_ 51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an
idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead
raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a
lunatic asylum.
Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness
necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to
make people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church
wants is a typical
décadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up 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 majorem dei honorem.... Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of
training[22] in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing a
folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the
courage for health
and likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power). It does
not represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of
décadence products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It was
not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole
imperium were Christianized, the
contrary type, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts,
triumphed.... Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the
healthy, against
health. Everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the
weak things of the world, the
foolish things of the world, the
base things of the world, and things which are
despised":[23]
this was the formula;
in hoc signo the
décadence triumphed.--
God on the cross--is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is
divine.... We all hang on the cross, consequently
we are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.--
[22] The word
training is in English in the text.
[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.
52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all
intellectual well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it
can use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the
superbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of "faith"
must be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge
must be banned by the church as
forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start.... The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon
resulting from
décadence,--one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of
décadence. "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 superabundance, from power, is
evil": so argues the believer. The
impulse to lie--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his
unfitness for philology. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts
without interpreting them falsely, and
without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as
ephexis[24] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul."... The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so
daring that it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia[25] use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man--at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance.... "Divine Providence," which every third man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong an argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument against Germans!...
[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism.
[25] A reference to the University of Tübingen and its famous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination, David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian.
Vide § 10 and § 28.
53.
--It is so little true that
martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such
insensibility to the problem of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his
discretion, on this point. To
know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything
further.... "Truth," as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.--The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have
misled.... The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have
damaged the truth.... Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?--An error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?--One best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians.... This was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom.... Women are still on their knees before an error because they have been told that some one died on the cross for it.
Is the cross, then, an argument? --But about all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years--
Zarathustra.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning![26]
[26] The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of Priests."
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the
freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power,
manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is
below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions
beneath him--and
behind him.... A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction
belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view.... That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not
begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of something unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of
weakness. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit
himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be
used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement.... When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense,
slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To
avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are
antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth.... The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on
this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong,
emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these
sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to
reasons....
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)[27] This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?--All the world believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--Every conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it
becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long time,
not one, and then, for an even longer time,
hardly one. What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it
as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.--Now, this will
not to see what one sees, this will
not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its very
survival to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?--"This is
our conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for it--let us respect all who have convictions!"--I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more respectable because he lies on principle.... The priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle
because it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the will of God" and "the revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was his
practical reason.[28] There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is
not for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason.... To know the limits of reason--
that alone is genuine philosophy.... Why did God make a revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man
could not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught him His will.... Moral: the priest does
not lie--the question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary to know
what is true. But this is more than man
can know; therefore, 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
décadence as well as to the priest of pagan times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God" is a word signifying acquiescence in all things).--The "law," the "will of God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these things are merely words for the 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 Mohammed and to the Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this means, no matter where it is heard,
the priest lies....
[27] The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
[28] A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft" (Critique of Practical Reason).
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the
end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is
my objection to the means it employs. Only
bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--
therefore, its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the
intelligence to so much as
name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it,
in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And,
not to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the
nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life--the
sun shines upon the whole book.--All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; ... it is better to marry than to burn"?[29] And is it
possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say,
befouled, by the doctrine of the
immaculata conceptio?... I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."
[29] 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9.
57.
One catches the
unholiness of Christian means
in flagranti by the simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity
contemptible.--A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained
truth are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou 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 necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life.
To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The
order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an
order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. It 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 caste--I call it the
fewest--has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness.
Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:[30] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees
ugliness--or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "
The world is perfect"--so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. "Imperfection, 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 and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a
recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.... Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They are the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they
are; they are not at liberty to play second.--The
second caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is
rough in the business of ruling--their followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.--In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the
contrary is made up--by it nature is brought to shame.... The order of castes, the
order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types--the
inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.--A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the
mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the
heights--the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture,
science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of
occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not
society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the
first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart--it is simply his
duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who make him envious and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of "equal" rights.... What is
bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.--The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry....
[30] Few men are noble.
58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions which cause life to
flourish into an "eternal" social organization,--Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such an organization,
because life flourished under it. There the benefits that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, on the contrary, the harvest is
blighted overnight.... That which stood there
aere perennis, the
imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling,
dilletantism--those holy anarchists made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world,"
which is to say, the
imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another--and even Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters.... The Christian and the anarchist: both are
décadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating,
blood-sucking; both have an instinct of
mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future.... Christianity was the vampire of the
imperium Romanum,--overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture
that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The
imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to
prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale
sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things--the
first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the
corruptest of all forms of corruption--against Christians.... These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in
real things, of all instinct for
reality--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all "souls," step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own
pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the
unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all
that sort of thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know
what Epicurus made war upon--
not paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.--He combatted the
subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity--to deny immortality was already a form of genuine
salvation.--Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean--
when Paul appeared ... Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world," in the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the
eternal Jew
par excellence.... What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding
and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into the mouth--he
made out of him something that even a priest of Mithras could understand.... This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he
needed the belief in immortality in order to rob "the world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master Rome--that the notion of a "beyond" is the
death of life.... Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme....
59.
The whole labour of the ancient world gone for
naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole
meaning of antiquity disappears!... To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?--All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the
methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably--that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,--
the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every
essential to the beginning of the work was ready:--and the
most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have 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 two thousand years!
More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste!
Not as mere brain-drilling!
Not as "German" culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct--in short, as reality....
All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory!--The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the
will to secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the
imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth,
life....--All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anæmic vampires! Not conquered,--only sucked dry!... Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became
master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole
ghetto-world of the soul, was at once
on top!--One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement:--ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was something quite different. Nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of
cleanly instincts.... Between ourselves, they are not even men.... If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with
men....
60.
Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of
Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to
us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was
trampled down (--I do not say by what sort of feet--) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin--because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life!... The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust--a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile."--What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich.... Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to be
won.... The German noble, always the "Swiss guard" of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--
but well paid.... Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands
outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious.... Christianity, alcohol--the two
great means of corruption.... Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not.... "War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the
act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel
decently? I can't make out how a German could ever feel
Christian....
61.
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the
Renaissance. Is it understood at last,
will it ever be understood,
what the Renaissance was?
The transvaluation of Christian values,--an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the
opposite values, the more
noble values.... This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance--it is
my question too--; there has never been a form of
attack more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say, to
insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there ... I see before me the
possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:--it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter--
Cæsar Borgia as pope!... Am I understood?... Well then,
that would have been the sort of triumph that
I alone am longing for today--: by it Christianity would have been
swept away!--What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion
against the Renaissance in Rome.... Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its
capital--instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself.--Luther saw only the
depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the
peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!... And Luther
restored the church: he attacked it.... The Renaissance--an event without meaning, a great futility!--Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us!
Futility--that has always been the work of the Germans.--The Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire--every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something
irrecoverable.... These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of,--they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible--Protestantism.... If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the
Germans will be to blame....
62.
--With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I
condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it
creates distress to make
itself immortal.... For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls before God"--this fraud, this
pretext for the
rancunes of all the base-minded--this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order--this is
Christian dynamite.... The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of
humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of Christianity!--Parasitism as the
only practice of the church; with its anæmic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect,
kindness of soul--
against life itself....
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and
small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race....
And mankind reckons
time from the
dies nefastus when this fatality befell--from the
first day of Christianity!--
Why not rather from its last? --
From today? --The transvaluation of all values!...
[THE END]
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's Book: Antichrist
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