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Title: The Antichrist Author: Friedrich Nietzsche Date: 1895 Language: en Topics: anti-christian, nihilism, democracy, elitism, morality Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is
yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my
“Zarathustra”: how could I confound myself with those who are now
sprouting ears?—First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men
are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily
understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness,
my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of
hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to
looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath
him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth
whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an
inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage
for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth.
The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for
what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto
remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner—to hold
together his strength, his enthusiasm.... Reverence for self; love of
self; absolute freedom of self....
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my
readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?—The rest are merely
humanity.—One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in
loftiness of soul,—in contempt.
—Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well
enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water will you
find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar,[1] in his day, knew
that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our
life, our happiness.... We have discovered that happiness; we know the
way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the
labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The man of today?—“I don’t know either
the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out
or the way in”—so sighs the man of today.... This is the sort of
modernity that made us ill,—we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compro
mise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This
tolerance and largeur of the heart that “forgives” everything because it
“understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice
than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!... We were brave
enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time
finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us
fatalists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of
powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far
as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation”...
There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became
overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness:
a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal....
What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power,
power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is
overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not
virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue
free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.
And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched
and the weak—Christianity....
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the
order of living creatures (—man is an end—): but what type of man must
be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of
life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but
always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately
willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it
has been almost the terror of terrors;—and out of that terror the
contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic
animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man—the Christian....
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or
stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This “progress”
is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of
today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the
Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean
elevation, enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various
parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in
these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which,
compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such
happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain
possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and
nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to
the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of
evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the strong man as
the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken
the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out
of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it
has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are
intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual
values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most
lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his
intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually
destroyed by Christianity!—
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn
back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is
at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation
against humanity. It is used—and I wish to emphasize the fact
again—without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the
rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters
where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward “virtue” and
“godliness.” As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the
sense of décadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind
now fixes its highest aspirations are décadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its
instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A
history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”—and it is
possible that I’ll have to write it—would almost explain why man is so
degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for
survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will
to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest
values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of
décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands in opposition
to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of
aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through
pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a
thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain
circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living
energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the
case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there
is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of
pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a
menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole
law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves
whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those
disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of
the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious
aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (—in every superior
moral system it appears as a weakness—); going still further, it has
been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other
virtues—but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint
of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of
life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of
pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial—pity is the technic of
nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands
against all those instincts which work for the preservation and
enhancement of life: in the rĂ´le of protector of the miserable, it is a
prime agent in the promotion of décadence—pity persuades to
extinction.... Of course, one doesn’t say “extinction”: one says “the
other world,” or “God,” or “the true life,” or Nirvana, salvation,
blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of
religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one
reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the
tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why
pity appeared to him as a virtue.... Aristotle, as every one knows, saw
in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was
an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The
instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any
such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing
in Schopenhauer’s case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary
décadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that
it may burst and be discharged.... Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all
our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to
be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here—all this is our business,
all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we
Hyperboreans!—
It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists:
theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins—this
is our whole philosophy.... One must have faced that menace at close
hand, better still, one must have had experience of it directly and
almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly
(—the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems
to me to be a joke—they have no passion about such things; they have not
suffered—). This poisoning goes a great deal further than most people
think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard
themselves as “idealists”—among all who, by virtue of a higher point of
departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with
suspicion.... The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of
lofty concepts in his hand (—and not only in his hand!); he launches
them with benevolent contempt against “understanding,” “the senses,”
“honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such things as beneath him,
as pernicious and seductive forces, on which “the soul” soars as a pure
thing-in-itself—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness,
had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable
horrors and vices.... The pure soul is a pure lie.... So long as the
priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is
accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the
question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when
the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its
representative....
Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it
everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and
dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this
condition is called faith: in other words, closing one’s eyes upon one’s
self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood.
People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this
false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty
vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once
they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of “God,” “salvation”
and “eternity.” I unearth this theological instinct in all directions:
it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to
be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false:
there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of
self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any
way, or even getting stated. Wherever the in fluence of theologians is
felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts “true” and
“false” are forced to change places: whatever is most damaging to life
is there called “true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves
it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called “false.”...
When theologians, working through the “consciences” of princes (or of
peoples—), stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt
as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic
will exerts that power....
Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological
blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the
grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum
originale. Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of
Christianity—and of reason.... One need only utter the words “Tübingen
School” to get an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottom—a
very artful form of theology.... The Suabians are the best liars in
Germany; they lie innocently.... Why all the rejoicing over the
appearance of Kant that went through the learned world of Germany,
three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of preachers and
teachers—why the German conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a
change for the better? The theological instinct of German scholars made
them see clearly just what had become possible again.... A backstairs
leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the “true world,”
the concept of morality as the essence of the world (—the two most
vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle
and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no
longer refutable.... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so
far.... Out of reality there had been made “appearance”; an absolutely
false world, that of being, had been turned into reality.... The success
of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and
Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity, already far from
steady.—
A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention;
it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case
it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces
it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of
“virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good
for its own sake,” goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of
universal validity—these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an
expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit
of Königsberg. 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 “impersonal” duty,
every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.—To think that no one
has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...
The theological instinct alone took it under protection!—An action
prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the
amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his
bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection....
What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without
inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a
mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for décadence, and no less
for idiocy.... Kant became an idiot.—And such a man was the contemporary
of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German
philosopher—still passes today!... I forbid myself to say what I think
of the Germans.... Didn’t Kant see in the French Revolution the
transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic?
Didn’t he ask himself if there was a single event that could be
explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on
the basis of it, “the tendency of mankind toward the good” could be
explained, once and for all time? Kant’s answer: “That is revolution.”
Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt
against nature, German décadence as a philosophy—that is Kant! —
I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of
philosophy: the rest haven’t the slightest conception of intellectual
integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and
prodigies—they regard “beautiful feelings” as arguments, the “heaving
breast” as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the
criterion of truth. In the end, with “German” innocence, Kant tried to
give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of
intellectual conscience, by calling it “practical reason.” He
deliberately invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it
was desirable not to trouble with reason—that is, when morality, when
the sublime command “thou shalt,” was heard. When one recalls the fact
that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development
from the old type of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this
fraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable. When a man feels that he has a
divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind—when a
man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the
mouthpiece of super natural imperatives—when 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!—And hitherto
the priest has ruled!—He has determined the meaning of “true” and “not
true”!...
Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits,
are already a “transvaluation of all values,” a visualized declaration
of war and victory against all the old concepts of “true” and “not
true.” The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the
most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All the methods,
all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets
for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined
to them he was excluded from the society of “decent” people—he passed as
“an enemy of God,” as a scoffer at the truth, as one “possessed.” As a
man of science, he belonged to the Chandala[2].... We have had the whole
pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion of what the
truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be—their
every “thou shalt” was launched against us.... Our objectives, our
methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner—all appeared to them as
absolutely discreditable and contemptible.—Looking back, one may almost
ask one’s self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense
that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was
picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their
senses. It was our modesty that stood out longest against their
taste.... How well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God!
We have unlearned something. We have become more modest in every way. We
no longer derive man from the “spirit,” from the “godhead”; 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 instincts—though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most
interesting!—As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first
had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole
of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine.
Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we
know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have
regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his
inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called “free
will”; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer
describes anything that we can understand. The old word “will” now
connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows
inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious
stimuli—the will no longer “acts,” or “moves.”... Formerly it was
thought that man’s consciousness, his “spirit,” offered evidence of his
high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised,
tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly
things, to shuffle off his mortal coil—then only the important part of
him, the “pure spirit,” would remain. Here again we have thought out the
thing better: to us consciousness, or “the spirit,” appears as a symptom
of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping,
a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force
unnecessarily—we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it
is done consciously. The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity:
take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called “mortal
shell,” and the rest is miscalculation—that is all!...
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of
contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (“God,”
“soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—or even “unfree”), and purely
imaginary effects (“sin,” “salvation,” “grace,” “punishment,”
“forgiveness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,”
“spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a
total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology
(misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or
disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the states of the nervus
sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical
balderdash—, “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” “temptation by the
devil,” “the presence of God”); an imaginary teleology (the “kingdom of
God,” “the last judgment,” “eternal life”).—This 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
“nature” had been opposed to the concept of “God,” the word “natural”
necessarily took on the meaning of “abominable”—the whole of that
fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (—the real!—),
and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of
reality.... This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for
living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to
suffer from reality one must be a botched reality.... The preponderance
of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and
religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for
décadence....
A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same
conclusion.—A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own
god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to survive,
to its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into
a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his
riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices....
Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful
for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.—Such a god must be
able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either
friend or foe—he is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the
evil he does. But the castration, against all nature, of such a god,
making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human
inclination. Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good
god; it doesn’t have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for its
own existence.... What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of
anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps never
experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one
would understand such a god: why should any one want him?—True enough,
when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its
own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see
submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as
measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then
becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels “peace of soul,”
hate-no-more, leniency, “love” of friend and foe. He moralizes
endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the god of
every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan.... Formerly he
represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive
and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is simply the good
god.... The truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: either
they are the will to power—in which case they are national gods—or
incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good....
Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is
always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence. The
divinity of this décadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions,
is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the
weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call
themselves “the good.”... No hint is needed to indicate the moments in
history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first
became possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce
their own god to “goodness-in-itself” also prompts them to eliminate all
good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on
their masters by making a devil of the latter’s god.—The good god, and
the devil like him—both are abortions of décadence.—How can we be so
tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in their
doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from “the god of
Israel,” the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all
goodness, is to be described as progress?—But even Renan does this. As
if Renan had a right to be naĂŻve! 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
man’s god, the sinner’s god, the invalid’s god par excellence, and the
attribute of “saviour” or “redeemer” remains as the one essential
attribute of divinity—just what is the significance of such a
metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of the godhead imply?—To be
sure, the “kingdom of God” has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only
his own people, his “chosen” people. But since then he has gone
wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given
up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home
everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan—until now he has the “great
majority” on his side, and half the earth. But this god of the “great
majority,” this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god:
on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god
of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the
world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the
underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.... And he himself is
so pale, so weak, so décadent.... Even the palest of the pale are able
to master him—messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the
intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that finally he
was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another
metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old busi ness of
spinning the world out of his inmost being sub specie Spinozae;
thereafter he became ever thinner and paler—became the “ideal,” became
“pure spirit,” became “the absolute,” became “the thing-in-itself.”...
The collapse of a god: he became a “thing-in-itself.”
The Christian concept of a god—the god as the patron of the sick, the
god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit—is one of the most
corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably
touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God
degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its
transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on
nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander
upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! In him
nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!...
The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this
Christian god does little credit to their gift for religion—and not much
more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of such
a moribund and worn-out product of the décadence. A curse lies upon them
because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and
contradiction a part of their instincts—and since then they have not
managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come and
gone—and not a single new god! Instead, there still exists, and as if by
some intrinsic right,—as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the
power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind—this pitiful
god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay, conjured
up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the
instincts of décadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul
find their sanction!—
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a
related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to
Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions—they
are both décadence religions—but they are separated from each other in a
very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all
the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of
India.—Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity—it is
part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively
and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical
speculation. The concept, “god,” was already disposed of before it
appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be
encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which
is a strict phenomenalism). It does not speak of a “struggle with sin,”
but, yielding to reality, of the “struggle with suffering.” Sharply
differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception
that lies in moral concepts behind it; it is, in my phrase, beyond good
and evil.—The two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and
upon which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive
sensitiveness to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined
susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a
too protracted concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the
influence of which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion
of the “impersonal.” (—Both of these states will be familiar to a few of
my readers, the objectivists, by experience, as they are to me). These
physiological states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to combat
it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a
life of travel; moderation in eating and a careful selection of foods;
caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of
the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no
worry, either on one’s own account or on account of others. He
encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good cheer—he
finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. He understands good, the
state of goodness, as something which promotes health. Prayer is not
included, and neither is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative
nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery (—it is always
possible to leave—). These things would have been simply means of
increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For the same
reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his teaching
is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion, ressentiment
(—“enmity never brings an end to enmity”: the moving refrain of all
Buddhism....) And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these
passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are unhealthful.
The mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too
much “objectivity” (that is, in the individual’s loss of interest in
himself, in loss of balance and of “egoism”), he combats by strong
efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego. In
Buddha’s teaching egoism is a duty. The “one thing needful,” the
question “how can you be delivered from suffering,” regulates and
determines the whole spiritual diet. (—Perhaps one will here recall that
Athenian who also declared war upon pure “scientificality,” to wit,
Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality).
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.—
Under Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed
come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their
salvation in it. Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for
boredom is the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of
conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called “God”) is pumped
up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a
gift, as “grace.” Here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and
the darkened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is
denounced as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness
(—the first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed the
public baths, of which there were 270 in Cordova alone). Christian, too,
is a certain cruelty toward one’s self and toward others; hatred of
unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in
the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most
respectable names, are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to
engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian,
again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the
“aristocratic”—along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (—one
resigns one’s “body” to them; one wants only one’s “soul”...). And
Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of
freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the
senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general....
When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest
orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power
among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men,
but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self-torture—in brief,
strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists,
the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely
a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the
contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency
to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas.
Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to
obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the
sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the
disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms,
whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a
religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that
have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (—Europe is not yet ripe
for it—): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and
cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain
hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey;
its modus operandi is to make them ill—to make feeble is the Christian
recipe for taming, for “civilizing.” Buddhism is a religion for the
closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears
before civilization has so much as begun—under certain circumstances it
lays the very foundations thereof.
Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more
objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to
suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says,
as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering in
itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an
explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny
his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word
“devil” was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible
enemy—there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such
an enemy.—
At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong
to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little
consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed to
be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of
ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds—the road to the one and
the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact
thoroughly—this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage. The
Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows it.
When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he has
been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually sinful,
but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is thus exalted above
everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and
patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a
forbidden road.—Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more
powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.
Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict
with actuality can dash it—so high, indeed, that no 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]—In order that love may be
possible, God must become a person; in order that the lower instincts
may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of
the woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy
that of the men there must be a virgin. These things are necessary if
Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some
aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion as to what
a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly strengthens the
vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct—it makes the cult
warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.—Love is the state in which man
sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of illusion
reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for
transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any other
time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which
would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer
is overcome—it is scarcely even noticed.—So much for the three Christian
virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian
ingenuities.—Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too full of
positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.—
Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The
first thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to
be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung—it is not
a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it
is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the
words of the Saviour, “salvation is of the Jews.”[4]—The second thing to
remember is this: that the psychological type of the Galilean is still
to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is
at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve
in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Saviour of
mankind.—
The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for
when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they
chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this
price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all
naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the
outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which,
hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to
live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct
opposition to natural conditions—one by one they distorted religion,
civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a
contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same
phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a
copy: the Christian church, put beside the “people of God,” shows a
complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the
Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their
influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that
today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it
is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
In my “Genealogy of Morals” I give the first psychological explanation
of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble
morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere
product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system
belongs to the second division, and in every detail. In order to be able
to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of
life—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval—the
instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent
an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil
and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people
gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found
themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily,
and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those
instincts which make for décadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if
detecting in them a power by which “the world” could be defied. The Jews
are the very opposite of décadents: 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 décadent movements (—for example, the Christianity of
Paul—), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly
saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for power under
Judaism and Christianity,—that is to say, to the priestly
class—décadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have
a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of
“good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only
dangerous to life, but also slanders it.
The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt
to denaturize all natural values: I point to five facts which bear this
out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel
maintained the right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural
attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power,
its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for
victory and salvation and through him they expected nature to give them
whatever was necessary to their existence—above all, rain. Jahveh is the
god of Israel, and consequently the god of justice: this is the logic of
every race that has power in its hands and a good conscience in the use
of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this
self-approval stand revealed. The nation is grateful for the high
destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the
benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its
herds and its crops.—This view of things remained an ideal for a long
while, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows:
anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained,
as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who
was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge—a vision best
visualized in the typical prophet (i. e., critic and satirist of the
moment), Isaiah.—But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no
longer could do what he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But
what actually happened? Simply this: the conception of him was
changed—the conception of him was denaturized; this was the price that
had to be paid for keeping him.—Jahveh, the god of “justice”—he is in
accord with Israel no more, he no longer 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 “sin”: that most fraudulent of
all imaginable interpretations, whereby a “moral order of the world” is
set up, and the fundamental concepts, “cause” and “effect,” are stood on
their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by
doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of un-natural causation
becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature
follow it. A god who demands—in place of a god who helps, who gives
counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of
courage and self-reliance.... Morality is no longer a reflection of the
conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people;
it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become
abstract and in opposition to life—a fundamental perversion of the
fancy, an “evil eye” on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian
morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the
idea of “sin”; well-being represented as a danger, as a “temptation”; a
physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience....
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;—but
even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel
ceased to be of any value: out with it!—These priests accomplished that
miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the
documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the
face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the
past of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they
converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all
offences against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was
rewarded. We would regard this act of historical falsification as
something far more shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical
interpretation of history for thousands of years had not blunted our
inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And the philosophers support
the church: the lie about a “moral order of the world” runs through the
whole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a “moral
order of the world”? That there is a thing called the will of God which,
once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought
not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is
to 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.—In place of all that pitiable lie reality has this
to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at
the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he
calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the
value of all things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby
that state of affairs is attained “the will of God”; with cold-blooded
cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the
extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly
order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood
the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its
long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that
great age—during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of
the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned,
according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites
or men entirely “godless.” They reduced every great event to the idiotic
formula: “obedient or disobedient to God.”—They went a step further: the
“will of God” (in other words some means necessary for preserving the
power of the priests) had to be determined—and to this end they had to
have a “revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had to
be perpetrated, and “holy scriptures” had to be concocted—and so, with
the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamentation
over the long days of “sin” now ended, they were duly published. The
“will of God,” it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was
that mankind had neglected the “holy scriptures”.... But the “will of
God” had already been revealed to Moses.... What happened? Simply this:
the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest
meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to
the smallest (—not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the
priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known
just what he wanted, what “the will of God” was.... From this time
forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable
everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at
marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the “sacrifice” (that is,
at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded
to denaturize it—in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it.... For this should
be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the
state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and
of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short,
everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute
worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of
priests (or, if you chose, by the “moral order of the world”). The fact
requires a sanction—a power to grant values becomes necessary, and the
only way it can create such values is by denying nature.... The priest
depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he can
exist at all.—Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest,
to “the law,” now gets the name of “sin”; the means prescribed for
“reconciliation with God” are, of course, precisely the means which
bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can
“save”.... Psychologically considered, “sins” are indispensable to every
society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable
weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him
that there be “sinning”.... Prime axiom: “God forgiveth him that
repenteth”—in plain English, him that submitteth to the priest.
Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything
natural, every natural value, every reality was opposed by the deepest
instincts of the ruling class—it grew up as a sort of war to the death
upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. The “holy
people,” who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all
things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected
everything of the earth as “unholy,” “worldly,” “sinful”—this people put
its instinct into a final for mula that was logical to the point of
self-annihilation: as Christianity it actually denied even the last form
of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” Jewish reality
itself. The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small
insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is
simply the Jewish instinct redivivus—in other words, it is the priestly
instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as
a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic
than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that
necessary to an ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actually
denies the church....
I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to
have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the
Jewish church—“church” being here used in exactly the same sense that
the word has today. It was an insurrection against the “good and just,”
against the “prophets of Israel,” against the whole hierarchy of
society—not against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order,
formalism. It was unbelief in “superior men,” a Nay flung at everything
that priests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy that was
called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the
structure of piles which, above everything, was necessary to the safety
of the Jewish people in the midst of the “waters”—it represented their
last possibility of survival; it was the final residuum of their
independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon
the most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to
live, that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who
aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and “sinners,” the
Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of
things—and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would
get him sent to Siberia today—this man was certainly a political
criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly
unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the cross: the
proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the
cross. He died for his own sins—there is not the slightest ground for
believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins
of others. —
As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction—whether, in
fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of—that is quite
another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem of
the psychology of the Saviour.—I confess, to begin with, that there are
very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My
difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned
curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable
triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars,
enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist
the work of the incomparable Strauss.[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 “tradition”? How can any one call pious legends
“traditions”? The histories of saints present the most dubious variety
of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in
the entire ab sence of corroborative documents, seems to me to condemn
the whole inquiry from the start—it is simply learned idling....
What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type
might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and
however much overladen with extraneous characters—that is, in spite of
the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his
legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of mere truthful
evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the
question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been
handed down to us.—All the attempts that I know of to read the history
of a “soul” in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable
psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has
contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining
the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero
(“héros”). But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is
surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is
precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict:
the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something
moral: (“resist not evil!”—the most profound sentence in the Gospels,
perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of
gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad
tidings”?—The true life, the life eternal has been found—it is not
merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in
love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of
distances. Every one is the child of God—Jesus claims nothing for
himself alone—as the child of God each man is the equal of every other
man.... Imagine making Jesus a hero!—And what a tremendous
misunderstanding appears in the word “genius”! Our whole conception of
the “spiritual,” the whole conception of our civilization, could have
had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of
the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here.... We
all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which
causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from
every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion,
such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all
reality, a flight into the “intangible,” into the “incomprehensible”; a
distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for
everything established—customs, institutions, the church—; a feeling of
being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely
“inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal” world.... “The Kingdom of
God is within you”....
The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme
susceptibility to pain and irritation—so great that merely to be
“touched” becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.
The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and
distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to
pain and irritation—so great that it senses all resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (—that is to say, as
harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and
regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer
necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or
dangerous—love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life....
These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the
doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime
super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What
stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of
Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation
of paganism. Epicurus was a typical décadent: I was the first to
recognize him.—The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain—the end
of this can be nothing save a religion of love....
I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is
the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a
greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many
reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure
form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange
figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been
imprinted by the history, the destiny, of the early Christian
communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type
retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving
the purposes of war and of propaganda. That strange and sickly world
into which the Gospels lead us—a world apparently out of a Russian
novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and “childish”
idiocy keep a tryst—must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the
first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an
existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their
own crudity, in order to understand it at all—in their sight the type
could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar
mould.... The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of
morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist—all these merely
presented chances to misunderstand it.... Finally, let us not underrate
the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it
tends to erase from the venerated objects all its original traits and
idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange—it does not even see them. It
is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the
neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent—I mean some one who
would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime,
the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type
of the décadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and
contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of.
Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that case
tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas
we have reasons for assuming the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a
contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore
and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike
India’s, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and
ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan’s malice as “le grand
maître en ironie.” I myself haven’t any doubt that the greater part of
this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the
Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda:
we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn
their leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians
had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle
theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a “god” that met
that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain
ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the
Gospels—“the second coming,” “the last judgment,” all sorts of
expectations and promises, current at the time.—
I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the
fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the very word impérieux, used by
Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What the “glad tidings” tell
us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of
heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an
embattled faith—it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a
sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at
all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in
the living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is
not furious, it does not de nounce, it does not defend itself: it does
not come with “the sword”—it does not realize how it will one day set
man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by
rewards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it is itself, first and last,
its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of
God.” This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so
guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment,
of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain
sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a
Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last
supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else
Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not
to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, 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]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to
him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call
Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the
word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as
an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to
every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of
inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the
innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all
nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here
it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations
lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a
symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of
worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all
knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom”
is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things. He has never heard
of culture; he doesn’t have to make war on it—he doesn’t even deny
it.... The same thing may be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoise
social order, of labour, of war—he has no ground for denying “the
world,” for he knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept of “the
world”.... Denial is precisely the thing that is impossible to him.—In
the same way he lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an
article of faith, a “truth,” may be established by proofs (—his proofs
are inner “lights,” subjective sensations of happiness and
self-approval, simple “proofs of power”—). Such a doctrine cannot
contradict: it doesn’t know that other doctrines exist, or can exist,
and is wholly incapable of imagining anything opposed to it.... If
anything of the sort is ever encountered, it laments the “blindness”
with sincere sympathy—for it alone has “light”—but it does not offer
objections....
In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the concepts of guilt and
punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which means
anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished—this is
precisely the “glad tidings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor
is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality—what
remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.
The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of
life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a “belief” that
marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of
action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or
in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction
between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles (“neighbour,” of
course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he
despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds
their mandates (“Swear not at all”).[12] He never under any
circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her
infidelity.—And under all of this is one principle; all of it arises
from one instinct.—
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of
life—and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual
in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of
the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was
only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self “divine,”
“blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by
“prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to
God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in
the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through
faith”—the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the
“glad tidings.”
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he
will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons
for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological
reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith....
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this:
that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”
—that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and
historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of
“the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an
isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological
symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in
the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom
of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian
than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom
of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son
of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be
forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what
an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to
world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what
is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”—not, of course, to every
one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a
general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses
that feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am
ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has
it not set an Amphitryon story[13] at the threshold of the Christian
“faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And
thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness—
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come
“beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is
absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is
absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world,
useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian
idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence
for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not
something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after
tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience
of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save
mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he
bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers,
before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he
does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most
extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves
with those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend one’s self, not
to show anger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to
the Evil One—to love him....
—We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to
understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct
and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more
than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our
benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit
which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle
things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own
advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the
Gospels....
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity’s hand in the great
drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the
stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind
should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the
origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of
the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer
of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be
impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical irony—
—Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude
itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and
Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity—and that everything
spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary,
the whole history of Christianity—from the death on the cross onward—is
the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original
symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder
masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to
it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous—it
absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the
imperium Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly
reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become
as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar
to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself
to power as the church—the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility
to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the
spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian values—noble
values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have re-established this
greatest of all antitheses in values!...
—I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited
by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. Let
me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of
today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of
today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all
who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous
self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of
this madhouse of a world, call it “Christianity,” “Christian faith” or
the “Christian church,” as you will—I take care not to hold mankind
responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out
irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age knows
better.... What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent—it is
indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins.—I look
about me: not a word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no
longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes
the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a
priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually
lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence”
or “ignorance.” The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no
longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any “Saviour”—that “free will” and
the “moral order of the world” are lies—: serious reflection, the
profound self-conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he
does not know it.... All the ideas of the church are now recognized for
what they are—as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase
nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually
is—as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of
creation.... We know, our conscience now knows—just what the real value
of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what
ends they have served, with their debasement of humanity to a state of
self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,—the concepts
“the other world,” “the last judgment,” “the immortality of the soul,”
the “soul” itself: they are all merely so many instruments of torture,
systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains
master.... Every one knows this, but nevertheless things remain as
before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of
self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of
men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves
Christians and go to the communion-table?... A prince at the head of his
armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his
people—and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a
Christian!... Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call “the
world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one’s
self; to be careful of one’s honour; to desire one’s own advantage; to
be proud ... every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that
shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of
falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and
without shame, a Christian!—
—I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of
Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding—at
bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The
“Gospels” died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called
the “Gospels” was the very reverse of what he had lived: “bad tidings,”
a Dysangelium.[14] It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in
“faith,” and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the
distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life,
the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian.... To this
day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even necessary:
genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages.... Not
faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state of
being.... States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for
example, of anything as true—as every psychologist knows, the value of
these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of
the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual
causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of
Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of
consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact,
there are no Christians. The “Christian”—he who for two thousand years
has passed as a Christian—is simply a psycho logical self-delusion.
Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his “faith,” he has been
ruled only by his instincts—and what instincts!—In all ages—for example,
in the case of Luther—“faith” has been no more than a cloak, a pretense,
a curtain behind which the instincts have played their game—a shrewd
blindness to the domination of certain of the instincts.... I have
already called “faith” the specially Christian form of shrewdness—people
always talk of their “faith” and act according to their instincts.... In
the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing that so much as
touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an instinctive hatred
of reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of
Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even here, in psychologicis,
there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals,
which is to say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine
reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity crumbles to
nothingness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion
not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in
devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart—this
remains a spectacle for the gods—for those gods who are also
philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the
celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their disgust leaves
them (—and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the
Christians: perhaps because of this curious exhibition alone the
wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from
omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us not
underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false to the point of
innocence, is far above the ape—in its application to the Christians a
well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness....
—The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”...
It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the
cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this
appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real
riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dis may, of profound
affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a
refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this
way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything
must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a
reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all
chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death?
who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a
lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that
moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order,
and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established
order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in
his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present
its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what
was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by
this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of
ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all!
All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to
offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the
most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving
his death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in
the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves,
with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the
contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge,
that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should
perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary
(—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,”
and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming
of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an
historical moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with judgment upon
his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding:
imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere promise! The
Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the
realization of this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the
familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians
began to appear in the character of the Master—he 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....
—And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: “how could
God allow it!” To which the deranged reason of the little community
formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his
son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end
of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and
barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty!
What appalling paganism!—Jesus him self had done away with the very
concept of “guilt,” he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God
and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was precisely
his “glad tidings”.... And not as a mere privilege!—From this time
forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the
doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as
a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of which the
entire concept of “blessedness,” the whole and only reality of the
gospels, is juggled away—in favour of a state of existence after
death!... St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in
all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent
conception, in this way: “If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all
our faith is in vain!”—And at once there sprang from the Gospels the
most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the shameless doctrine
of personal immortality.... Paul even preached it as a reward....
One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the
death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a
Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth—real, not
merely promised. For this remains—as I have already pointed out—the
essential difference between the two religions of décadence: Buddhism
promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises
everything, but fulfils nothing.—Hard upon the heels of the “glad
tidings” came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated
the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the
genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred.
What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all,
the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the
teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole
gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred
had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical
truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the
same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday
and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own
history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history
of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to
his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his
“Saviour.”... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in
order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the
Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his
death, even the consequences of his death—nothing remained untouched,
nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply
shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this
existence—in the lie of the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for
the life of the Saviour—what he needed was the death on the cross, and
something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home
was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an
hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even
to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination
himself—this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed
the end; therefore he also willed the means.... What he himself didn’t
believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread
his teaching.—What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more
reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and
symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and
organizing mobs. What was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed
borrowed later on? Paul’s invention, his device for establishing
priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality
of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment”....
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in
“the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of
gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all
reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts
that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is
a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning:
this is now the “meaning” of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take
any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one
another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare, and try to
serve it?... Merely so many “temptations,” so many strayings from the
“straight path.”—“One thing only is necessary”.... That every man,
because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that
in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual
may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the
three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly
suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt
upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to
insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable
flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured
all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole
refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The “salvation of the
soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves around me.”... The poisonous
doctrine, “equal rights for all,” has been propagated as a Christian
principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct
Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and
distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first
prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of
civilization—out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its
chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and
high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.... To allow
“immortality” to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious
outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.—And let us not
underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon
politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for
the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and
his equals—for the pathos of distance.... Our politics is sick with this
lack of courage!—The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined
by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the “privileges of
the majority” makes and will continue to make revolutions—it is
Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert
every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a
revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that
is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers....
—The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was
already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul, with
the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at
bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the
Saviour.—These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk
behind every word. I confess—I hope it will not be held against me—that
it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a
psychologist—as the opposite of all merely naïve corruption, as
refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological
corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is
not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first
thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the
matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal
“holiness” unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this
elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art—all this
is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any
violation of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism
appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there,
after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of
Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The
Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again—he is
threefold the Jew.... The underlying will to make use only of such
concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the
instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other
method of estimating values and utilities—this is not only tradition, it
is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the
force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best
ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human—), have permitted
themselves to be deceived. The gospels have been read as a book of
innocence ... surely no small indication of the high skill with which
the trick has been done.—Of course, if we could actually see these
astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the
farce would come to an end,—and it is precisely because I cannot read a
word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made an
end of them.... I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up
their eyes.—For the majority, happily enough, books are mere
literature.—Let us not be led astray: they say “judge not,” and yet they
condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in
judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify
themselves; in demanding that every one show the virtues which they
themselves happen to be capable of—still more, which they must have in
order to remain on top—they assume the grand air of men struggling for
virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. “We live, we
die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good” (—“the truth,” “the light,”
“the kingdom of God”): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot
help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners,
to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity into 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! “Virtue itself shall
bear witness for us.”... One may read the gospels as books of moral
seduction: these petty folks fasten themselves to morality—they know the
uses of morality! Morality is the best of all devices for leading
mankind by the nose!—The fact is that the conscious conceit of the
chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that they,
the “community,” the “good and just,” range themselves, once and for
always, on one side, the side of “the truth”—and the rest of mankind,
“the world,” on the other.... In that we observe the most fatal sort of
megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and
liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of “God,” “the
truth,” “the light,” “the spirit,” “love,” “wisdom” and “life,” as if
these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to
fence themselves off from the “world”; little super-Jews, ripe for some
sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to meet their
notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the
standard and even 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 “reformed”
confession.—
—I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got
into their heads—what they have put into the mouth of the Master: the
unalloyed creed of “beautiful souls.”—
“And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them.
Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha
in the day of judgment, than for that city” (Mark vi, 11)—How
evangelical!...
“And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me,
it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he
were cast into the sea” (Mark ix, 42).—How evangelical!...
“And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to
enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be
cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched.” (Mark ix, 47.[15])—It is not exactly the eye that is
meant....
“Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here,
which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God
come with power.” (Mark ix, 1.)—Well lied, lion![16]....
“Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me. For...” (Note of a psychologist. Christian
morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,—this makes
it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.—
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall
be measured to you again.” (Matthew vii, 1.[17])—What a notion of
justice, of a “just” judge!...
“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even
the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye
more than others? do not even the publicans so?” (Matthew v,
46.[18])—Principle of “Christian love”: it insists upon being well paid
in the end....
“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew vi, 15.)—Very compromising for the
said “father.”...
“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you.” (Matthew vi, 33.)—All these
things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error,
to put it mildly.... A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least
in certain cases....
“Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is
great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the
prophets.” (Luke vi, 23.)—Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the
prophets....
“Know 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.” (Paul, 1
Corinthians iii, 16.[19])—For that sort of thing one cannot have enough
contempt....
“Do 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?”
(Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)—Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a
lunatic.... This frightful impostor then proceeds: “Know ye not that we
shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?”...
“Hath 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.”
(Paul, 1 Corinthians i, 20ff.[20])—In order to understand this passage,
a first-rate example of the psychology underlying every
Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my “Genealogy of
Morals”: there, for the first time, the antagonism between a noble
morality and a morality born of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness
is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge....
—What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading
the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very
advisable. One would as little choose “early Christians” for companions
as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them....
Neither has a pleasant smell.—I have searched the New Testament in vain
for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly,
open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first
step upward—the instinct for cleanliness is lacking.... Only evil
instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil
instincts. It is all 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 Cæsar Borgia to the
Duke of Parma: “è tutto festo”—immortally healthy, immortally cheerful
and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They
attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Whoever is
attacked by an “early Christian” is surely not befouled.... On the
contrary, it is an honour to have an “early Christian” as an opponent.
One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for
whatever it abuses—not to speak of the “wisdom of this world,” which an
impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of “by the foolishness of
preaching.”... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such
opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been
hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy—as if this were a charge
that the “early Christians” dared to make!—After all, they were the
privileged, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no
other excuse. The “early Christian”—and also, I fear, the “last
Christian,” whom I may perhaps live to see—is a rebel against all
privilege by profound instinct—he lives and makes war for ever for
“equal rights.”... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man
proposes to represent, in his own person, the “chosen of God”—or to be a
“temple of God,” or a “judge of the angels”—then every other criterion,
whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or
upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply “worldly”—evil in
itself.... Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an “early
Christian” is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest—all
his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever he
hates, has real value.... The Christian, and particularly the Christian
priest, is thus a criterion of values.
—Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a
solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a
Jewish imbroglio seriously—that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or
less—what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the
word “truth” was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with
the only saying that has any value—and that is at once its criticism and
its destruction: “What is truth?...”
—The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature—but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as “divine,” but as pitiable, as
absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a crime against
life.... We deny that God is God.... If any one were to show us this
Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.—In a
formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.—Such a religion as
Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which
goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must
be inevitably the deadly enemy of the “wisdom of this world,” which is
to say, of science—and it will give the name of good to whatever means
serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline,
all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and
all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. “Faith,” as an imperative,
vetoes science—in praxi, lying at any price.... Paul well knew that
lying—that “faith”—was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact
from Paul.—The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who “reduced to
absurdity” “the wisdom of this world” (especially the two great enemies
of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication
of Paul’s resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself:
to give one’s own will the name of God, thora—that is essentially
Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the “wisdom of this world”: his enemies
are the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school—on
them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian
or a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a
philologian a man sees behind the “holy books,” and as a physician he
sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The
physician says “incurable”; the philologian says “fraud.”...
—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror of science?... No one, in
fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is
fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only
one great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great danger.—
The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is
promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against
boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] What does he do? He creates
man—man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored.
God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises
knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first
mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he sought
dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.—So God
created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end—and also many
other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.—“Woman, at bottom, is
a serpent, Heva”—every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil
in the world”—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame
for science.... It was through woman that man learned to taste of the
tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal
terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a
rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests
and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden
per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of
all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou
shall not know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s mortal terror,
however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect
one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital
problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster
thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so
the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth,
all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing
but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow
him to think.... Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edifice of knowledge
begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be
done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men
destroy one another (—the priests have always had need of war....).
War—among other things, a great disturber of science!—Incredible!
Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.—So
the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become
scientific—there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”...
—I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole
psychology of the priest.—The priest knows of only one great danger:
that is science—the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science
flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions—a man must
have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to “know.”...
“Therefore, man must be made unhappy,”—this has been, in all ages, the
logic of the priest.��It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the
first thing to come into the world:—“sin.”... The concept of guilt and
punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against
science—against the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must not
look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly
and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must
suffer.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the
priest.—Away with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour.—The concept
of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of “grace,” of
“salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies through and through, and absolutely
without psychological reality—were devised to destroy man’s sense of
causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!—And
not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and
love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most
crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack
of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the
natural consequences of an act are no longer “natural,” but are regarded
as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition—by “God,” by
“spirits,” by “souls”—and reckoned as merely “moral” consequences, as
rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole
ground-work of knowledge is destroyed—then the greatest of crimes
against humanity has been perpetrated.—I repeat that sin, man’s
self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science,
culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest
rules through the invention of sin.—
—In this place I can’t permit myself to omit a psychology of “belief,”
of the “believer,” for the special benefit of “believers.” If there
remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be
“believing”—or how much a sign of décadence, of a broken will to
live—then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even
the deaf.—It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that
there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is
called “proof by power.” “Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true.”—It
might be objected right here that blessedness is not dem onstrated, it
is merely promised: it hangs upon “faith” as a condition—one shall be
blessed because one believes.... But what of the thing that the priest
promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental “beyond”—how is that
to be demonstrated?—The “proof by power,” thus assumed, is actually no
more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will
not fail to appear. In a formula: “I believe that faith makes for
blessedness—therefore, it is true.”... But this is as far as we may go.
This “therefore” would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.—But
let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may
be demonstrated (—not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the
suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessedness—in a technical
term, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it
is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence
the answer to the question “What is true?” or, at all events, it is
enough to make that “truth” highly suspicious. The proof by “pleasure”
is a proof of “pleasure”—nothing more; why in the world should it be
assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and
that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily
bring agreeable feelings in their train?—The experience of all
disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to
fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost
everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to.
Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is
the hardest of all services.—What, then, is the meaning of integrity in
things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own
heart, that he must scorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makes every
Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!—Faith makes blessed: therefore, it
lies....
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for
blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no
means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves
no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before:
all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum.
Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie
that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums.
Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need
of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose of the whole
system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church
itself—doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate
ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?—The sort of religious man that the
church wants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a religious
crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous
disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the
“inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to
distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up before
mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in
form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to
gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem.... Once I ventured to designate
the whole Christian system of 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 “converted” to
Christianity—one must first be sick enough for it.... We others, who
have the courage for health and likewise for contempt,—we may well
despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that
refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a
“virtue” of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of
enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to
carry about a “perfect soul” in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this
end, had to devise for itself a new concept of “perfection,” a pale,
sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called “holiness”—a
holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished,
enervated and incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a
European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of
all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (—who now, under cover of
Christianity, aspire to power). It does not represent the decay of a
race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of décadence
products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too
sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that
theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the
whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility,
reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master;
democracy, with its Christian instincts, triumphed.... Christianity was
not “national,” it was not based on race—it appealed to all the
varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere.
Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core—the instinct
against the healthy, against health. Everything that is
well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence
to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul’s priceless saying:
“And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of
the world, the base things of the world, and things which are
despised”:[23] this was the formula; in hoc signo the décadence
triumphed.—God on the cross—is man always to miss the frightful inner
significance of this symbol?—Everything that suffers, everything that
hangs on the cross, is divine.... We all hang on the cross, consequently
we are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a
victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it—Christianity
remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.—
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual
well-being,—sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian
reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it
pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the superbia of the healthy
intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that
the typically Christian state of “faith” must be a form of sickness too,
and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge
must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from
the start.... The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the
priest—revealed by a glance at him—is a phenomenon resulting from
décadence,—one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children
how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the
mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking
straight are symptoms of décadence. “Faith” means the will to avoid
knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud
because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall never be
allowed its rights on any point. “Whatever makes for illness is good;
whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is
evil”: so argues the believer. The impulse to lie—it is by this that I
recognize every foreordained theologian.—Another characteristic of the
theologian is his unfitness for philology. What I here mean by philology
is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit—the capacity for
absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing
caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them.
Philology as ephexis[24] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with
books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with
weather statistics—not to mention the “salvation of the soul.”... The
way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to
explain, say, a “passage of Scripture,” or an experience, or a victory
by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the
Psalms of David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a
philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other
such cows from Suabia[25] use the “finger of God” to convert their
miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of
“grace,” a “providence” and an “experience of salvation”? The most
modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should
certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect
childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital
dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who
always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us
into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would
seem so absurd a god that he’d have to be abolished even if he existed.
God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man—at
bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance.... “Divine
Prov idence,” which every third man in “educated Germany” still believes
in, is so strong an argument against God that it would be impossible to
think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument against
Germans!...
—It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a
cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything
to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings
what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low
a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of
“truth,” that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not
something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only
peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any
such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man’s
intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discretion,
on this point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to
know anything further.... “Truth,” as the word is understood by every
prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every
churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been
made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary
to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.—The deaths of the martyrs,
it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have
misled.... The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to,
that there must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his
death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of
death-seeking)—this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the
testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation.
The martyrs have damaged the truth.... Even to this day the crude fact
of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty
sort of sectarianism.—But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the
fact that some one had laid down his life for it?—An error that becomes
honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the
more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the
chance to be martyred for your lies?—One best disposes of a cause by
respectfully putting it on ice—that is also the best way to dispose of
theologians.... This was precisely the world- historical stupidity of
all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the
cause they opposed—that they made it a present of the fascination of
martyrdom.... Women are still on their knees before an error because
they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. Is the
cross, then, an argument?—But about all these things there is one, and
one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of
years—Zarathustra.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly
taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth
even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the
heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching—what doth that prove?
Verily, it is more when one’s teaching cometh out of one’s own
burning![26]
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 him—and behind him.... A mind that aspires
to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily
sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and
to an independent point of view.... That grand passion which is at once
the foundation and the power of a sceptic’s existence, and is both more
enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of
his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him
courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not
begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a
good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and
uses up convictions; it does not yield to them—it knows itself to be
sovereign.—On the contrary, the need of faith, of 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 “believer” of any sort, is
necessarily a dependent man—such a man cannot posit himself as a goal,
nor can he find goals within himself. The “believer” does not belong to
himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs
some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an
ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything:
his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in
itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement.... When one
reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be
regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to
what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only
condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and
especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and “faith.”
To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many
things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and
through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly—these are
conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same
token they are antagonists of the truthful man—of the truth.... The
believer is not free to answer the question, “true” or “not true,”
according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point
would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his
vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic—Savonarola, Luther,
Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to
the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these
sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon
the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing
poses to listening to reasons....
—One step further in the psychology of conviction, of “faith.” It is now
a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question
whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than
lies. (“Human, All-Too-Human,” I, aphorism 483.)[27] This time I desire
to put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a
lie and a conviction?—All the world believes that there is; but what is
not believed by all the world!—Every conviction has its history, its
primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it becomes a
conviction only after having been, for a long time, not one, and then,
for an even longer time, hardly one. What if falsehood be also one of
these embryonic forms of conviction?—Sometimes all that is needed is a
change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in
the son.—I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to
see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not
before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is
that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a
relatively rare offence.—Now, this will not to see what one sees, this
will not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who
belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a
liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was
synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the
spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this
conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans,
including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of
morality upon their tongues—that morality almost owes its very survival
to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every
moment?—“This is our conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we
live and die for it—let us respect all who have convictions!”—I have
actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the
contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more
respectable because he lies on principle.... The priests, who have more
finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies
against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that
becomes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose, have borrowed
from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, “God,” “the
will of God” and “the revelation of God” at this place. Kant, too, with
his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was 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
reason—that alone is genuine philosophy.... Why did God make a
revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man could
not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught
him His will.... Moral: the priest does not lie—the question, “true” or
“untrue,” has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it
is impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would
be necessary to know what is true. But this is more than man can know;
therefore, the priest is simply the mouthpiece of God.—Such a priestly
syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie
and the shrewd dodge of “revelation” belong to the general priestly
type—to the priest of the décadence as well as to the priest of pagan
times (—Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom “God” is a
word signifying acquiescence in all things).—The “law,” the “will of
God,” the “holy book,” and “inspiration”—all these things are merely
words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with
which he maintains his power,—these concepts are to be found at the
bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or
priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The “holy lie”—common
alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the
Christian church—is not even wanting in Plato. “Truth is here”: this
means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies....
—In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The
fact that, in Christianity, “holy” ends are not visible is my objection
to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the
calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the
degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of
sin—therefore, its means are also bad.—I have a contrary feeling when I
read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior
work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as
name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is
a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess
of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,—it gives even the most fastidious
psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what
is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by
means of it the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the
whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a
feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling
toward self and life—the sun shines upon the whole book.—All the things
on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity—for example,
procreation, women and marriage—are here handled earnestly, with
reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into
the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things
as this: “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let
every woman have her own husband; ... it is better to marry than to
burn”?[29] And is it possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of
man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by the doctrine of the
immaculata conceptio?... I know of no book in which so many delicate and
kindly things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old
grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it
would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. “The mouth of a woman,” it
says in one place, “the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and
the smoke of sacrifice are always pure.” In another place: “there is
nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air,
water, fire and the breath of a maiden.” Finally, in still another
place—perhaps this is also a holy lie—: “all the orifices of the body
above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden
is the whole body pure.”
One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the simple
process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends
sought by the Code of Manu—by putting these enormously antithetical ends
under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the
necessity of making Christianity contemptible.—A book of laws such as
the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it
epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation
of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer
creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition
of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and
painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which
one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility,
the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it
would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is
based. The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain point in the
evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight,
which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the
series of experiences determining how all shall live—or can live—has
come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a
harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience. In
consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further
experimentation—the continuation of the state in which values are
fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad 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 one’s forefathers to bring it into question.
The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it,
and the fathers lived it.—The higher motive of such procedure lies in
the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern
with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been
proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that
instinct attains to a perfect automatism—a primary necessity to every
sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw
up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the
possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them
to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the
thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.—The
order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the
ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank,
over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence.
In every healthy society there are three physiological types,
gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one
another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work,
its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. It is not Manu but
nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in
another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and
in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other,
but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority,
and the first two the select. The superior caste—I call it the
fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands
for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most
intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in
them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum
hominum:[30] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming
to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees
ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indigna
tion is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. “The world is
perfect”—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of
the man who says yes to life. “Imperfection, whatever is inferior to us,
distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts
of this perfection.” The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find
their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth,
in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight
is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a
necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it
is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all
others.... Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most honourable
kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and
most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are;
they are not at liberty to play second.—The second caste: to this belong
the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more
noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior,
judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the
executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking
from them all that is rough in the business of ruling—their followers,
their right hand, their most apt disciples.—In all this, I repeat, there
is nothing arbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is
made up—by it nature is brought to shame.... The order of castes, the
order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the
separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of
society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the
inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at
all.—A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord
with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of
the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold
increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid:
it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong
and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce,
agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range
of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability
and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men;
the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy
as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a
wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not
society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable
of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is
a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one
thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound
intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is,
in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it
is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the
exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than
he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of
heart—it is simply his duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily among the
rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the
Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his
feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and
teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the
assertion of “equal” rights.... What is bad? But I have already
answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.—The
anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry....
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference:
whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness
between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points
only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of
this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied
a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the
conditions which cause life to flourish into an “eternal” social
organization,—Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such
an organization, because life flourished under it. There the benefits
that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity
were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in
a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible;
here, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight.... That which
stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent
form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been
achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it
appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made
it a matter of “piety” to destroy “the world,” which is to say, the
imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another—and
even Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters....
The Christian and the anarchist: both are décadents; both are incapable
of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating,
blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that
stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a
future.... Christianity was the vampire of the imperium
Romanum,—overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the
conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can
it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we
know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know
better and better,—this most admirable of all works of art in the grand
manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to
prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, noth ing on a like
scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed
of!—This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the
accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—the first
principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong
enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of
corruption—against Christians.... These stealthy worms, which under the
cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking
him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for
reality—this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually
alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning
against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found
in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their
own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the
conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the
innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the
slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge—all that sort of
thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a
pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius
to know what Epicurus made war upon—not paganism, but “Christianity,”
which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of
guilt, punishment and immortality.—He combatted the subterranean cults,
the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was already a form
of genuine salvation.—Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable
intellect in Rome was Epicurean—when Paul appeared ... Paul, the
Chandala hatred of Rome, of “the world,” in the flesh and inspired by
genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence.... What he saw was how,
with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart
from Judaism, a “world conflagration” might be kindled; how, with the
symbol of “God on the cross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of
anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one
immense power. “Salvation is of the Jews.”—Christianity is the formula
for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties,
that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance:
in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His
instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he
put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion
into the mouth of the “Saviour” as his own inventions, and not only into
the mouth—he made out of him something that even a priest of Mithras
could understand.... This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the
fact that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob “the
world” of its value, that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that
the notion of a “beyond” is the death of life.... Nihilist and
Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme....
The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to
describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.—And,
considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with
adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to
go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity
disappears!... To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All the
prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were
already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art
of read ing profitably—that first necessity to the tradition of culture,
the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with
mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,—the sense of fact,
the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its
traditions were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood?
Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready:—and the most
essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most
difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness.
What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for
ourselves—for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still
lurk in our bodies—that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the
cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the
whole integrity of knowledge—all these things were already there, and
had been there for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined
and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as
“German” culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as
instinct—in short, as reality.... All gone for naught! Overnight it
became merely a memory!—The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility,
taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration,
faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yes to
everything entering into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all the
senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality,
truth, life....—All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of
nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But
brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anæmic vampires! Not
conquered,—only sucked dry!... Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became
master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad
feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on top!—One
needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St.
Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows
came to the top. It would be an error, however, to assume that there was
any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement:—ah,
but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of
the church! What they lacked was something quite different. Nature
neglected—perhaps forgot—to give them even the most modest endowment of
respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts.... Between ourselves,
they are not even men.... If Islam despises Christianity, it has a
thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing
with men....
Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization,
and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan
civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was
fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes
than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (—I do not say by what
sort of feet—) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts
for its origin—because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined
luxuriousness of Moorish life!... The crusaders later made war on
something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have
grovelled in the dust—a civilization beside which even that of our
nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.”—What they wanted,
of course, was booty: the orient was rich.... Let us put aside our
prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The
German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its
element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was
to be won.... The German noble, always the “Swiss guard” of the church,
always in the service of every bad instinct of the church—but well
paid.... Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords
and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through
its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a
host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands
outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is
obvious.... Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption....
Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and
Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is
already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man
is a Chandala or he is not.... “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and
friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that
great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II.
What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel
decently? I can’t make out how a German could ever feel Christian....
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred
times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the
last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the
Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what
the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,—an attempt
with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius
to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble
values.... This has been the one great war of the past; there has never
been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance—it is my
question too—; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental,
more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the
center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat
of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to
say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental
needs and appetites of those sitting there.... I see before me the
possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:—it seems
to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate
beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine,
that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such
possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same
time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods
on Olympus to immortal laughter—Cæsar Borgia as pope!... Am I
understood?... Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that
I alone am longing for today—: by it Christianity would have been swept
away!—What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk,
with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised
a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome.... Instead of grasping,
with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the
conquest of Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was
stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of
himself.—Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment
when the 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
Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great futility!—Ah, these
Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility—that has always been the
work of the Germans.—The Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and so-called
German philosophy; the war of “liberation”; the empire—every time a
futile substitute for something that once existed, for something
irrecoverable.... These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise
all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before
every honest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled
and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their
conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way
measures, that Europe is sick of,—they also have on their conscience the
uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable
and indestructible—Protestantism.... If man kind never manages to get
rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame....
—With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn
Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of
all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to
me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the
ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church
has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value
into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into
baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian”
blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to
abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make
itself immortal.... For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that
first enriched mankind with this misery!—The “equality of souls before
God”—this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the
base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern
idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order —this is
Christian dynamite.... The “humanitarian” blessings of Christianity
forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of
self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for
all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarianism”
of Christianity!—Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its
anæmic and “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the
hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross
as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever
heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of
soul—against life itself....
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all
walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind
will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one
great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which
no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small
enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race....
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality
befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from its
last?—From today?—The transvaluation of all values!...
THE END
[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] The lowest of the Hindu castes.
[3] That is, in Pandora’s box.
[4] John iv, 22.
[5] David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of “Das Leben Jesu”
(1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.
[6] The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable that Semantik
is what Nietzsche had in mind.
[7] One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.
[8] The reputed founder of Taoism.
[9] Nietzsche’s name for one accepting his own philosophy.
[10] That is, the strict letter of the law—the chief target of Jesus’s
early preaching.
[11] A reference to the “pure ignorance” (reine Thorheit) of Parsifal.
[12] Matthew v, 34.
[13] Amphitryon was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was
Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
[14] So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numerous coinages, obviously
suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel.
[15] To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48.
[16] A paraphrase of Demetrius’ “Well roar’d, Lion!” in act v, scene 1
of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The lion, of course, is the familiar
Christian symbol for Mark.
[17] Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.
[18] The quotation also includes verse 47.
[19] And 17.
[20] Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.
[21] A paraphrase of Schiller’s “Against stupidity even gods struggle in
vain.”
[22] The word training is in English in the text.
[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.
[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also
occasionally called ephecticism.
[25] A reference to the University of TĂĽbingen and its famous school of
Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of
the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche’s pet abomination, David
F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28.
[26] The quotations are from “Also sprach Zarathustra” ii, 24: “Of
Priests.”
[27] The aphorism, which is headed “The Enemies of Truth,” makes the
direct statement: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than
lies.”
[28] A reference, of course, to Kant’s “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft”
(Critique of Practical Reason).
[29] 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9.
[30] Few men are noble.