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THE
ANTICHRIST by Friedrich Nietzsche Published 1895 translation by H.L. Mencken Published 1920 PREFACE This
book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not
one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who
understand my "Zarathustra": how could I confound myself
with those who are now sprouting ears?--First the day after tomorrow must
come for me. Some men are born posthumously. The
conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands
me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he
must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be
accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched
gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become
indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him
or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for
questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination
for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music.
New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have
hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand
manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self;
love of self; absolute freedom of self..... Very
well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers
foreordained: of what account are the rest?--The rest are merely
humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness
of soul,--in contempt. FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE. 1. --Let us
look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well enough how
remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will you find the
road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in his day, knew that much about
us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death--our life, our happiness...We
have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it
from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?--The
man of today?--"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am
whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so sighs the
man of today...This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,--we
sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of
the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that
"forgives" everything because it "understands" everything
is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and
other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared neither
ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to
direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate--it
was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted
for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the
happiness of the weakling, from "resignation" . . . There was
thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast--for we had
not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a
straight line, a goal... 2. What is
good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power
itself, in man. 3. The
problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of
living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must be bred, must
be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the
most secure guarantee of the future.
This
more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a
happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very
often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the
terror of terrors ;--and out of that terror the
contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic
animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian. . . 4. Mankind
surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or
higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress" is
merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today,
in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the
process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement,
strengthening. True
enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the
earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher
type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in
the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success
have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to
come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such
lucky accidents. 5. We
should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the
death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil,
of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as the
typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken
the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism
to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted
even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by
representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as
full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal,
who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas
it was actually destroyed by Christianity!--
6. It is a
painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the
curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at
least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against
humanity. It is used--and I wish to emphasize the fact again--without any
moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is
most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most
aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." As
you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of decadence: my
argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest
aspirations are decadence-values.
I call
an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts,
when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history
of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and
it is possible that I'll have to write it--would almost explain why man is so
degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for
survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will
to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest
values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that
the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the
holiest names. 7. Christianity
is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands
in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling
of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through
pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a
thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain
circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a
loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of the
death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a
still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity
of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a
much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law
of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it
fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by
maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself
a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (--in
every superior moral system it appears as a weakness--); going still
further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of
all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from the
standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the
denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by
means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of
denial--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing
and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the
preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the
miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence--pity persuades
to extinction....Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says
"the other world," or "God," or "the true life,"
or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm
of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when
one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the
tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is
why pity appeared to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as every one knows,
saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an
occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of
life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological
and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case
(and also, alack, in that of our whole literary decadence, from St.
Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be
discharged. . . Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all
our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to
be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here--all this is our business,
all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we
Hyperboreans !-- 8. It is
necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists: theologians
and all who have any theological blood in their veins--this is our whole
philosophy. . . . One must have faced that menace at close hand, better
still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to
it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (--the alleged
free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be a
joke--they have no passion about such things; they have not suffered--). This
poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find the
arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as
"idealists"--among all who, by virtue of a higher point of
departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with
suspicion. . . The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of
lofty concepts in his hand (--and not only in his hand!); he launches them
with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "the
senses," "honor," "good living,"
"science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious
and seductive forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure
thing-in-itself--as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had
not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and
vices. . . The pure soul is a pure lie. . . So long as the priest, that professional
denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety
of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth
has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere
emptiness is mistaken for its representative.
9. Upon
this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it everywhere.
Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonourable in all
things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith:
in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once for all, to avoid
suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of
morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they
ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort
of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the
names of "God," "salvation" and "eternity." I
unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most
widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be found on
earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you
have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation
stands against truth ever coming into honour in any way, or even getting
stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a
transvaluation of values, and the concepts "true" and
"false" are forced to change places: what ever is most damaging to
life is there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies
it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called
"false."... When theologians, working through the
"consciences" of princes (or of peoples--), stretch out their hands
for power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the
will to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts that power... 10. Among
Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological blood is the
ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German
philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale. Definition
of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity--and of reason. ... One
need only utter the words "Tubingen School" to get an understanding
of what German philosophy is at bottom--a very artful form of theology. . .
The Suabians are the best liars in Germany; they lie innocently. . . . Why
all the rejoicing over the appearance of Kant that went through the learned
world of Germany, three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of preachers
and teachers--why the German conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a
change for the better? The theological instinct of German scholars
made them see clearly just what had become possible again. . . . A
backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the "true
world," the concept of morality as the essence of the world (--the two
most vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle
and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no
longer refutable... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not
go so far. . . Out of reality there had been made "appearance"; an
absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality. . . .
The success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and
Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity, already far from
steady.-- 11. A word
now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it
must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case
it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it;
a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of "virtue,"
as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue," "duty,"
"good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or a
notion of universal validity--these are all chimeras, and in them one finds
only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese
spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound
laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown virtue, his own categorical
imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with
the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating
disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the
Moloch of abstraction.--To think that no one has thought of Kant's
categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The theological
instinct alone took it under protection !--An action prompted by the
life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of
pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of
Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection . . . What
destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner
necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure--as a mere
automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for
idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.--And such a man was the contemporary of
Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German
philosopher--still passes today! . . . I forbid myself to say what I think of
the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant see in the French Revolution the
transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn't
he ask himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on
the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it,
"the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be explained, once
and for all time? Kant's answer: "That is revolution." Instinct at
fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German
decadence as a philosophy--that is Kant!---- 12. I put
aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the
rest haven't the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. They behave
like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies--they regard
"beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving breast"
as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion of
truth. In the end, with "German" innocence, Kant tried to give a
scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of intellectual
conscience, by calling it "practical reason." He deliberately
invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it was desirable not
to trouble with reason--that is, when morality, when the sublime command
"thou shalt," was heard. When one recalls the fact that, among all
peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development from the old type of
priest, this inheritance from the priest, this fraud upon self, ceases
to be remarkable. When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift
up, to save or to liberate mankind--when a man feels the divine spark in his
heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural
imperatives--when such a mission in. flames him, it is only natural that he
should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels
that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a
type of a higher order! . . . What has a priest to do with philosophy! He
stands far above it!--And hitherto the priest has ruled!--He has
determined the meaning of "true" and "not true"! 13. Let us
not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are
already a "transvaluation of all values," a visualized declaration
of war and victory against all the old concepts of "true"
and "not true." The most valuable intuitions are the last to be
attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All
the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the
targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man
inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent"
people--he passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth,
as one "possessed." As a man of science, he belonged to the
Chandala2... We have had the whole
pathetic stupidity of mankind against us--their every notion of what the
truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to
be--their every "thou shalt" was launched against us. . . . Our
objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner--all
appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.--Looking back,
one may almost ask one's self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic
sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was
picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their
senses. It was our modesty that stood out longest against their
taste...How well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God! 14. We have
unlearned something. We have be come more modest in
every way. We no longer derive man from the "spirit," from the
"god-head"; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard
him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the
results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves
against a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great
second thought in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything
but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at
similar stages of development... And even when we say that we say a bit too
much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals
and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his
instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting!--As
regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really
admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole of our
physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover,
it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today
is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a
machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher
order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we have taken
even this will from him, for the term no longer describes anything that we
can understand. The old word "will" now connotes only a sort of
result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of
partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli--the will no longer
"acts," or "moves." . . . Formerly it was thought that
man's consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his high
origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised,
tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things,
to shuffle off his mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the
"pure spirit," would remain. Here again we have thought out the
thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a
symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a
groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force
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!... 15. Under
Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with
actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God"
"soul," "ego," "spirit," "free
will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary effects ("sin"
"salvation" "grace," "punishment,"
"forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginarybeings ("God,"
"spirits," "souls"); an imaginarynatural 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 imaginaryteleology (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 later at
least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and
denies it. Once the concept of "nature" had been opposed to the
concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on
the meaning of "abominable"--the whole of that fictitious world has
its sources in hatred of the natural (--the real!--), and is no more than
evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This
explains everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of
reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be
a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures is
the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence... 16. A
criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same
conclusion.--A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own
god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to survive, to
its virtues--it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a
being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a
proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices. . .
Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for
his own existence: to that end he needs a god.--Such a god must be able to
work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or
foe--he is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does.
But the castration, against all nature, of such a god, making him a god of
goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination. Mankind has just as
much need for an evil god as for a good god; it doesn't have to thank mere
tolerance and humanitarianism for its own existence. . . . What would be the
value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning,
violence? who had perhaps never experienced the
rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one would
understand such a god: why should any one want him?--True enough, when a
nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future,
its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a
first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of
self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then becomes a
hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels "peace of soul,"
hate-no-more, leniency, "love" of friend and foe. He moralizes endlessly;
he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he
becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan. . . Formerly he represented a
people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsty for power
in the soul of a people; now he is simply the good god...The truth is
that there is no other alternative for gods: either they are the will
to power--in which case they are national gods--or incapacity for power--in
which case they have to be good.
17. Wherever
the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an
accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence.
The divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and
passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded,
of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they
call themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate the
moments in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god
first became possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce
their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to
eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make
revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's god.--The good
god, and the devil like him--both are abortions of decadence.--How
can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in
their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of
Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all
goodness, is to be described as progress?--But even Renan does this.
As if Renan had a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in the
face. When everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is
strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept
of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the
weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he be comes the poor man's god,
the sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and the attribute
of "saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential
attribute of divinity--just what is the significance of such a
metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of
the godhead imply?--To be sure, the "kingdom of God" has thus grown
larger. Formerly he had only his own people, his "chosen" people.
But since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves, into
foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has
come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan--until now he
has the "great majority" on his side, and half the earth. But this
god of the "great majority," this democrat among gods, has not
become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a
god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the
noisesome quarters of the world! . . His earthly
kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom,
a ghetto kingdom. . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so decadent . . . Even the palest
of the pale are able to master him--messieurs the metaphysicians,
those albinos of the intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long
that finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another
metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old business of spinning
the world out of his inmost being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he
be came ever thinner and paler--became the "ideal," became
"pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the
thing-in-itself." . . . The collapse of a god: he became a
"thing-in-itself." 18. The
Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a
spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts
that has ever been set up in the world: it probably
touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God
degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its
transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature,
on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the
"here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! In
him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! . . . 19. The fact
that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this Christian god
does little credit to their gift for religion--and not much more to their
taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of such a moribund and
worn-out product of the decadence. A curse lies upon them because they
were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part
of their instincts--and since then they have not managed to create any
more gods. Two thousand years have come and gone--and not a single new god!
Instead, there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,--as if he
were the ultimatum and maximum of the power to create gods, of
the creator spiritus in mankind--this pitiful god of Christian
monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness,
contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of decadence,
all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!-- 20. In my
condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related
religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both
are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions--they are both decadence
religions--but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable
way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all the critic of
Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.--Buddhism is a hundred
times as realistic as Christianity--it is part of its living heritage that it
is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long
centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, "god," was
already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive
religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its
epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism) --It does not speak of a
"struggle with sin," but, yielding to reality, of the
"struggle with suffering." Sharply differentiating itself from
Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral concepts be hind
it; it is, in my phrase,beyond good and evil.--The two physiological
facts upon which it grounds itself and upon which it bestows its chief
attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to sensation, which
manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an
extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted concern with concepts and
logical procedures, under the influence of which the instinct of personality
has yielded to a notion of the "impersonal." (--Both of these
states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objectivists, by
experience, as they are to me). These physiological states produced a depression,
and Buddha tried to combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he
prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in eating and a
careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same
caution in arousing any of the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat
the blood; finally, no worry, either on one's own account or on
account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment
or good cheer--he finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes
health. Prayer is not included, and neither is asceticism. There
is no categorical imperative nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a
monastery (--it is always possible to leave--). These things would have been
simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For
the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his
teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion, ressentiment
(--"enmity never brings an end to enmity": the moving refrain
of all Buddhism. . .) And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these
passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The
mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too much
"objectivity" (that is, in the individual's loss of interest in
himself, in loss of balance and of "egoism"), he combats by strong
efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego. In
Buddha's teaching egoism is a duty. The "one thing needful," the
question "how can you be delivered from
suffering," regulates and determines the whole spiritual diet.
(--Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who also declared war upon pure
"scientificality," to wit, Socrates, who also elevated egoism to
the estate of a morality) . 21. The
things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great
gentleness and liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must get
its start among the higher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet
and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are attained.
Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an object of
aspiration: perfection is actually normal.--Under Christianity the instincts
of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who
are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it. Here the prevailing
pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin,
self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here
the emotion produced by power (called "God") is pumped up
(by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as
"grace." Here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and the
darkened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is denounced
as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness (--the first
Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed the public baths, of
which there were 270 in Cordova alone) . Christian,
too; is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of
unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in the
foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most respectable
names are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender morbid symptoms
and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the
rulers of the earth, to the "aristocratic"--along with a sort of
secret rivalry with them (--one resigns one's "body" to them--one
wantsonly one's "soul" . . . ).
And Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage of
freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the
senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general . . . 22. When
Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the underworld
of the ancient world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it
no longer had to deal with exhausted men, but with men still inwardly
savage and capable of self torture--in brief, strong men, but bungled men.
Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self,
suffering through self, is not merely a general sensitiveness and
susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for
inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in
hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts
and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for
example, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a
sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its
forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a
religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have
become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet ripe for
it--): it is a summons 'that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a
careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body.
Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is
to make them ill--to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming,
for "civilizing." Buddhism is a religion for the closing,
over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization
has so much as begun--under certain circumstances it lays the very
foundations thereof. 23. Buddhism,
I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more
objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility
to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply says,
as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however,
suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all,
is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him
to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word
"devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible
enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an
enemy. --At the
bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the
Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little consequence
whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed
to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct
worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds--the road to
the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact
thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage.
The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student
of the esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out
of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to
be actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is
thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be
discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road.--Hope, in its
stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than
any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a
hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it--so high, indeed,
that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this
world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering
hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most malign of
evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil.)3--In order that love may be possible, God must become a
person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter God
must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint must
appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin.
These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on
which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion as
to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly
strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it
makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--Love is the state in
which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of
illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening,
for transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any
other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion
which would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer
is overcome--it is scarcely even noticed.--So much for the three Christian
virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian ingenuities.--Buddhism
is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be
shrewd in any such way.-- 24. Here I
barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first
thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to be
understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it is not a
reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is
simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of
the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." 4--The second thing to remember is this: that the
psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only
in its most degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with
foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been
used: as a type of the Saviour of mankind. --The
Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when
they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with
perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this
price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all
naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer.
They put themselves against all those conditions under which,
hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to
live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition
to natural conditions--one by one they distorted
religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a
contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same
phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy:
the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows a
complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews
are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their
influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today
the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more
than the final consequence of Judaism.
In my
"Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation of
the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble morality
and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of
the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the
second division, and in every detail. In order to be able to say Nay to
everything representing an ascending evolution of life--that is, to
well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval--the instincts of ressentiment,
here become downright genius, had to invent an other world in
which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable
thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very
strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing
impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a profound
talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts which make for decadence--not
as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which
"the world" could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite
of decadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in
that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of
histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent
movements (--for example, the Christianity of Paul--), and so make of
them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the
sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,--that is
to say, to the priestly class-decadence is
no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in
making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of "good" and
"bad," "true" and "false" in a manner that is
not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it. 25. The
history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt to denaturize
all natural values: I point to five facts which bear this out.
Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel maintained the
right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural attitude. Its Jahveh
was an expression of its consciousness of power, its joy in itself, its hopes
for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory and salvation and through him
they expected nature to give them whatever was necessary to their
existence--above all, rain. Jahveh is the god of Israel, and consequently the
god of justice: this is the logic of every race that has power in its hands
and a good conscience in the use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the
Jews both aspects of this self-approval stand revealed. The nation is
grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is
grateful for the benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune
attending its herds and its crops.--This view of things remained an ideal for
a long while, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows:
anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained, as a
projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once
a gallant warrior and an upright judge--a vision best visualized in the
typical prophet (i.e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.
--But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do
what he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But what actually
happened? simply this: the conception of him was changed--the conception
of him was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paid for
keeping him.--Jahveh, the god of "justice"--he is in accord with
Israel no more, he no longer visualizes the national egoism; he is now
a god only conditionally. . . The public notion of this god now becomes
merely a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who interpret all
happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or
disobedience to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of all
imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is
set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and
"effect," are stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been
swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of unnatural
causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature
follow it. A god who demands--in place of a god who helps, who gives
counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of
courage and self-reliance. . . Morality is no longer a reflection of
the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people;
it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and
in opposition to life--a fundamental perversion of the fancy, an "evil
eye" on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality?
Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of
"sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a
"temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm
of conscience... 26. The
concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified
;--but even here Jewish priest craft did not stop. The whole history
of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!--These priests accomplished
that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the
documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the face
of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of
their people into religious terms, which is to say, they converted it
into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences against Jahveh
were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard this act
of historical falsification as something far more shameful if familiarity
with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history for thousands of
years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And
the philosophers support the church: the lie about a "moral order
of the world" runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest.
What is the meaning of a "moral order of the world"? That there is
a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time, determines what
man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or
of an individual thereof, is to he measured by the extent to which they or he
obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual arecontrolled
by this will of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of
obedience manifested.--In place of all that pitiable lie reality has
this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist
only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain:
he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value
of all things "the kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby that
state of affairs is attained "the will of God"; with cold-blooded
cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent
of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. One
observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood the great age
of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its long series of
misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that great
age-during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of the powerful
and wholly free heroes of Israel's history they fashioned, according
to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men
entirely "godless." They reduced every great event to the idiotic
formula: "obedient or disobedient to God."--They went a step
further: the "will of God" (in other words some means necessary for
preserving the power of the priests) had to be determined--and to this
end they had to have a "revelation." In plain English, a gigantic
literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and "holy scriptures" had to
be concocted--and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance
and much lamentation over the long days of "sin" now ended, they
were duly published. The "will of God," it appears, had long stood
like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected the "holy
scriptures". . . But the ''will of God'' had already been revealed
to Moses. . . . What happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once
and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to
be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most
appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks);
in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what "the will
of God" was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the
priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural
events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at
the "sacrifice" (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite
put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize
it--in his own phrase, to "sanctify" it. . . . For this should
be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the
administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor),
everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any
value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made
the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you
chose, by the "moral order of the world"). The fact requires a
sanction--a power to grant values becomes necessary, and the only way
it can create such values is by denying nature. . . . The priest depreciates
and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he can exist at
all.--Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest, to "the
law," now gets the name of "sin"; the means prescribed for
"reconciliation with God" are, of course, precisely the means which
bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can
"save". Psychologically considered, "sins" are
indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are
the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is
necessary to him that there be "sinning". . . . Prime axiom:
"God forgiveth him that repenteth"--in plain English, him that
submitteth to the priest. 27. Christianity
sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural
value, every reality was opposed by the deepest instincts of the
ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as
such it has never been surpassed. The "holy people," who had
adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a
terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as "unholy,"
"worldly," "sinful"--this people put its instinct into a
final formula that was logical to the point of self-annihilation: asChristianity
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 theirlast
possibility of survival; it was the final residuum of their
independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon the
most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to live,
that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the
people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the Chandala of
Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things--and in
language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to
Siberia today--this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so
far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a
community. This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be
found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins--there
is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is
asserted, that he died for the sins of others.-- 28. As to
whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction--whether, in fact,
this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of--that is quite another
question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem of the psychology
of the Saviour.--I confess, to begin with, that there are very few books
which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite
different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind
to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since
I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of
a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.5At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for
that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of
"tradition"? How can any one call pious legends
"traditions"? The histories of saints present the most dubious
variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method,
in the entire absence of corroborative documents, seems to me to
condemn the whole inquiry from the start--it is simply learned idling. 29. What
concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might
be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and however much
overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in spite of the
Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his legends
in spite of his legends. It is not a question of mere truthful
evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the
question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been
handed down to us.--All the attempts that I know of to read the history of
a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable
psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in
psychologicus, has contributed the two most unseemly notions to
this business of explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and
that of the hero ("heros"). But if there is anything
essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. What the
Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of
all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted
into something moral: ("resist not evil !"--the
most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit,
the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be an enemy.
What is the meaning of "glad tidings"?--The true life, the life
eternal has been found--it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you;
it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions,
from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God--Jesus claims
nothing for himself alone--as the child of God each man is the equal of every
other man. . . .Imagine making Jesus a hero!--And what a tremendous
misunderstanding appears in the word "genius"! Our whole conception
of the "spiritual," the whole conception of our civilization, could
have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of
the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here. . . . We all
know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes
those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to
grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological
habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into
the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste
for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything
established--customs, institutions, the church--; a feeling of being at home
in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner"
world, a "true" world, an "eternal" world. . . .
"The Kingdom of God is withinyou". . . . 30. The
instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to
pain and irritation--so great that merely to be "touched" becomes
unendurable, for every sensation is too profound. The
instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and
distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to
pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all compulsion
to resistance, as unbearable anguish (--that is to say, as harmful,
as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and regards
blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer
resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerous--love, as the
only, as the ultimate possibility of life. . . These
are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine
of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-development of hedonism
upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely related to
them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is
epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical
decadent: I was the first to recognize him.--The fear of pain, even of
infinitely slight pain--the end of this can be nothing save a religion
of love. . . . 31. I have
already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the
assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly
distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why
a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and
free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have
left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by the history, the destiny,
of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have
embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood
only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda. That strange and
sickly world into which the Gospels lead us--a world apparently out of a
Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and
"childish" idiocy keep a tryst--must, in any case, have coarsened
the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to
translate an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into
their own crudity, in order to understand it at all--in their sight the type
could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould....
The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker
of wonders, John the Baptist--all these merely presented chances to
misunderstand it . . . . Finally, let us not underrate the proprium of
all great, and especially all sectarian veneration:
it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its original traits and
idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange--it does not even see them. It
is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of
this most interesting decadent--I mean some one who would have felt
the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the
childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence, may
actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility
is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be
against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate
and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary. Meanwhile,
there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the
sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike
India's, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and
ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's malice as "le grand
maitre en ironie." I myself haven't any doubt that the greater part
of this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the
Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all
know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their
leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians had
need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian
to tackle other theologians, they created a "god" that met
that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas
that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the
Gospels--"the second coming," "the last judgment," all
sorts of expectations and promises, current at the time.-- 32. I can
only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into
the figure of the Saviour: the very word imperieux, used by Renan, is
alone enough to annul the type. What the "glad tidings" tell
us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven
belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an
embattled faith--it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort
of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at all events,
are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the living
organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not furious, it
does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with "the
sword"--it does not realize how it will one day set man against man. It
does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or
by "scriptures": it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its
own reward, its own promise, its own "kingdom
of God." This faith does not formulate itself--it simply lives, and
so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment,
of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in
primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo--Semitic
character (--that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this
category--an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled
by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more
than symbolical language, semantics6 an
opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to
be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down
among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,7and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse 8--and in neither case would it have made any difference to
him.--With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call
Jesus a "free spirit"9--he cares nothing for
what is established: the word killeth,10 a whatever is established killeth. 'The idea of
"life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands
opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He
speaks only of inner things: "life" or "truth" or
"light" is his word for the innermost--in his sight everything
else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only
as sign, as allegory. --Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the
temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices:
such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all
notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience,
all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art--his
"wisdom" is precisely a pure ignorance11 of all such things. He has never heard of culture; he
doesn't have to make war on it--he doesn't even deny it. . . The same thing
may be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour, of
war--he has no ground for denying" the world," for he knows nothing
of the ecclesiastical concept of "the world" . . . Denial is
precisely the thing that is impossible to him.--In the same way he lacks
argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a
"truth," may be established by proofs (--his proofs are
inner "lights," subjective sensations of happiness and
self-approval, simple "proofs of power"--). Such a doctrine cannot
contradict: it doesn't know that other doctrines exist, or can exist,
and is wholly incapable of imagining anything opposed to it. . . If anything
of the sort is ever encountered, it laments the "blindness" with
sincere sympathy--for it alone has "light"--but it does not offer
objections . . . 33. In the
whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt and
punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. "Sin," which
means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished--this
is precisely the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely
promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality--what
remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it. The results
of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the
special evangelical way of life. It is not a "belief" that marks
off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts
differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart,
to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction between strangers and
countrymen, Jews and Gentiles ("neighbour," of course, means
fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. He
neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their mandates
("Swear not at all") .12 He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when
he has proofs of her infidelity.--And under all of this is one principle; all
of it arises from one instinct.--
The life
of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life--and so was his
death. . . He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with
God--not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of
repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of
life that one could feel one's self "divine," "blessed,"
"evangelical," a "child of God."Not by
"repentance,"not by "prayer and forgiveness" is
the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God--it is itself
"God!"--What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in
the concepts of "sin," "forgiveness of sin,"
"faith," "salvation through faith"--the wholeecclesiastical
dogma of the Jews was denied by the "glad tidings." The deep
instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel
that he is "in heaven" and is "immortal," despite many
reasons for feeling that he isnot "in heaven": this is the
only psychological reality in "salvation."--A new way of life, not
a new faith. 34. If I
understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he
regarded only subjective realities as realities, as
"truths"--hat he saw everything else, everything natural,
temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables.
The concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person
in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal"
fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same
thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical
symbolist, of the "kingdom of God," and of the "sonship of
God." Nothing could he more un-Christian than the crude
ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a "kingdom of
God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven" beyond, and of
a "son of God" as the second person of the Trinity. All
this--if I may be forgiven the phrase--is like thrusting one's fist into the
eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect
for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism. . . .But it is
nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "Father"
and "Son"--not, of course, to every one--: the word "Son"
expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation
of all things (beatitude), and "Father" expresses that feeling
itself--the sensation of eternity and of perfection.--I am ashamed to
remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an
Amphitryon story13 at the threshold of
the Christian "faith"? And a dogma of "immaculate
conception" for good measure? . . --And
thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness-- The
"kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come
"beyond the world" or "after death." The whole idea of
natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a
passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely
apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death" isnot
a Christian idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its
crises have no existence for the bearer of "glad tidings." . . . The
"kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no
yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a
"millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere
and it is nowhere. . . . 35. This
"bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taught--not to
"save mankind," but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of
life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before
the officers, before his accusers--his demeanour on the cross. He does
not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the
most extreme penalty--more, he invites it. . . And he prays, suffers
and loves with those, in those, who do him evil . . . Not to
defend one's self, not to show anger, not to lay blames. . . On
the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One--to love him. . . . 36. --We
free spirits--we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to
understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood--that instinct and
passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie" even more
than upon all other lies. . . Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent
and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes
possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always
sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they
created the church out of denial of the Gospels. . . . Whoever
sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great drama of
existence would find no small indication thereof in the stupendous
question-mark that is called Christianity. That
mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the
origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels--that in the concept of
the "church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the
"bearer of glad tidings" regards as beneath him and behind
him--it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of
world-historical irony-- 37. --Our
age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into
believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviour
constituted the beginnings of Christianity--and that everything spiritual and
symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary, the whole history of
Christianity--from the death on the cross onward--is the history of a
progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With
every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less
capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to
make it more and more vulgar and barbarous--it absorbed
the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium
Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning.
It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as
low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to
administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the
church--the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to
all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous
and kindly humanity.--Christian values--noble values: it is
only we, we free spirits, who have re-established this greatest of all
antitheses in values!. . . . 38. --I
cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a
feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--contempt of man. Let me
leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the
man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of
today--I am suffocated by his foul breath! . . . Toward the past, like all
who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control:
with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this mad house of a
world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the
"Christian church," as you will--I take care not to hold mankind
responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out
irresistibly the moment I enter modern times,our
times. Our age knows better. . . What was formerly merely sickly
now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my
disgust begins.--I look about me: not a word survives of what was once
called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce
the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must
know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he
speaks, but actually lies--and that he no longer escapes blame for his
lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows,
as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any
"sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free will"
and the "moral order of the world" are lies--: serious reflection,
the profound self-conquest of the spirit,allow no man to pretend that
he does not know it. . . All the ideas of the church are now
recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence,
invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen
as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous
spider of creation. . - - We know, our conscience now knows--just what
the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has
been and what ends they have served, with their debasement of humanity
to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the
concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the
immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all
merely so many in instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the
priest becomes master and remains master. . .Every one knows this,but
nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last
trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an
unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now
call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at
the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and
arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, without any shame,
that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call "the world"? To
be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's self; to
be careful of one's honour; to desire one's own advantage; to be proud .
. . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself
in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the
modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a
Christian!-- 39. --I
shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of
Christianity.--The very word "Christianity" is a
misunderstanding--at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the
cross. The "Gospels" died on the cross. What, from that
moment onward, was called the "Gospels" was the very reverse of
what he had lived: "bad tidings," a Dysangelium.14It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in
"faith," and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the
distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life, the
life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian. . . To this day
such a life is still possible, and for certain men even
necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages.
. . . Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a
different state of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a
sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true--as every psychologist
knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate
compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of
intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of
Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of
consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact,
there are no Christians. The "Christian"--he who for two
thousand years has passed as a Christian--is simply a psychological
self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his
"faith," he has been ruled only by his instincts--and what
instincts!--In all ages--for example, in the case of
Luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a curtain
behind which the instincts have played their game--a shrewd blindness to
the domination of certain of the instincts . . .I have already called
"faith" the specially Christian form of shrewdness--people
always talk of their "faith" and act according
to their instincts. . . In the world of ideas of the Christian there is
nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an
instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power, the only motive power
at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even here, in psychologicis,
there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals,
which is to say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a
genuine reality in its place--and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness !--Viewed calmly, this strangest of all
phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and
ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to
the heart--this remains a spectacle for the gods--for those gods who
are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the
celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their disgust leaves
them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the
Christians: perhaps because of this curious exhibition alone the
wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a
show of divine interest. . . . Therefore, let us not underestimate the
Christians: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far
above the ape--in its application to the Christians a well--known theory of
descent becomes a mere piece of politeness. . . . 40. --The
fate of the Gospels was decided by death--it hung on the "cross.".
. . It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the
cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only--it was only this
appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real
riddle: "Who was it? what was it?"--The
feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a
death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible
question, "Why just in this way?"--this state of mind is only too
easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary;
everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the
love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt
yawn: "Who put him to death? who was his
natural enemy?"--this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer:
dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one's self in
revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as
in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant,
this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is
more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little
community had not understood what was precisely the most
important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the
freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment--a plain
indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope
to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer
the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most
public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his
death--though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the
highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves,
with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death. . . . On the
contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed
impossible that the cause should perish with his death:
"recompense" and "judgment" became necessary (--yet what could
be less evangelical than "recompense," "punishment," and
"sitting in judgment"!) --Once more the popular belief in the
coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was riveted upon an
historical moment: the "kingdom of God" is to come, with judgment
upon his enemies. . . But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding:
imagine the "kingdom of God" as a last act, as a mere promise! The
Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfillment, therealization
of this "kingdom of God." It was only now that all the familiar
contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear
in the character of the Master was thereby turned into a Pharisee and
theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these
completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine,
taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their
revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion,
and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews,
to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their
God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God:
both were products of resentment . . . .
41. --And
from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how could God
allow it!" To which the deranged reason of the little community
formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son
as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end
of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most
obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins
of the guilty! What appalling paganism !--Jesus himself had done away with
the very concept of "guilt," he denied that there was any gulf
fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between God and man,
and that was precisely his "glad tidings". . . And not as
a mere privilege!--From this time forward the type of the Saviour was
corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming,
the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by
means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the whole and
only reality of the gospels, is juggled away--in favour of a state of
existence after death! . . . St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence
which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that
conception, that indecent conception, in this way: "If Christ
did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!"--And at once
there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable
promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immortality. . . Paul
even preached it as a reward . . .
42. One now
begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on
the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace
movement, and so establish happiness on earth--real, not merely
promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed out--the essential
difference between the two religions of decadence: Buddhism promises
nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything, but fulfills
nothing.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the
worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of
the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred,
the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed,
has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he
nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the
death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels--nothing was
left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his
uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! . . . Once more
the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime
against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before
yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated
the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere
prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had
referred to his "Saviour." . . . Later on the church even
falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity .
. . The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the
meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing remained
untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply
shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this
existence--in the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he
had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed was the death on the
cross, and something more. To see anything honest in such a man as
Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he
converts an hallucination into a proof of the
resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered
from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine niaiserie in
a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the
means. --What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the
idiots among whom he spread his teaching.--What he wanted was
power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had use only
for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing
over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of
Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his device
for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the
immortality of the soul--that is to say, the doctrine of
"judgment". 43. When the
centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in
"the beyond"--in nothingness--then one has taken away
its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality
destroys all reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the
instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the
future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any
meaning: this is now the "meaning" of life. . . . Why be
public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour
together, trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare,
and try to serve it? . . . Merely so many "temptations," so
many strayings from the "straight path."--"One thing
only is necessary". . . That every man, because he has an "immortal
soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of
things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to
eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane
may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their
behalf--it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a
magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And
yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of
personal vanity for its triumph--it was thus that it lured all the
botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and
off-scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the
soul"--in plain English: "the world revolves around me." . . .
The poisonous doctrine, "equal rights for all," has been
propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of
bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of
reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite
to every step upward, to every development of civilization--out of the ressentiment
of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against
everything noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on
earth . . . To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul
was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever
perpetrated.--And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that
Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any
more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of
honourable pride in himself and his equals--for the pathos of distance.
. . Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!--The aristocratic
attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and
if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue
to make revolution--it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian
valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and
crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground
against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly" lowers
. . . 44. --The
gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already
persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul, with the
cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom
merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the
Saviour.--These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk
behind every word. I confess--I hope it will not be held against me--that it
is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a
psychologist--as the opposite of all merely naive corruption, as
refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological
corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to
be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing
to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This
positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal "holiness"
unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud
in word and attitude to the level of an art--all this is not an
accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of
nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears in
Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many
centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of Jewish technic, the
business comes to the stage of mastery. The Christian, that ultima ratio of
lying, is the Jew all over again--he is threefold the Jew. . . The
underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as
fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode
of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities--this
is not only tradition, it is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it
able to operate with the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best
minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human--), have permitted themselves to be deceived. The gospels
have been read as a book of innocence. . . surely no small indication
of the high skill with which the trick has been done.--Of course, if we could
actually see these astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only
for an instant, the farce would come to an end,--and it is precisely because I
cannot read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I
have made am end of them. . . . I simply cannot endure the way they have
of rolling up their eyes.--For the majority, happily enough, books are mere
literature.--Let us not be led astray: they say "judge not," and
yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in
judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in
demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen
to be capable of--still more, which they must have in order to remain
on top--they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men
engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good" (--"the
truth," "the light," "the kingdom of God"): in point
of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing. Forced, like hypocrites,
to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert
their necessity into aduty: it is on grounds of duty that they account
for their lives of humility, and that humility becomes merely one more proof
of their piety. . . Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud!
"Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.". . . . One may read the
gospels as books of moral seduction: these petty folks fasten
themselves to morality--they know the uses of morality! Morality is the best
of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!--The fact is that the
conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in
this way that they, the "community," the "good and just,"
range themselves, once and for always, on one side, the side of
"the truth"--and the rest of mankind, "the world," on the
other. . . In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that
the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim
exclusive rights in the concepts of "God," "the truth,"
"the light," "the spirit," "love," "wisdom"
and "life," as if these things were synonyms of themselves and
thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the "world";
little super-Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down
in order to meet their notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning,
the salt, the standard and even thelast judgment of all the rest. . .
. The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already
existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to
wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn between Jews and Judaeo-Christians,
the latter had no choice but to employ the self-preservative measures that
the Jewish instinct had devised, even against the Jews themselves,
whereas the Jews had employed them only against non-Jews. The Christian is
simply a Jew of the "reformed" confession.-- 45. --I
offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into
their heads--what they have put into the mouth of the Master: the unalloyed
creed of "beautiful souls."-- "And
whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake
off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto
you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of
judgment, than for that city" (Mark vi, 11)--How evangelical! "And
whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it
is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were
cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42) .--How evangelical!
-- "And
if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better
for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes
to be cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched." (Mark ix, 47)15--It is not exactly the
eye that is meant. "Verily
I say unto you, That there be some of them that
stand here, which shall not taste death, till they have seen the kingdom of
God come with power." (Mark ix, 1.)--Well lied,
lion!16 . . . . "Whosoever
will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow
me. For . . ." (Note of a psychologist. Christian morality
is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,--this makes it
Christian.) Mark viii, 34.-- "Judge
not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured
to you again." (Matthew vii, l.)17--What a notion of justice, of a "just" judge! . . . "For
if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do
not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do
ye more than others? do
not even the publicans so?" (Matthew V, 46.)18--Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being
well paid in the end. . . .
"But
if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your
trespasses." (Matthew vi, 15.)--Very compromising for the said
"father." "But
seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things
shall be added unto you." (Matthew vi, 33.)--All these things: namely,
food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error, to put it
mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in certain
cases. "Rejoice
ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in
heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets."
(Luke vi, 23.)--Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the prophets. .
. "Know
yea not that yea are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God
dwelt in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him
shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple yea
are." (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.)19--For that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt. . . . "Do
yea not know that the saints shall judge the world? and
if the world shall be judged by you, are yea unworthy to judge the smallest
matters?" (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)--Unfortunately, not merely the
speech of a lunatic. . . This frightful
impostor then proceeds: "Know yea not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?". . . "Hat
not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom
of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of
preaching to save them that believe. . . . Not many wise men after the flesh,
not men mighty, not many noble are called: But God hat chosen the
foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hat chosen the weak
things of the world confound the things which are mighty; And base things of
the world, and things which are despised, hat God chosen, yea, and
things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh
should glory in his presence." (Paul, 1 Corinthians i, 20ff.)20 --In order to understand this passage, a first rate
example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read
the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for the first
time, the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of ressentiment
and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all
apostles of revenge. . . . 46. --What
follows, then? That one
had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so
much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose "early
Christians" for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an
objection to them . . . Neither has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the
New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that
is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make
the first step upward--the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . .
Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of
these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes,
a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New
Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight
that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say
what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Ceasar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: "e
tutto Iesto"--immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and
sound. . . .These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack,
but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Whoever is
attacked by an "early Christian" is surely not befouled . .
. On the contrary, it is an honour to have an
"early Christian" as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament
without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the
"wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind bag tries to dispose
of "by the foolishness of preaching." . . . Even the scribes and
pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been
worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as
if this were a charge that the "early Christians" dared to
make!--After all, they were the privileged, and that was enough: the
hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early
Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last Christian," whom I
may perhaps live to see--is a rebel against all privilege by
profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal
rights." . . .Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man
proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or
to be a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then
every other criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect,
upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes
simply "worldly"--evil in itself. . . Moral: every word that
comes from the lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his every
act is instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but
whoever he hates, whatever he hates, has real value . .
. The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a criterion
of values. --Must I
add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary figure
worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously--that
was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less-- what did it matter? . . . The
noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was
shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying that
has any value--and that is at once its criticism and its destruction: "What
is truth?". . . 47. --The
thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history,
or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard what has been
honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as
injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life. . . We
deny that God is God . . . If any one were to show us this Christian
God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula: deus,
qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a religion as Christianity,
which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the
moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly
enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of science--and
it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate
and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness
in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of
the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes science--in
praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew that lying--that
"faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from
Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to
absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two
great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an
indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very
thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, thora--that is
essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the "wisdom of this
world": his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of
the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man
can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. That
is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the "holy
books," and as a physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration
of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the
philologian says "fraud.". . .
48. --Has
any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the
Bible--of God's mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in fact, has
understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting,
with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great
danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great danger.-- The old
God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is
promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom
even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He
creates man--man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also
bored. God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises
knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first mistake:
to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over
them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God created
woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things!
Woman was the second mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a
serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every
evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is
also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that man learned
to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God was seized by
mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had
created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike--it is all up
with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--Moral: science is the
forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of
sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is
of morality.--"Thou shalt not know"--the rest follows
from that.--God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being
shrewd. How is one to protect one's self against science? For a long
while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man!
Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must
not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers
of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing
but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow him
to think. . . Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins
to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The
old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy
one another (--the priests have always had need of war....). War--among other
things, a great disturber of science !--Incredible!
Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.--So
the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--there
is no help for it: he must be drowned!". . . . 49. --I have
been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology
of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger: that is
science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes,
on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must
have an overflowing intellect, in order to "know." . . ."Therefore,
man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of
the priest.--It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first
thing to come into the world :--"sin." . . .
The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world,"
was set up against science--against the deliverance of man from
priests. . . . Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must
not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he
must not look at all; he must suffer . . . And he must suffer so much
that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians! What is
needed is a Saviour.--The concept of guilt and punishment,
including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of
"forgiveness"--lies through and through, and absolutely
without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's sense of
causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect !--And not an attack with the fist, with the
knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the
most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests!
An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean
leeches! . . . When the natural consequences of an act are no longer
"natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of
superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by
"souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as
rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of
knowledge is destroyed--then the greatest of crimes against humanity has
been perpetrated.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration par
excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and
every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through
the invention of sin.-- 50. --In
this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief,"
of the "believer," for the special benefit of 'believers." If
there remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be "believing"--or how much a sign of decadence,
of a broken will to live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My
voice reaches even the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly
informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth
that is called "proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore
it is true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is
not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon
"faith" as a condition--one shall be blessed because one
believes. . . . But what of the thing that the priest promises to the
believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is that to
be demonstrated?--The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually
no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will
not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for
blessedness--therefore, it is true." . .
But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be absurdum
itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of
politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--not merely
hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a
priest): even so, could blessedness--in a technical term, pleasure--ever
be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof
against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the
question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make
that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure"
is a proof of "pleasure--nothing more; why in the world should it
be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and
that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring
agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all disciplined and
profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every
atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the
heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is
needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all
services.--What, then, is the meaning of integrityin things
intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he
must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and
Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed:therefore, it lies. .
. . 51. The fact
that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that
this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by no means makes the idea
itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead
raises them up where there were none before: all this is made
sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of course,
to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not
sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness
necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of
health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the
church is to make people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up
a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a
madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church wants is a
typical decadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a
people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the inner
world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world"
of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between
them; the "highest" states of mind, held up be fore mankind by
Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form--the church
has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem
dei honorem. . . . Once I ventured to designate the whole
Christian system of training22in penance and salvation (now best studied
in England) as a method of producing a folie circulaire upon a soil
already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not
every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to
Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it. . . .We others, who have
the courage for health and likewise for contempt,--we may well despise
a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that
refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that
makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that
combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself
that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of
a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of
"perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of
existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a
series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered
body! . . . The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the
start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse
elements (--who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power)-- It does not represent the decay of a race; it
represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of decadence products
from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It was
not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of noble antiquity,
which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the
learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the
sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium were
Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached its finest and
ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian
instincts, triumphed . . . Christianity was not "national,"
it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men
disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the
rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the healthy, against
health. Everything that is well--constituted, proud, gallant and,
above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you
of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things
of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things
of the world, and things which are despised":23 this was the formula; in hoc signo the decadence triumphed.--God
on the cross--is man always to miss the frightful inner
significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers, everything that hangs
on the cross, is divine. . . . We all hang on the cross, consequently we
are divine. . . . We alone are divine. . . . Christianity was thus a
victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains
to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.-- 52. Christianity
also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,--sick
reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it
takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon
"intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect.
Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically
Christian state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too,
and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must
be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin
from the start. . . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the
priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon resulting from decadence,--one
may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the
falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and
incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of decadence.
"Faith" means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The
pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his
instinct demands that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on
any point. "Whatever makes for illness is good; whatever issues
from abundance, from super-abundance, from power, is evil": so
argues the believer. The impulse to lie--it is by this that I
recognize every foreordained theologian.--Another characteristic of the
theologian is his unfitness for philology. What I here mean by
philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit--the
capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without
losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them.
Philology as ephexis24 in interpretation:
whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper
reports, with the most fateful events or with weather statistics--not to
mention the "salvation of the soul." . . . The way in which a theologian,
whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a "passage of
Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by
turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daring
that it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall he
do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia25 use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably
commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a
"providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most
modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be
enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness
of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our piety, if
we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the head at just
the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain
began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he'd
have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a
letter carrier, as an almanac--man--at bottom, he is' a mere name for the
stupidest sort of chance. . . . "Divine Providence," which every
third man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong an
argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And
in any case it is an argument against Germans! . . . 53. --It is
so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause
that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with
the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies
to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of
intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of
"truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not
something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants,
or peasant apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such way. One may
rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience
the greater will be his modesty, his discretion, on this point. To know
in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything further .
. . "Truth," as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian,
every free-thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete
proof that not even a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline
and self-control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest
truth.--The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been
misfortunes of history: they have misled . . . The conclusion that all
idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause
for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive
Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has been
an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of
inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have damaged the truth. . . .
Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an
honourable name to the most empty sort of
sectarianism.--But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some
one had laid down his life for it?--An error that becomes honourable is
simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you
suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be
martyred for your lies?--One best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting
it on ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians. . . . This
was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that
they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they made
it a present of the fascination of martyrdom. . . .Women are still on their
knees before an error because they have been told that some one died on the
cross for it. Is the cross, then, an argument?--But about all these
things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for
thousands of years--Zarathustra.
They
made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly taught them
that the truth is proved by blood.
54. Do not
let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a
sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed
from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest
themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it
comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of
convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what
is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value
and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him--and
behind him. . . . A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills
the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of
conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view. .
. That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a
sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he
is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him
unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain
circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as
a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand
passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it
knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of some
thing unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the
word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the
"believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man
cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself.
The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means
to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His
instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is
prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his
vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of
self-estrangement. . . When one reflects how necessary it is to the
great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and
hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery,
is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the
weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction
and "faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid
seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man
through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these
are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same
token they are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. . . .
The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or
"not true," according to the dictates of his own conscience:
integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The
pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a
fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these
types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the
grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual
epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics are picturesque,
and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons. . . . 55. --One
step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is now
a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question whether
convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies.
("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)27 This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any
actual difference between a lie and a conviction?--All the world believes
that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--Every conviction
has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error:
it becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long time, not
one, and then, for an even longer time, hardly one. What if falsehood
be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that is
needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a
conviction in the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to
refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses
or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is
that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively
rare offence.--Now, this will not to see what one sees, this will not
to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a
party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. For example,
the German historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous with despotism
and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world:
what is the difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be
wondered at that all partisans, including the German historians,
instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their tongues--that
morality almost owes its very survival to the fact that the party man
of every sort has need of it every moment?--"This is our conviction:
we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for it--let us respect all
who have convictions!"--I have actually heard such sentiments from the
mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely
does not become more respectable because he lies on principle. . . The
priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the
objection that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a
falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because it serves a
purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the
concepts, "God," "the will of God" and "the
revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical
imperative, was on the same road: this was hispractical reason.28 There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it
is not for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital
problems of valuation, are beyond human reason. . . . To know the limits of
reason--that alone is genuine. philosophy.
Why did God make a revelation to man? Would God have done anything
superfluous? Man could not find out for himself what was good and what
was evil, so God taught him His will. Moral: the priest does not lie--the question, "true" or "untrue,"
has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible
to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary to knowwhat
is true. But this is more than man can know; therefore, the priest
is simply the mouth-piece of God.--Such a priestly syllogism is by no means
merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of
"revelation" belong to the general priestly type--to the priest of
the decadence as well as to the priest of pagan times (--Pagans are
all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God" is a word
signifying acquiescence in all things) --The "law," the "will
of God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all
these things are merely words for the conditionsunder which the priest
comes to power and with which he maintains his power,--these concepts
are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all
priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy
lie"--common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to
the Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is
here": this means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies.
. . . 56. --In the
last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The fact
that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is my objection
to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the
calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation
and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--therefore, its
means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu,
an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin
against the intelligence to so much as name in the same breath
with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind
it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist
something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what is most
important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it
the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over
the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of
perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and
life--the sun shines upon the whole book.--All the things on which
Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation, women
and marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and
confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and ladies
a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication,
let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; .
. . it is better to marry than to burn"?29 And is it possible to be a Christian so
long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by
the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio? . . . I know of no book in
which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of
Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women
that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a
woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer
of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another
place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast
by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in
still another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the
orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only
in the maiden is the whole body pure."
57. One
catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the
simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends
sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously antithetical ends
under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity
of making Christianity contemptible.--A book of laws such as the Code
of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the
experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries;
it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a
codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which
establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are
fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A
law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the
casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the
imperative tone, the "thou shalt," on which obedience is based. The
problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in
the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which
is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of
experiences determining how all shall live--or can live--has come to
an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as
possible from the days of experiment and hard experience. In
consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further
experimentation--the continuation of the state in which values are fluent,
and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infnitum. Against this
a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the
assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin,
that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many
errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete,
perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and on
the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has
stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime
against one's forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law
is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.--The
higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness,
step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say,
those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully
considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism--a
primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in
the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a
people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection--it
permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that
end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy
lie.--The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely
the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first
rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any
influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types,
gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and
each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special
mastery and feeling of perfection. It isnot Manu but nature that sets
off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are
marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are
distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity--the
last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The
superior caste--I call it the fewest--has, as the most perfect,
the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for
everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right
to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness.
Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:30 goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to
them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness--or
indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the
privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world is perfect"--so
prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who
says yes to life. "Imperfection, what ever is inferior to us,
distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of
this perfection. "The most intelligent men,
like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only
disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in
effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second
nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a
privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would
crush all others. . . . Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They are the most
honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most
cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because
they are; they are not at liberty to play second.--The second
caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and
security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of
warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the
executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from
them all that is rough in the business of ruling-their followers,
their right hand, their most apt disciples.--In all this, I repeat, there is
nothing arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the contrary
is made up--by it nature is brought to shame. . . The order of castes,
the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself;
the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the
highest types--the inequality of rights is essential to the existence
of any rights at all.--A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the
privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate
the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts
the heights--the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high
civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary
prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The
handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art,
in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible
only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of
place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much
opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly
useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural
predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that
the majority are capable of, that makes them
intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they
have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would
be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable
in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the
appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree
of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more
delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not
merely kindness of heart--it is simply his duty. . . . Whom do I hate
most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the
apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his
pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who make him
envious and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it
lies in the assertion of "equal" rights. . . . What is bad? But
I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.--The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . . 58. In point
of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference: whether one
preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness between Christian
and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction.
One need only turn to history for a proof of this: there it appears with
appalling distinctness. We have just studied a code of religious legislation
whose object it was to convert the conditions which cause life to flourish
into an "eternal" social organization,--Christianity found its
mission in putting an end to such an organization, because life flourished
under it. There the benefits that reason had produced during long ages of
experiment and insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort
was made to bring in a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as
complete as possible; here, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight.
. . .That which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the
most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has
ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it
appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism--those holy anarchists
made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world,"which
is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone
stood upon another--and even Germans and other such louts were able to become
its masters. . . . The Christian and the anarchist: both are decadents; both
are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating,
blood-sucking; both have an instinct
of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has
durability, and promises life a future. . . . Christianity was the vampire of
the imperium Romanum,-- overnight it
destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a
great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is
not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the
history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this
most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the
beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for
thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie
aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This
organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of
personality has nothing to do with such things--the first principle of
all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up
against the corruptest of all forms of corruption--against Christians.
. . . These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and
duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest
interest in real things, of all instinct for reality--this
cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all
"souls," step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against
it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause
of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The
sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black
as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in
the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of
Chandala revenge--all that sort of thing became master of Rome: the same kind
of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has
but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon--not
paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say, the corruption of
souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.--He
combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity--to
deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation.--Epicurus
had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean--when Paul
appeared. . . Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the
world," in the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the eternal Jew
par excellence. . . . What he saw was how, with the aid of the small
sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world
conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on
the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic
intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation
is of the Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing
up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great
Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the
genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with
reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to
every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the "Saviour" as
his own inventions, and not only into the mouth--he made out of him
something that even a priest of Mithras could understand. . . This was his
revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the belief
in immortality in order to rob "the world" of its value, that the
concept of "hell" would master Rome--that the notion of a
"beyond" is the death of life. Nihilist and Christian: they
rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme.
59. The
whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to
describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--And, considering
the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine
self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for
thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears! . . To
what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?--All the prerequisites to a
learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man
had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading
profitably--that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of
the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and
mechanics, were on the right road,--the sense of fact, the last and
more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were
already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential to
the beginning of the work was ready;--and the most essential, it
cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to
develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have to day
reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves--for certain bad
instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies--that is to
say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in
the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge--all these
things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! More,
there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere
brain-drilling! Not as "German" culture, with its loutish
manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct--in short, as reality. . . All
gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory !--The
Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius
for organization and administration, faith in and the will to secure the
future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the imperium
Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond
mere art, but had become reality, truth, life . . --All overwhelmed in
a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons
and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking,
invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered,--only sucked dry! . . . Hidden
vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched,
intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of
the soul, was at once on top!--One needs but read any of the
Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in
order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an error,
however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of
the Christian movement:--ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of
holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was something quite
different. Nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to give them even the most
modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts. . .
Between ourselves, they are not even men. . . . If
Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at
least assumes that it is dealing with men. . . . 60. Christianity
destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also
destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The
wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us
and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled
down (--I do not say by what sort of feet--) Why? Because it had to thank
noble and manly instincts for its origin--because it said yes to life, even
to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! . . . The crusaders
later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for
them to have grovelled in the dust--a civilization beside which even that of
our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile."--What
they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put
aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing
more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in
its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was
to be won . . . The German noble, always the "Swiss guard"
of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--but
well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German
swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry
through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a
host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands outside
the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious. . .
Christianity, alcohol--the two great means of corruption. . . .
Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity
than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached;
nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is
not. . . . "War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the act, of
that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II.
What! must a German first be a genius, a free
spirit, before he can feel decently? I can't make out how a German
could ever feel Christian. . . .
61. Here it
becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more
painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great
harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the Renaissance. Is
it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the
Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,--an attempt
with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to
bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values.
. . . This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a
more critical question than that of the Renaissance--it is my question
too--; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more
direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the
enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and
there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say, to insinuate them
into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those
sitting there . . . I see before me the possibility of a perfectly
heavenly enchantment and spectacle :--it seems to me to scintillate with all
the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art
so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands
of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in
significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it
should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter--Caesar Borgia
as pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well then, that would have been the
sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today--: by it
Christianity would have been swept away!--What happened? A German
monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an
unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance
in Rome. . . . Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle
that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital--instead
of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks
only of himself.--Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the
very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum
originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair!
Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there
was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things! . . . And
Luther restored the church: he attacked it. . . . The Renaissance--an
event without meaning, a great futility !--Ah, these
Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility--that has always
been the work of the Germans.--The Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant and so-called
German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire-every time a
futile substitute for something that once existed, for something irrecoverable
. . . These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their
uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest
yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused
everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the
half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick
of,--they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of
Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible--Protestantism.
. . . If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will
be to blame. . . . 62. --With
this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity;
I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations
that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all
imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst
possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its
depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into
a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.
Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings!
Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it
lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.
. . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched
mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls before God"--this
fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the
base-minded--this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea,
and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order--this is Christian dynamite.
. . . The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth! To
breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution,
a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest
instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of
Christianity!--Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its
anaemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all
the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross
as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard
of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of
soul--against life itself. . . .
This
eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls,
wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be
able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great
intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means
are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human
race. . . . And
mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality
befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from
its last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values! . . . THE
END
FOOTNOTES created and inserted by
H.L. Mencken: 1. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth
hook of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the
Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and
perpetual youth. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 2. The lowest of the Hindu castes. [RETURN TO TEXT] 3. That is, in Pandora's box. [RETURN TO TEXT] 4. John iv, 22. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 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. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 6. The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is
probable that Semantik is what Nietzsche had in mind. [RETURN TO TEXT] 7. One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy. [RETURN TO TEXT] 8. The reputed founder of Taoism. [RETURN TO TEXT] 9. Nietzsche's name for one accepting his own philosophy. [RETURN TO TEXT] 10. That is, the strict letter of the law--the chief target
of Jesus's early preaching. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 11. A reference to the "pure ignorance" (reine
Thorheit) of Parsifal. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 12. Matthew v, 34. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 13. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His
wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore
Heracles. [RETURN TO TEXT] 14. So in the text. One of Nietzsche's numerous coinages,
obviously suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel.[RETURN TO TEXT] 15. To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse
48. [RETURN TO TEXT] 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. [RETURN TO TEXT] 17. Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2. [RETURN TO TEXT] 18. The quotation also includes verse 47. [RETURN TO TEXT] 19. And 17. [RETURN TO
TEXT] 20. Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29. [RETURN TO TEXT] 21. A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even
gods struggle in vain." [RETURN TO
TEXT] 22. The word training is in English in the text. [RETURN TO TEXT] 23. I Corinthians i, 27, 28. [RETURN TO TEXT] 24. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism
was also occasionally called ephecticism. [RETURN TO TEXT] 25. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its famous
school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and
one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination,
David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28. [RETURN TO TEXT] 26. The quotations are from "Also sprach
Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of Priests." [RETURN TO TEXT] 27. The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of
Truth," makes the direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous
enemies of truth than lies." [RETURN TO
TEXT] 28. A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der
praktischen Vernunft" (Critique of Practical Reason). [RETURN TO TEXT] 29. I Corinthians vii, 2, 9. [RETURN TO TEXT] 30. Few men are noble. [RETURN TO TEXT]
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