--
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of
life--and so was his death. . . He no longer needed any formula or
ritual in his relations with God--not even prayer. He had rejected the
whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that
it was only by a way of life that one could feel one's self "divine,"
"blessed," "evangelical," a "child of God."Not by "repentance,"not by
"prayer and forgiveness" is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to
God--it is itself "God!"--What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in
the concepts of "sin," "forgiveness of sin," "faith," "salvation through
faith"--the wholeecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the
"glad tidings."
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he
will feel that he is "in heaven" and is "immortal," despite many reasons
for feeling that he isnot "in heaven": this is the only psychological
reality in "salvation."--A new way of life, not a new faith.
34.
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this:
that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as
"truths"--hat he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal,
spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The
concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in
history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a
psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing
is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist,
of the "kingdom of God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing could he
more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a
person, of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven"
beyond, and of a "son of God" as the second person of the Trinity. All
this--if I may be forgiven the phrase--is like thrusting one's fist into
the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols
amounting to world-historical cynicism. . . .But it is nevertheless
obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "Father" and "Son"--not, of
course, to every one--: the word "Son" expresses entrance into the
feeling that there is a general transformation of all things
(beatitude), and "Father" expresses that feeling itself--the sensation
of eternity and of perfection.--I am ashamed to remind you of what the
church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story13
at the threshold of the Christian "faith"? And a dogma of "immaculate
conception" for good measure? . . --And thereby it has robbed conception
of its immaculateness--
The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come
"beyond the world" or "after death." The whole idea of natural death is
absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is
absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world,
useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death" isnot a Christian
idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence
for the bearer of "glad tidings." . . .
The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no
yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a
"millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it
is nowhere. . . .
35.
This "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taught--not to "save
mankind," but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he
bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers,
before his accusers--his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he
does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most
extreme penalty--more, he invites it. . . And he prays, suffers and
loves with those, in those, who do him evil . . . Not to defend one's
self, not to show anger, not to lay blames. . . On the contrary, to
submit even to the Evil One--to love him. . . .
36.
--We free spirits--we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite
to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood--that
instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie"
even more than upon all other lies. . . Mankind was unspeakably far from
our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the
spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and
subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their
own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the
Gospels. . . .
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great
drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the
stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind
should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the
origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels--that in the concept of
the "church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer
of glad tidings" regards as beneath him and behind him--it would be
impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical
irony--
37.
--Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude
itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and
Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity--and that everything
spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary,
the whole history of Christianity--from the death on the cross
onward--is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of
an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger
and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave
birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and
barbarous--it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean
cults of the imperium Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all
sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its
faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were
sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism
finally lifts itself to power as the church--the church, that
incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of
soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly
humanity.--Christian values--noble values: it is only we, we free
spirits, who have re-established this greatest of all antitheses in
values!. . . .
38.
--I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am
visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--contempt of
man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is
the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The
man of today--I am suffocated by his foul breath! . . . Toward the past,
like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say,
generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole
millenniums of this mad house of a world, call it "Christianity,"
"Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will--I take care
not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes
and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times,our times.
Our age knows better. . . What was formerly merely sickly now becomes
indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust
begins.--I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called
"truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even
a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that
a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks,
but actually lies--and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie
through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one
knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any
"Saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are
lies--: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the
spirit,allow no man to pretend that he does not know it. . . All the
ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst
counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural
values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most
dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation. . - - We
know, our conscience now knows--just what the real value of all those
sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what ends they
have served, with their debasement of humanity to a state of
self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the concepts
"the other world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the soul,"
the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many in instruments of
torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and
remains master. . .Every one knows this,but nevertheless things remain
as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of
self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of
men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves
Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of
his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of
his people--and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a
Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call
"the world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend
one's self; to be careful of one's honour; to desire one's own
advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct,
every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what
a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself
nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!--
39.
--I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of
Christianity.--The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding--at
bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The
"Gospels" died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called
the "Gospels" was the very reverse of what he had lived: "bad tidings,"
a Dysangelium.14It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in
"faith," and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the
distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life,
the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian. . . To this
day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even necessary:
genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages. . . .
Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state
of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the
acceptance, for example, of anything as true--as every psychologist
knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate
compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept
of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the
state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon
of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact,
there are no Christians. The "Christian"--he who for two thousand years
has passed as a Christian--is simply a psychological self-delusion.
Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his "faith," he has been
ruled only by his instincts--and what instincts!--In all ages--for
example, in the case of Luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a
pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts have played their game--a
shrewd blindness to the domination of certain of the instincts . . .I
have already called "faith" the specially Christian form of
shrewdness--people always talk of their "faith" and act according to
their instincts. . . In the world of ideas of the Christian there is
nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes
an instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power, the only motive
power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even
here, in psychologicis, there is a radical error, which is to say one
conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance. Take away
one idea and put a genuine reality in its place--and the whole of
Christianity crumbles to nothingness !--Viewed calmly, this strangest of
all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive
and ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and
to the heart--this remains a spectacle for the gods--for those gods who
are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the
celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their disgust leaves
them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the
Christians: perhaps because of this curious exhibition alone the
wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from
omnipotence, a show of divine interest. . . . Therefore, let us not
underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false to the point of
innocence, is far above the ape--in its application to the Christians a
well--known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness. . . .
40.
--The fate of the Gospels was decided by death--it hung on the "cross.".
. . It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only
the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only--it was only
this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the
real riddle: "Who was it? what was it?"--The feeling of dismay, of
profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might
involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, "Why just in
this way?"--this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here
everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a
meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple
excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: "Who put him
to death? who was his natural enemy?"--this question flashed like a
lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that
moment, one found one's self in revolt against the established order,
and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established
order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in
his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present
its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what
was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by
this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of
ressentiment--a plain indication of how little he was understood at all!
All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to
offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the
most public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his
death--though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in
the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves,
with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death. . . . On
the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings,
revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause
should perish with his death: "recompense" and "judgment" became
necessary (--yet what could be less evangelical than "recompense,"
"punishment," and "sitting in judgment"!) --Once more the popular belief
in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was
riveted upon an historical moment: the "kingdom of God" is to come, with
judgment upon his enemies. . . But in all this there was a wholesale
misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom of God" as a last act, as a mere
promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the
fulfillment, therealization of this "kingdom of God." It was only now
that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and
theologians began to appear in the character of the Master was thereby
turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the
savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer
endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all
men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of elevating
Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from
themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves
upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him
on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were
products of resentment . . . .
41.
--And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how could
God allow it!" To which the deranged reason of the little community
formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his
son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end
of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and
barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty!
What appalling paganism !--Jesus himself had done away with the very
concept of "guilt," he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God
and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was precisely
his "glad tidings". . . And not as a mere privilege!--From this time
forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the
doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as
a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of which the
entire concept of "blessedness," the whole and only reality of the
gospels, is juggled away--in favour of a state of existence after death!
. . . St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all
his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent
conception, in this way: "If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all
our faith is in vain!"--And at once there sprang from the Gospels the
most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the shameless doctrine
of personal immortality. . . Paul even preached it as a reward . . .
42.
One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the
death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a
Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth--real,
not merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed
out--the essential difference between the two religions of decadence:
Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises
everything, but fulfills nothing.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad
tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated
the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the
genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred.
What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all,
the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the
teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole
gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred
had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical
truth! . . . Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the
same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the
yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his
own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the
history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere
prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had
referred to his "Saviour." . . . Later on the church even falsified the
history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity . . . The
figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the
meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing
remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with
reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to
a place behind this existence--in the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At
bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed was
the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything honest in
such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical
enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the
resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he
suffered from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine
niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also
willed the means. --What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily
enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.--What he wanted
was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had
use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose
of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only
part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention,
his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the
belief in the immortality of the soul--that is to say, the doctrine of
"judgment".
43.
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in
"the beyond"--in nothingness--then one has taken away its centre of
gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all
reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the instincts
that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is
a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning:
this is now the "meaning" of life. . . . Why be public-spirited? Why
take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust
one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to
serve it? . . . Merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from
the "straight path."--"One thing only is necessary". . . That every man,
because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that
in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of every individual
may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the
three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly
suspended in their behalf--it is impossible to lavish too much contempt
upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to
insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable
flattery of personal vanity for its triumph--it was thus that it lured
all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole
refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the
soul"--in plain English: "the world revolves around me." . . . The
poisonous doctrine, "equal rights for all," has been propagated as a
Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad
instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of
reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the
first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of
civilization--out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its
chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high
spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth . . . To allow
"immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious
outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.--And let us not
underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon
politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for
the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and
his equals--for the pathos of distance. . . Our politics is sick with
this lack of courage!--The aristocratic attitude of mind has been
undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the
"privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to make
revolution--it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian
valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and
crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the
ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly"
lowers . . .
44.
--The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was
already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul, with
the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at
bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the
Saviour.--These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk
behind every word. I confess--I hope it will not be held against
me--that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy
to a psychologist--as the opposite of all merely naive corruption, as
refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological
corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is
not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first
thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the
matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal
"holiness" unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this
elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art--all this
is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any
violation of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism
appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there,
after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of
Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The
Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again--he is
threefold the Jew. . . The underlying will to make use only of such
concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the
instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other
method of estimating values and utilities--this is not only tradition,
it is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the
force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best
ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human--), have permitted
themselves to be deceived. The gospels have been read as a book of
innocence. . . surely no small indication of the high skill with which
the trick has been done.--Of course, if we could actually see these
astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the
farce would come to an end,--and it is precisely because I cannot read a
word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made am
end of them. . . . I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling
up their eyes.--For the majority, happily enough, books are mere
literature.--Let us not be led astray: they say "judge not," and yet
they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in
judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify
themselves; in demanding that every one show the virtues which they
themselves happen to be capable of--still more, which they must have in
order to remain on top--they assume the grand air of men struggling for
virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we
die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good" (--"the truth," "the light,"
"the kingdom of God"): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot
help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners,
to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity into aduty:
it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility,
and that humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety. . . Ah,
that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! "Virtue itself shall
bear witness for us.". . . . One may read the gospels as books of moral
seduction: these petty folks fasten themselves to morality--they know
the uses of morality! Morality is the best of all devices for leading
mankind by the nose!--The fact is that the conscious conceit of the
chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that they,
the "community," the "good and just," range themselves, once and for
always, on one side, the side of "the truth"--and the rest of mankind,
"the world," on the other. . . In that we observe the most fatal sort of
megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and
liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of "God," "the
truth," "the light," "the spirit," "love," "wisdom" and "life," as if
these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to
fence themselves off from the "world"; little super-Jews, ripe for some
sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to meet their
notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the
standard and even thelast judgment of all the rest. . . . The whole
disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed
in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit,
the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn between Jews and
Judaeo-Christians, the latter had no choice but to employ the
self-preservative measures that the Jewish instinct had devised, even
against the Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them only
against non-Jews. The Christian is simply a Jew of the "reformed"
confession.--
45.
--I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have
got into their heads--what they have put into the mouth of the Master:
the unalloyed creed of "beautiful souls."--
"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them.
Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha
in the day of judgment, than for that city" (Mark vi, 11)--How
evangelical!
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me,
it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he
were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42) .--How evangelical! --
"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to
enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be
cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched." (Mark ix, 47)15--It is not exactly the eye that is meant.
"Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here,
which shall not taste death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come
with power." (Mark ix, 1.)--Well lied, lion!16 . . . .
"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me. For . . ." (Note of a psychologist. Christian
morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,--this makes
it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.--
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall
be measured to you again." (Matthew vii, l.)17--What a notion of
justice, of a "just" judge! . . .
"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even
the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye
more than others? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew V,
46.)18--Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid
in the end. . . .
"But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses." (Matthew vi, 15.)--Very compromising for the
said "father."
"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you." (Matthew vi, 33.)--All these
things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error,
to put it mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at
least in certain cases.
"Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is
great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the
prophets." (Luke vi, 23.)--Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the
prophets. . .
"Know yea not that yea are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God
dwelt in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple yea are." (Paul, 1
Corinthians iii, 16.)19--For that sort of thing one cannot have enough
contempt. . . .
"Do yea not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world
shall be judged by you, are yea unworthy to judge the smallest matters?"
(Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)--Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a
lunatic. . .
This frightful impostor then proceeds: "Know yea not that we shall judge
angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?". . .
"Hat not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in
the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by
the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. . . . Not many
wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called: But
God hat chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and
God hat chosen the weak things of the world confound the things which
are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised,
hat God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things
that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence." (Paul, 1
Corinthians i, 20ff.)20 --In order to understand this passage, a first
rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one
should read the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for the
first time, the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born
of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the
greatest of all apostles of revenge. . . .
46.
--What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading
the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very
advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions
as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them . . .
Neither has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in vain
for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly,
open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first
step upward--the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . . Only evil
instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil
instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a
self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the
New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up
with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of
whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Ceasar Borgia to the
Duke of Parma: "e tutto Iesto"--immortally healthy, immortally cheerful
and sound. . . .These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They
attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Whoever is
attacked by an "early Christian" is surely not befouled . . . On the
contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an opponent.
One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for
whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an
impudent wind bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."
. . . Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition:
they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such
an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early
Christians" dared to make!--After all, they were the privileged, and
that