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THE ANTICHRIST 1.
óLet us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreansówe know well enough how remote
our place is. ìNeither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreansî:
even Pindar,[1] in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice,
beyond deathóour 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?óThe man of today?óìI donít know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesnít
know either the way out or the way inîóso sighs the man of today.... This is the sort
of modernity that made us ill,ówe sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compro mise, the whole
virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that
ìforgivesî everything because it ìunderstandsî 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 fateóit 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 ìresignationî... There was
thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcastófor we had not yet found
the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal....
[1] Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth book of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans
were a mythical people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed
unbroken happiness and perpetual youth. 2.
What is good?óWhatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself,
in man.
What is evil?óWhatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?óThe feeling that power increasesóthat 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?óPractical sympathy for the botched and the weakóChristianity....
3.
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures
(óman is an endó): 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;óand out of that terror
the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd
animal, the sick brute-manóthe Christian.... 4.
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level,
as progress is now understood. This ìprogressî 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 instinctsóthe strong
man as the typical reprobate, the ìoutcast among men.î 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!ó 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 usedóand I wish to emphasize
the fact againówithout 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 ìvirtueî and ìgodliness.î As you probably surmise, I
understand rottenness in the sense of dÈcadence: my argument is that all the values on which
mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are dÈcadence-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 ìhigher feelings,î
the ìideals of humanityîóand it is possible that Iíll have to write itówould 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 willóthat the values of dÈcadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest
names. 7.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.óPity 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 energyóa loss out of all proportion to the
magnitude of the cause (óthe 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 (óin every superior moral system it appears as a weaknessó);
going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other
virtuesóbut 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 denialópity
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 rÙle of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of dÈcadenceópity
persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesnít say ìextinctionî: one says ìthe
other world,î or ìGod,î or ìthe true life,î 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 Schopenhauerís case (and also,
alack, in that of our whole literary dÈcadence, 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 hereóall this is our business, all this is our sort of humanity, by this
sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!ó 8.
It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists: theologians and all who
have any theological blood in their veinsóthis 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 (óthe alleged
free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be a jokeóthey have no passion
about such things; they have not sufferedó). 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 ìidealistsîóamong 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 (óand not only in his hand!);
he launches them with benevolent contempt against ìunderstanding,î ìthe senses,î
ìhonor,î ìgood living,î ìscienceî; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious
and seductive forces, on which ìthe soulî soars as a pure thing-in-itselfóas 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 oneís
eyes upon oneís 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 ìGod,î ìsalvationî
and ìeternity.î 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 in fluence of theologians is felt there
is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts ìtrueî and ìfalseî are forced to change
places: whatever is most damaging to life is there called ìtrue,î and whatever exalts
it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called
ìfalse.î... When theologians, working through the ìconsciencesî of princes (or of peoplesó),
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
Christianityóand of reason.... One need only utter the words ìT¸bingen Schoolî to get
an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottomóa 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 teachersówhy 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 ìtrue world,î the concept of morality
as the essence of the world (óthe 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 ìappearanceî; 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.ó
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 ìvirtue,î as Kant would have it, is pernicious. ìVirtue,î ìduty,î
ìgood for its own sake,î goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal
validityóthese are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay,
the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Kˆnigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded
by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find
his own 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 ìimpersonalî duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.óTo
think that no one has thought of Kantís categorical imperative as dangerous to life!... The theological
instinct alone took it under protection!óAn 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 pleasureóas a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe
for dÈcadence, and no less for idiocy.... Kant became an idiot.óAnd such a man was
the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopheróstill
passes today!... I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans.... Didnít Kant see
in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the
organic? Didnít 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, ìthe tendency
of mankind toward the goodî could be explained, once and for all time? Kantís answer: ìThat
is revolution.î Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against
nature, German dÈcadence as a philosophyóthat is Kant! ó
12.
I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the rest havenít
the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts
and prodigiesóthey regard ìbeautiful feelingsî as arguments, the ìheaving breastî as the
bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion of truth. In the end, with
ìGermanî innocence, Kant tried to give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption,
this dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it ìpractical reason.î He deliberately
invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it was desirable not to trouble with
reasonóthat is, when morality, when the sublime command ìthou shalt,î 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 mankindówhen a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that
he is the mouthpiece of super natural imperativesówhen such a mission inflames 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!óAnd hitherto the priest has
ruled!óHe has determined the meaning of ìtrueî and ìnot trueî!...
13.
Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a
ìtransvaluation of all values,î a visualized declaration of war and victory against all
the old concepts of ìtrueî and ìnot true.î 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 ìdecentî peopleóhe passed as ìan enemy of God,î as a scoffer at the
truth, as one ìpossessed.î As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala[2].... We have
had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against usótheir every notion of what the
truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to beótheir every ìthou
shaltî was launched against us.... Our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful
manneróall appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.óLooking back,
one may almost ask oneís 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-*** of God!
[2] The lowest of the Hindu castes. 14.
We have unlearned something. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive
man from the ìspirit,î from the ìgodheadî; 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 re
sults 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 instinctsóthough
for all that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting!óAs 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 ìfree willî;
now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer describes anything
that we can understand. The old word ìwillî now connotes only a sort of result, an individual
reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious
stimulióthe will no longer ìacts,î or ìmoves.î... Formerly it was thought that manís consciousness,
his ìspirit,î 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 coilóthen only the important part of him, the ìpure
spirit,î would remain. Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness,
or ìthe spirit,î 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
unnecessarilyówe deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously.
The ìpure spiritî is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses,
the so-called ìmortal shell,î and the rest is miscalculationóthat is all!...
15.
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It
offers purely imaginary causes (ìGod,î ìsoul,î ìego,î ìspirit,î ìfree willîóor even
ìunfreeî), and purely imaginary effects (ìsin,î ìsalvation,î ìgrace,î ìpunishment,î
ìforgiveness of sinsî). Intercourse between imaginary beings (ìGod,î ìspirits,î ìsoulsî);
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 feelingsófor example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with
the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdashó, ìrepentance,î ìpangs of conscience,î
ìtemptation by the devil,î ìthe presence of Godî); an imaginary teleology (the ìkingdom
of God,î ìthe last judgment,î ìeternal lifeî).óThis purely fictitious world, greatly
to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter at least
reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept
of ìnatureî had been opposed to the concept of ìGod,î the word ìnaturalî necessarily
took on the meaning of ìabominableîóthe whole of that fictitious world has its sources
in hatred of the natural (óthe real!ó), 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 dÈcadence.... 16.
A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same conclusion.óA
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 virtuesóit 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.óSuch a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries;
he must be able to play either friend or foeóhe 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 doesnít 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?óTrue 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 ìpeace of
soul,î hate-no-more, leniency, ìloveî 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 poweróin
which case they are national godsóor incapacity for poweróin 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 dÈcadence. The divinity of this dÈcadence, 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
ìthe good.î... 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 ìgoodness-in-itselfî 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 latterís god.óThe good god, and the devil like himóboth are abortions of dÈcadence.óHow
can we be so tolerant of the naÔvetÈ of Christian theologians as to join in their
doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from ìthe god of Israel,î the god
of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?óBut
even Renan does this. As if Renan had a right to be naÔve! 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 becomes the poor manís god, the sinnerís god, the invalidís god par excellence, and
the attribute of ìsaviourî or ìredeemerî remains as the one essential attribute of
divinityójust what is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a reduction
of the godhead imply?óTo be sure, the ìkingdom of Godî has thus grown larger. Formerly he
had only his own people, his ìchosenî 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 cosmopolitanóuntil now he
has the ìgreat majorityî on his side, and half the earth. But this god of the ìgreat
majority,î 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 dÈcadent.... Even the palest of the pale are able to master himómessieurs
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 busi ness of spinning the world out of his inmost
being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he became ever thinner and paleróbecame the ìideal,î
became ìpure spirit,î became ìthe absolute,î became ìthe thing-in-itself.î... The collapse
of a god: he became a ìthing-in-itself.î 18.
The Christian concept of a godóthe god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner
of cobwebs, the god as a spiritóis 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 ìhere and now,î and for every lie about
the ìbeyondî! 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 religionóand 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 dÈcadence. A
curse lies upon them because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude
and contradiction a part of their instinctsóand since then they have not managed to create
any more gods. Two thousand years have come and goneóand not a single new god! Instead,
there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,óas if he were the ultimatum and maximum
of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankindóthis 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 dÈcadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses
of the soul find their sanction!ó 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 religionsóthey are both dÈcadence religionsóbut 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.óBuddhism is a hundred
times as realistic as Christianityóit 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, ìgod,î 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 ìstruggle with sin,î
but, yielding to reality, of the ìstruggle with suffering.î Sharply differentiating
itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral concepts behind it; it
is, in my phrase, beyond good and evil.óThe 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 ìimpersonal.î (óBoth 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 oneís own account
or on account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or
good cheeróhe 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
(óit is always possible to leaveó). 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 (óìenmity never brings an end to enmityî: 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 ìobjectivityî (that is, in the individualís loss of interest
in himself, in loss of balance and of ìegoismî), he combats by strong efforts to lead even
the spiritual interests back to the ego. In Buddhaís teaching egoism is a duty. The ìone
thing needful,î the question ìhow can you be delivered from suffering,î regulates and
determines the whole spiritual diet. (óPerhaps one will here recall that Athenian who also
declared war upon pure ìscientificality,î 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 edu cated 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.ó
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 ìGodî) is pumped
up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as ìgrace.î
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 (óthe 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 oneís 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 ìaristocraticîóalong with a sort of secret rivalry with them (óone
resigns oneís ìbodyî to them; one wants only oneís ìsoulî...). 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-tortureóin
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
(óEurope is not yet ripe for itó): 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 illóto
make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for ìcivilizing.î Buddhism is a religion
for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has
so much as begunóunder 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 sinóit simply says, as it simply thinks, ìI suffer.î 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 ìdevilî was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent
and terrible enemyóthere was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such
an enemy.ó
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 worldsóthe road to the one and the
road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact thoroughlyóthis 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.óHope, 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 itóso high, indeed, that no fulfilment
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]óIn
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 ***. 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 instinctóit makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.óLove
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 overcomeóit is scarcely even noticed.óSo much for the
three Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian ingenuities.óBuddhism
is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such
way.ó
[3] That is, in Pandoraís box. 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 sprungóit 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, ìsalvation is of the Jews.î[4]óThe 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.ó
[4] John iv, 22.
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 conditionsóone 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 ìpeople of God,î 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 ìGenealogy of Moralsî 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 lifeóthat is, to well-being,
to power, to beauty, to self-approvalóthe 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 dÈcadenceónot as if mastered by them, but
as if detecting in them a power by which ìthe worldî could be defied. The Jews are the
very opposite of dÈcadents: 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 dÈcadent movements (ófor example, the Christianity
of Pauló), 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,óthat
is to say, to the priestly classódÈcadence 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 ìgoodî and ìbad,î ìtrueî and ìfalseî 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 existenceóabove 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.óThis 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 judgeóa vision best visualized in the typical prophet
(i. e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.óBut 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 changedóthe conception of him
was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paid for keeping him.óJahveh, the god
of ìjusticeîóhe is in accord with Israel no more, he no longer vizualizes 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 ìsinî: that
most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a ìmoral order of the worldî is
set up, and the fundamental concepts, ìcauseî and ìeffect,î are stood on their heads.
Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment
some sort of un-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the
denial of nature follow it. A god who demandsóin 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 lifeóa fundamental perversion of the fancy, an ìevil
eyeî on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its
innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of ìsinî; well-being represented as a danger,
as a ìtemptationî; a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience....
26.
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;óbut even here Jewish
priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with
it!óThese 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 ìmoral order of the worldî runs through the whole
of philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a ìmoral order of the worldî?
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 be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God; that
the destinies of a people or of an individual are controlled by this will of God, which
rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.óIn 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
ìthe kingdom of Godî; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained
ìthe will of Godî; 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 ageóduring which priests had not yet come into existence.
Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israelís history they fashioned, according
to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely ìgodless.î
They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: ìobedient or disobedient to God.îóThey
went a step further: the ìwill of Godî (in other words some means necessary for preserving
the power of the priests) had to be determinedóand to this end they had to have a ìrevelation.î
In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and ìholy scripturesî
had to be concoctedóand so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and
much lamentation over the long days of ìsinî now ended, they were duly published. The ìwill
of God,î it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected
the ìholy scripturesî.... But the ìwill of Godî 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 (ónot 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 ìthe will of Godî
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 ìsacrificeî (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite
put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize itóin his own phrase, to ìsanctifyî 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 ìmoral order of the worldî). The fact requires a sanctionóa
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.óDisobedience to God, which actually means to the priest,
to ìthe law,î now gets the name of ìsinî; the means prescribed for ìreconciliation
with Godî are, of course, precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the
thumb of the priest; he alone can ìsaveî.... Psychologically considered, ìsinsî 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 ìsinningî....
Prime axiom: ìGod forgiveth him that repentethîóin 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 classóit grew up
as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. The
ìholy people,î 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 ìunholy,î
ìworldly,î ìsinfulîóthis people put its instinct into a final for mula that was logical
to the point of self-annihilation: as Christianity it actually denied even the last form of reality,
the ìholy people,î the ìchosen people,î 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 redivivusóin 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 churchóìchurchî being
here used in exactly the same sense that the word has today. It was an insurrection against
the ìgood and just,î against the ìprophets of Israel,î against the whole hierarchy of
societyónot against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was
unbelief in ìsuperior men,î 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 ìwatersîóit 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 ìsinners,î the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt
against the established order of thingsóand in language which, if the Gospels are to be
credited, would get him sent to Siberia todayóthis 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 sinsóthere is not the slightest ground
for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others. ó
28.
As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradictionówhether, in fact, this
was the only contradiction he was cognizant ofóthat is quite another question. Here,
for the first time, I touch upon the problem of the psychology of the Saviour.óI 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.[5] At 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 ìtraditionî?
How can any one call pious legends ìtraditionsî? The histories of saints present the most dubious
variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in the entire
ab sence of corroborative documents, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the
startóit is simply learned idling....
[5] David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of ìDas Leben Jesuî (1835-6), a very famous
work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.
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
charactersóthat 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.óAll the attempts
that I know of to read the history of a ìsoulî 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 (ìhÈrosî). 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: (ìresist not evil!îóthe 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 ìglad tidingsî?óThe
true life, the life eternal has been foundóit 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 GodóJesus claims nothing for himself aloneóas
the child of God each man is the equal of every other man.... Imagine making Jesus a
hero!óAnd what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word ìgeniusî! Our whole
conception of the ìspiritual,î 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 ìintangible,î
into the ìincomprehensibleî; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time
and space, for everything establishedócustoms, institutions, the churchó; a feeling of being
at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely ìinnerî world, a ìtrueî
world, an ìeternalî world.... ìThe Kingdom of God is within youî....
30.
The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritationóso
great that merely to be ìtouchedî 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 irritationóso great that it senses
all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (óthat 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 dangerousólove, 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 dÈcadent: I was the first to recognize him.óThe fear of pain, even of
infinitely slight painóthe 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 usóa world apparently out of
a Russian novel, in which the *** of society, nervous maladies and ìchildishî idiocy keep
a trystómust, 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 allóin 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 Baptistóall 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 strangeóit does not even
see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood
of this most interesting dÈcadentóI 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 dÈcadence, 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 Indiaís, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy
of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renanís malice as ìle grand
maÓtre en ironie.î I myself havenít 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 ìgodî 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 Gospelsóìthe second coming,î ìthe last judgment,î all
sorts of expectations and promises, current at the time.ó
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 impÈrieux, used by Renan, is alone enough to annul the
type. What the ìglad tidingsî 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 faithóit 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 de nounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come
with ìthe swordîóit 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 ìscripturesî:
it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own ìkingdom
of God.î This faith does not formulate itselfóit 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 (óthat of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to
this categoryóan 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, semantics[6] 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,[7] and among Chinese
he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]óand in neither case would it have made any difference
to him.óWith a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a
ìfree spiritî[9]óhe cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever
is established killeth. The idea of ìlifeî 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: ìlifeî or ìtruthî or ìlightî is his word for the innermostóin
his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance
only as sign, as allegory.óHere 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
artóhis ìwisdomî is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. He has never heard of
culture; he doesnít have to make war on itóhe doesnít even deny it.... The same thing may
be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour, of waróhe has no
ground for denying ìthe world,î for he knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept of ìthe
worldî.... Denial is precisely the thing that is impossible to him.óIn the same way
he lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a ìtruth,î
may be established by proofs (óhis proofs are inner ìlights,î subjective sensations
of happiness and self-approval, simple ìproofs of powerîó). Such a doctrine cannot contradict:
it doesnít 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
ìblindnessî with sincere sympathyófor it alone has ìlightîóbut it does not offer
objections....
[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] Nietzscheís name for one accepting his own philosophy.
[10] That is, the strict letter of the lawóthe chief target of Jesusís early preaching.
[11] A reference to the ìpure ignoranceî (reine Thorheit) of Parsifal.
33.
In the whole psychology of the ìGospelsî the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking,
and so is that of reward. ìSin,î which means anything that puts a distance between God
and man, is abolishedóthis is precisely the ìglad tidings.î Eternal bliss is not merely
promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only realityówhat
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 ìbeliefî 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 (ìneighbour,î 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 (ìSwear not at allî).[12] He never under any circumstances divorces
his wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity.óAnd under all of this is one principle; all of
it arises from one instinct.ó
[12] Matthew v, 34.
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of lifeóand so was his death....
He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with Godónot 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 oneís self ìdivine,î ìblessed,î
ìevangelical,î a ìchild of God.î Not by ìrepentance,î not by ìprayer and forgivenessî
is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to Godóit is itself ìGod!îóWhat the Gospels
abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of ìsin,î ìforgiveness of sin,î ìfaith,î
ìsalvation through faithîóthe whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the ìglad
tidings.î
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is
ìin heavenî and is ìimmortal,î despite many reasons for feeling that he is not ìin
heavenî: this is the only psychological reality in ìsalvation.îóA 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 ìtruthsî óthat he saw everything else,
everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials
for parables. The concept of ìthe Son of Godî does not connote a concrete person in
history, an isolated and definite individual, but an ìeternalî 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 ìkingdom of God,î and of the ìsonship of
God.î Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God
as a person, of a ìkingdom of Godî that is to come, of a ìkingdom of heavenî beyond,
and of a ìson of Godî as the second person of the Trinity. All thisóif I may be forgiven
the phraseóis like thrusting oneís 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 ìFatherî and ìSonîónot, of course, to every oneó:
the word ìSonî expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation
of all things (beatitude), and ìFatherî expresses that feeling itselfóthe sensation
of eternity and of perfection.óI am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made
of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story[13] at the threshold of the Christian
ìfaithî? And a dogma of ìimmaculate conceptionî for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed
conception of its immaculatenessó
[13] Amphitryon was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was Alcmene. During his
absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
The ìkingdom of heavenî is a state of the heartónot something to come ìbeyond the
worldî or ìafter death.î 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 ìhour of deathî is not a Christian
ideaóìhours,î time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer
of ìglad tidings.î... The ìkingdom of Godî is not something that men wait for: it had
no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a ìmillenniumîóit
is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
35.
This ìbearer of glad tidingsî died as he lived and taughtónot to ìsave mankind,î
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 accusersóhis demeanour on the
cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off
the most extreme penaltyómore, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with
those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend oneís self, not to show anger, not
to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil Oneóto love him....
36.
óWe free spiritsówe are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding
what nineteen centuries have misunderstoodóthat instinct and passion for integrity which makes
war upon the ìholy lieî 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 divinityís 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 Gospelsóthat in the concept of the ìchurchî the very
things should be pronounced holy that the ìbearer of glad tidingsî regards as beneath
him and behind himóit would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical
ironyó 37.
óOur 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
Christianityóand that everything spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite
to the contrary, the whole history of Christianityófrom the death on the cross onwardóis 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 barbarousóit
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 churchóthe 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.óChristian
valuesónoble values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have re-established this greatest
of all antitheses in values!... 38.
óI cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker
than the blackest melancholyócontempt 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 todayóI 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 madhouse of a world, call it ìChristianity,î ìChristian faithî
or the ìChristian church,î as you willóI 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
indecentóit is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins.óI look
about me: not a word survives of what was once called ìtruthî; 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 liesóand that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through
ìinnocenceî or ìignorance.î The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no
longer any ìGod,î or any ìsinner,î or any ìSaviourîóthat ìfree willî and the
ìmoral order of the worldî are liesó: 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 areóas the worst counterfeits in existence, invented
to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually isóas
the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation.... We know, our
conscience now knowsójust 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,óthe concepts ìthe
other world,î ìthe last judgment,î ìthe immortality of the soul,î the ìsoulî itself:
they are all merely so many 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 peopleóand
yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian!... Whom, then, does Christianity
deny? what does it call ìthe worldî? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot;
to defend oneís self; to be careful of oneís honour; to desire oneís 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!ó
39.
óI shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.óThe very
word ìChristianityî is a misunderstandingóat bottom there was only one Christian, and he
died on the cross. The ìGospelsî died on the cross. What, from that moment onward,
was called the ìGospelsî was the very reverse of what he had lived: ìbad tidings,î a Dysangelium.[14]
It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in ìfaith,î 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 trueóas 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 ìChristianîóhe
who for two thousand years has passed as a Christianóis simply a psycho logical self-delusion.
Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his ìfaith,î he has been ruled only
by his instinctsóand what instincts!óIn all agesófor example, in the case of Lutheróìfaithî
has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts have
played their gameóa shrewd blindness to the domination of certain of the instincts....
I have already called ìfaithî the specially Christian form of shrewdnessópeople always
talk of their ìfaithî 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 placeóand
the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!óViewed 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 heartóthis remains a spectacle for the godsófor 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 (óand 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 apeóin its application to the Christians
a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness....
[14] So in the text. One of Nietzscheís numerous coinages, obviously suggested by Evangelium,
the German for gospel. 40.
óThe fate of the Gospels was decided by deathóit hung on the ìcross.î... It was only death,
that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved
for the canaille onlyóit was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to
face with the real riddle: ìWho was it? what was it?îóThe feeling of dis may, of profound
affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their
cause; the terrible question, ìWhy just in this way?îóthis 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: ìWho put him to death? who was his
natural enemy?îóthis question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism,
its ruling class. From that moment, one found oneís 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 ressentimentóa
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 deathóthough 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: ìrecompenseî and ìjudgmentî became necessary (óyet what could be less
evangelical than ìrecompense,î ìpunishment,î and ìsitting in judgmentî!). Once more the
popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was
rivetted upon an historical moment: the ìkingdom of Godî is to come, with judgment upon his
enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the ìkingdom of
Godî as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation,
the fulfilment, the realization of this ìkingdom of God.î It was only now that all the familiar
contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character
of the Masteróhe 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 ressentiment....
41.
óAnd from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: ìhow could God allow it!î
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!óJesus
him self had done away with the very concept of ìguilt,î 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 ìglad tidingsî.... And not as a mere privilege!óFrom 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 ìblessedness,î the whole and only reality of the gospels,
is juggled awayóin 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: ìIf Christ did not rise from the dead, then all
our faith is in vain!îóAnd 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 earthóreal, not merely promised. For this remainsóas I have already pointed
outóthe essential difference between the two religions of dÈcadence: Buddhism promises
nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.óHard
upon the heels of the ìglad tidingsî came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul
is incarnated the very opposite of the ìbearer of glad tidingsî; 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 gospelsónothing 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 historyóhe 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 ìSaviour.î... 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 deathónothing
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 existenceóin the lie
of the ìrisenî Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviourówhat 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 himselfóthis would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist.
Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means.... What he himself didnít believe
was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.óWhat he
wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for poweróhe 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? Paulís invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing
the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soulóthat is to say, the doctrine of
ìjudgmentî.... 43.
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in ìthe beyondîóin
nothingnessóthen one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal
immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinctóhenceforth, 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 ìmeaningî of life.... Why
be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together,
trust one another, or concern oneís self about the common welfare, and try to serve
it?... Merely so many ìtemptations,î so many strayings from the ìstraight path.îóìOne
thing only is necessaryî.... That every man, because he has an ìimmortal soul,î is as
good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the ìsalvationî 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 behalfóit
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 triumphóit 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 ìsalvation of the soulîóin plain English: ìthe world
revolves around me.î... The poisonous doctrine, ìequal rights for all,î 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 civilizationóout 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 ìimmortalityî to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most
vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.óAnd 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 equalsófor
the pathos of distance.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!óThe aristocratic
attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief
in the ìprivileges of the majorityî makes and will continue to make revolutionsóit
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 ìlowlyî lowers....
44.
óThe 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.óThese gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind
every word. I confessóI hope it will not be held against meóthat it is precisely for
this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologistóas the opposite of all
merely naÔve 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 ìholinessî unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation
of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an artóall 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 againóhe 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 utilitiesóthis 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 humanó), 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.óOf 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,óand
it is precisely because I cannot read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing
that I have made an end of them.... I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling
up their eyes.óFor the majority, happily enough, books are mere literature.óLet us
not be led astray: they say ìjudge not,î 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 ofóstill more, which they must have in order to remain on topóthey
assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue
may prevail. ìWe live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the goodî (óìthe truth,î
ìthe light,î ìthe kingdom of Godî): 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 a duty: 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! ìVirtue
itself shall bear witness for us.î... One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction:
these petty folks fasten themselves to moralityóthey know the uses of morality! Morality is the
best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!óThe fact is that the conscious
conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that they, the
ìcommunity,î the ìgood and just,î range themselves, once and for always, on one side,
the side of ìthe truthîóand the rest of mankind, ìthe world,î 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 ìGod,î ìthe truth,î
ìthe light,î ìthe spirit,î ìlove,î ìwisdomî and ìlife,î as if these things were synonyms
of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the ìworldî; 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
the last 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 ìreformedî confession.ó
45.
óI offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into their headsówhat
they have put into the mouth of the Master: the unalloyed creed of ìbeautiful souls.îó
ìAnd 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 *** and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that cityî (Mark vi,
11)óHow evangelical!...
ìAnd 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 seaî
(Mark ix, 42).óHow evangelical!...
ìAnd 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.î (Mark ix, 47.[15])óIt is not exactly the
eye that is meant....
[15] To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48.
ìVerily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste
of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.î (Mark ix, 1.)óWell
lied, lion![16]....
[16] A paraphrase of Demetriusí ìWell roaríd, Lion!î in act v, scene 1 of ìA Midsummer
Nightís Dream.î The lion, of course, is the familiar Christian symbol for Mark.
ìWhosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow
me. For...î (Note of a psychologist. Christian morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons
are against it,óthis makes it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.ó
ìJudge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you
again.î (Matthew vii, 1.[17])óWhat a notion of justice, of a ìjustî judge!...
[17] Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.
ìFor 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?î (Matthew v, 46.[18])óPrinciple of ìChristian loveî: it insists upon being
well paid in the end....
[18] The quotation also includes verse 47.
ìBut if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.î
(Matthew vi, 15.)óVery compromising for the said ìfather.î...
ìBut seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall
be added unto you.î (Matthew vi, 33.)óAll 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....
ìRejoice 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.î (Luke vi, 23.)óImpudent rabble!
It compares itself to the prophets....
ìKnow ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you?
If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy,
which temple ye are.î (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.[19])óFor that sort of thing one
cannot have enough contempt....
[19] And 17.
ìDo ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged
by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?î (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)óUnfortunately,
not merely the speech of a lunatic.... This frightful impostor then proceeds: ìKnow ye
not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?î...
ìHath 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 hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;
and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things
which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.î
(Paul, 1 Corinthians i, 20ff.[20])óIn order to understand this passage, a first-rate example
of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my ìGenealogy
of Moralsî: 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....
[20] Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29. 46.
óWhat 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 ìearly
Christiansî for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to
them.... Neither has a pleasant smell.óI 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 upwardóthe instinct for cleanliness
is lacking.... Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these
evil instincts. It is all coward ice; 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 CÊsar Borgia to the Duke
of Parma: ìË tutto festoîóimmortally 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 ìearly Christianî is surely not befouled.... On
the contrary, it is an honour to have an ìearly Christianî as an opponent. One cannot read
the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abusesónot to speak of the
ìwisdom of this world,î which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of ìby the foolishness
of preaching.î... 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. Hypocrisyóas
if this were a charge that the ìearly Christiansî dared to make!óAfter all, they were the privileged,
and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The ìearly Christianîóand
also, I fear, the ìlast Christian,î whom I may perhaps live to seeóis a rebel against
all privilege by profound instinctóhe lives and makes war for ever for ìequal rights.î...
Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own
person, the ìchosen of Godîóor to be a ìtemple of God,î or a ìjudge of the angelsîóthen
every other criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and
pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply ìworldlyîóevil in itself....
Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an ìearly Christianî is a lie, and his
every act is instinctively dishonestóall 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.
óMust 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 seriouslyóthat was quite
beyond him. One Jew more or lessówhat did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman,
before whom the word ìtruthî was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with
the only saying that has any valueóand that is at once its criticism and its destruction:
ìWhat is truth?...î 47.
óThe thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history,
or in nature, or behind natureóbut that we regard what has been honoured as God, not
as ìdivine,î but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as
a crime against life.... We deny that God is God.... If any one were to show us this
Christian God, weíd be still less inclined to believe in him.óIn a formula: deus, qualem
Paulus creavit, dei negatio.óSuch 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 ìwisdom of this world,î which is
to say, of scienceóand 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. ìFaith,î as an
imperative, vetoes scienceóin praxi, lying at any price.... Paul well knew that lyingóthat
ìfaithîówas necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.óThe God that
Paul invented for himself, a God who ìreduced to absurdityî ìthe wisdom of this worldî
(especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only
an indication of Paulís resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to
give oneís own will the name of God, thoraóthat is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose
of the ìwisdom of this worldî: his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of
the Alexandrine schoolóon 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 ìholy books,î and as a physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration
of the typical Christian. The physician says ìincurableî; the philologian says ìfraud.î...
48.
óHas any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bibleóof
Godís 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, ìGodî faces only one great danger.ó
The old God, wholly ìspirit,î 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.[21] What does he do? He creates manóman is entertaining.... But then he notices that
man is also bored. Godís pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises
knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. Godís first mistake: to man these
other animals were not entertainingóhe sought dominion over them; he did not want to be
an ìanimalî himself.óSo God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an endóand
also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.óìWoman, at bottom, is a
serpent, Hevaîóevery priest knows that; ìfrom woman comes every evil in the worldîóevery
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.óWhat 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 godlikeóit is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!óMoral:
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.óìThou shall
not knowî:óthe rest follows from that.óGodís mortal terror, however, did not hinder him
from being shrewd. How is one to protect oneís self against science? For a long while this
was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thoughtóand
all thoughts are bad thoughts!óMan must not think.óAnd so the priest invents distress,
death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above
all, sicknessónothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man donít
allow him to think.... Neverthelessóhow terrible!ó, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft,
invading heaven, shadowing the godsówhat is to be done?óThe old God invents war; he
separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (óthe priests have always had
need of war....). Waróamong other things, a great disturber of science!óIncredible!
Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.óSo the old God comes to
his final resolution: ìMan has become scientificóthere is no help for it: he must be drowned!î...
[21] A paraphrase of Schillerís ìAgainst stupidity even gods struggle in vain.î
49.
óI have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of
the priest.óThe priest knows of only one great danger: that is scienceóthe sound comprehension
of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditionsóa
man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to ìknow.î... ìTherefore,
man must be made unhappy,îóthis has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.óIt
is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:óìsin.î...
The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole ìmoral order of the world,î was set up against
scienceóagainst 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.óAway with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour.óThe concept
of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of ìgrace,î of ìsalvation,î of ìforgivenessîólies
through and through, and absolutely without psychological realityówere devised to destroy
manís sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!óAnd
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 ìnatural,î but are regarded as
produced by the ghostly creations of superstitionóby ìGod,î by ìspirits,î by ìsoulsîóand
reckoned as merely ìmoralî consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons,
then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyedóthen the greatest of crimes against
humanity has been perpetrated.óI repeat that sin, manís 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.ó
50.
óIn this place I canít permit myself to omit a psychology of ìbelief,î of the ìbeliever,î
for the special benefit of ìbelievers.î If there remain any today who do not yet know
how indecent it is to be ìbelievingîóor how much a sign of dÈcadence, of a broken
will to liveóthen they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the
deaf.óIt appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among Christians
a sort of criterion of truth that is called ìproof by power.î ìFaith makes blessed:
therefore it is true.îóIt might be objected right here that blessedness is not dem onstrated,
it is merely promised: it hangs upon ìfaithî as a conditionóone shall be blessed because
one believes.... But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly
transcendental ìbeyondîóhow is that to be demonstrated?óThe ìproof by power,î
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: ìI believe that faith makes for blessednessótherefore,
it is true.î... But this is as far as we may go. This ìthereforeî would be absurdum
itself as a criterion of truth.óBut let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness
by faith may be demonstrated (ónot merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the
suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessednessóin a technical term, pleasureóever
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 ìWhat is true?î or, at all
events, it is enough to make that ìtruthî highly suspicious. The proof by ìpleasureî
is a proof of ìpleasureîónothing 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?óThe 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.óWhat, then, is the meaning of integrity in things
intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn
ìbeautiful feelings,î and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!óFaith
makes blessed: therefore, it lies.... 51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness
produced by an idÈe 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 healthóthe actual ulterior purpose of the whole system
of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itselfódoesnít it set
up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?óThe whole earth as a madhouse?óThe
sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical dÈcadent; the moment at which
a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the
ìinner worldî of the religious man is so much like the ìinner worldî of the overstrung
and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the ìhighestî states of mind,
held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid
in formóthe 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
training[22] in 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 ìconvertedî to Christianityóone
must first be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the courage for health and likewise
for contempt,ówe 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 ìvirtueî of
insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that
persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a ìperfect soulî in a cadaver of a
body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of ìperfection,î
a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called ìholinessîóa 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 (ówho 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 dÈcadence 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 ìnational,î it was not based on raceóit 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 coreóthe
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
Paulís priceless saying: ìAnd 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 despisedî:[23]
this was the formula; in hoc signo the dÈcadence triumphed.óGod on the crossóis man always
to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?óEverything 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 itóChristianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.ó
[22] The word training is in English in the text.
[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28. 52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,ósick 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 ìintellect,î upon the superbia of the healthy
intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state
of ìfaithî 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 priestórevealed
by a glance at himóis a phenomenon resulting from dÈcadence,óone 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 dÈcadence. ìFaithî 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. ìWhatever makes for illness
is good; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is evilî: so
argues the believer. The impulse to lieóit is by this that I recognize every foreordained
theologian.óAnother 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 profitóthe
capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution,
patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis[24] in interpretation:
whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with
weather statisticsónot to mention the ìsalvation of the soul.î... The way in which a theologian,
whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a ìpassage of Scripture,î
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 Suabia[25] use the
ìfinger of Godî to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into
a miracle of ìgrace,î a ìprovidenceî and an ìexperience of salvationî? 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 heíd have to be
abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-manóat
bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance.... ìDivine Prov idence,î
which every third man in ìeducated Germanyî 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!...
[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also occasionally called
ephecticism.
[25] A reference to the University of T¸bingen 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 Nietzscheís pet abomination, David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide ß 10 and
ß 28. 53.
óIt 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 ìtruth,î 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 manís 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.... ìTruth,î 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.óThe 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)óthis
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.óBut why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one
had laid down his life for it?óAn 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?óOne best disposes of a cause
by respectfully putting it on iceóthat 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 opposedóthat 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?óBut about
all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands
of yearsóZarathustra.
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 teachingówhat doth that prove? Verily, it is more when oneís
teaching cometh out of oneís own burning![26]
[26] The quotations are from ìAlso sprach Zarathustraî ii, 24: ìOf Priests.î
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 scep ticism. 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 himóand 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 scepticís 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 themóit knows itself to be sovereign.óOn the contrary, the need of faith, of something
unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of
weakness. The man of faith, the ìbelieverî of any sort, is necessarily a dependent manósuch
a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The ìbelieverî
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 ìfaith.î 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
infalliblyóthese are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the
same token they are antagonists of the truthful manóof the truth.... The believer is not
free to answer the question, ìtrueî or ìnot true,î 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 fanaticóSavonarola, Luther,
Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simonóthese 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 massesófanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing
poses to listening to reasons.... 55.
óOne step further in the psychology of conviction, of ìfaith.î 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. (ìHuman, All-Too-Human,î I, aphorism 483.)[27] This time I desire to
put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?óAll
the world believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!óEvery 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?óSometimes
all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction
in the son.óI 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.óNow, 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 tonguesóthat morality almost owes
its very survival to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?óìThis
is our conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for itólet us respect
all who have convictions!îóI 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, ìGod,î ìthe will of Godî
and ìthe revelation of Godî at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative,
was on the same road: this was his practical 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 reasonóthat 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 lieóthe question,
ìtrueî or ìuntrue,î 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 know what is true. But this is more than man can know; therefore, the priest is simply
the mouthpiece of God.óSuch a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian;
the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of ìrevelationî belong to the general priestly typeóto the
priest of the dÈcadence as well as to the priest of pagan times (óPagans are all those
who say yes to life, and to whom ìGodî is a word signifying acquiescence in all things).óThe
ìlaw,î the ìwill of God,î the ìholy book,î and ìinspirationîóall these things are
merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with which he
maintains his power,óthese concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations,
and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The ìholy lieîócommon
alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian churchóis not
even wanting in Plato. ìTruth is hereî: this means, no matter where it is heard, the
priest lies....
[27] The aphorism, which is headed ìThe Enemies of Truth,î makes the direct statement: ìConvictions
are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.î
[28] A reference, of course, to Kantís ìKritik der praktischen Vernunftî (Critique of Practical
Reason). 56.
óIn the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity,
ìholyî 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 sinótherefore, its means are also bad.óI
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,óit
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 lifeóthe sun shines upon the whole book.óAll the things
on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarityófor example, procreation, women
and marriageóare 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: ìto avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every
woman have her own husband; ... it is better to marry than to burnî?[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.
ìThe mouth of a woman,î it says in one place, ìthe *** of a maiden, the prayer of a
child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure.î In another place: ìthere is nothing
purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath
of a maiden.î Finally, in still another placeóperhaps this is also a holy lieó: ìall the orifices
of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is
the whole body pure.î
[29] 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9. 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 Manuóby putting
these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot
evade the necessity of making Christianity contemptible.óA 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 ìthou shall,î on which obedience
is based. The problem lies exactly here.óAt 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 liveóor can liveóhas
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 experimentationóthe continuation of the state in which values
are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infinitum. 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 oneís 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.óThe 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 automatismóa 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 Manuís means to lay before a people the
possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfectionóit 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.óThe 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 ìmodern idea,î 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 mediocrityóthe last-named represents the great majority, and the first
two the select. The superior casteóI call it the fewestóhas, 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 uglinessóor indignation against the general aspect of things. Indigna
tion is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. ìThe world is perfectîóso
prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life.
ìImperfection, whatever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the
Chandala themselves are parts of this perfection.î 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.... Knowledgeóa form of asceticism.óThey 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.óThe 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 rulingótheir followers,
their right hand, their most apt disciples.óIn all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary,
nothing ìmade upî; whatever is to the contrary is made upóby 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 typesóthe inequality of rights is essential
to the existence of any rights at all.óA 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 heightsóthe 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 heartóit 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 workingmanís instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment
with his petty existenceówho make him envious and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies
in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of ìequalî rights.... What is bad? But I
have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.óThe anarchist
and the Christian have the same ancestry....
[30] Few men are noble. 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 ìeternalî
social organization,óChristianity 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, dilletantismóthose holy anarchists made it a matter of ìpietyî
to destroy ìthe world,î which is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not
a stone stood upon anotheróand even Germans and other such louts were able to become its
masters.... The Christian and the anarchist: both are dÈcadents; 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,óovernight
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,óthis 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, noth ing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being,
or even dreamed of!óThis organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the
accident of personality has nothing to do with such thingsóthe first principle of all
genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest
of all forms of corruptionóagainst 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 realityóthis cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated
gang gradually alienated all ìsouls,î 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 revengeóall 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 uponónot paganism, but ìChristianity,î
which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment
and immortality.óHe combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianityóto
deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation.óEpicurus had triumphed, and every
respectable intellect in Rome was Epicureanówhen Paul appeared ... Paul, the Chandala hatred
of Rome, of ìthe world,î in the flesh and inspired by geniusóthe 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 ìworld conflagrationî might be kindled; how, with the symbol of
ìGod on the cross,î all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in
the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. ìSalvation is of the Jews.îóChristianity
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 ìSaviourî as his own inventions, and not only into the
mouthóhe 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 ìthe worldî of its value, that the concept of ìhellî would master
Romeóthat the notion of a ìbeyondî 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.óAnd, 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?óAll the prerequisites to a learned culture, all
the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable
art of read ing profitablyóthat 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,óthe 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:óand 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 today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline,
for ourselvesófor certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in
our bodiesóthat is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness
in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledgeóall 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 ìGermanî culture, with its loutish
manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinctóin short, as reality.... All gone for naught!
Overnight it became merely a memory!óThe 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....óAll 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, anÊmic vampires! Not conquered,óonly 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!óOne 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:óah, but they were
clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was
something quite different. Nature neglectedóperhaps forgotóto 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 (óI do not say by what sort of feetó)
Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its originóbecause 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 dustóa civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century
seems very poor and very ìsenile.îóWhat they wanted, of course, was ***: 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 ìSwiss guardî of the church, always in the service of every
bad instinct of the churchóbut 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, alcoholóthe 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.... ìWar to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship
with Islam!î: 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 canít 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 reapóthe Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be
understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,óan 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 Renaissanceóit
is my question tooó; 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 valuesóthat
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:óit 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 laughteróCÊsar Borgia as pope!... Am I understood?... Well
then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for todayó: by it
Christianity would have been swept away!óWhat 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 capitalóinstead of
this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself.óLuther
saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the oppo site 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 Renaissanceóan event without meaning, a great
futility!óAh, these Germans, what they have not cost us! Futilityóthat has always been
the work of the Germans.óThe Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy;
the war of ìliberationî; the empireóevery 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,óthey also have on their conscience
the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructibleóProtestantism....
If man kind never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame....
62.
óWith 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 ìhumanitarianî 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!óThe
ìequality of souls before Godîóthis fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-mindedóthis
explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing
the whole social order óthis is Christian dynamite.... The ìhumanitarianî 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 ìhumanitarianismî of Christianity!óParasitism
as the only practice of the church; with its anÊmic and ìholyî 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,óagainst
health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soulóagainst life itself....
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls
are to be foundóI 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,óI
call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race....
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befellófrom the first
day of Christianity!óWhy not rather from its last?óFrom today?óThe transvaluation
of all values!...
THE END