Nietzsche : The Antichrist
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THE ANTICHRIST
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Published 1895
translation by H.L. Mencken
Published 1920
PREFACE
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them
is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand
my "Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those
who are now sprouting ears?--First the day after tomorrow must come for
me. Some men are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily
understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my
seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge
of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to
looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath
him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth
whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an
inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage
for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the
labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New
eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have
hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand
manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for
self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.....
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers,
my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?--The rest
are merely humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in
power, in loftiness of soul,--in contempt.
FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.
1.
--Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know
well enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water
will you find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in
his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the
ice, beyond death--our life, our happiness...We have
discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it
from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found
it?--The man of today?--"I don't know either the way out or the way
in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so
sighs the man of today...This is the sort of modernity that made
us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole
virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur
of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands"
everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern
virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared
neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where
to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our
fate--it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of
powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as
possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation"
. . . There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became
overcast--for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our
happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal...
2.
What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to
power, power itself, in man. 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 | |
