Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy...
Yes, Please make this my home page!
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 Pindar ,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--thatresistance
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 Chandala... 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 un necessarily--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--thatis
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 imaginaryeffects
("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 purelyfictitious
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.)--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."--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. At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for
that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"?
How can any one call pious legends "traditions"? The histories of saints
present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine
them by the scientific method, in the entire 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, semantics 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, and among Chinese he would have employed those
of Lao-tse --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"--he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,
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 ignorance 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") 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 story 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--itabsorbed
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.It
is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in "faith," and particularly
in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian:
only the Christian way of life, the life lived by him who
died on the cross, is Christian. . . To this day such a life is
still possible, and for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive
Christianity will remain possible in all ages. . . . Not faith,
but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state
of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance,
for example, of anything as true--as every psychologist knows, the value
of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that
of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual
causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity,
to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to
formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact, there are no Christians.
The "Christian"--he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian--is
simply a 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--aplain indication
of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish
by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or
example, of his teachings in the most public manner. But his disciples
were very far from forgiving his death--though to have done so would
have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were
they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness
of heart, for a similar death. . . . On the contrary, it was precisely
the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed
them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death:
"recompense" and "judgment" became necessary (--yet what could be less
evangelical than "recompense," "punishment," and "sitting in judgment"!)
--Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the
foreground; attention was riveted upon an historical moment: the "kingdom
of God" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies. . . But in all this
there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom of God" as
a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation,
the fulfillment, therealization of this "kingdom of God." It was
only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees
and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master was thereby
turned
into
a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration
of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel
doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children
of God: their revenge took the form of elevating
Jesus in an extravagant
fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times,
the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves
from their God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the Only
Son of God: both were products of resentment . . . .
41.
--And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how could
God
allow it!" To which the deranged reason of the little community formulated
an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son as a sacrifice
for
the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice
for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the
innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism !--Jesus
himself had done away with the very concept of "guilt," he denied that
there was any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity
between God and man, and that was precisely
his "glad tidings".
. . And not as a mere privilege!--From this time forward the type
of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and
of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine
of the resurrection, by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness,"
the whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away--in favour of
a state of existence after death! . . . St. Paul, with that rabbinical
impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality
to that conception, that indecent
conception, in this way: "If
Christ
did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!"--And at once
there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable
promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immortality. . . Paul
even preached it as a reward . . .
42.
One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with
the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a
Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth--real,
not merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed out--the
essential difference between the two religions of decadence: Buddhism
promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything,
but fulfills nothing.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings"
came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very
opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for
hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What,
indeed,
has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour:
he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching,
the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels--nothing
was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it
to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! .
. . Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old
master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the
day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of
Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel
to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to
his achievement:
all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour."
. . . Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to
make it a prologue to Christianity . . . The figure of the Saviour, his
teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the
consequences of his death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained
in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of
gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existence--in
the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life
of the Saviour--what he needed was the death on the cross,
and something
more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the
centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination
into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe
his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself--this would be
a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore
he
also willed the means. --What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily
enough by the idiots among whom he spread
his teaching.--What
he
wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he
had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose
of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What
was the
only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention,
his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the
belief in the immortality of the soul--that
is to say,
the doctrine
of "judgment".
43.
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself,
but in "the beyond"--in nothingness--then one has taken away
its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality
destroys all reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the
instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the
future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any
meaning: this is now the "meaning" of life. . . . Why be public-spirited?
Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust
one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to
serve it? . . . Merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from
the "straight path."--"One thing only is necessary". . . That every
man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man;
that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of every individual
may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the
three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly
suspended
in
their behalf--it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a
magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to
insolence.
And
yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery
of personal vanity for its triumph--it was thus that it lured all
the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse
and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul"--in
plain English: "the world revolves around me." . . . The poisonous doctrine,
"equal
rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle: out
of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged
a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and
man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite
to every step
upward, to every development of civilization--out of the ressentiment
of
the masses it has forged its chief weapons against
us, against everything
noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth
. . . To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest,
the most vicious outrage upon noble
humanity ever perpetrated.--And
let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has
had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special
rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in
himself and his equals--for the pathos
of distance. . .
Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!--The aristocratic attitude
of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if
belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to
make revolution--it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian
valuations,
which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity
is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything
that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly" lowers . . .
44.
--The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was
already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul,
with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was
at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the
Saviour.--These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk
behind every word. I confess--I hope it will not be held against me--that
it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist--as
the opposite of all merely naive corruption, as refinement par
excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption. The
gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared
to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne
in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius
for conjuring up a delusion of personal "holiness" unmatched anywhere else,
either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude
to the level of an art--all this is not an accident due to the chance
talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible
is race. The whole of Judaism appears in Christianity as the art
of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish
training and hard practice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the
stage of mastery. The Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is
the Jew all over again--he is threefold the Jew. . . The underlying
will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into
priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode
of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities--this
is not only tradition, it is inheritance: only as an inheritance
is it able to operate with the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even
the best minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human--),
have permitted themselves to be deceived. The gospels have been read as
a book of innocence. . . surely no small indication of the high
skill with which the trick has been done.--Of course, if we could actually
see
these
astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce
would come to an end,--and it is precisely because I
cannot read
a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that
I have made
am end of them. . . . I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling
up their eyes.--For the majority, happily enough, books are mere literature.--Let
us not be led astray: they say "judge not," and yet they condemn to hell
whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge
themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in demanding
that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be
capable of--still more, which they must have in order to remain
on top--they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men
engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we die, we sacrifice
ourselves for the good" (--"the truth," "the light," "the kingdom
of God"): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing.
Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along
in the shadows, they convert their necessity into aduty: it is on
grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility, and that
humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety. . . Ah, that humble,
chaste, charitable brand of fraud! "Virtue itself shall bear witness for
us.". . . . One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction:
these petty folks fasten themselves to morality--they know the uses of
morality! Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by
the nose!--The fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here
disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that they, the "community,"
the "good and just," range themselves, once and for always, on one
side, the side of "the truth"--and the rest of mankind, "the world," on
the other. . . In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania
that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began
to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of "God," "the truth," "the light,"
"the spirit," "love," "wisdom" and "life," as if these things were synonyms
of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the
"world"; little super-Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values
upside down in order to meet their notions, just as if the Christian were
the meaning, the salt, the standard and even thelast judgment of
all the rest. . . . The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact
that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to
this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn
between Jews and Judaeo-Christians, the latter had no choice but to employ
the self-preservative measures that the Jewish instinct had devised, even
against
the
Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them only against non-Jews.
The Christian is simply a Jew of the "reformed" confession.--
45.
--I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have
got into their heads--what they have put into the mouth of the Master:the
unalloyed creed of "beautiful souls."--
"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them.
Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha
in the day of judgment, than for that city" (Mark vi, 11)--How evangelical!
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that
believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about
his neck, and he were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42) .--How evangelical!
--
"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee
to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to
be cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched."
(Mark ix, 47)--It is not exactly the eye that is meant.
"Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here,
which shall not taste death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come
with power." (Mark ix, 1.)--Well lied, lion!. . . .
"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up
his cross, and follow me. For . . ." (Note of a psychologist.
Christian
morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,--this
makes it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.--
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it
shall be measured to you again." (Matthew vii, l.)--What a notion of justice,
of a "just" judge! . . .
"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not
even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what
do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew
V, 46.)--Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid
in the end. . . .
"But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses." (Matthew vi, 15.)--Very compromising for the
said "father."
"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and
all these things shall be added unto you." (Matthew vi, 33.)--All these
things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error,
to
put it mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least
in certain cases.
"Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward
is
great
in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets."
(Luke vi, 23.)--Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the prophets.
. .
"Know yea not that yea are the temple of God, and that the
spirit of God dwelt in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him
shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple yea
are." (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.)--For that sort of thing one cannot
have enough contempt. . . .
"Do yea not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the
world shall be judged by you, are yea unworthy to judge the smallest matters?"
(Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)--Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a
lunatic. . .
This frightful impostor then proceeds: "Know yea not that
we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?".
. .
"Hat not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that
in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by
the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. . . . Not many
wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called:
But
God hat chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and
God hat chosen the weak things of the world confound the things which are
mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hat
God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things
that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence." (Paul, 1 Corinthians
i, 20ff.) --In order to understand this passage, a first rate example
of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the
first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for the first time, the
antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of ressentiment
and
impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles
of revenge. . . .
46.
--What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before
reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very
advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions
as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them . . . Neither
has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in vain for a
single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted
or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward--the
instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . . Only evil instincts
are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It
is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every
other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example,
immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming
and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio
wrote of Ceasar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: "e tutto Iesto"--immortallyhealthy,
immortally cheerful and sound. . . .These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation.
They attack, but everything they attack is thereby
distinguished. Whoever
is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely
not befouled . . .
On the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an opponent.
One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever
it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent
wind bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching." . . . Even
the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must
certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent
manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early Christians"
dared
to make!--After all, they were the
privileged, and that was
enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early Christian"--and
also, I fear, the "last Christian,"
whom I may perhaps live to see--is
a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes
war for ever for "equal rights." . . .Strictly speaking, he has no alternative.
When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or
to be a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every other
criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness
and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--evil
in itself. . . Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early
Christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all
his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever
he hates, has real value . . . The Christian, and particularly
the Christian priest, is thus a criterion of values.
--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but
a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To
regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously--that was quite beyond him.
One Jew more or less-- what did it matter? . . . The noble scorn of a Roman,
before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New
Testament with the only saying that has any value--and that is at
once its criticism and its destruction: "What is truth?". . .
47.
--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd,
as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life. .
. We deny that God is God . . . If any one were to show us this
Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula:
deus,
qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a religion as Christianity,
which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces
the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably
the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of science--and
it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate
and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness
in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom
of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes science--in praxi,
lying
at any price. . . . Paul well knew that lying--that "faith"--was
necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.--The God that
Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom
of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology
and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination
to
accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of
God, thora--that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose
of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the good philologians
and physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As
a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without
being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees
behind
the
"holy books," and as a physician he sees behind the physiological
degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable";
the philologian says "fraud.". . .
48.
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning
of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in
fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens,
as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces
only one great danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great danger.--
The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect,
is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against
boredom even gods struggle in vain.What does he do? He creates man--man
is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored. God's
pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no
bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first mistake: to
man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over
them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God created woman.
In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things! Woman
was the second mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent,
Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"--every
priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.
. . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What
happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been
his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science
makes men godlike--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes
scientific!--Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is
forbidden. Science is the first
of sins, the germ of all sins, the
original sin. This is all there is of morality.--"Thou shalt
not know"--the rest follows from that.--God's mortal terror, however,
did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one's
self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer:
Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts
are bad thoughts!--Man
must
not think.--And so the priest invents
distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery,
old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing but devices for
making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow
him to think.
. . Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower
aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The old
God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy
one another (--the priests have always had need of war....). War--among
other things, a great disturber of science !--Incredible! Knowledge,
deliverance
from the priests, prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to
his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--there
is no help for
it: he must be drowned!". . . .
49.
--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole
psychology
of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science--the
sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the
whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must
have an overflowing intellect, in order to "know." . . ."Therefore,
man
must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It
is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to
come into the world :--"sin." . . . The concept of
guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up
against science--against the deliverance of man from priests. .
. . Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not
look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must
not look at all; he must suffer . . . And he must suffer so much
that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians!
What
is needed is a Saviour.--The concept of guilt and punishment,
including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--lies
through
and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised
to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the
concept of cause and effect !--And not an attack with the fist,
with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired
by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An
attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism
of pale, subterranean leeches! . . . When the natural consequences of an
act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly
creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned
as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as
lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--then
the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.--I repeat
that sin, man's self-desecration par excellence, was invented inorder
to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible;
the priest rules through the invention of sin.--
50.
--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief,"
of the "believer," for the special benefit of 'believers." If there remain
any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be "believing"--or
how much a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live--then they
will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the deaf.--It
appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among
Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power."
Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true."--It might be objected
right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised:
it
hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one shall be blessed because
one
believes. . . . But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer,
the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is that to be demonstrated?--The
"proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief
that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula:
"I believe that faith makes for blessedness--therefore, it is true."
. . But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be absurdum
itself
as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of politeness,
that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--not
merely hoped
for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest):
even so, could blessedness--in a technical term,
pleasure--everbe
a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against
truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question
"What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly
suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof
of "pleasure--nothing
more; why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments
give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established
harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The
experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary.
Man
has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it
almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling
to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth
is the hardest of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of integrityin
things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart,
that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and
Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed:therefore, it lies.
. . .
51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness,
but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by no means makes
the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains,
but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this
is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not,
of
course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness
is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds
sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance
of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation
of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself--doesn't
it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth
as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church wants
is
a typical decadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates
a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the inner world"
of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung
and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest"
states of mind, held up be fore mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth,
are actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy
only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem. .
. . Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of training
in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method
of producing a folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared for
it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be
a Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first be
sick enough for it. . . .We others, who have the courage for health
and likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches
misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition
about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that
combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself
that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body,
and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection,"
a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a
holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished,
enervated and incurably disordered body! . . . The Christian movement,
as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising
of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of
Christianity, aspire to power)-- It does not represent the decay
of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of decadence
products
from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It
was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of noble
antiquity,
which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the
learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when
the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium
were
Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached its finest
and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its
Christian instincts, triumphed . . . Christianity was not "national,"
it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited
by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of
the sick at its very core--the instinct against the
healthy, against
health.
Everything that is well--constituted, proud, gallant and, above all,
beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's
priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things of the world,
the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world,
and things which are despised": this was the formula; in hoc
signo the decadence triumphed.--God on the cross--is
man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything
that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine. . .
. We all hang on the cross, consequently we
are divine. . . . We
alone are divine. . . . Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude
of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest
misfortune of humanity.--
52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,--sick
reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning;
it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse
upon "intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect. Since
sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian
state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too, and that all straight,
straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must be banned
by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start.
. . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest--revealed
by a glance at him--is a phenomenon resulting from decadence,--one
may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly
the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying,
and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of
decadence.
"Faith"
means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of
either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct
demands
that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever
makes for illness is good; whatever issues from abundance, from
super-abundance, from power, is evil": so argues the believer. The
impulse to lie--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained
theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness
for philology. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense,
the art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts without
interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience
and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis
in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports,
with the most fateful events or with weather statistics--not to mention
the "salvation of the soul." . . . The way in which a theologian, whether
in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a "passage of Scripture,"
or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it
the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daring that
it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do
when pietists and other such cows from Suabia use the "finger of God" to
convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle
of "grace," a "providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest
exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough
to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness
of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our piety,
if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the head
at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant
heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he'd have
to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a letter
carrier, as an almanac--man--at bottom, he is' a mere name for the stupidest
sort of chance. . . . "Divine Providence," which every third man in "educated
Germany" still believes in, is so strong an argument against God that it
would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument
against Germans! . . .
53.
--It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the
truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had
anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr
flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears
so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to
the problem of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth
is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only
peasants, or peasant apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such
way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual
conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discretion, on this
point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know
anything further . . . "Truth," as the word is understood by every
prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every
churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been
made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary
to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.--The deaths of the martyrs,
it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have
misled
.
. . The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there
must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which,
as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this
conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon
the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have damaged
the
truth. . . . Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to
give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--But why?
Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down
his life for it?--An error that becomes honourable is simply an error that
has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians,
that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?--One best
disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice--that is also the
best way to dispose of theologians. . . . This was precisely the world-historical
stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour
to the cause they opposed--that they made it a present of the fascination
of martyrdom. . . .Women are still on their knees before an error because
they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. Is the cross,
then, an argument?--But about all these things there is one, and one
only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years--Zarathustra.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their
folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth
even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the
heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that
prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning!
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra
is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual
power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves
as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining
what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are
prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below
them:
whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must
be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him--and behind
him.
. . . A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means
thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction
belongs
to
strength, and to an independent point of view. . . That grand passion which
is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is
both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the
whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it
gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it
does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one
may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes
use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself
to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned
by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of
weakness.
The
man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such
a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within
himself. The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means
to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up.
His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement;
he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience,
his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement,
of self-estrangement. . . When one reflects how necessary it is to
the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without
and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense,
slavery,
is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the
weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction
and "faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid
seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man
through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these
are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same
token they are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. .
. . The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true,"
according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point
would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision
turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau,
Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong,
emancipated
spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick
intellects,
these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics
are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons.
. . .
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is
now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question
whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies.
("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.) This time I desire to put the
question definitely: is there any actual difference between a lie and a
conviction?--All the world believes that there is; but what is not believed
by all the world!--Every conviction has its history, its primitive forms,
its stage of tentativeness and error: it becomes a conviction only
after having been, for a long time, not one, and then, for an even longer
time, hardly one. What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic
forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons:
what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.--I call it
lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it
is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses
is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man
deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.--Now,
this will not to see what one sees, this will not to see
it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party
of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. For example,
the German historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous with despotism
and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world:
what is the difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered
at that all partisans, including the German historians, instinctively roll
the fine phrases of morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes
its very survival to the fact that the party man of every sort has
need of it every moment?--"This is our conviction: we publish it
to the whole world; we live and die for it--let us respect all who have
convictions!"--I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of
anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not
become more respectable because he lies on principle. . . The priests,
who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection
that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood
that becomes a matter of principle
because
it serves a purpose,
have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts,
"God," "the will of God" and "the revelation of God" at this place. Kant,
too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was hispractical
reason. There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which
it is not
for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the
capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason. . . . To know the
limits of reason--that alone is genuine. philosophy. Why did God
make a revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man
could not find out for himself what was good and what was evil,
so God taught him His will. Moral: the priest does not lie--the
question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing to do with such things as the
priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. In order
to lie here it would be necessary to knowwhat
is true. But this
is more than man can know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouth-piece
of God.--Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian;
the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of "revelation" belong to
the general priestly type--to the priest of the
decadence as well
as to the priest of pagan times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to
life, and to whom "God" is a word signifying acquiescence in all things)
--The "law," the "will of God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all
these things are merely words for the conditionsunder
which the
priest comes to power and with which he maintains his power,--these
concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and
of all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy
lie"--common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to
the Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this
means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies. . . .
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying?
The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is my objection
to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the
calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation
and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--therefore, its
means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of
Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would
be a sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the
same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy
behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism
and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something
to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what is most important,
it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the nobles,
the
philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it
is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance
of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life--the sun shines
upon the whole book.--All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless
vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and marriage--are here handled
earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one
really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains
such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have his
own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; . . . it is better
to marry than to burn"? And is it possible to be a Christian so
long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled,
by the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio? . . . I know of
no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as
in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being
gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The
mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the
prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another
place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast
by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still
another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of
the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the
maiden is the whole body pure."
57.
One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti
by
the simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the
ends sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously antithetical
ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the
necessity of making Christianity contemptible.--A book of laws such
as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it
epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation
of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates.
The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact
that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully
attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one
would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the
grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would
lose the imperative tone, the "thou shalt," on which obedience is based.
The problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in the evolution of
a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say,
the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences
determining how all shall live--or can live--has come to an end.
The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible
from the days of experiment and hard experience. In consequence,
the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation--the
continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen
and criticized ad infnitum. Against this a double wall is
set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption that
the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin, that they were
not sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that
they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without
a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and on the other hand,
tradition,
which
is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial,
and that it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it
into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis:
God gave it, and the fathers lived it.--The higher motive of such
procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from
its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have
been proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience),
so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism--a primary necessity to
every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life.
To draw up such a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility
of future mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire
to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must
be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The order
of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification
of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over
which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. In
every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating
toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each
of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery
and feeling of perfection. It isnot Manu but nature that sets off
in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are
marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are
distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity--the
last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select.
The superior caste--I call it the fewest--has,as the most perfect,
the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything
good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty,
to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum
est paucorum hominum: goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more
unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye
that sees ugliness--or indignation against the general aspect of
things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism.
"The world is perfect"--soprompts the instinct of the intellectual,
the instinct of the man who says yes to life. "Imperfection, what ever
is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala
themselves are parts of this perfection. "The most intelligent men, like
the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only
disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others,
in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes
second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as
a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that
would crush all others. . . . Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They are
the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the
most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but
because they are;
they are not at liberty to play second.--The second
caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order
and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest
form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute
the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking
from them all that is rough in the business of ruling-their followers,
their right hand, their most apt disciples.--In all this, I repeat, there
is nothing arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the contrary
is made up--by it nature is brought to shame. . . The order of castes,
the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself;
the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society,
and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types--the inequality
of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.--A right
is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state
of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre.
Life
is always harder as one mounts the heights--the cold increases,
responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand
only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly
consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science,
the
greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational
activities,
are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings
would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to
them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that
a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of
a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of
happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent
machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have
a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would
be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable
in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite
to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a
high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre
man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals,
this is not merely kindness of heart--it is simply his duty. . .
. Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of
Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's
instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who
make him envious and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal
rights; it lies in the assertion of "equal" rights. . . . What is bad?
But
I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.--The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .
58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference:
whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness
between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only
toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of this:
there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied a code
of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions
which cause life to flourish into an "eternal" social organization,--Christianity
found its mission in putting an end to such an organization, because
life flourished under it. There the benefits that reason had produced
during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the most
remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in a harvest that should be
as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, on the contrary, the
harvest is blighted overnight. . . .That which stood there aere
perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of
organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and
compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork,
bungling, dilletantism--those holy anarchists made it a matter of
"piety" to destroy "the world,"which is to say, the imperium
Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another--and even
Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters. . . . The
Christian and the anarchist: both are decadents; both are incapable
of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking;
both
have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up,
and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future. . . . Christianity
was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,-- overnight it destroyed
the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great
culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not
yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the
history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this
most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning,
and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands
of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has
been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong
enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing
to do with such things--the first principle of all genuinely great
architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest
of
all forms of corruption--against Christians. . . . These stealthy worms,
which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual,
sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct
for reality--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually
alienated all "souls," step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning
against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found
in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their
own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle,
concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio
mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire
of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all that sort of thing became master of
Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus
had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know what
Epicurus
made war upon--not paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say,
the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and
immortality.--He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of
latent Christianity--to deny immortality was already a form of genuine
salvation.--Epicurus
had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean--when
Paul
appeared. . . Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world," in
the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the eternal Jew par
excellence. . . . What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian
Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world conflagration"
might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on the cross," all secret
seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might
be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the Jews."--Christianity
is the formula for exceeding
and summing up the subterranean cults
of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras,
for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed
itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the
truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala
religion into the mouth of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not
only into the mouth--he
made out of him something that even a priest
of Mithras could understand. . . This was his revelation at Damascus: he
grasped the fact that he needed
the belief in immortality in order
to rob "the world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master
Rome--that the notion of a "beyond" is the death of life. Nihilist
and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme.
59.
The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have
no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--And,
considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with
adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to
go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!
. . To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?--All the prerequisites
to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there;
man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably--that
first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences;
the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were
on the right road,--the sense of fact, the last and more valuable
of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries
old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning
of the work was ready;--and the most essential, it cannot be said
too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the
longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have to day reconquered,
with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves--for certain bad instincts,
certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies--that is to say,
the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in
the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge--all these
things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! More,
there
was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling!
Not
as "German" culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing,
as instinct--in short, as reality. . . All gone for naught!
Overnight
it became merely a memory !--The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility,
taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration,
faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yes to
everything entering into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all
the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality,
truth, life . . --All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion
of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But
brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered,--only
sucked dry! . . . Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything
wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole
ghetto-world
of the soul, was at once on top!--One needs but read
any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to
realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would
be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding
in the leaders of the Christian movement:--ah, but they were clever, clever
to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked
was something quite different. Nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to give
them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly
instincts.
. . Between ourselves, they are not even men. . . . If Islam despises Christianity,
it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is
dealing with men. . . .
60.
Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization,
and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization.
The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer
to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and
Greece, was trampled down (--I do not say by what sort of feet--)
Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin--because
it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish
life! . . . The crusaders later made war on something before which it would
have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust--a civilization
beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very
"senile."--What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich.
. . . Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form
of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a
Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well
how the German nobility was to be won . . . The German noble, always
the "Swiss guard" of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct
of the church--but well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely
the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the
church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth!
At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German
nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization:
the reason is obvious. . . Christianity, alcohol--the two great means
of corruption. . . . Intrinsically there should be no more choice between
Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision
is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a
man is a Chandala or he is not. . . . "War to the knife with Rome! Peace
and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the act,
of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick
II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can
feel decently? I can't make out how a German could ever feel Christian.
. . .
61.
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred
times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the
last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the Renaissance.
Is
it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what
the
Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,--anattempt
with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius
to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more
noble
values.
. . . This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been
a more critical question than that of the Renaissance--it is
my question
too--; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more
direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of
the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity,
and there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say, to insinuate
them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites
of those sitting there . . . I see before me the possibility
of
a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle :--it seems to me to scintillate
with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there
is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain
for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle
so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox
that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter--Caesar
Borgia as pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well then, that would
have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today--:
by it Christianity would have been swept away!--What happened? A
German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts
of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion
against the
Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving,
the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital--instead
of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks
only of himself.--Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at
the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption,
the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied
the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph
of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring
things! . . . And Luther restored the church:
he attacked
it. . . . The Renaissance--an event without meaning, a great futility !--Ah,
these Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility--thathas always
been the work of the Germans.--The Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant and so-called
German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire-every time a futile
substitute for something that once existed, for something
irrecoverable
. . . These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness
in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay.
For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their
fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures,
all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of,--they also
have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists,
and the most incurable and indestructible--Protestantism. . . . If mankind
never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans
will be to
blame. . . .
62.
--With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn
Christianity;
I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations
that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of
all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the
worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched
by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every
truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one
dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities
range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress;
it creates distress to make itself
immortal. . . . For example,
the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this
misery!--The "equality of souls before God"--this fraud, this pretext
for
the rancunes of all the base-minded--this explosive concept, ending
in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole
social order--this is Christian
dynamite. . . . The "humanitarian"
blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a
self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price,
an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to
me, is the "humanitarianism" of Christianity!--Parasitism as the only
practice
of the church; with its anaemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood,
all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny
all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean
conspiracy ever heard of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect,
kindness of soul--against life itself. . . .
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all
walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind
will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the
one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which
no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,--I
call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race. . . .
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when
this fatality befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why
not rather from its last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values!
. . .
THE
END
