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.
What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?--The feeling that power increases--that
resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but
war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance
sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of
our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy for
the botched and the weak--Christianity...
3.
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind
in the order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what
type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being
the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee
of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the
past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never
as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely
the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror
of terrors ;--and out of that terror the contrary type has been
willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal,
the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian. . .
4.
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward
a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood.
This "progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to
say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth,
falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process
of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement,
strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases
in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different
cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests
itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears
as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have
always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for
all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally
represent such lucky accidents.
5.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has
waged a war to the death against this higher type of man,
it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban,
it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself,
out of these instincts--the strong man as the typical reprobate,
the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken the
part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal
out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts
of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures
that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest
intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.
The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed
that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas
it was actually destroyed by Christianity!--
6.
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before
me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of
man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion:
that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used--and
I wish to emphasize the fact again--without any moral significance:
and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most
apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been
most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness."
As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense
of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which
mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when
it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers,
what is injurious to it. A history of the "higher feelings,"
the "ideals of humanity"--and it is possible that I'll
have to write it--would almost explain why man is so degenerate.
Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival,
for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the
will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that
all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this
will--that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now
prevail under the holiest names.
7.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity
stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the
energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man
loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength
which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering
is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may
lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a loss out
of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of
the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there
is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the
effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its
character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light.
Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of
natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction;
it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by
life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds,
it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has
ventured to call pity a virtue (--in every superior moral
system it appears as a weakness--); going still further, it has
been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all
other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from
the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon
whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer
was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and
made worthy of denial--pity is the technic of nihilism.
Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands
against all those instincts which work for the preservation and
enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the miserable,
it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence--pity persuades
to extinction....Of course, one doesn't say "extinction":
one says "the other world," or "God," or
"the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness....
This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash,
appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon
the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency
to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that
is why pity appeared to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as
every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of
mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded
tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt
us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and
dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's
case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary decadence,
from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that
it may burst and be discharged. . . Nothing is more unhealthy,
amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be
the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield
the knife here--all this is our business, all this is
our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers,
we Hyperboreans !--
8.
It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our
antagonists: theologians and all who have any theological blood
in their veins--this is our whole philosophy. . . . One must
have faced that menace at close hand, better still, one must
have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to it,
to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (--the alleged
free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me
to be a joke--they have no passion about such things; they have
not suffered--). This poisoning goes a great deal further than
most people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian
among all who regard themselves as "idealists"--among
all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right
to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion. .
. The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty
concepts in his hand (--and not only in his hand!); he launches
them with benevolent contempt against "understanding,"
"the senses," "honor," "good living,"
"science"; he sees such things as beneath him,
as pernicious and seductive forces, on which "the soul"
soars as a pure thing-in-itself--as if humility, chastity, poverty,
in a word, holiness, had not already done much more damage
to life than all imaginable horrors and vices. . . The pure soul
is a pure lie. . . So long as the priest, that professional
denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as
a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the
question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood
on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken
for its representative.
9.
Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks
of it everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins
is shifty and dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing
that grows out of this condition is called faith: in other
words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once for all, to avoid
suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept
of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all
things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they
argue that no other sort of vision has value any more,
once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God,"
"salvation" and "eternity." I unearth this
theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread
and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be found
on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be
false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound
instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming
into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the
influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of
values, and the concepts "true" and "false"
are forced to change places: what ever is most damaging to life
is there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies
it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there
called "false."... When theologians, working through
the "consciences" of princes (or of peoples--), stretch
out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as
to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic
will exerts that power...
10.
Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that
theological blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor
is the grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself
is its peccatum originale. Definition of Protestantism:
hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity--and of reason. ... One
need only utter the words "Tubingen School" to get
an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottom--a very
artful form of theology. . . The Suabians are the best liars
in Germany; they lie innocently. . . . Why all the rejoicing
over the appearance of Kant that went through the learned world
of Germany, three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of
preachers and teachers--why the German conviction still echoing,
that with Kant came a change for the better? The theological
instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what
had become possible again. . . . A backstairs leading to
the old ideal stood open; the concept of the "true world,"
the concept of morality as the essence of the world (--the two
most vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks
to a subtle and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable,
then at least no longer refutable... Reason,
the prerogative of reason, does not go so far. . . Out of reality
there had been made "appearance"; an absolutely false
world, that of being, had been turned into reality. . . . The
success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like
Luther and Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity,
already far from steady.--
11.
A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be
our invention; it must spring out of our personal
need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger.
That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue
which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of "virtue,"
as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue," "duty,"
"good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality
or a notion of universal validity--these are all chimeras, and
in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse
of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary
is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and
of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown virtue,
his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces
when it confounds its duty with the general concept of
duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster
than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before
the Moloch of abstraction.--To think that no one has thought
of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The
theological instinct alone took it under protection !--An action
prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action
by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist,
with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as
an objection . . . What destroys a man more quickly than
to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any
deep personal desire, without pleasure--as a mere automaton of
duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for
idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.--And such a man was the contemporary
of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the
German philosopher--still passes today! . . . I forbid myself
to say what I think of the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant see in
the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the
inorganic form to the organic? Didn't he ask himself if
there was a single event that could be explained save on the
assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of
it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could
be explained, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That
is revolution." Instinct at fault in everything and anything,
instinct as a revolt against nature, German decadence as
a philosophy--that is Kant!----
12.
I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the
history of philosophy: the rest haven't the slightest conception
of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, all these
great enthusiasts and prodigies--they regard "beautiful
feelings" as arguments, the "heaving breast" as
the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion
of truth. In the end, with "German" innocence,
Kant tried to give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption,
this dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it "practical
reason." He deliberately invented a variety of reasons for
use on occasions when it was desirable not to trouble with reason--that
is, when morality, when the sublime command "thou shalt,"
was heard. When one recalls the fact that, among all peoples,
the philosopher is no more than a development from the old type
of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this fraud upon
self, ceases to be remarkable. When a man feels that he has
a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind--when
a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he
is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives--when such a mission
in. flames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond
all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he
is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself
a type of a higher order! . . . What has a priest to do with
philosophy! He stands far above it!--And hitherto the priest
has ruled!--He has determined the meaning of "true"
and "not true"!
13.
Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves,
we free spirits, are already a "transvaluation of all
values," a visualized declaration of war and
victory against all the old concepts of "true" and
"not true." The most valuable intuitions are the last
to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine
methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific
spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the
most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded
from the society of "decent" people--he passed as "an
enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed."
As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala2... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity
of mankind against us--their every notion of what the truth ought
to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be--their
every "thou shalt" was launched against us. . . . Our
objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner--all
appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.--Looking
back, one may almost ask one's self with reason if it was not
actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long:
what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness,
and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. It was our
modesty that stood out longest against their taste...How
well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God!
14.
We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest
in every way. We no longer derive man from the "spirit,"
from the "god-head"; we have dropped him back among
the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the beasts because
he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality.
On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which
would assert itself even here: that man is the great second thought
in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything
but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals,
all at similar stages of development... And even when we say
that we say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is
the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he
has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts--though
for all that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting!--As
regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the
really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the
whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth
of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart,
as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely
by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine.
Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher
order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we
have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer describes
anything that we can understand. The old word "will"
now connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that
follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly
harmonious stimuli--the will no longer "acts," or "moves."
. . . Formerly it was thought that man's consciousness, his "spirit,"
offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might
be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his
senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle
off his mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the
"pure spirit," would remain. Here again we have thought
out the thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit,"
appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism,
as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction
which uses up nervous force 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.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood
poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness
and hatred in the heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth
that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out
of one's own burning!26
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical.
Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which
proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual
power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed
convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is
fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions
are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what
is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose
about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions
beneath him--and behind him. . . . A mind that
aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto,
is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction
belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view.
. . That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the
power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened
and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his
intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives
him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances
it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction
as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction.
A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does
not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary,
the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned by yea or nay,
of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness.
The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is
necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit himself
as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer"
does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end;
he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His
instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement;
he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his
experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence
of self-effacement, of self-estrangement. . . When one
reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there
be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast,
and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery,
is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being
of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once
understands conviction and "faith." To the man with
convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many
things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through
and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these
are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But
by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful
man--of the truth. . . . The believer is not free to answer the
question, "true" or "not true," according
to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point
would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations
of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola,
Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand
in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the
grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual
epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics
are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening
to reasons. . . .
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of
"faith." It is now a good while since I first proposed
for consideration the question whether convictions are not even
more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human,"
I, aphorism 483.)27
This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any
actual difference between a lie and a conviction?--All the world
believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--Every
conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of
tentativeness and error: it becomes a conviction only
after having been, for a long time, not one, and then, for an
even longer time, hardly one. What if falsehood be also
one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that
is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father
becomes a conviction in the son.--I call it lying to refuse to
see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether
the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is
of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is that by which
a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively
rare offence.--Now, this will not to see what one sees,
this will not to see it as it is, is almost the first
requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the
party man becomes inevitably a liar. For example, the German
historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous with despotism
and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into
the world: what is the difference between this conviction and
a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including
the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of
morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its very
survival to the fact that the party man of every sort
has need of it every moment?--"This is our conviction:
we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for it--let
us respect all who have convictions!"--I have actually heard
such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary,
gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more respectable
because he lies on principle. . . The priests, who have more
finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection
that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say,
of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because
it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd
device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the
will of God" and "the revelation of God" at this
place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the
same road: this was hispractical reason.28 There are questions regarding the truth or
untruth of which it is not for man to decide; all the
capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are
beyond human reason. . . . To know the limits of reason--that
alone is genuine. philosophy. Why did God make a revelation to
man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man could not
find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God
taught him His will. Moral: the priest does not lie--the
question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing
to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible
to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary
to knowwhat is true. But this is more than man can
know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouth-piece of
God.--Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish
and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of
"revelation" belong to the general priestly type--to
the priest of the decadence as well as to the priest of
pagan times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and
to whom "God" is a word signifying acquiescence in
all things) --The "law," the "will of God,"
the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these
things are merely words for the conditionsunder which
the priest comes to power and with which he maintains
his power,--these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all
priestly organizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical
schemes of governments. The "holy lie"--common alike
to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian
church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here":
this means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies.
. . .
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end
of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy"
ends are not visible is my objection to the means it employs.
Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation,
the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation
and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--therefore,
its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when I
read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and
superior work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence
to so much as name in the same breath with the Bible.
It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it,
in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and
superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist
something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what
is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of
Bible: by means of it the nobles, the philosophers and
the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full
of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance
of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life--the sun
shines upon the whole book.--All the things on which Christianity
vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation, women
and marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and
with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the
hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile
things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have
his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; . . .
it is better to marry than to burn"?29 And is it possible to be a Christian
so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say,
befouled, by the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio?
. . . I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly
things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards
and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would
be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman,"
it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer
of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure."
In another place: "there is nothing purer than the light
of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the
breath of a maiden." Finally, in still another place--perhaps
this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of the body
above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the
maiden is the whole body pure."
57.
One catches the unholiness of Christian means in
flagranti by the simple process of putting the ends sought
by Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manu--by
putting these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light.
The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity of making
Christianity contemptible.--A book of laws such as the
Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book:
it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation
of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer
creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition
of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a
slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally
different from those which one would make use of to prove it.
A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical
antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative
tone, the "thou shalt," on which obedience is based.
The problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in the evolution
of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which
is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that
the series of experiences determining how all shall live--or
can live--has come to an end. The object now is to reap
as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of
experiment and hard experience. In consequence, the thing
that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation--the
continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are
tested, chosen and criticized ad infnitum. Against
this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation,
which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the
laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and
found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they
are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect,
without a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and
on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption
that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that
it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring
it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on
the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.--The
higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract
consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of
right living (that is to say, those that have been proved
to be right by wide and carefully considered experience),
so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism--a primary necessity
to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the
art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu's means to lay
before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable
perfection--it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches
of the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious:
that is the aim of every holy lie.--The order of castes,
the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification
of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank,
over which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can
exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three
physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually
conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene,
its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of
perfection. It 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] |