 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Translated from the German with an introduction by H. L. Mencken. Copyright 1918 by Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated. Introduction by H. L. Mencken. Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, Eke Homo, the Antichrist is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form. Notes for it had been accumulating for years, and it was to have constituted the first volume of his long-projected Magnum Opus, The Will to Power. His full plan for this work as originally drawn up was as follows. Volume one, The Antichrist, an attempt at a criticism of Christianity. Volume two, The Free Spirit, a criticism of philosophy as a nihilistic movement. Volume three, The Immoralist, a criticism of morality, the most fatal form of ignorance. Volume four, Dionysus, the philosophy of eternal recurrence. The first sketches for The Will to Power were made in 1884, soon after the publication of the first three parts of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and thereafter, for four years, Nietzsche piled up notes. They were written at all the places he visited on his endless travels in search of health, at Nice, at Venice, at Cilsmaria, in the Angadine, for long his favorite resort, at Canobio, at Zurich, at Genoa, at Chur, at Leipzig. Several times his work was interrupted by other books, first by Beyond Good and Evil, then by The Genealogy of Morals, written in twenty days, then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almost as often he changed his plan. Once he decided to expand The Will to Power to ten volumes with an attempt at a new interpretation of the world, as a general subtitle. Again he adopted the subtitle of An Interpretation of All That Happens. Finally he hid upon an attempt at transvaluation of all values, and went back to four volumes, though with a number of changes in their arrangement. In September 1888 he began actual work upon the first volume, and before the end of the month it was completed. The summer had been one of almost hysterical creative activity. Since the middle of June he had written two other small books, The Case of Wagner and The Twilight of the Idols, and before the end of the year he was destined to write at Kehomo. Sometime during December his health began to fail rapidly, and soon after the new year he was helpless. Thereafter he wrote no more. The Wagner Diatribe and The Twilight of the Idols were published immediately, but the Antichrist did not get into type until 1895. I suspect that the delay was due to the influence of the philosopher's sister, Elizabeth Forsternica, an intelligent and ardent, but by no means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas. During his dark days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept aloof, Frau Forsternica went with him farther than any other, but there were bounds beyond which she also hesitated to go, and those bounds were marked by crosses. One notes in her biography of him a useful but not always accurate work, an evident desire to purge him of the accusation of mocking at sacred things. He had, she says, great admiration for, quote, the elevating effect of Christianity upon the weak and ailing, unquote, and, quote, a real liking for sincere pious Christians, unquote, and, quote, a tender love for the founder of Christianity, unquote. All his wrath she continues was reserved for, quote, St. Paul and his like, unquote, who perverted the Beatitudes which Christ intended for the lowly only into a universal religion which made war upon aristocratic values. Here, obviously, one is addressed by an interpreter who cannot forget that she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and the granddaughter of two others. A touch of conscience gets into her reading of the Antichrist. She even hints that the text may have been garbled after the authors collapse by some more sinister heretic. There is not the slightest reason to believe that any such garbling ever took place, nor is there any evidence that their common heritage of piety rested upon the brother as heavily as it rested upon the sister. On the contrary, it must be manifest that Nietzsche in this book intended to attack Christianity headlong and with all arms, that for all his rapid writing he put the utmost care into it and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it stands. The ideas in it were anything but new to him when he set them down. He had been developing them since the days of his beginning. You will find some of them clearly recognizable in the first book he ever wrote, The Birth of Tragedy. You will find the most important of all of them, the conception of Christianity as recentiment, set forth at length in the first part of the genealogy of morals, published under his own supervision in 1887, and the rest are scattered through the whole vast mass of his notes, sometimes as mere questionings but often worked out very carefully. Moreover, let it not be forgotten that it was Wagner's yielding Christian sentimentality and Parsifal that transformed Nietzsche from the first among his literary advocates into the most bitter of his opponents. He could forgive every other sort of Mount of Bancury, but not that. In me he once said, quote, the Christianity of my forebears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns against Christianity. In me Christianity devours itself, unquote. In truth the present Philippic is as necessary to the completeness of the whole of Nietzsche's system as the keystone is to the arch. All the curves of his speculation lead up to it. What he flung himself against from beginning to end of his days of writing was always in the last analysis Christianity in some form or other. Christianity as a system of practical ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as metaphysics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth. It would be difficult to think of any intellectual enterprise on his long list that did not, more or less directly and clearly, relate itself to this master enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man. The will to power was his answer to Christianity's affectation of humility and self-sacrifice. Eternal recurrence was his mocking criticism of Christian optimism and millennialism. The Superman was his candidate for the place of the Christian ideal of the good man, prudently abased before the throne of God. The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things. The abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies, of the priest of the politician of the plutocrat, the revival of the healthy lordly innocence that was Greek. If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His dreams were thoroughly Hellenic. His whole manner of thinking was Hellenic. His peculiar errors were Hellenic no less. But his Hellenism, I need not add, was anything but the pale Neoplatonism that has run like a thread through the thinking of the Western world since the days of the Christian fathers. From Plato to be sure, he got what all of us must get. But his real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe, a view to wit that sees it not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic representation. The God that Nietzsche imagined in the end was not far from the God that such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines, a supreme craftsman ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing of lines and forces, and yet always failing to work out the final harmony. The late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury of the Western nations, and therewith all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon Nietzsche as upon the most daring and provocative of recent amateur theologians. The Germans with their characteristic tendency to explain their every act in terms as realistic and unpleasant as possible appear to have mauled him in a belated and unexpected embrace to the horror, I dare say, of the Kaiser, and perhaps to the even greater horror of Nietzsche's own ghost. The folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with their equally characteristic tendency to explain all their enterprises romantically, simultaneously set him up as the Antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. The result was a great deal of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of him, from the pulpits of the Allied countries and particularly from those of England and the United States. A horde of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in extravagant terms as the author of all the horrors of the time, and in the newspapers, until the Kaiser was elected soul bugaboo, he shared the honors of that office with von Hindenburg, the Crown Prince, Captain Boy Ed, von Bernstorf, and von Terpitz. Most of this denunciation, of course, was frankly idiotic. The naive pishposh of suburban Methodists, notoriety-seeking college professors, almost illiterate editorial writers, and other such numbskulls. In much of it, including not a few official hymns of hate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the teacher of such spokesmen of the extremist sort of German nationalism as von Berhardt and von Treitschke, which was just as intelligent as making George Bernard Shaw the mentor of Lloyd George. In other solemn pronunciamientos, he was credited with being philosophically responsible for various imaginary crimes of the enemy, the wholesale slaughter or mutilation of prisoners of war, the deliberate burning down of Red Cross hospitals, the utilization of the corpses of the slain for soap banking. I amused myself in those gaudy days by collecting newspaper clippings to this general effect, and later on I shall probably publish a digest of them as a contribution to the study of war hysteria. The thing went to unbelievable lengths. On the strength of the fact that I had published a book on Nietzsche in 1906, six years after his death, I was called upon by agents of the Department of Justice, elaborately outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I was an intimate associate and agent of, quote, the German monster, Nietzsche, unquote. I quote the official Proce Verbal, an indignant but often misspelled document. Alas, poor Nietzsche, after all his laborious efforts to prove that he was not a German but a Pole, even after his heroic readiness via anti-antisemitism, to meet the deduction that, if a Pole, then probably also a Jew. But under all this alarmed and preposterous tosh, there was at least a sound instinct, and that was the instinct which recognized Nietzsche as the most eloquent, pertenacious, and effective of all the critics of the philosophy to which the Allies against Germany stood committed, and on the strength of which, at all events in theory, the United States had engaged itself in the war. He was not in point of fact involved with the visible enemy, save in remote and transient ways. The German officially remained the most ardent of Christians during the war, and became a Democrat at its close. But he was plainly a foe of democracy in all its forms, political, religious, and epistemological. And what is worse, his opposition was set forth in terms that were not only extraordinarily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonly offensive. It was thus quite natural that he should have aroused a degree of indignation verging upon the pathological in the two countries that had planted themselves upon the Democratic platform most boldly, and that felt it most shaky, one may add, under their feet. I daresay that Nietzsche, had he been alive, would have got a lot of satisfaction out of the execration thus heaped upon him, not only because being a vain fellow, he enjoyed execration as a tribute to his general singularity, and hence to his superiority, but also, and more importantly, because being no mean psychologist, he would have recognized the disconcerting doubts underlying it. If Nietzsche's criticism of democracy were as ignorant and empty, say, as the average evangelical clergyman's criticism of Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection, then the advocates of democracy could afford to dismiss it as loftily as the Darwinians dismiss the blather of the holy clerks. And if his attack upon Christianity were mere sound and fury signifying nothing, then there would be no call for anathemas from the sacred desk. But these onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and a great deal of point and plausibility. There are, in brief, bullets in the gun, teeth in the tiger, and so it is no wonder that they excite the ire of men, who hold as a primary article of belief that their acceptance would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and bring Yahweh to sobs upon his throne. But in all this justifiable fear, of course, there remains a false assumption, and that is the assumption that Nietzsche proposed to destroy Christianity altogether, and so rob the plain people of the world of their virtue, their spiritual consolations, and their hope of heaven. Nothing could be more untrue. The fact is that Nietzsche had no interest whatever in the delusions of the plain people, that is, intrinsically. It seemed to him of small moment what they believed, so long as it was safely imbecile. What he stood against was not their beliefs, but the elevation of those beliefs by any sort of democratic process to the dignity of a state philosophy. What feared most was the pollution and crippling of the superior minority by intellectual disease from below. His plain aim in the Antichrist was to combat that menace by completing the work begun on the one hand by Darwin and the other evolutionist philosophers, and, on the other hand, by German historians and philologians. The net effect of this earlier attack in the 80s had been the collapse of Christian theology as a serious concern of educated men. The mob, it must be obvious, was very little shaken. Even to this day it has not put off its belief in the essential Christian doctrines. But the intelligentsia by 1885 had been pretty well convinced. No man of sound information at the time Nietzsche planned the Antichrist actually believed that the world was created in seven days, or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by flood as a penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved the boa constrictor, the prairie dog, and the pediculus capitis by taking a pair of each into the ark, or that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of the true cross could cure hydrophobia. Such notions, still almost universally prevalent in Christendom a century before, were now confined to the great body of ignorant and credulous men, that is, to 95 or 96% of the race. For a man of the superior minority to subscribe to one of them publicly was already sufficient to set him off as one in imminent need of psychiatric attention. Belief in them had become a mark of inferiority, like the allied belief in madstones, magic, and apparitions. But though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient castes of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck, that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this sphere a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult, a cult to wit purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus. This cult still flourishes. Protestantism tends to become identical with it. It invades Catholicism as modernism. It is supported by great numbers of men whose intelligence is manifest and whose sincerity is not open to question. Even Nietzsche himself yielded to it in weak moments, as you will discover on examining his somewhat laborious effort to make Paul the villain of Christian theology, and Jesus no more than an innocent bystander. But this sentimental yielding never went far enough to distract his attention for long from his main idea, which was this, that Christian ethics were quite as dubious at bottom as Christian theology, that they were founded just as surely childish fables as the story of Jonah and the Whale. Upon the peculiar prejudices and credulities, the special desires and appetites of inferior men, that they ward upon the best interests of men of a better sort, quite as unmistakably as the most extravagant of objective superstitions. In brief, what he saw in Christian ethics under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism and all the theoretical benefits therein was a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong, a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors, nay against the free progress of mankind. This theory is the thing he exposes in the Antichrist, bringing to the business his amazing chromatic and exigent eloquence at its finest flower. This is the quote conspiracy, unquote, he sets forth in all the panoply of his characteristic italics, dashes, sforzando interjections and exclamation points. Well, an idea is an idea. The present one may be right and it may be wrong. One thing is quite certain, that no progress will be made against it by denouncing it as merely immoral. If it is ever laid at all, it must be laid evidentially, logically. The notion to the contrary is thoroughly democratic. The mob is the most ruthless of tyrants. It is always in a democratic society that heresy and felony tend to be most constantly confused. One hears, without surprise, of a Bismarck philosophizing placidly, at least in his old age, upon the delusion of socialism and of a Frederick the Great playing the hose of his cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identical with his own person. But men in the mass never broke the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs. Impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem. Democracy and free speech are eternal enemies. But in any battle between an institution and an idea, the idea in the long run has the better of it. Here I do not venture into the absurdity of arguing that, as the world wags on, the truth always survives. I believe nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that an idea that happens to be true, or more exactly, as near to truth as any human idea can be, and yet remain generally intelligible, it seems to me that such an idea carries a special and often fatal handicap. The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes, it is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances, of complex, irrational phenomena defectively grasped. But though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great advantage. The evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality, and sentimentality is as powerful as an army with banners. One never hears of a martyr in history whose notions are seriously disputed today. The forgotten ideas are those of the men who put them forward soberly and quietly, hoping fatuously that they would conquer by the force of their truth. These are the ideas that we now struggle to rediscover. Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by outraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been a glorious day for his doctrines. As it is, they are helped on their way every time they are denounced as immoral and against God. The war brought down upon them the maledictions of vast herds of right-thinking men, and now the Antichrist, after 15 years of neglect, is being reprinted. One imagines the author a sardonic wraith snickering somewhat sadly over the fact. His shade, wherever it suffers, is favored in these days by many such consolations, some of them of much greater horsepower. Think of the facts and arguments, the underlying theories and attitudes that have been borrowed from him, consciously and unconsciously, by the foes of Bolshevism during these last thrilling years. The face of democracy, suddenly seen hideously close, has scared the guardians of the reigning plutocracy half to death, and they have gone to the devil himself for aid. Southern senators, almost illiterate men, have mixed his assets with well water and spouted them like affrighted geysers, not knowing what they did. Nor are they the first to borrow from him. Years ago I called attention to the debt incurred with characteristic forgetfulness of obligation by the late Theodore Roosevelt in The Strenuous Life and Elsewhere. Roosevelt's a typical apologist for the existing order, adeptly dragging a herring across the trail whenever it was menaced, yet managed to delude the native blueberry, at least until toward the end, into accepting him as a fiery exponent of pure democracy. Perhaps he even fooled himself. Charlatans usually do so soon or late. A study of Nietzsche reveals the sources of much that was honest in him and exposes the hollowness of much that was sham. Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas. He seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. What is called Bolshevism today, he saw clearly a generation ago and described for what it was and is. Democracy in another aspect, the old ressentiment of the lower orders in free function once more, socialism, puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity, he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit. The world needed a staggering exaggeration to make it see even half of the truth. It trembles today as it trembled during the French Revolution. Perhaps it would tremble less if it could combat the monster with a clearer conscience and less burden of compromising theory, if it could launch its forces, frankly, at the fundamental doctrine and not merely employ them in transient orgy. Nietzsche in the long run may help it toward that greater honesty. His notions, propagated by cuttings from cuttings from cuttings, may conceivably prepare the way for a sounder, more healthful theory of society and of the state, and so free human progress from the stupidities which now hamper it, and men of true vision from the despairs which now sicken them. I say it is conceivable, but I doubt that it is probable. The soul and the belly of mankind are too evenly balanced. It is not likely that the belly will ever put away its hunger or forget its power. Here perhaps there is an example of the eternal recurrence that Nietzsche was fond of mulling over in his blacker moods. We are in the midst of one of the perennial risings of the lower orders. It got underway long before any of the current Bolshevist demons was born. It was given its long secure start by the intolerable tyranny of the plutocracy, the end product of the 18th century revolts against the old aristocracy. It found resistance suddenly slackened by civil war within the plutocracy itself, one gang of traitors falling upon another gang, to the tune of vast hymn singing and yells to God. Perhaps it has already passed its apogee. The plutocracy chastened show signs of a new solidarity. The wheel continues to swing round. But this combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world. What actual difference does it make to a civilized man when there is a steel strike, whether the workmen win or the mill owners win? The conflict can interest him only as spectacle as the conflict between Bonaparte and the old order in Europe interest Goethe and Beethoven. The victory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring chaos nearer and so set the stage for a genuine revolution later on with, let us hope, a new feudalism or something better coming out of it, and a new 13th century at dawn. This seems to be the slow, costly way of the worst of habitable worlds. In the present case, my money is laid upon the plutocracy. It will win because it will be able in the long run to enlist the finer intelligences. The mob and its maudlin causes attract only sentimentalists and scoundrels, chiefly the latter. Politics under a democracy reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat. Even when a superior man prevails at the disgusting game, he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy, a slimy fellow offensive to the nose. The plutocracy can recruit measurably more respectable janissaries if only because it can make self-interest less obviously costly to a more propery. Its defect and its weakness lie in the fact that it is still too young to have acquired dignity. But lately sprung from the mob it now preys upon, it yet shows some of the habits of mind of that mob. It is blatant, stupid, ignorant, lacking in all delicate instinct and governmental finesse. Above all, it remains somewhat heavily moral. One seldom finds it undertaking one of its characteristic imbecilities without offering a sonorous moral reason. It spends almost as much to support the YMCA, vice crusading, prohibition and other such purellities as it spends upon congressmen, strikebreakers, gunmen, kept patriots and newspapers. In England the case is even worse. It is almost impossible to find a wealthy industrial over there who is not also an eminent nonconformist layman and even among financiers there are praying brothers. On the continent the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to leave the plutocracy of the world out of little Bethel he will fail of course to turn it into an aristocracy, i.e. a caste of gentlemen. But he will at least make it clever and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the Jews is long and damning. It would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. But whenever you find a David's bundler shaft making practice against the Philistines there you will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spoke against them. He was not blind to their faults but when he set them beside Christians he could find their general superiority. Perhaps in America and England as on the continent the increasing Jewishness of the plutocracy while cutting it off from all chance of ever developing into an aristocracy will yet lift it to such a dignity that it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect. But even so it will remain in a sort of half world midway between the gutter and the stars. Above it will still stand the small man that constitutes the permanent aristocracy of the race. The men of imagination and high purpose the makers of genuine progress the brave and ardent spirits above all petty fears and discontents and above all petty hopes and ideals no less. There were heroes before Agamemnon there will be Bach's after Johann Sebastian. And beneath the Judaized plutocracy the subliminated bourgeoisie there the immemorial proletariat I venture to guess will roar on endlessly tortured by its vain hatreds and envies stampeded and made to tremble by its ancient superstitions prodded and made miserable by its sordid and degrading hopes. It seems to me very likely that in this proletariat Christianity will continue to survive. It is nonsense true enough but it is sweet. Nietzsche denouncing its dangers as a poison almost falls into the fear of denying it its undoubtedly sugary smack. Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race this is the one that offers most for the least money so to speak to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority. It is a merit to be stupid and miserable and sorely put upon of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzches nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwin's and Harnax will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it and so give them armament against the contagion. I think that the antichrist has a useful place in that enterprise. It is strident, it is often extravagant, it is to many sensitive men in the worst of possible taste but at bottom it is enormously apt and effective and on the surface it is undoubtedly a good show. One somehow enjoys with the malice that is native to man the spectacle of anathemas batted back. It is refreshing to see the pitchfork employed by trans-gentlemen who have doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found after many long years a foeman worthy of them not a mere fancy swordsman like Voltaire or a mob orator like Tom Payne or a pedant like the heretics of exegesis but a gladiator armed with steel and armored with steel and showing all the ferocious gusto of a medieval bishop. It is a pity that holy church is a process for the elevation of demons like its process for the canonization of saints. There must be a long role of black miracles to the discredit of the accursed Friedrich sinners purged of conscience and made happy in their sinning clerics shaken in their theology by visions of a new and better holy city the strong made to exalt the weak robbed of their old sad romance. It would be a pleasure to see the Advocate Stia Boli turn from the temple of the prosecution to the table of the defense and move in solemn form for the damnation of the Nelberg Hopgoblin. Of all Nietzsche's books the Antichrist comes nearest to conventionality in form. It presents a connected argument with very few interludes and has a beginning a middle and an end. Most of his works are in the form of collections of apathems and sometimes the subject changes on every second page. That's one of the counts in the orthodox indictment of him. It is cited as proof that his capacity for consecutive thought was limited and that he was thus deficient mentally and perhaps a downright moron. The argument it must be obvious is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives the professors is the traditional prolixity of philosophers because the average philosophical writer when he essays to expose his ideas makes such inordinate drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emptied. These defective observers jump to the conclusion that his intrinsic notions are of corresponding weight. This is not unsell them quite untrue. What makes philosophy so garrulous is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art. They are like physicians who sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by giving the patient a carload of burned oyster shells to eat. There is too the endless pole parroting that goes on. Each new philosopher must prove his learning by laboriously rehearsing the ideas of all previous philosophers. Nietzsche avoided both faults. He always assumed that his readers knew the books and that it was thus unnecessary to rewrite them. And having an idea that seemed to him to be novel and original he stated it in as few words as possible and then shut down. Sometimes he got it into a hundred words. Sometimes it took a thousand. Now and then, as in the present case he developed a series of related ideas into a connected book. But he never wrote a word too many. He never pumped up an idea to make it appear bigger than it actually was. The pedagogues alas are not accustomed to that sort of writing in serious fields. They resent it and sometimes they even try to improve it. There exists in fact a huge and solemn tome on Nietzsche by a learned man of America in which all of his brilliancy is painfully translated into the windy phrases of the seminaries. The tome is satisfactorily ponderous but the meat of the coconut is left out. There is actually no discussion of the Nietzschean view of Christianity. Always Nietzsche daunts the pedants. He employed too few words for them and he had too many ideas. The present translation of the Antichrist is published by agreement with Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English edition of Nietzsche. There are two earlier translations, one by Thomas Common and the other by Anthony M. Ludovicci. That of Mr. Common follows the text very closely and thus occasionally shows some essentially German terms of phrase. That of Mr. Ludovicci is more fluent but less exact. I do not offer my own version on the plea that either of these is useless. On the contrary, I cheerfully acknowledge that they have much merit and that they helped me at almost every line. I began this new Englishing of the book, not in any hope of supplanting them and surely not with any notion of meeting a great public need but simply as a private amusement in troubled days. But as I got on with it I began to see ways of putting some flavor of Nietzsche's peculiar style into the English and so amusement turned into a more or less serious labor. The result, of course, is far from satisfactory but it at least represents a very diligent attempt. Nietzsche, always under the influence of French models, wrote a German that differs materially from any other German that I know. It is more nervous, more varied, more rapid and tempo. It runs to more effective climaxes. It is never stodgy. His marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger Germans of today. They are getting away from the old thunderous manner with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. In the course of time, I dare say, they will develop a German almost as clear as French and almost as colorful and resilient as English. I owe thanks to Dr. Levy for his imprimatur, to Mr. Theodor Hemberger for his criticism, and to Mr. Kamen and Ludoviki for showing me the way around many a difficulty. H.L. Menken End of the introduction to The Antichrist by H.L. Menken This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche translated from the German with an introduction by H.L. Menken Section 2, Preface Read by M.L. Cohen Cleveland, Ohio January 2007 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 strut. 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 anyone 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 mountaintops and to looking upon the wretched gavel 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 truth that of 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 oneself superior to humanity in power in loftiness of soul in contempt. Friedreich W. Nietzsche End of Antichrist by Friedrich W. Nietzsche Translated from the German with an introduction by H. L. Menken Read by M. L. Cohen Cleveland, Ohio, January 2007 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are on the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche Translated by H. L. Menken Section 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. Footnote. Confer the 10th Pythian Ode. See also the fourth book of Herodotus. The hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the Rapaean mountains in the far north. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth. And footnote. 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. So sighs the man of today. This is the sort of modernity that made us ill. We sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromised the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern yay and nay. This tolerance and large roar of the heart that forgives everything because it understands everything is a surroco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues 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 fullness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds. We kept as far as possible 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 yay, a nay, a straight line, a goal. Section 2 What is good whatever augments the feeling of power the will to power itself in man? What is evil whatever springs from weakness what is happiness the feeling that power increases that resistance is overcome not contentment but more power not peace at any price but war not virtue but efficiency virtue in the renaissance virtue 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 Section 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 section 4 mankind surely does not represent 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 and 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 occasionally represent such lucky accidents section 5 we should not deck out an embellished 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 has 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 section 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 these values of humanity have been emptied of this will that the values of decadence of nihilism now prevail under the holiest names section 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 thousand fold 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 characters and 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 is 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 technique 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 everyone knows saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind the remedy for which was an occasional purgative in regard to tragedy is 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 a lack that of our whole literary decadence from Saint Petersburg to Paris from Tolstoy to Wagner that it may be burst and 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 hyperborians section 8 it is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists 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 over 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, and 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 on the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative section 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 dishonorable 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 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 anymore once they have made their 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 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 honor 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 whatever is most damaging to life is there called true and whatever exalts it intensifies it approves it justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called false when theologians working through the consciences of princes or of peoples stretch out their hands for power there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue the will to make an end the nihilistic will exerts that power section 10 among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological blood is the ruin of philosophy the Protestant pastor 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 to begin school to get an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottom a very artful form of theology the Swabians are the best liars in Germany they lie innocently while 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 back stairs leading to the old ideal stood open the true world, the concept of morality is the essence of the world the two most vicious errors that ever existed were once more thanks to a subtle and wily skepticism 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 being had been turned into reality the success of Kant is merely a theological success he was like Luther and Leibniz but one more impediment to German integrity already far from steady section 11 a word now against Kant as a moralist a virtue must be our invention it must spring out of our personal need and our defense in every other case it is a source of danger that which does not belong to our life menaces it a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of virtue as Kant would have it is pernicious virtue, duty good for its own sake goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity these are all chimeras and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Königsberg quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth to it that every man find his own virtue his own categorical imperative a nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty a general concept of duty nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every impersonal duty every sacrifice before the molloch 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 but 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 towards 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 section 12 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 flavor 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 one 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 inflames him it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment he feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission that he is himself a type of a higher order what has a priest to do with philosophy he stands far above it and hitherto the priest has ruled he has determined the meaning of true and not true section 13 let us not underestimate this fact that we ourselves we free spirits are already a transvaluation of all values a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of true and not true the most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained the most valuable of all are those which determine methods all the methods all the principles of the scientific spirit of today were the targets for thousands of years of profound contempt of 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 footnote the lowest of the Hindu castes and footnote we have had the whole pathetic mankind against us their every notion of what the truth ought to be of what the service of the truth ought to be there every thou shalt was launched against us our objectives our methods are quiet cautious distrustful manner all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible looking back one may almost ask oneself with reason if it was not actually aesthetic sense that kept men blind for 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 section 14 we have unlearned something we have become more modest in every way we no longer derive man from the spirit from the Godhead we have dropped him back among the beasts we regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest one of the 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 in 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 Makina the whole of our physiology is directed towards 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 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 entirely we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously the pure spirit is a piece of pure stupidity take away the nervous system and the senses the so-called mortal shell and the rest is miscalculation that is all section 15 under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality it offers purely imaginary causes God, soul, ego, spirit free will or even unfree and purely imaginary effects sins, salvation, grace, punishment forgiveness of sins intercourse between imaginary beings God, spirits, souls an imaginary natural history anthropocentric 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 nervous sympathicus with the help of the sign language of religio-ethical balderdash repentance, pangs of conscious temptation by the devil, the presence of God an imaginary teleology the kingdom of God the last judgment, eternal life this purely fictitious world greatly to its disadvantage is to be differentiated from the world of dreams the latter at least reflects reality whereas the former falsifies it cheapens it and denies it once the concept of nature had been opposed to the concept of God the word natural necessarily took on the meaning of abominable the whole of that fictitious world as 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 as the cause of this fictitious morality and religion but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence section 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 honor to the conditions which enable it to survive 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 he doesn't have to thank fear, 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 would perhaps never experience the rapturous adures of victory and of destruction no one would understand such a God why should anyone 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 and 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 section 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 of its masculine virtues and passions is converted per force 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 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 are both abortions of decadence how can we be so tolerant of the naivete of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of God the God of Israel the Christian God the essence of all goodness is to be described as progress but even renault does this as if renault had a right to be so naivete 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 God when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary a sheet anchor for the drowning when he becomes the poor man's God the sinner's God the invalids 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 of 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 noisome quarters of the world his earthly kingdom now as always is a kingdom of the underworld a Jew-terrain 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 physician thereafter he resumed once more his old business of spinning the world out of his inmost being subspeciespinote thereafter he became ever thinner and paler became the ideal became pure spirit became the absolute became the thing in itself the collapse of a God he became a thing in itself section 18 the creation 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 watermark in the ebbing evolution of the God type God degenerated into the contradiction of life instead of being its transfiguration and eternal yay in him war was 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 section 19 the fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this Christian God does little credit for their gift for religion and not much more to their taste they ought to have been able to make an end of such more abundant 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 a 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 creatore spiritos in mankind this pitiful God of Christian monotheism this hybrid image of decay conjured up out of emptiness and in vain imagining in which all the instincts of decadence all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction and sections 1 through 19 this recording is in the public domain The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche sections 20 through 26 section 20 in my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do know 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 behind it it is in my phrase beyond good and evil the two physiological facts upon which it surrounds 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 two 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 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 the 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 revenge a vergement, resentment 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 regimenal 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 Buddhist teaching egoism is a duty the one thing needful the more you can be delivered from suffering regulates and determines the whole spiritual diet perhaps one will hear recall that Athenian who also declared war on pure scientificality to wit Socrates who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality section 21 the things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate customs of great gentleness and liberality and no militarism or over 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 of salvation in it here the prevailing pastime the favorite 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 to open dealing is lacking concealment and the dark in 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 Cordoba alone Christian too is a certain cruelty toward oneself and toward others hatred of unbelievers the will to persecute somber 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 overstimulate the nerves Christian again is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth to the aristocratic along with a sort of secret rivalry with them one resigns one's body to them one wants only one's soul and Christian is all hatred of the intellect of pride of courage of freedom of intellectual libertinage Christian is all hatred of the senses of joy in the senses of joy in general section 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 firstborn 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 pump of the cult Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of development for races that have become kind 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 overweared stages of civilization Christianity appears before civilization has so much has begun under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof section 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 suffering 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 in the form of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the Orient in the first place it knows that it is a 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 I want 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 stimulants 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 that is in Pandora's box 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 men see 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 Christian ingenuities Buddhism is in too late a stage of development too full of positivism to be shrewd in any such way section 24 here I barely touch on 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 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 these two antithetical things a noble morality and a resentment morality the second of which is a mere product of the denial of the former the Judeo-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 resentment the right genius had to invent another 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 decadence they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise and with a degree of skill approaching the non-plusultra 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 section 25 the history of Israel is invaluable the 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 Yahweh 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, reign Yahweh 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 and for the good fortune attending its herds and 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 that was the price that had to be paid for keeping him Yahweh the God of justice he is in accord with Israel no more he no longer visualizes national egoism he is now a God only conditionally the public notion of this God 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 the 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 danger as temptation a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience section 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 offenses against Yahweh 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 individual thereof is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God that the destinies of a people or of an individual are controlled by this will of God which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested in place of all that pitiful 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 makes 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 people 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 holy free heroes of Israel's history they fashioned according to their changing needs either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely hopeless 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 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 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 beef steaks 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 mealtimes 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 choose 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 forgive him that repenteth in plain English him that submiteth to the priest end of sections 20 through 26 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 as Christianity it actually denied even the last form of reality the holy people, the chosen people Jewish reality itself the phenomenon is of the first order of importance the small insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct 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 and nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for but the hierarchy that was called into question if only for an instant by this movement was the structure of piles which above everything was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the midst of the waters it represented their last possibility of survival it was the final residuum of their independent political existence an attack upon it was an attack upon the most profound national instinct the most powerful national will to live that has ever appeared on earth this saintly anarchist who aroused the people of the abyss the outcasts and sinners the chandala of Judaism to rise in revolt against the established order of things and in language which if the gospels are to be credited would get him sent to Siberia today this man was certainly a political criminal at least insofar 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 section 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 savior 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 enable 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 translators note 5 David Friedrich Strauss 1808-1874 author of Das Leben Jesus 1835-36 a very famous work in its day Nietzsche here refers to it at that time I was 20 years old now I am too serious for that sort of thing what do I care for the contradictions of tradition how can anyone 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 section 29 what concerns me is the psychological type of the saviour this type might be depicted in the gospels in however mutilated of 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 the possible psychological levity em ranan that mount a bank in psychological 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 on evangelical 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 everyone is the child of God Jesus claims nothing for himself alone as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man imagine making Jesus a hero and what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word genius our whole conception of the spiritual the whole conception of our civilization could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in in the strict sense of the physiologist a quite different word ought to be used here we all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch and from every effort to grasp a solid object brought to its logical conclusion such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality a flight into the intangible into the incomprehensible a distaste for all formulae for all conceptions of time and space for everything established customs, institutions, the church a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives a merely inner world a true world an eternal world the kingdom of God is within you section 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 and 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 unsolourious 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 section 31 I have already given my answer to the problem the prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the savior 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 trist 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 mold 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 of its original traits and idiosyncrasies often so painfully strange it does not see them it is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighborhood of this most interesting decadent I mean someone 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 probability 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 seashore 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 as the grand maître in irony 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 apology 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 section 32 I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of the savior the very word imperio 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 recudescent childishness of the spirit the physiologists at all events are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete purity 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 Judeo-Semitic character that of eating and drinking at the 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 translators note 6 the word semiotic is in the text but it is probable that semantic is what Nietzsche had in mind end of note 6 it is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all said down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhaya translators note 7 one of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy and note 7 and among Chinese he would have employed those of Laosay translators note 8 the reputed founder of Taoism and note 8 and in neither case would it have made any difference to him with a little freedom in the use of words one might actually call Jesus a quote free spirit translator's note 9 Nietzsche's name for one accepting his own philosophy end of note 9 he cares nothing for what is established the word kilith translators note 10 that is the strict letter law the chief target of Jesus's early preaching end of note 10 whatever is established kilith 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 literature 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 art his wisdom is precisely a pure ignorance translators note 11 a reference to the pure ignorance rainy thaw height of parcifal end of note 11 of all such things he has never heard of culture he doesn't have to make war on it he doesn't even deny it the same thing may be said of the state of the whole bourgeoisie social order of labor 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 section 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 neighbor of course means fellow believer Jew he is angry with no one and despises no one he neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their mandates swear not at all translators note 12 Matthew verse 34 end of note 12 he never under any circumstances divorces his wife even when he has proofs of her infidelity and under all this is one principle all of it arises from one instinct the life of the savior was simply a carrying out of this way of life 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 God what the gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of sin forgiveness of sin faith salvation through faith the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the glad tidings the deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel he is in heaven and is immortal despite many reasons for feeling that he is not in heaven this is the only psychological reality in salvation a new way of life not a new faith section 34 if I understand anything at all about this great symbolist it is this that he regarded only subjective realities as realities as truths that he saw everything else everything natural temporal spatial and historical merely as signs as materials for parables the concept of the son of God does not connote a concrete person in history an isolated and definite individual but an eternal fact a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time the same thing is true and in the highest sense of the God of this typical symbolist of the kingdom of God and of the sonship of God nothing could be more un-christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person of a kingdom of God that is to come of a kingdom of heaven beyond and of a son of God as the second person in 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 everyone the word son expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a transformation of all things be attitude 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 the symbolism has it not set an Amphitrion story translators note 13 Amphitrion was the son of Alsaias king of tyrants his wife was al-kmeni during his absence she was visited by Zeus and bore Heracles at the end of note 13 at the threshold of the Christian faith and a dogma of immaculate conception for good measure and thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness the kingdom of heaven is a state of the heart not something to come beyond the world or after death the whole idea of natural death is absent from the gospels death is not a bridge not a passing it is absent because it belongs to a quite a merely apparent world useful only as a symbol the hour of death is not a Christian idea hours time the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of glad tidings the kingdom of God is not something that men wait for it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow it is not going to come at a millennium it is an experience of the heart it is everywhere and it is nowhere section 35 the 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 demeanor before the judges before the officers before his accusers his demeanor 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 oneself not to show anger not to lay blames on the contrary to submit even to the evil one to love him section 36 we free spirits we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood that instinct fashion 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 thought 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 wholly that the bearer of glad tidings regards as beneath him it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world historical irony section 37 our age is proud of its historical sense how then could it dilute itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder worker and savior constituted the beginnings of Christianity and that everything spiritual and symbolical in it only came later quite to the contrary the whole history of Christianity from the death on the cross onward is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism with every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous it absorbed the teachings and rights of all the subterranean cults of the barium 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 reestablished this greatest of all antithesis in values section 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 airs when he speaks but actually lies and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through innocence or ignorance the priest knows as everyone knows that there is no longer any God or any sinner or any savior that free will and the moral order of the world 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 site of which excites loathing the concepts the other world the last judgment the immortality of the soul the soul itself they are all merely so many instruments of torture systems of cruelty whereby priest becomes master and remains master everyone 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 oneself to be careful of one's honor to desire one's own advantage to be proud every act of every day 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 section 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 disangelium translators note 14 so in the text one of Nietzsche's numerous coinages obviously suggested by Evangelium the German for Gospel end of note 14 it is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in faith and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ the distinguishing mark of the Christian only the Christian way of life the life lived by him who died on the cross is a 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 and 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 2000 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 especially 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 there from that even here in psychological Jesus 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 the strangest of all phenomena a religion not only depending on errors but inventive and ingenious only in devising injurious errors poisonous to life into the heart this remains a spectacle for the gods for those gods who are also philosophers and whom I have referred 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 falls to the point of innocence is far above the shape in its application to the Christians a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness section 40 the fate of the Gospels was decided by death if hung on the cross it was only death that unexpected and shameful death which was usually reserved for the canal only it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle 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 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 it's ruling class from that moment one found oneself 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 character had been lacking what is more he had appeared to present its opposite obviously the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all the example offered by this way of dying the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment a plain indication of how little he was understood at all all that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death in itself was to offer the strongest possible proof or example of his teachings in the most public manner but his disciples were very far from forgiving his death though to have done so would have accorded with the gospels in the highest degree and neither were they prepared to offer themselves with gentle and serene calmness of heart for a similar death on the contrary it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings revenge that now possessed them it seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death recompense and judgment became necessary yet what could be less evangelical than recompense punishment and sitting in judgment once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground attention was riveted upon an historical moment the kingdom of God is to come with judgment upon his enemies but in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding imagine the kingdom of God as a last act as a mere promise the gospels had been in fact the incarnation the fulfillment the realization of this kingdom of God it was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the master he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself on the other hand the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the gospel doctrine taught by Jesus of the equal right of all men to be children of God their revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion and thus separating him from themselves just as in earlier times the Jews to revenge themselves upon their enemies separated themselves from their God and placed him on a great height the one God and the only son of God both were products of ressentiment section 41 and from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself how could God allow it to which the most arranged 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 to 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 savior was corrupted 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 favor of a state of existence after death Saint 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 quote then all our faith is in vain unquote 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 section 42 when now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross new and thoroughly original effort to found a buddhist 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 and 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 disangelist sacrifice 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 of his achievement all the prophets 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 center 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 center 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 diocese 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 and 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 end of LibriVox section 5 The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche section 43 when the center of gravity of life is placed not in life itself but in the beyond in nothingness then one has taken away its center of gravity all together the vast lie of personal immortality destroys all of the world the vast lie of personal immortality destroys all of the world 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 dissent and forefathers why labor together or concern oneself about the common welfare and try to serve it merely so many temptations so many strains 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 refuge 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 the civilization out of the resentiment of the masses it has formed 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 anymore for special rights for the rights of dominion for feelings of honorable pride in himself and his equals for the pathos of distance our politics is sick with this lack of courage the aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls and if belief in the privileges of the majority makes and will continue to make revolutions it is christianity let us not doubt and christian valuations which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep upon the ground against everything that is lofty the gospel of the lowly lowers 44 the gospels are invaluable as an evidence of the corruption that is persistent within the primitive community that which paul with the cynical logic of a rabbi later developed to a conclusion which 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 that is merely naive corruption as a 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 born in mind if we are not to lose the threat of the matter this positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal holiness unmatched anywhere else either in books or by men an 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 technique 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 an inheritance only as an inheritance is it able to operate within 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 for an instant the farce would come to an end and it is precisely because I cannot read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made an end of them I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes for the majority happily enough books are mere literature let us not be let 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 everyone 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 shadows they convert their necessity into a duty it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility and that humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety ah that humble chaste charitable brand of fraud virtue itself shall bear witness for us one may read the gospels as books of moral seduction these petty folks fasten themselves to morality they know the uses of morality morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose the fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty it is in this way that they the community the good and just range themselves once and for always on one side the side of the truth and the rest of mankind the world on the other in that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen little abortions of bigots and liars begin to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of God the truth, the light, the spirit love, wisdom and life as if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the world little super-jews ripe for some sort of madhouse turned values upside down in order to meet their notions just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the last judgment of all the rest the whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania allied to this one in race to wit, the Jewish once a chasm had begun to yawn between Jews and Judeo-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 this one 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 you 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 Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city Mark 611 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 around his neck and he were cast into the sea Mark 942 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 hellfire where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched Mark 947-48 it is not exactly the eye that is meant verily I say unto you that there be some of them that stand here which shall not taste of death till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power well lied lion whosoever will come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me 4 Mark 834 judge not that ye be not judged with what measure ye meet it shall be measured to you again Matthew 7 1 and 2 what a notion of justice of a just judge for if you love them which love you what reward have ye do not even the publicans the same and if you salute your brethren only what do you more than ever do if you love them which love you and if you love your brethren only what do you more than others do not even the publicans so Matthew 5 46-47 principle of Christian love it insists on being well paid in the end but if you forgive not men their trespasses neither will your father forgive your trespasses Matthew 6 15 very compromising for the said father but seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you Matthew 6 33 all these things namely food clothing all the necessities of a 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 6 23 impudent rabble it compares itself to the prophets know ye not that you are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you if any man defile the temple of God him shall God destroy for the temple of God is holy which temple you are Paul 1 Corinthians 3 16 and 17 for that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world and if the world shall be judged by you are you unworthy to judge the world are you judged by you are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters Paul 1 Corinthians 6 2 unfortunately not merely the speech of a lunatic this frightful imposter then precedes know ye not that you shall judge angels how much more things that pertain to this life have 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 have chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and God have chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty and base things of the world and things which are despised have God chosen ye and things which are not to bring to not things that are that no flesh should glory in his presence Paul 1 Corinthians 1 20-29 in order to understand this passage a first rate example of the psychology underlying every chandelier 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 resentment 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 needs 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 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 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 Cesar Borgia to the Duke of Parma etutofesto immortally healthy immortally cheerful and sound these petty bigots make a capital miscalculation whoever is attacked by an early Christian is surely not befouled on the contrary it is an honor 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 windbag tries to dispose of by the foolishness of preaching even the scribes and Pharisees are benefited 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 for 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 more forever for equal rights strictly speaking he has no alternative when a man proposes to represent in his own person the chosen of God the 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 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 honor Pilate the Roman Visoroi to regard a Jewish embryo 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 honored as God not as divine but as pitiable as absurd as injurious not as a mere error but as a crime against life we deny that God is God if anyone were to show us this Christian God we'd be still less inclined to believe in him in a formula deus qualum paulus creavit dei negazio such a religion is 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 served to poison columniate 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 proxy 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 the 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 end of sections 43 through 47 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org recorded by Kirsten Ferrari the Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche sections 48 through 53 48 has anyone 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 he's 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 holy spirit holy the high priest holy perfect is promenading his garden he is bored and trying to kill time against boredom even God struggling 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 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 also is 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 God-like 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 the reality 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 oneself 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 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 and destroying 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 favorable 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 and hate and love 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 groundwork of knowledge is destroyed then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated I repeat that sin man's self desecration par excellence was invented in order to make peace, culture and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible the priest rules through the invention of sin fifty 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 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 holy transcendental beyond how is that to be demonstrated the proof by power thus assumed is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear in a formula I believe that faith makes for blessedness therefore it is true but this is as far as we may go this therefore would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth but let us admit for the sake of politeness that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated not merely hoped for and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest even so could blessedness in a technical term pleasure ever be a proof of truth so little is this truth that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question what is true or at all events it is enough to make that truth highly suspicious the proof by pleasure is a proof of pleasure nothing more why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones and that in conformity to some pre-established harmony they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train the experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary man has had to fight for every atom of the truth and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart that human love that human trust cling to greatness of soul is needed for this business the service of truth is the hardest of all services what then is the meaning of integrity in things intellectual it means that a man must be severe with his own heart he must scorn beautiful feelings and that he makes every yay and nay a matter of conscience faith makes blessed therefore it lies the fact that faith under certain circumstances may work for blessedness but that this blessedness is produced by an idea fixé 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 super abundance of health the actual ulterior motive 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 is so much like the inner world of the over strung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them the highest states of mind held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth are actually epileptoid in form the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorum de honorum once I've entered to designate the whole Christian system of training in penance and salvation as a method of producing a foley circular upon a soil already prepared for it which is to say a soil thoroughly unhealthy not everyone 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 innervated 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 an aberration of decadence products from all direction 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 of imbecility 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 applied to all the varieties of men disinherited by life it had its allies everywhere Christianity has the rancor 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 offense to its ears and eyes again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying and God have chosen the weak things of the world the foolish things of the world the base things of the world and things which are despised 1 Corinthians 1 27-28 this was the formula in hawk signal 1 Corinthians 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 its fortune 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 suburbia of the healthy intellect since sickness is inherent in Christianity it follows that the typically Christian state 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 recitic 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 four ordained theologian another characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness for philology what I mean here 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 and subtlety in the effort to understand them philology as effectis that is skepticism 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 of 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 Suebia use the finger of God to convert their miserably commonplace and hugger mugger existence into a miracle of grace a providence and an experience of salvation the most modest exercise of the intellect 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 just at 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 even 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 have 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 the 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 anyone 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 honorable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism but why? the birth of a cause altered by the fact that someone had laid down his life for it an error that becomes honorable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm more do you suppose, Mr. 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 honor 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 someone 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 it 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 goes through fire for his teaching what does that prove? verily it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning end of sections 48 through 53 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are on the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche sections 54 through 62 54 do not let yourself be deceived great intellects are skeptical Zarathustra is a skeptic the strength the freedom which proceed from intellectual power from a superabundance of intellectual power manifest themselves as skepticism man 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 500 convictions beneath him and behind him a mind that aspires to great things and that wills the means there too is necessarily skeptical freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength and to an independent point of view that grand passion is once the foundation and the power of a skeptic's existence and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself drafts the whole of his intellect into its service it makes him unscrupulous it gives him courage to employ unholy means under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions conviction as a means one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction a grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions it does not yield to them it knows itself to be sovereign on the contrary the need of faith of something unconditioned by yay or nay of carliolism 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 visit 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 someone to use him up his instinct gives the highest honors to an ethic of self-effacement he is prompted to embrace it by everything his prudence 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 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 the 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 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 paren human all too human one aphorism 483 translators footnote 27 the aphorism which is headed the enemies of truth makes the direct statement convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies and footnote and paren this time I desire to put the question definitively 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 a history its primitive forms its stage of tenetiveness and error it becomes a conviction only after having been for a long time not one even 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 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 offense 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 one 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 to the whole world we live and die for it let us respect all who have convictions I've 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 that serves a purpose have borrowed from the jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts God, the will of God and the revelation of God at this place Kant too, with his categorical imperative was on the same road this was his practical reason translators footnote 28 a reference of course to Kant's critique of practical reason paren critique of practical reason and paren and footnote there are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not for man to decide all the capital questions all the capital questions evaluation 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 superfluous man could not find out for himself what was good and what was evil so God taught him his will moral the priest does not lie the question true or untrue has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses it is impossible to lie about these things in order to lie here it would be necessary to know what is true but this is more than man can know the priest is simply the mouthpiece of God such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of revelation belong to the general priestly type to the priest of the 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 are merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with which he maintains his power these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations and of all priestly or priestly philosophical schemes of governments the holy lie common alike to Confucius to the code of Manu to Muhammad and to the Christian church is not even wanting in Plato truth is here this means no matter where it's heard or speaks 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 deploys 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 I have a contrary feeling when I read the code of Manu an incomparably more intellectual and superior work which it would be sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the same breath as the Bible it is easy to see why there's 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 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 evaluations it shows a feeling of perfection an acceptance of life and a triumphant feeling towards self in the life the sun shines upon the whole book all the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity for example, procreation and marriage are here handled earnestly with reverence and with love and confidence how can anyone 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 life and let every woman have her own husband it is better to marry than to burn translators footnote number 29 1 Corinthians 7 2 9 and footnote and it is possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized which is to say be fouled 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 gray 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 breath 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 inflagranti 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 the 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 that thou shall on which obedience is based the problem lies exactly here at a certain point in the evolution of a people the class within it of the greatest insight which is to say the greatest hindsight and foresight declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live or can live has come to an end the object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience in consequence the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation the continuation of the state in which values are fluent and are tested chosen and criticized ad infinitum against this a double wall is set up on the one hand revelation which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors but that they are of divine ancestry and came into being complete perfect without a history as a free gift a miracle and on the other hand tradition which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial and that it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question the authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis God gave it and the fathers lived it the higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness step by step from its concern with notions of right living that is to say those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism a primary necessary 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 casts 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 towards differentiation but mutually conditioning one another and each of these has its own hygiene its own sphere of work its own special mastery and feeling of perfection it is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other but show only mediocrity the last named represents the great majority and the first two the select the superior cast 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 hominom translators footnote 30 few men are noble and footnote goodness is a privilege nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look or an eye that sees ugliness or indignation against the general aspect of things indignation is the privilege of the chandala so is pessimism the world is perfect so prompts the instinct of the intellectual the instinct of the man who says yes to life imperfection whatever is inferior to us distance the pathos of distance even the chandala themselves are parts of this perfection the most intelligent men like the strongest find their happiness where others would find only disaster in the labyrinth in being hard with themselves 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 honorable kind of men but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful amiable they rule not because they want to but because they are they are not at liberty to play second the second cast to this belong the guardians of the law the keepers of order and security the more noble warriors above all the king has 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 is a law 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 cast 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 is essential to the existence of any rights at all a right is a privilege everyone 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 the whole range of occupational activities are compatible only with mediocrity and aspiration such callings would be out of place for exceptional men the instincts which belong to them are 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 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 rables of today the rabble of socialists the apostles to the chandala who undermine the working man's instincts his pleasures 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've 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 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 Ere Perennis the Imperium Romanum the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork bungly de la tanteism 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 decadent no 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 of future Christianity was the vampire of the Imperium Romanum overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans the conquest of the soil and 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 subspecie attorney to 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 corruptist of all forms of corruption against Christians these stealthy worms which under the cover of night mist and duplicity in 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 inventical concepts as black as hell such as the sacrifice of the innocent the uniomistica 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 combated 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 concept of guilt, punishment and immortality he combated 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 Epicurian when Paul appeared 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 within 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 idea which lent fascination to every sort of chandala religion into the mouth of the savior 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 in master Rome that the notion of a beyond is the death of life nihilists and Christian they rhyme in German and they do more than rhyme 59 the whole labor 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 labor 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 men 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 most valuable of all the senses had its schools and its traditions were already centuries old is all this properly understood every essential to the beginning of the work was ready and the most essential it cannot be said too often are methods and also the most difficult to develop and the longest opposed by habit and laziness what we have today reconquered with unspeakable self-discipline for ourselves for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts still lurk in our bodies that is to say the keen eye for reality the cautious hand patience and seriousness in the smallest things the whole integrity of knowledge all these things were already there and had been there for 2,000 years more refined and excellent tact and taste not as mere brain drilling not as German culture with its lautish 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 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 it become reality truth, life all overwhelmed in a night but not by a convulsion of nature not trampled to death by two-tons 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 once on top one needs but read any of the Christian agitators for example, Saint Augustine in order to realize in order to smell what filthy fellows came to the top it would be an error however there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement 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 thousand fold 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 in taste than that of Roman Greek 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 groveled in the dust a civilization beside which even that of our 19th 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 the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valor 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 ability 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 the second what must a German first be a genius or he can feel decently I can't make out how a German could ever feel Christian 61 here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans the Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap the Renaissance is it understood at last will it ever be understood what the Renaissance was the transvaluation of Christian values an attempt with all available means all instincts and all the resources 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 on the center of the enemy to attack at the critical place at the very seat of Christianity and their 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 pure beauty and within it there is not 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 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 a sort of triumph I alone am longing for today but yet 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 this 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 Picatum originale of Christianity itself no longer occupied the papal chair instead there was life instead there was the triumph of life instead there was a great yay to all lofty beautiful and daring things and Luther restored the church he attacked it the renaissance an event without meaning a great futility ah these Germans what they have not cost us futility that has always been the work of the Germans the reformation Leibniz 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 I despise all their uncleanliness and concept and valuation their cowardice before every honest yay and nay for nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched they have run the conscience all the halfway measures all the three eighths way measures that Europe is sick of they also have in 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 anyone dare to speak to me of its humanitarian blessings its deepest necessities range it against the 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 wrong cune of the base minded this explosive concept ending in revolution the modern era and the notion of 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 the good and honest instincts all this to me is the humanitarianism of christianity parasitism as the only practice of the church with its anemic 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 a 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 decimifastus when this fatality befell from the first day of christianity why not rather from its last from today the transvaluation of all values and the antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche this recording is in the public domain