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 was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The
"early Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last Christian," whom I may
perhaps live to see--is a rebel against all privilege by profound
instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights." . .
.Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to
represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be a "temple of
God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every other criterion, whether
based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon
beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--evil in
itself. . . Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early
Christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all
his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever he
hates, has real value . . . The Christian, and particularly the
Christian priest, is thus a criterion of values.
--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a
solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a
Jewish imbroglio seriously--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or
less-- what did it matter? . . . The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom
the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament
with the only saying that has any value--and that is at once its
criticism and its destruction: "What is truth?". . .
47.
--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as
absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life. .
. We deny that God is God . . . If any one were to show us this
Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a
formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a religion as
Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which
goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must
be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is
to say, of science--and it will give the name of good to whatever means
serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline,
all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and
all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative,
vetoes science--in praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew that
lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the
fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who
"reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two
great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only
an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very
thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, thora--that is
essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the "wisdom of this world":
his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine
school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a
philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to
say, as a philologian a man sees behind the "holy books," and as a
physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical
Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says
"fraud.". . .
48.
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of science? . . . No one,
in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is
fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only
one great danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great danger.--
The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is
promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against
boredom even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He creates
man--man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also
bored. God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all
paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's
first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he
sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal"
himself.--So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an
end--and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of
God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that;
"from woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that,
too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman
that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The
old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest
blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men
godlike--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes
scientific!--Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is
forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the
original sin. This is all there is of morality.--"Thou shalt not
know"--the rest follows from that.--God's mortal terror, however, did
not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one's self
against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer:
Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all
thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must not think.--And so the priest
invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of
misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing but devices
for making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow him to think.
. . Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to
tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be
done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men
destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war....).
War--among other things, a great disturber of science !--Incredible!
Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.--So
the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become
scientific--there is no help for it: he must be drowned!". . . .
49.
--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole
psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger:
that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But
science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a
man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to
"know." . . ."Therefore, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in
all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just what, by this
logic, was the first thing to come into the world :--"sin." . . . The
concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world,"
was set up against science--against the deliverance of man from priests.
. . . Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look
at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look
at all; he must suffer . . . And he must suffer so much that he is
always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians! What is needed is a
Saviour.--The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines
of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--lies through and through,
and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy
man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause
and effect !--And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with
honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most
cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of
priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean
leeches! . . . When the natural consequences of an act are no longer
"natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of
superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely
"moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons,
then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--then the greatest
of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.--I repeat that sin,
man's self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make
science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible;
the priest rules through the invention of sin.--
50.
--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief,"
of the "believer," for the special benefit of 'believers." If there
remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be
"believing"--or how much a sign of decadence, of a broken will to
live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even
the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that
there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is
called "proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore it is
true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is not
demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon "faith" as a
condition--one shall be blessed because one believes. . . . But what of
the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly
transcendental "beyond"--how is that to be demonstrated?--The "proof by
power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that
the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula:
"I believe that faith makes for blessedness--therefore, it is true." . .
But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be absurdum
itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of
politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--not merely
hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest):
even so, could blessedness--in a technical term, pleasure--ever be a
proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against
truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question
"What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth"
highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof of
"pleasure--nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that true
judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to
some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings
in their train?--The experience of all disciplined and profound minds
teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth,
and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human
love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this
business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.--What,
then, is the meaning of integrityin things intellectual? It means that a
man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn "beautiful
feelings," and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of
conscience!--Faith makes blessed:therefore, it lies. . . .
51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for
blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by no
means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves
no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before:
all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum.
Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie
that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums.
Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need
of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole
system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church
itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate
ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that
the church wants is a typical decadent; the moment at which a religious
crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous
disorder; the inner world" of the religious man is so much like the
"inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to
distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up be fore
mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in
form--the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to
gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem. . . . Once I ventured to
designate the whole Christian system of training22in penance and
salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing a folie
circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil
thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not
"converted" to Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it. . .
.We others, who have the courage for health and likewise for
contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding
of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the
soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats
health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that
it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body,
and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of
"perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence,
so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of
symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body! .
. . The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start
no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse
elements (--who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power)-- It
does not represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary,
a conglomeration of decadence products from all directions, crowding
together and seeking one another out. It was not, as has been thought,
the corruption of antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity
possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which
today maintains that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten
Chandala classes in the whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary
type, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The
majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts,
triumphed . . . Christianity was not "national," it was not based on
race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it
had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at
its very core--the instinct against the healthy, against health.
Everything that is well--constituted, proud, gallant and, above all,
beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of
Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things of the
world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world,
and things which are despised":23 this was the formula; in hoc signo the
decadence triumphed.--God on the cross--is man always to miss the
frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers,
everything that hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We all hang on the
cross, consequently we are divine. . . . We alone are divine. . . .
Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed
by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of
humanity.--
52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual
well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as
Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it
pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy
intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that
the typically Christian state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too,
and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge
must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from
the start. . . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the
priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon resulting from
decadence,--one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children
how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the
mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking
straight are symptoms of decadence. "Faith" means the will to avoid
knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud
because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall never be
allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever makes for illness is good;
whatever issues from abundance, from super-abundance, from power, is
evil": so argues the believer. The impulse to lie--it is by this that I
recognize every foreordained theologian.--Another characteristic of the
theologian is his unfitness for philology. What I here mean by philology
is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit--the capacity for
absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing
caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them.
Philology as ephexis24 in interpretation: whether one be dealing with
books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with
weather statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul." . . .
The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to
explain, say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory
by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the
Psalms of David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a
philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other
such cows from Suabia25 use the "finger of God" to convert their
miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of
"grace," a "providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most
modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should
certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect
childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital
dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who
always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us
into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would
seem so absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed.
God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac--man--at
bottom, he is' a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance. . . .
"Divine Providence," which every third man in "educated Germany" still
believes in, is so strong an argument against God that it would be
impossible to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument
against Germans! . . .
53.
--It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a
cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything
to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings
what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low
a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of
"truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not
something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only
peasants, or peasant apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any
such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's
intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discretion,
on this point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to
know anything further . . . "Truth," as the word is understood by every
prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every
churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been
made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary
to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.--The deaths of the
martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history:
they have misled . . . The conclusion that all idiots, women and
plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which any
one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets
off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has been an unspeakable
drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and
investigation. The martyrs have damaged the truth. . . . Even to this
day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name
to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--But why? Is the worth of a
cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for
it?--An error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has
acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs.
Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your
lies?--One best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on
ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians. . . . This was
precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that
they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they
made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom. . . .Women are still
on their knees before an error because they have been told that some one
died on the cross for it. Is the cross, then, an argument?--But about
all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been
needed for thousands of years--Zarathustra.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly
taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth
even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the
heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove?
Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own
burning!26
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical.
Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from
intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power,
manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count
when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of
values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough,
they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any
purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred
convictions beneath him--and behind him. . . . A mind that aspires to
great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily
sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and
to an independent point of view. . . That grand passion which is at once
the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more
enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of
his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him
courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not
begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a
good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and
uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be
sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing
unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word,
is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is
necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit himself as a goal,
nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong to
himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs
some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an
ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything:
his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in
itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement. . . When
one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be
regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to
what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only
condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and
especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith."
To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many
things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and
through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are
conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same
token they are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. . . . The
believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true,"
according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point
would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his
vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther,
Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to
the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these
sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon
the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers
observing poses to listening to reasons. . . .
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is
now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question
whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than
lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)27 This time I desire to
put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a
lie and a conviction?--All the world believes that there is; but what is
not believed by all the world!--Every conviction has its history, its
primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it becomes a
conviction only after having been, for a long time, not one, and then,
for an even longer time, hardly one. What if falsehood be also one of
these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that is needed is a
change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in
the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse
to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not
before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is
that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a
relatively rare offence.--Now, this will not to see what one sees, this
will not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who
belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a
liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was
synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the
spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this
conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans,
including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of
morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its very survival
to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every
moment?--"This is our conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we
live and die for it--let us respect all who have convictions!"--I have
actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the
contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more
respectable because he lies on principle. . . The priests, who have more
finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies
against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that
becomes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose, have borrowed
from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the
will of God" and "the revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with
his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was hispractical
reason.28 There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it
is not for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital
problems of valuation, are beyond human reason. . . . To know the limits
of reason--that alone is genuine. philosophy. Why did God make a
revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man could
not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught
him His will. Moral: the priest does not lie--the question, "true" or
"untrue," has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it
is impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would
be necessary to knowwhat is true. But this is more than man can know;
therefore, the priest is simply the mouth-piece of God.--Such a priestly
syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie
and the shrewd dodge of "revelation" belong to the general priestly
type--to the priest of the decadence as well as to the priest of pagan
times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God" is
a word signifying acquiescence in all things) --The "law," the "will of
God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these things are merely
words for the conditionsunder which the priest comes to power and with
which he maintains his power,--these concepts are to be found at the
bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or
priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy lie"--common
alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the
Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this
means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies. . . .
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The
fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is my objection
to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the
calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the
degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of
sin--therefore, its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when
I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior
work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as
name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is
a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess
of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious
psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what
is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by
means of it the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the
whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a
feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling
toward self and life--the sun shines upon the whole book.--All the
things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity--for
example, procreation, women and marriage--are here handled earnestly,
with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put
into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile
things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife,
and let every woman have her own husband; . . . it is better to marry
than to burn"?29 And is it possible to be a Christian so long as the
origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by the
doctrine of the immaculata conceptio? . . . I know of no book in which
so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of
Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to
women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a
woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a
child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place:
"there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a
cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still
another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of
the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the
maiden is the whole body pure."
57.
One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the simple
process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends
sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously antithetical
ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the
necessity of making Christianity contemptible.--A book of laws such as
the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it
epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation
of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer
creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition
of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and
painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which
one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility,
the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it
would lose the imperative tone, the "thou shalt," on which obedience is
based. The problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in the
evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight,
which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the
series of experiences determining how all shall live--or can live--has
come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a
harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience. In
consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further
experimentation--the continuation of the state in which values are
fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infnitum. Against this
a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the
assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human
origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and
after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into
being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle .
. . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the
law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and
a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question. The
authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and
the fathers lived it.--The higher motive of such procedure lies in the
design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with
notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved to
be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct
attains to a perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of
mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such
a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility of
future mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to
the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be
made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The order of
castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of
an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no
arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. In every
healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward
differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these
has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and
feeling of perfection. It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one
class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are
marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who
are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only
mediocrity--the last-named represents the great majority, and the first
two the select. The superior caste--I call it the fewest--has, as the
most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for
beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of
men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can
goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:30
goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than
uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness--or
indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the
privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world is perfect"--so
prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who
says yes to life. "Imperfection, what ever is inferior to us, distance,
the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this
perfection. "The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their
happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in
being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is
in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity,
an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them
a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others. . . .
Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They are the most honourable kind of
men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most
amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are; they
are not at liberty to play second.--The second caste: to this belong the
guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble
warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and
preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of
the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that
is rough in the business of ruling-their followers, their right hand,
their most apt disciples.--In all this, I repeat, there is nothing
arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the contrary is made up--by
it nature is brought to shame. . . The order of castes, the order of
rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation
of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to
the evolution of higher types, and the highest types--the inequality of
rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.--A right is a
privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of
existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life
is always harder as one mounts the heights--the cold increases,
responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand
only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly
consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture,
science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of
occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and
aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the
instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as
to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a
wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not
society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable
of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is
a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one
thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound
intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is,
in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it
is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the
exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than
he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of
heart--it is simply his duty. . . . Whom do I hate most heartily among
the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the
Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his
feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who make him envious
and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies
in the assertion of "equal" rights. . . . What is bad? But I have
already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.--The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .
58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference:
whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness
between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points
only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of
this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied
a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the
conditions which cause life to flourish into an "eternal" social
organization,--Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such
an organization, because life flourished under it. There the benefits
that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity
were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in
a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible;
here, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight. . . .That
which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most
magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has
ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after
it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism--those holy anarchists
made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world,"which is to say, the
imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another--and
even Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters. . . .
The Christian and the anarchist: both are decadents; both are incapable
of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating,
blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that
stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future.
. . . Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,-- overnight
it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the
soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this
fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that
the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and
better,--this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was
merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its
worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub
specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This
organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident
of personality has nothing to do with such things--the first principle
of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to
stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption--against
Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night,
mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all
earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality--this
cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all
"souls," step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it
all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause
of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The
sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as
black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica
in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of
revenge, of Chandala revenge--all that sort of thing became master of
Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus
had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made
war upon--not paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say, the
corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and
immortality.--He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent
Christianity--to deny immortality was already a form of genuine
salvation.--Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in
Rome was Epicurean--when Paul appeared. . . Paul, the Chandala hatred of
Rome, of "the world," in the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the
eternal Jew par excellence. . . . What he saw was how, with the aid of
the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a
"world conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on
the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic
intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power.
"Salvation is of the Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding
and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris,
that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his
discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct
was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the
ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into the
mouth of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into the
mouth--he made out of him something that even a priest of Mithras could
understand. . . This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact
that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob "the world" of
its value, that the concept of "hell" would master Rome--that the notion
of a "beyond" is the death of life. Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme
in German, and they do more than rhyme.
59.
The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to
describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--And,
considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with
adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to
go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!
. . To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?--All the
prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were
already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art
of reading profitably--that first necessity to the tradition of culture,
the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with
mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,--the sense of fact,
the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its
traditions were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood?
Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready;--and the most
essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most
difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness.
What we have to day reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for
ourselves--for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still
lurk in our bodies--that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the
cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the
whole integrity of knowledge--all these things were already there, and
had been there for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined
and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as
"German" culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as
instinct--in short, as reality. . . All gone for naught! Overnight it
became merely a memory !--The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility,
taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration,
faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yes to
everything entering into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all the
senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality,
truth, life . . --All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of
nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But
brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not
conquered,--only sucked dry! . . . Hidden vengefulness, petty envy,
became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by
bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on
top!--One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example,
St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy
fellows came to the top. It would be an error, however, to assume that
there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian
movement:--ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness,
these fathers of the church! What they lacked was something quite
different. Nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to give them even the most
modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts. . .
Between ourselves, they are not even men. . . . If Islam despises
Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least
assumes that it is dealing with men. . . .
60.
Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization,
and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan
civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was
fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes
than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (--I do not say by what
sort of feet--) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts
for its origin--because it said yes to life, even to the rare and
refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! . . . The crusaders later made
war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them
to have grovelled in the dust--a civilization beside which even that of
our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile."--What they
wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put
aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing
more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was
in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German
nobility was to be won . . . The German noble, always the "Swiss guard"
of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the
church--but well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely the
aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the
church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on
earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The
German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization:
the reason is obvious. . . Christianity, alcohol--the two great means of
corruption. . . . Intrinsically there should be no more choice between
Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The
decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here.
Either a man is a Chandala or he is not. . . . "War to the knife with
Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was
the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors,
Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit,
before he can feel decently? I can't make out how a German could ever
feel Christian. . . .
61.
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred
times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the
last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the
Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what
the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,--an attempt
with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius
to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values.
. . . This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been
a more critical question than that of the Renaissance--it is my question
too--; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more
direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of
the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of
Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say,
to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs
and appetites of those sitting there . . . I see before me the
possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle :--it
seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and
delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally
divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another
such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the
same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the
gods on Olympus to immortal laughter--Caesar Borgia as pope! . . . Am I
understood? . . . Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph
that I alone am longing for today--: by it Christianity would have been
swept away!--What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This
monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him,
raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of
grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place:
the conquest of Christianity at its capital--instead of this, his hatred
was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of
himself.--Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment
when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the
peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal
chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life!
Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!
. . . And Luther restored the church: he attacked it. . . . The
Renaissance--an event without meaning, a great futility !--Ah, these
Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility--that has always been the
work of the Germans.--The Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant and so-called
German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire-every time a
futile substitute for something that once existed, for something
irrecoverable . . . These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise
all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before
every honest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled
and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their
conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way
measures, that Europe is sick of,--they also have on their conscience
the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most
incurable and indestructible--Protestantism. . . . If mankind never
manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame. . . .
62.
--With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn
Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of
all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to
me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the
ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church
has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value
into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into
baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian"
blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to
abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make
itself immortal. . . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the church
that first enriched mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls
before God"--this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the
base-minded--this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern
idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order--this is
Christian dynamite. . . . The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity
forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of
self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for
all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism"
of Christianity!--Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with
its anaemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all
the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the
cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy
ever heard of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness
of soul--against life itself. . . .
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all
walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the
blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great
curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of
revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean
and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human
race. . . .
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality
befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from its
last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values! . . .
THE END
FOOTNOTES created and inserted by H.L. Mencken:
1. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth hook of Herodotus. The
Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in
the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth.
2. The lowest of the Hindu castes.
3. That is, in Pandora's box.
4. John iv, 22.
5. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of "Das Leben Jesu"
(1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.
6. The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable that Semantik is
what Nietzsche had in mind.
7. One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.
8. The reputed founder of Taoism.
9. Nietzsche's name for one accepting his own philosophy.
10. That is, the strict letter of the law--the chief target of Jesus's
early preaching.
11. A reference to the "pure ignorance" (reine Thorheit) of Parsifal.
12. Matthew v, 34.
13. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was
Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
14. So in the text. One of Nietzsche's numerous coinages, obviously
suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel.
15. To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48.
16. A paraphrase of Demetrius' "Well roar'd, Lion!" in act v, scene 1 of
"A Midsummer Night's Dream." The lion, of course, is the familiar
Christian symbol for Mark.
17. Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.
18. The quotation also includes verse 47.
19. And 17.
20. Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.
21. A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even gods struggle in
vain."
22. The word training is in English in the text.
23. I Corinthians i, 27, 28.
24. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also
occasionally called ephecticism.
25. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its famous school of
Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of
the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination, David
F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28. [RETURN TO TEXT]
26. The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of
Priests."
27. The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the
direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than
lies."
28. A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft"
(Critique of Practical Reason).
29. I Corinthians vii, 2, 9.
30. Few men are noble.
THE ANTICHRIST
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Published 1895
translation by H.L. Mencken
Published 1920
This Book Scanned and Archived at Nietzsche's Labyrinth
FOOTNOTES created and inserted by H.L. Mencken:
1. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth hook of Herodotus. The
Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in
the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth.
2. The lowest of the Hindu castes.
3. That is, in Pandora's box.
4. John iv, 22.
5. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of "Das Leben Jesu"
(1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.
6. The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable that Semantik is
what Nietzsche had in mind.
7. One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.
8. The reputed founder of Taoism.
9. Nietzsche's name for one accepting his own philosophy.
10. That is, the strict letter of the law--the chief target of Jesus's
early preaching.
11. A reference to the "pure ignorance" (reine Thorheit) of Parsifal.
12. Matthew v, 34.
13. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was
Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
14. So in the text. One of Nietzsche's numerous coinages, obviously
suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel.
15. To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48.
16. A paraphrase of Demetrius' "Well roar'd, Lion!" in act v, scene 1 of
"A Midsummer Night's Dream." The lion, of course, is the familiar
Christian symbol for Mark.
17. Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.
18. The quotation also includes verse 47.
19. And 17.
20. Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.
21. A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even gods struggle in
vain."
22. The word training is in English in the text.
23. I Corinthians i, 27, 28.
24. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also
occasionally called ephecticism.
25. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its famous school of
Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of
the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination, David
F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28. [RETURN TO TEXT]
26. The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of
Priests."
27. The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the
direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than
lies."
28. A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft"
(Critique of Practical Reason).
29. I Corinthians vii, 2, 9.
30. Few men are noble.
THE ANTICHRIST
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Published 1895
translation by H.L. Mencken
Published 1920
This Book Scanned and Archived at Nietzsche's Labyrinth