THE

ANTI-CHRIST

BY

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED AND WITH

AN INTRODUCTION BY

H.L. MENCKEN

SEE SHARP PRESS @ TUCSON @ 1999

Publisher’s Note copyright © 1999 by Chaz Bufe.
Published by See Sharp Press, P.O. Box 1731, Tucson, AZ 85702.
Free catalog upon request.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.

The Antichrist / by Friedrich Nietzsche ; translated by H.L.
Mencken. — Tucson, AZ : See Sharp Press, 1999.
9) p73722 cm.
Reprint of the 1920 Knopf edition.
ISBN 1-884365-20-5

1. Religion — Controversial literature. 2. Christianity - Controversial

literature. 3. Philosophy, German —- 19th century. I. Mencken, H. L.
(Henry Louis), 1880-1956. II. Title.

193

Cover design by Clifford Harper. Interior design by Chaz Bufe. Printed on acid-
free paper with soy-based ink by Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, Michigan.
 CONTENTS

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 PUBLISHER’S NOTE

It has been over 75 years since H.L. Mencken’s translation of

“The Anti-Christ,” and his introduction to it, first appeared. To the
best of my knowledge, this is the first reprinting of this translation
of Nietzsche’s essay by a mainstream press. This seems odd at first
glance, given the popularity of both Nietzsche and Mencken, but
one understands this once one has read Mencken’s introduction.
While most of it is typical of Mencken—flashing with humor and
insight—certain portions of it reveal him at his absolute worst:
snobbish, profoundly anti-democratic, and even anti-semitic.
In the wake of the Holocaust, it is acutely uncomfortable for
admirers of Mencken—of whom I’m one—to read:
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 unpleasant-
ness. If he is destined to lead 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 Davidsbundler-
schaft 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 not deny their general superiority. Perhaps in
America and England, as on the Continent, the increasing Jewish-
ness 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.
This excerpt—not withstanding the comment about the
“general superiority” of Jews—is certainly anti-semitic. And the
comment about pogroms, despite its obvious hyperbole, is simply
odious. But at the same time, it’s important to realize that Mencken
any
had few kind words for religious, national or ethnic groups of
 2 ¢ Publisher’s Note

kind. This is not to excuse Mencken’s anti-semitic remarks, but,

rather, to place them in context. He made equally damning
remarks about members of many other groups, stating, for
instance, that, “The difference between the smartest dog and the
stupidest man—say a Tennessee Holy Roller—is really very small,”
and he once wrote, “The American people, taking one with
another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish,
ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under
one flag since the end of the Middle Ages.” But, to the best of my
knowledge, he never suggested that pogroms against other groups
would be justified; he saved that for his remarks about Jews.
Rather than excise these remarks, I’ve chosen to retain them
because they’re part of the historical record, and because—if one
values honesty—it’s important to present those one admires in as
clear a light as possible, no matter how unflattering. Sanitizing
icons is a matter best left to those skilled at and habituated to it:
religious and political apologists.
But there are major rewards once one gets past these stumbling
blocks: “The Anti-Christ” remains one of the most insightful and
entertaining indictments of Christianity ever written, and
Mencken’s is a skillful translation. Enjoy.
—CHAZ BUFE

EDITING NOTE: The only alterations I’ve made to Mencken’s intro-

duction are to correct two misspellings, eliminate an unnecessary “and,”
change several British spellings to their American equivalents, eliminate
some archaic punctuation (e.g., the use of em-dashes and commas to-
gether), and to translate several French terms into English. These terms
are all set off in brackets. (I translated them because they were impedi-
ments to comprehension, and because there is no real point to having
untranslated French terms in an English text; its only purpose is to make
those who can read French feel like members of an elite club.)
I’ve made a few similar changes to the translated text, though I’ve
preserved Mencken’s/Nietzsche’s very idiosyncratic punctuation. In addi-
tion to translating several French terms, I also translated a large number
of Latin terms. All such translated terms are in brackets. I retained,
however, several untranslated French and Latin terms, because they are
either: 1) in common use (e.g., par excellence); or 2) are easily understood
cognates (e.g., Imperium Romanum).
—C.B.
 INTRODUCTION

Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, “Ecce 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:

Vol. I. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity.

Vol. II. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic
Movement.
Vol. III. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, the Most Fatal
Form of Ignorance.
Vol. IV. 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 Sils-Maria in the
Engadine (for long his favorite resort), at Cannobio, 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
at
to expand “The Will to Power” to ten volumes, with “An Attempt
a New Interpretation of the World” as a general subtitle. Again he
adopted the subtitle of “An Interpretation of All That Happens.”
Finally, he hit upon “An Attemptata Transvaluation of All Values,”
and went back to four volumes, though with a number of changes
in their arrangement. In September 1888, be began actual work
it was
upon the first volume, and before the end of the month
 4 ¢ H.L. Mencken

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 “Ecce Homo.”
Some time 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, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, 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 Forster-Nietzsche 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 “the elevating effect of Christianity . . . upon the
weak and ailing,” “a real liking for sincere, pious Christians,” and
“a tender love for the Founder of Christianity.” All his wrath, she
continues, was reserved for “St. Paul and his like,” 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 grand-
daughter 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 author’s 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
 Introduction ¢ 5

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
[resentment]—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 to Christian sentimentality in “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
mountebankery, but not that. “In me,” he once said, “the
Christianity of my forbears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the
stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes
paramount turns against Christianity. In me Christianity .. .
devours itself.”
In truth, the present philippic is as necessary to the complete-
ness 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 pluto-
 6 @ H.L. Mencken

crat), 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 neo-Platonism that has ran 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, butas mere aesthetic representa-
tion. 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 ina belated and
unexpected embrace, to the horror, I daresay, 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 sole bugaboo, he shared the honors of that office with
von Hindenburg, the Crown Prince, Capt. Boy-Ed, von Bernstorff
and von Tirpitz. 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 numskulls. In much of it, including not a few official
 Introduction ¢ 7

hymns of hate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the teacher

of such spokesmen of the extremest sort of German nationalism as
von Bernhardt and von Tkeitschke—which was just as intelligent as
making George Bernard Shaw the mentor of Lloyd-George. In
other solemn pronunciamentoes, 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-making. 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 ofJustice, elaborately
outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I was an intimate
associate and agent of “the German monster, Nietzsky.” I quote the
official [report], 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-anti-Semitism, 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, pertinacious 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
 8 ¢ H.L. Mencken

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 agreat deal of point and
plausibility—tthere 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 Jahveh to sobs upon
His Throne.
But in all this justifiable fear, of course, there remains a false
assumption, and thatis 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
he 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 eighties,
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
 Introduction ¢ 9

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 a
flood as a penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved the boa
constrictor, the prairie dog and the pediculus capitis [head louse] 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 ninety-five or
ninety-six percent 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 caste 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 fear 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 itin 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 as such
childish fables as the story of Jonah and the whale, upon the
 10 H.L. Mencken

peculiar prejudices and credulities, the special desires and

appetites, of inferior men—that they warred 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 amazingly
chromatic and exigent eloquence at its finest flower. This is the
“conspiracy” 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 brook the
destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that
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 and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped. But
 Introduction ¢ 11

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 fifteen years
of neglect, is being reprinted... .
One imagines the author, a sardonic wraith, snickering some-
what 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, even 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 acids
with well water and spouted them like affrighted geysers, not
knowing what they did. Nor are they the first to borrow from him.
Years agoI called attention to the debt incurred with characteristic
forgetfulness of obligation by the late Theodore Roosevelt, in “The
Strenuous Life” and elsewhere. Roosevelt, a typical apologist for the
existing order, adeptly dragging a herring across the trail whenever
it was menaced, yet managed to delude the native boobery, 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
 12 H.L. Mencken

called Bolshevism today he saw clearly a generation ago and

described for what it was and is—democracy in another aspect, the
old [resentment] 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 com-
promising theory—if it could launch its forces frankly at the
fundamental doctrine, and not merely employ them to police the
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 con-
ceivable, 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 under way 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 Eighteenth Century revolt against the old
aristocracy. It found resistance suddenly slackened by civil war
within the plutocracy itself—one gang of traders 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,
shows 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
 Introduction ¢ 13

spectacle, as the conflict between Bonaparte and the old order in

Europe interested 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 Thirteenth
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 senti-
mentalists 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 that
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 [self-respect]. 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 puerilities as it spends upon Congressmen,
strike-breakers, gunmen, kept patriots and newspapers. In England
the case is even worse. It is almost impossible to find a wealthy
over there who is not also an eminent non-
industrial[ist]
conformist layman, and even among financiers there are praying
the
brothers. On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact that
the
plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here
intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social
world
unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the
into an
out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it
at least make it
aristocracy—i.e., a caste of gentlemen—but he will
 14 « H.L. Mencken

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 Davidsbiindlerschaft 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 not deny 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
group of men 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 Bachs after Johann
Sebastian. And beneath the Judaized plutocracy, the sublimated
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
error 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 intoa sort of actual superiority: it isa merit to be stupid,
and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect.
Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful
marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, 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
 Introduction ¢ 15

against the contagion. This is going on; this is being done. 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 against gentlemen who have doomed such innumerable
caravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found, after many long years, a
foreman worthy of them—not a mere fancy swordsman like
Voltaire, or a mob orator like Tom Paine, 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 mediaeval
bishop. It is a pity that Holy Church has no process for the
elevation of demons, like its process for the canonization of saints.
There must be a long roll 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 exult, the weak robbed of
their old sad romance. It would be a pleasure to see the Advocatus
Diaboli turn from the table of the prosecution to the table of the
defense, and move in solemn form for the damnation of the
Naumburg hobgoblin.
Of all Nietzsche’s books, “The Antichrist” comes nearest to con-
ventionality 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 apothegms, and some-
times the subject changes on every second page. This fact con-
stitutes 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
upon the
essays to expose his ideas, makes such inordinate drafts
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 unseldom quite untrue.
of
What makes philosophy so garrulous is not the profundity
 16 ¢ H.L. Mencken

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 poll-
parrotting 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 ac-
customed 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. Ludovici. That of Mr.
Common follows the text very closely, and thus occasionally shows
some essentially German turns of phrase; that of Mr. Ludovici is
more fluent but rather 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
 Introduction ¢ 17

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
in 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 daresay, 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 criticism, and to Messrs. Common and Ludovici for
showing me the way around many a difficulty.

—H. L. MENCKEN
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 PREFACE

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of
them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who
understand my “Zarathustra”: how could I confound myself with
those who are now sprouting ears? First the day after tomorrow
must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and
necessarily understands me, I know them only too well. Even to
endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual
integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living
on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of
politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become
indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit
to him or a fatality to him. .. . He must have an inclination, born
of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the
courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The
experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for
what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto
remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand
manner—to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm. . .
Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self. . . .
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true
readers, my readers foreordained: of what accountare the rest? The
rest are merely humanity. One must make one’s self superior to
humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul—in contempt.

—FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE
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 THE
ANTI-CHRIST

Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we

know well enough how remote our place is.” Neither by land nor
by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar,’
in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the
ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness. . . . We have discovered
that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from
thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?p—The
man of today?—‘“I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I
am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in”—so
sighs the man of today. . . . This is the sort of modernity that made
us ill —we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole
virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and
[breadth] of the heart that “forgives” everything because it
“understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice
than among modern virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We
were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we
were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew
the
dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the fullness,
and
tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings
the
great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of

of Herodotus. The
1. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth book
Rhipa ean mount ains, in the far
Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the
ual youth.
North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpet
 22 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

weakling, from “resignation” . . . There was thunder in our air;

nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found
the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line,
a goal.

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the

will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evilp—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happinessP—The feeling that power increases—that
resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but
war; notvirtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu,
virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our
charity. And one should help them to it.
Whatis more harmful than any vice—Practical sympathy for the
botched and the weak—Christianity. . . .

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 de-
liberately 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.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better

or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This
“progress” is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea.
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 23

The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the
European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not
necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in
various parts of the earth and under the most widely different
cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself,
something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a
sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always
been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to
come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally
represent such lucky accidents.

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged

a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the
deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its
concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the
strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.”
Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched,
it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative
instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those
natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the
highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of
temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of
Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by
original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!—

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,
I
toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As you probably surmise,
is
understand rottenness in the sense of decadence: my argument
 24 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspi-
rations are decadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses
its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it.
A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”—and it
is possible that I’ll have to write it—would almost explain why man
is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth,
for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever
~ the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the
highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the
values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.

Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands in

opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the
feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he
pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works
is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity;
under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life
and living energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of
the cause (the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first
view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one
measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up,
its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light.
Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural
selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on
the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by main-
taining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself
a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a
virtue (—in every superiormoral 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 lifewas inscribed. Schopenhauer was
right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy
of denial—pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this de-
pressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts
which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 25

role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the pro-

motion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction. . . . Of course,
one doesn’t say “extinction”: one says “the other world,” or “God,”
or “the true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness. . . . This
innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash,
appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the
tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to
destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity
appeared to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as every one knows, saw
in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which
was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative.
The instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of
puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation of
pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer’s case (and also, alack, in
that of our whole literary decadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris,
from Tolstoy to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged. ...
Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism,
than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to
wield the knife here—all this is our business, all this is our sort of
humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!—

It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists:

theologians and all who have any theological blood in their
veins—this is our whole philosophy. . .. One must have faced that
menace at close hand, better still, one must have had experience
of it directly and almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to
be taken lightly (—the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and
physiologists seems to me to be a joke—they have no passion about
such things; they have not suffered—). This poisoning goes a great
deal further than most people think: I find the arrogant habit of
the theologian among all who regard themselves as “idealists”—
among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a
...
right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion.
The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts
with
in his hand (and not only in his hand!); he launches them
benevolent contempt against “understanding,” “the senses,”
“honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such things as beneath
 26 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which "the soul” soars

as a pure thing-in-itself—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word,
holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all
imaginable horrors and vices. ... The pure soul is a pure lie. . . . So
long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poison-
er of life, is accepted as a higher ‘variety of man, there can be no
answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood
on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is
mistaken for its representative. ...

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 a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness
upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience
upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value
any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of
“God,” “salvation” and “eternity.” I unearth this theological instinct
in all directions: itis the most widespread and the most subterranean
form of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian
regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of
truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth
ever coming into honor in any way, or even getting stated.
Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a trans-
valuation 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 theo-
logians, 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. . . .
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 27

10

Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that

theological blood is the rain of philosophy. The Protestant pastor
is the grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its
peccatum originale. Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis
of Christianity—and of reason. .. . One need only utter the words
“Tubingen School” to get an understanding of what German
philosophy is at bottom—a very artful form of theology. .. . The
Suabians are the best liars in Germany; they lie innocently. . .. Why
all the rejoicing over the appearance of Kant that went through the
learned world of Germany, three-fourths of which is made up of
the sons of preachers and teachers—why the German conviction
still echoing, that with Kant came a change for the better? The
theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just
what had become possible again. . .. A backstairs leading to the old
ideal stood open; the concept of the “true world,” the concept of
morality as the essence of the world (the two most vicious errors that
ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily
scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no longer
refutable. .. . Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so far.
. . . Out of reality there had been made “appearances”; an
absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned. into reality.
_.. The success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like
Luther and Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German
integrity, already far from steady.—

11

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our

invention; it must spring out of our personal need and 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
s
pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its own sake,” goodnes
grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity—
these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of
the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg.
 28 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of

self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his own
virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when
it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing
works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every
“impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.
—To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical im-
perative 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 olyection. . .. What destroys a
man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner
necessity, without any deep personal de, sire, 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 whatI think of the Germans. . . . Didn’t Kant see in
the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the
inorganic form to the organic? Didn’t he ask himself if there was a
single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a
moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, “the tendency of
mankind toward the good” could be explained, once and for all
time? Kant’s answer: "That is revolution." Instinct at fault in
everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German
decadence as a philosophy—that is Kant!

12

I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of

philosophy: the rest haven’t the slightest conception of intellectual
integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and
prodigies—they regard “beautiful feelings” as arguments, the
“heaving breast” as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as
the criterion of truth. In the end, with “German” innocence, Kant
tried to give a scientific 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
 The Anti-Christ ¢ 29

when it was desirable not to trouble with reason—that is, when

morality, when the sublime command “thou shalt,” was heard.
When one recalls the fact that, among all peoples, the philosopher
is no more than a development from the old type of priest, this
inheritance from the priest, this fraud upon self, ceases to be
remarkable. When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to
lift up, to save or to liberate mankind—when a man feels the divine
spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of
supernatural imperatives —when such a mission inflames him, it is
only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable
standards of judgment. He feels that he is himselfsanctified by this
mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! .. . What has a
priest to do with philosophy! He stands far above it! And hitherto
the priest has ruled—He has determined the meaning of “true”
and “not true”!
13

Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free

spirits, are already a “transvaluation of all values,” a visualized
declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of “true”
and “not true.” The most valuable intuitions are the last to be
attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine
methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of
today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound
contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the
society of “decent” people—he passed as “an enemy of God,” as a
scoffer at the truth, as one “possessed.” As a man of science, he
belonged to the Chandala [untouchables]... . We have had the
whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion
of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought
to be—their every “thou shalt” was launched against us. . . . Our
objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful
manner—all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and
contemptible. —Looking back, one may almost ask one’s self with
reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind
so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque
effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. It
was our modesty that stood out longest against their taste. . .. How
well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks ofGod!
 30 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most
dangerously from his instincts—though for all that, to be sure, he
remains the most interesting! As regards the lower animals, it was
Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe
them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward
proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set
man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited
precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a
machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from
some higher order of beings, what was called “free will”; now we
have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer
describes anything that we can understand. The old word “will”
now connotes onlya sort of result, an individual reaction, that
follows inevitably upon aseries of partly discordant and partly
harmonious stimuli—the will no longer “acts,” or “moves.” . . .
Formerly it was thought that man’s consciousness, his “spirit,”
offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might be
perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have
no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil—then
only the important part of him, the “pure spirit,” would remain.
Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us con-
sciousness, or “the spirit,” appears as a symptom ofarelative
imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a
misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force
unnecessarily—we deny that anything can be done perfectly so
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 31

long as it is done consciously. The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure

stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called
“mortal shell,” and the rest is miscalculation—that is all! . . .

15

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point

of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (“God,”
“soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will’—or even “unfree”), and purely
imaginary effects (“sin,” “salvation,” “grace,” “punishment,” “for-
give ness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,”
“spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a
total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary
psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of
agreeable or disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the
states of the nervus sympathicuswith the help of the sign-language of
religio-ethical balderdash—, “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,”
“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 has its sources in
hatred of the natural (—the real!—), and is no more than evidence
of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . .. This explains
everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of
reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one
must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over
pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but
such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence. . . .

16

A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the

same conclusion.—A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to
its own god. In him it does honor to the conditions which enable
 32 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

it to survive, to its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of

power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich
will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can
make sacrifices. . . . Religion, within these limits, is a form of
gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he
needs a god.—Such a god must be able to work both benefits and
injuries; he must be able to play either friend or foe—he is
wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does.
But the castration, against all nature, of such a god, making him a
god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination.
Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god;
it doesn’t have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for
its own existence. .. . What would be the value of a god who knew
nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had
perhaps never experienced the rapturous [ardors] of victory and
of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why should
any one want him?.—True enough, when a nation is on the
downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of
freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission asafirst
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, every-
thing aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now
he is simply the good god. . . . The truth is that there is no other
alternative for gods: either they are the will to power—in which case
they are national gods—orincapacity for power—in which case they
have to be good....

17

Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form,

there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a
decadence. The divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine
virtues and passions, is converted perforce into a god of the
physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course, they do not call
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 33

themselves the weak; they call themselves “the good.” . .. No hint

is needed to indicate the moments in history at which the dualistic
fiction of a good and an evil god first became possible. The same
instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce their own god to
“goodness-in-itself” also prompts them to eliminate all good
qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on
their masters by making a devil of the latter’s god.—The good god,
and the devil like him—both are abortions of decadence—How can
we be so tolerant of the naivete of Christian theologians as to join
in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from “the
god of Israel,” the god of a people, to the Christian god, the
essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?—But even
Renan’ does this. As if Renan had aright to be naive! The contrary
actually stares one in the face. When everything necessary to
ascending life; when all that is strong, courageous, masterful and
proud has been eliminated from the concept of a god; when he has
sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor
for the drowning; when he becomes the poor man’s god, the
sinner’s god, the invalid’s god par excellence, and the attribute of
“savior” or “redeemer” remains as the one essential attribute of
divinity—just what is the significance of such a metamorphosis?
what does such a reduction of the godhead imply?—To be sure, the
“kingdom of God” has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only his
own people, his “chosen” people. But since then he has gone
wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has
given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel
at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan—until now he
has the “great majority” on his side, and half the earth. But this god
of the “great majority,” this democrat among gods, has not become
a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he
remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices,
of all the noisesome quarters of the world! . . . His earthly
kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a
[subterranean] 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

1. Ernst Renan (1823-1892), author of the influential Life ofJesus.

 34 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

of the intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that
finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became
another metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old
business of spinning the world out of his inmost being sub specie
Spinozae; thereafter he 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.”

18

The Christian concept of a god—the god as the patron of the

sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit—is one of
the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world:
it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the
god-type. God degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of
being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on
life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for
every slander upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the
“beyond.” In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothing-
ness is made holy! ...

19

The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not
repudiate this Christian god does little credit to their gift for
religion—and not much more to their taste. They ought to have
been able to make an end of such a moribund and worn-out
product of the decadence. A curse lies upon them because they
were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and contra-
diction a part of their instincts—and since then they have not
managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come
and gone—and nota single new god! Instead, there still exists, and
as if by some intrinsic right—as if he were the ultimatum and
maximum of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in
mankind—this pitiful god of Christian monotonotheism! This
hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction
and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of decadence, all the
cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 35

20

In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no

injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of
believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among
the nihilistic religions—they are both decadence religions—but they
are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the
fact that he is able to compare them at all, the critic of Christianity
is indebted to the scholars of India.—Buddhism is a hundred times
as realistic as Christianity—it is part of its living heritage that it is
able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of
long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept,”god,”
was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only
genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this
applies even to its epistemology (which isa 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 grounds itself and upon which it
bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to
sensation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain,
and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted con-
cern with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of
which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the
“impersonal.” (Both of these states will be familiar to a few of my
readers, the objectivists, by experience, as they are to me.) These
physiological states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to
combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in
the open, a life of travel; moderation in eating and a careful
selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same
caution in arousing any of the passions that foster a bilious habit
and heat the blood. finally, no worry, either on one’s own account
or on account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either
quiet contentment or good cheer—he finds means to combat ideas
of other sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as
something which promotes health. Prayer is not included, and
neither is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative nor any
 36 @ Friedrich Nietzsche

disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery (—it is always

possible to leave—). These things would have been simply means
of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For the
same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his
teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion,
[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 Buddha’s teaching egoism is
a duty. The “one thing needful,” the question “how can you be
delivered from suffering,” regulates and determines the whole
spiritual diet. (—Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who
also declared war upon pure “scientificality,” to wit, Socrates, who
also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality).

21
The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate,
customs of great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism;
moreover, it must get its start among the higher and better
educated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet and the absence of desire are
the chief desiderata, and they are attained. Buddhism is not a
religion in which perfection is merely an object of aspiration:
perfection is actually normal.—
Under Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and the
oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom
who seek their salvation in it. Here the prevailing pastime, the
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, too, open
dealing is lacking; concealment and the darkened room are
Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is denounced as
sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness (—the
first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed the
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 37

public baths, of which there were 270 in Cordova alone). Christian,

too, is a certain cruelty toward one’s self and toward others; hatred
of unbelievers; the will to persecute. 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 over-stimulate the nerves.
Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to
the “aristocratic’-—along with a sort of secret rivalry with them
(—one resigns one’s “body” to them; one wants only one’s “soul”
... ). And Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of
courage, of freedom, of intellectual lbertinage; Christian is all
hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general. . . .

22

When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the

lowest orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began
seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal
with exhausted men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable
of self-torture—in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here,
unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with
self, suffering through self, is not merely a general sensitiveness
and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst
for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain subjective
satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to embrace
barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over
barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the
first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the
intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or
not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism isa religion for peoples
in a further state of development, for races that have become kind,
gentle and over-spiritualized (—Europe is not yet ripe for it—): it
is a summons that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a
careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body.
Christianity aims at mastering beasts ofprey; its modus operandi is to
make them ili—to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming,
for “civilizing.” Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied
stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so
much as begun—under certain circumstances it lays the very
foundations thereof.
 38 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

23°

Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more

honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its
susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of
sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the barbarian,
however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he
needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere
instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure
itin silence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man had to have
an omnipotent and terrible enemy—there was no need to be
ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.—
At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that
belong to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very
little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is
believed to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct
worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds—the road
to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand
that fact thoroughly—this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make
one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of
the esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure
out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary
for him to be actually sinful, but merely to feelsinful. 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 stimulant 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 fulfilment can satisfyit: 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—H.L.M.] —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.
 The Anti-Christ_¢ 39
These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over
a soil on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already
established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon
chastity greatly strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the
religious instinct—it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic,
more soulful.—Love is the state in which man sees things most
decidedly as they are not. The force of illusion reaches its highest
here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring.
When a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he
submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which
would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to
offer is overcome—it is scarcely even noticed.—So much for the
three Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the
three Christian ingenuities—Buddhism is in too late a stage of
development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.—

24

Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of

Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is this: that
Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from
which it sprung—it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is
their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-
inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of the Savior, “salvation is
of the Jews.” (John IV:22)—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 Savior 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
all nature, of
at any price: this, price involved a radical falsification of
as well as of
all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world,
under
the outer. They put themselves against all those conditions
had even been
which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or
stood
permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which
they
in direct opposition to natural conditions—one by one
 40 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 ex-
aggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, put
beside the “people of God,” shows a complete lack of any claim to
originality. Precisely for this‘reason the Jews are the most fateful
people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified
the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the Christian
can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than -
the final consequence ofJudaism.
In my “Genealogy of Morals,” I give the first psychological
explanation of the concepts underlying those 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] here become
downright genius, had to invent an other world in which the
acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing
imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the
very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves
facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with
a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts
which make for decadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if
detecting in them a power by which “the world” could be defied.
The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply been
forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill
approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have
managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements
(—for example, the Christianity of Paul—), and so make of them
something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the
sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and
Christianity—that is to say, to the priestly class—decadence is no
more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest
in making mankind sick and in confusing the values of “good” and
“bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to
life, but also slanders it.
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 41

25

The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an

attempt to denaturalize all natural values: I point to five facts which
bear this out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy,
Israel maintained the right attitude of things, which is to say, the
natural attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness
of power, its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked
for victory and salvation and through him they expected nature to
give them whatever was necessary to their existence—above all,
rain. Jahveh is the god of Israel, and consequently the god of justice:
this is the logic of every race that has power in its hands and a good
conscience in the use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews,
both aspects of this self-approval stand revealed. The nation is
grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain
dominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of the seasons,
and for the good fortune attending its herds and its crops.—This
view of things remained an ideal for a long while, even after it had
been robbed of validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the
Assyrian without. But the people still retained, as a projection of
their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a
gallant warrior and an upright judge—a vision best visualized in the
typical prophet (i.e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.—But
every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do
what he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But what
actually happened? Simply this: the conception of him was
changed—the conception of him was denaturalized; this was the price
that had to be paid for keeping him.—Jahveh, the god of
“justice”—he is in accord with Israel no move, he no longer visualizes
the national egoism; he is now a god only conditionally. . . . The
public notion of this god now becomes merely a weapon in the
hands of clerical agitators, who interpret all happiness as a reward
and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or
disobedience to him, for “sin”: that most fraudulent of all
imaginable interpretations, whereby a “moral order of the world”
is set up, and the fundamental concepts, “cause” and “effect,” are
stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out
of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of
 42 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

unnatural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of

the denial of nature follow it. A god who demands—in place of a
god who helps, who gives counsel, who is at bottom merely a name
for every happy inspiration of courage and self-reliance. . .
Morality is no longer a reflection of the conditions which make for
the sound life and development of the people; it is no longer the
primary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and in
opposition to life—a fundamental perversion of the fancy, an “evil
eye” on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality?
Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the
idea of “sin”; well-being represented as a danger, as a “temptation”;
a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of
conscience. ...

26

The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality

falsified;—but even here Jewish priestcraft 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 Jahveh were
punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard
this act of historical falsification as something far more shameful if
familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history for
thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness
in historicis. And the philosophers support the church: the lieabout
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 doand
what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an
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
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 43

place of all that pitiable lie, reality has this to say: the priest, a
parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every
sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state
of human society in which he himself determines the value of all
things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby that state
of affairs is attained “the will of God”; with cold-blooded cynicism
he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent
of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly
order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish
priesthood the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the
Exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a
punishment for that great age—during which priests had not yet
come into existence. Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of
Israel’s history, they fashioned, according to their changing needs,
either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely “godless.”
They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: “obedient or
disobedient to God.” They wenta step further: the “will of God” (in
other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the
priests) had to be determined—and to this end they had to have a
“revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be
perpetrated, and “holy scriptures” had to be concocted—and so,
with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much
lamentation over the long days of “sin” now ended, they were duly
published. The “will of God,” it appears, had long stood like a rock;
the trouble was that mankind had neglected the “holy scriptures.”
But the “will of God” had already been revealed to Moses... . What
happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all
time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be
paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (—not forgetting the
most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of
beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what
“the will of God” was. .. . From this time forward things were so
arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the
at
great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness,
holy
death, not to say at the “sacrifice” (that is, at meal times), the
parasite putin his appearance, and proceeded to denaturalizeit—in
noted: that
his own phrase, to “sanctify” it... . For this should be
the admini-
every natural habit, every natural institution (the state,
of the poor),
stration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and
 44 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 forgiveth him that repenteth”—in plain English, him
that submitteth to the priest.
27
Christianity sprang fromasoil 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 aterrible 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
ofimportance: the small insurrectionary movementwhich took the
name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus—in
other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can
no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery ofa state of
existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life
even more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organi-
zation. Christianity actually denies the church. .. .
Tam unable to determine what was the target of the insurrec-
tion said to have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 45

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 unbeliefin “superior men,”
a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for. But
the hierarchy that was called into question, if only for an instant, by
this movement was the structure of piles which, above everything,
was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the midst of the
“waters”—it represented 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 in so far
as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community.
This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be
found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for
his own sins—there is not the slightest ground for believing, no
matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.
28

As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction

—whether, in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant
of—that is quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch
upon the problem of the psychology ofthe 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 enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve
one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I,
like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient
laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the in-
comparable Strauss. At that time I was twenty years old: now I am

[“The Life of
1. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), author of Das Leben Jesu
here refers to it.
Jesus”) (1835-36), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche
 46 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the
contradictions of “tradition”? How,can any one call pious legends
“traditions”? The histories of saints present the most dubious
variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific
method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents, seems to me
to condemn the whole inquiry from the start—it is simply learned
idling. ...

29

What concerns me is the psychological type of the Savior. This

type might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form
and however much overladen with extraneous characters—that is,
in spite of the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows
itself in his legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of
mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he
actually died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable,
whether it has been handed down to us.—All the attempts that I
know of to read the history of a “soul” in the Gospels seem to me to
reveal only a lamentable psychological levity. Mssr. Renan, that
mountebank in psychologicus, has contributed the two most
unseemly notions to this business of explaining the type of Jesus:
the notion of the genius and that of the hero (“heros”). But if there
is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the
hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of
all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for
resistance is here converted into something moral: (“resist not
evil!”—the most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the
true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness,
the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad
tidings”?—The true life, the life eternal has been found—it is not
merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love
free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances.
Every one is the child of God—Jesus claims nothing for himself
alone—as the child of God each man is the equal of every other
man. ... Imagine making Jesus a hero/—And what a tremendous
misunderstanding appears in the word “genius”! Our whole
conception of the “Spiritual,” the whole conception of our
civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 47

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” ....

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 pro-
found. The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds
and distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility
to pain and irritation—so great that it senses ali resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (—thatis to say, as
harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and
regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer
necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil
or dangerous—love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life.
These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which
the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-
development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil.
What stands most closely related to them, though with a large
admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the
theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical decadent: |
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.
 48 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

31.

I have already given my answer to the problem. The pre-

requisite 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
tryst—must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples,
in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence
visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own
crudity, in order to understand it at all—in their sight the type
could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar
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 [nature] of all great, and especially all sectarian
veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its
original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange—it does
not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky
lived in the 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: sucha possibility is not
to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against
it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate
and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary.
Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher
of the mount, the seashore and the fields, who appears like a new
Buddha on asoil very unlike India’s, and the aggressive fanatic, the
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 49

mortal enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified

by Renan’s malice as “the grand master of irony.” I myself haven’t
any doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of spirit)
got itself into the concept of the Master only as a result of the
excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all know the
unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their
leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians
had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously
subtle theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a “god”
that met that need, just as they put into his mouth without
hesitation certain ideas that were necessary to them but that were
utterly at odds with the Gospels—“the second coming,” “the last
judgment,” all sorts of expectations and promises, current at the
time.—

32

I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude
the fanatic into the figure of the Savior: the very word impenieux
[imperious], used by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type.
What the “glad tidings” tell us is simply that there are no more
contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith
that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith—it is at hand, it
has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent child-
ishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at all events, are familiar
with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the living organism,
the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not furious, it does
not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with “the
sword”—it does not realize how it will one day set man against man.
It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and
promises, or by “scriptures”: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle,
its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of God.” This
faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself
against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of
educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain
sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judeo-
Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper
belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish,
has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to
 50 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics,’

an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no
work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at
all. Set down among Hindus, he would have made use of the
concepts of Sankhya,? and among Chinese he would have
employed those of Lao-tse*—and in neither case would it have
made any difference to him.—With alittle freedom in the use of
words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”*—he cares
nothing for what is established: the word killeth,> whatever is
established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone
conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word,
formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things:
“life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his
sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language,
has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount
importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in
Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par
excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all
history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge,
all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is
precisely a pure ignorance’ of all such things. He has never heard of
culture; he doesn’t have to make war on it—he doesn’t even deny
it... . The same thing may be said of the state, of the whole
bourgeois 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

1. The word “Semiotik” is in the text, but it is probable that “Semantik” is what
Nietzsche bad in mind.
2. One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.
3. The reputed founder of Taoism.
4. Nietzsche’s name for one accepting his [Nietzsche’s] philosophy.
5. That is, the strict letter of the law—the chief target of Jesus’s early preaching
["killeth”].
6. A reference to the “pure ignorance” (“reine Thorheit”) of Parsifal.
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 51

power’”—). Such a doctrine cannot contradict: it doesn’t know that

other doctrines exist, or can exist, and is wholly incapable of
imagining anything opposed to it. . . . If anything of the sort is ever
encountered, it laments the “blindness” with sincere sympathy—for
it alone has “light”—but it does not offer objections. . . .
33

In the whole psychology of the “Gospels,” the concepts of guilt

and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which
means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is
abolished this is precisely the “glad tidings. ” Eternal bliss is not merely
promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the
only reality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speak-
ing 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 he despises no one. He neither appeals to the
courts of justice nor heeds their mandates (“Swear not at all”
[Matthew V:34]). He never under any circumstances divorces his
wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity—And under all of
this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.—
The life of the Savior was simply a carrying out of this way of
life—and so was his death. . . . He no longer needed any formula
or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had
rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and
atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could
feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.”
Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to
God: only the Gospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!” What the
Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,”
“forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the 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 that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite
 52 _¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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. ...

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 of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the
phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!)
of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-
historical cynicism. . . . But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is
meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”—not, of course, to every
one—-: the word “Son” expresses entranceinto the feeling that there
is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father”
expresses that feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of
perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has
made of this symbolism: has it not setan Amphitryon! story at the
threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate
conception” for good measure? . . . And thereby it has robbed
conception of its immaculateness—
The “kingdom of heaven” isa state of the heart—not something
to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of
natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not
a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a
merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of

1. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was Alcmene.
During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 53

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, itis everywhere and
it is nowhere. ...

35

This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to

“save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of
life that he bequeathed to man: his 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 one’s self, not to show anger, not to lay
blames. . . . On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—to
love him... .

36

—We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary pre-
requisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunder-
stood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war
upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies. . . . Man-
kind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious
neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes
possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men
always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage
therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels. . . .
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity’s hand in the
great drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in
the stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That man-
kind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was
the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the
concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy
that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind
him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of
world-historical irony.
 54 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

37

—Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it

delude itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker
and 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 rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and
the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was
the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low
and as vulgar, as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it
had to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the
church—the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all
honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all
spontaneous and kindly humanity. —Christian values—noblevalues:
it is only we, we free spirits, who have reestablished this greatest of
all antitheses in values! .. .

38

I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am

visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy —contempt
of man. Let me leave no doubt as to whatI despise, whomI 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 millennia of this madhouse 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 modem times, our times. Our age knows betier. . .. 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: nota
word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no longer
bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes
the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a
theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks,
but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie
through “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest knows as every one
knows, that there is no longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any
“Savior”—that “free will” and the “moral order of the world” are
lies—: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit,
allow no man to pretend that he does not know it. . . . All the ideas
of the church are now recognized for what they are—as the worst
counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural
values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is—as the most
dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation. .
_. We know, our conscience now knows—just what the real value of
all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what
ends they have served, with their debasement of humanity to a state
of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing—the
concepts “the other world,” “the last judgment,” “the immortality
of the soul,” the “soul” itself: they are all merely so many instru-
ments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the 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”?
self;
To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one’s
to be
to be careful of one’s honor; to desire one’s own advantage;
that
proud... every act of every day, every instinct, every valuation
of
shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster
and
falsehood the modem man must be to call himself nevertheless,
without shame, a Christian!
 56 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

39°

—I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of

Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is amisunderstanding—
at bottom there was only one‘Christian, and he died on the cross.
The “Gospels” died on the cross. What, from that moment onward,
was called the “Gospels” was the very reverse of what he had lived:
“bad tidings,” a Dysangelium.' It is an error amounting to non-
sensicality to see in “faith,” and particularly in faith in salvation
through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the
Christian way of life, the life lived by him who died on the cross, is
Christian. ... To this day sucha life is still possible, and for certain
men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain
possible in all ages. .. . Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of
acts, a different state of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a
sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true—as every
psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent
and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking,
the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being
a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to
amere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation
of Christianity. Jn fact, there are no Christians. The “Christian”—he
who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian—is simply a
psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears that,
despite all his “faith,” he has been ruled only by his instincts—and
what instincts‘—In all ages—for example, in the case of Luther
—“faith” has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a curtain
behind which the instincts have played their game—a shrewd
blindness to the domination of certain of the instincts. . . . I have
already called “faith” the specially Christian form of shrewd-
ness—people always talk of their “faith” and act according to their
instincts. .. . In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing
that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an
instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power, the only motive
power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That

1. So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numerous coinages, obviously suggested

by “Evangelium,” the German for “gospel.”
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 57

even here, [psychologically], there is a radical error, which is to say

one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance.
Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place—and the
whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!—Viewed calmly,
this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on
errors, but inventive and ingenious onlyin devising injurious errors,
poisonous to life and to the heart—this remains a spectacle for the
gods—for those gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have
encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At
the moment when their disgust leaves them (—and us!) they will
be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps
because of this curious exhibition alone the wretched little planet
called the Earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a show of
divine interest. . . . Therefore, let us not underestimate the
Christians: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above
the ape—in its application to the Christians a well-known theory of
descent becomes a mere piece of politeness. . . .

40

—The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the

“cross.” ... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death,
it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille
only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the
disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was
it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the
suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause;
the terrible question, “Why just in this way?’—this state of mind is
only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for
as necessary; everything must have a meaning, areason, the highest
sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then
did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? Who was his
natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke.
one
Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment,
found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began
to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then
this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character
had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its
 58 @ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 [resentment]—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,” “punish-
ment,” 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 in-
carnation, 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 elevatingJesus in an
extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just
as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their
enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on
a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were
products of [resentment].
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 59

41

—And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself:

“how could God allow it!” To which the deranged reason of the
little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its
absurdity: God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins.
At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its
most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for
the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!—Jesus himself had
done away with the very concept of “guilt,” he denied that there
was any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity be-
tween 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, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment
and of the second coming, the doctrine of death asa 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! . . . St.
Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his
doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent
conception, in this way: “JfChrist did not rise from the dead, then
all our faith is in vain!”—And at once there sprang from the
Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the
shameless doctrine of personal immortality. . . . Paul even preached
it as a reward. ...

42

One now begins to see just whatitwas that came to an end with
the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to
found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on
earth—real, not merely promised. For this remains—as I have
already pointed out—the essential difference between the two
religions of decadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually
fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing —Hard
upon the heels of the “glad tidings” came the worst imaginable:
those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer
of
of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision
 60 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this
dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Savior: 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 a Jew perpetrated the same old master
crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the
day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of
Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel
to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his
achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his
“Savior.” Later on the church even falsified the history of man in
order to make it a prologue to Christianity. . . . The figure of the
Savior, 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 of gravity of that whole life to a place
behind this existence in the lie of the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he
had no use for the life of the Savior—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 Savior, or even to believe his tale that he
suffered from this hallucination himself—this would be a genuine
[folly] in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed
the means. . . . What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed
readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread _ his
teaching.—What he wanted, was power; in Paul the priest once
more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts,
teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over
the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of
Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul’s invention,
his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob:
the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of
“judgment”... .
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 61

43

When the center of gravity of life is placed, notin life itself, but
in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its
center of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality
destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in
the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards
the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has
any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of life. . . . Why be public-
spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labor
together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the
common welfare, and try to serve it? . . . Merely so many
“temptations,” so many strayings from the “straight path.” “One
thing only is necessary.” . . . That every man, because he has an
“immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite
universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim
to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-
fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly
suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much
contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to
infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this
miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triwmph—it was thus that
it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days,
the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The
“salvation of the soul”—in plain words: “the world revolves around
me.” .. . The poisonous doctrine, “equal rights for all,” has been
propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and
crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon
all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which
is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every
development of civilization—out of the [resentment] of the masses
it has forged its chief weapons against ws, against everything noble,
joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.
_.. To allow “immortality” to every Peter and Paul was the greatest,
the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.
—And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity
has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any
more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of
 62 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 Christianvaluations, which convert every revolution
into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all
creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty:
the gospel of the “lowly” lowers. . . .

44

—The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that

was already persistent within the primitive community. That which
Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a
conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun
with the death of the Savior.—These gospels cannot be read too
carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confess—I hope it
will not be held against me—that it is precisely for this reason that
they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist—as the opposite of all
merely naive corruption, as refinement par excellence, as an artistic
triumph in psychological corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand
alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. Here
we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we
are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for
conjuring up a delusion of personal “holiness” unmatched
anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in
word and attitude to the level of an art—all this is not an accident
due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of
nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism
appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there,
after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice
of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The
Christian, that [last word in] 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
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 63

tradition, it is zwheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate

with the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best
minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly
human—.), have permitted themselves to be deceived. The gospels
have been read as a book of innocence... surely no small indication
of the high skill with which the trick has been done.—Of course, if
we could actually see these astounding bigots and bogus saints,
even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an end—and
itis precisely because Jcannot read a word of theirs without seeing
their attitud[es] that J 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
led astray: they say “judge not,” and yet they condemn to hell
whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment they
judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in
demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves
happen to be capable of—still more, which they must have in order
to remain on top—they assume the grand air of men struggling for
virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. “We live,
we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good” (—“the truth,” “the light,”
“the kingdom of God”): in point of fact, they simply do what they
cannot help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in
corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity
into a duty: itis on grounds of duty that they account for their lives
of humility, and that humility becomes merely one more proof of
their piety. . . . Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud!
“Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.” . . . One may read the
gospels as books of moral seduction: these petty folks fasten
themselves to morality—they know the uses of morality! Morality
is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!—The fact
is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as
modesty: it is in this way that they, the “community,” the “good and
just,” range themselves, once and for always, on one side, the side
of “the truth”—and the rest of mankind, “the world,” on the other.
_..In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that the
earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to
claim exclusive rights in the concepts of “God,” “the truth,” “the
light,” “the spirit,” “love,” “wisdom” and “life,” as if these things
were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence
 64 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 began 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. The Christian is simply a Jew of the “re-
formed” confession.

45

—I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people

have got into their heads—what they have put into the mouth of the
Master: the unalloyed creed of “beautiful souls.”—
And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against
them. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom
and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.
(Mark vi, 11).

—How evangelical! ...

And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in
me, itis better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and he were cast into the sea. (Mark ix, 42)
—How evangelical! ...
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to
enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes
to be cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is
not quenched. (Mark ix, 47-48)
—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. (Mark ix, 1)
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 65

—Well lied, lion!! ..

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me. For... (Mark viii, 34)

—WNote of a psychologist. Christian morality is refuted by its fors: its

reasons are against it—this makes it Christian.
Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it
shall be measured to you again. (Matthew vii, 1-2)
—What a notion of justice, of a “just” judge! ...
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not
even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only,
what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?"
(Matthew v, 46-47)

—Principle of “Christian love”: it insists upon being well paid in the

CNG.
But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses. (Matthew vi, 15)
—Very compromising for the said “father.”
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you. (Matthew vi, 33)
—All these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life.
An error, to put it mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a
tailor, at least in certain cases. ...

Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is
great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the
prophets. (Luke vi, 23)
—Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the prophets. . ..
Know ye not that ye 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 ye are. (Paul,
1 Corinthians iii, 16-17)

1. A paraphrase of Demetrius’ “Well roar’d lion!” in act v, scene 1 of “A

Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The lion, of course, is the familiar Christian
symbol for Mark.
 66 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

—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 ye unworthy to judge the smallest
matters? (Paul, I Corinthians vi, 2)

—Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a lunatic. . . . This

Jrightful impostor then proceeds: “Know ye not that we shall judge
angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?”

Hath 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 hath chosen the foolish things of the world to
confound the wise; and God hath 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, hath God chosen, yea, and
things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no
flesh should glory in his presence.
(Paul 1 Corinthians I, 20-21, 26-29)

—In order to understand this passage, a first-rate example of the

psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read
the first part of my “Genealogy of Morals”: there, for the first time,
the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of
[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
companionsas Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection
to them. .. . Neither has a pleasant smell. —I have searched the
New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is
there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity
does not even make the first step upward—the instinct for
cleanliness is lacking. . . . Only evil instincts are there, and there is
not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 67

all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every other book

becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for
example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that
most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one
may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Caesar Borgia to the
Duke of Parma: “é tutto festo’-—immortally healthy, immortally
cheerful and sound. . . . These petty bigots make a capital
miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby
distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an “early Christian” is surely
not befouled. . . . On the contrary, it isan 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 benefitted by such opposition: they must
certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an
indecent manner. Hypocrisy—as if this were a charge that the
“early Christians” dared to make!—After all, they were the privileged,
and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other
excuse. The “early Christian”—and also, I fear, the “last Christian,”
whom I may perhaps live to see—is a rebel against all privilege by
profound instinct—he lives and makes war for ever for “equal
rights.” . . . Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man
proposes to represent, in his own person, the “chosen of God”or to
be a “temple of God,” or a “judge of the angels”—then every other
criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon
manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart,
becomes simply “worldly” —evil in itself. . .. Moral: every word that
comes from the lips of an “early Christian” is a lie, and his every act
is instinctively dishonest—all his values, all his aims are noxious,
but whoever he hates, whatever he hates, has real value. .. . The
Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a criterion of
values.
—MustI add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears
buta solitary figure worthy of honor? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To
regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously—that was quite beyond him.
One Jew more or less—what did it matter? ... The noble scorn of
a Roman, before whom the word “trut ” was shamelessly
mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying that
 68 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 any one were to
show us this Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in
him.—In a formula: [God, as Paul created him, is the negation of
God. ]—Such areligion as Christianity, which does not touch reality
at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality
asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy
of the “wisdom of this world,” which is to say, of science—and it will
give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison,
calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and
strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble
coolness and freedom of the mind. “Faith,” as an imperative, vetoes
science—in practice—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 isessentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of
the “wisdom of this world”: his enemies are the good philologians
and physicians of the Alexandrine school—on them he makes his
war. As a matter of fact, no man can bea 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.” . . .

1. PHILOLOGY, n. 1. the study of written records, the establishment of their

authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning.
2. linguistics. —Random House Unabridged Dictionary
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 69

48

—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at

the beginning of the Bible — of God’s mortal terror of science? .
.. No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence
opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he
faces only one great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great
danger.—
The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly
perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill
time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.’ What does he
do? He creates man—man is entertaining. . . . But then he notices
that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that
invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates
other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were
not entertaining—he sought dominion over them; he did not want
to be an “animal” himself—So God created woman. In the act he
brought boredom to an end—and also many other things! Woman
was the second mistake of God.—“*Woman, at bottom, is a serpent,
Heva”—every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in
the world”—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame
for science. . . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of
the tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized
by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had
created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up
with priests and gods when man becomes scientific—Moral: science
is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of
sins, the germ ofall sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.
—“Thou shalt not know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s
mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd.
Howis one to protect one’s self against science? For along while this
was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man!
Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad
thoughts!—Man mustnot think.—And so the priest invents distress,
old age,
death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery,

e in vain.”
9. A paraphrase of Schiller’s “Against stupidity even gods struggl
 70 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing but devices for making

war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think.
Nevertheless—how terrible!—the edifice of knowledge begins to
tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be
done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he
makes men destroy one another (—the priests have always had
need of war ... ). War—among other things, a great disturber of
science!—Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the pmests,
prospers in spite of war.—So the old God comes to his final
resolution: “Man has become scientific—there zs 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; be must not look at all; be
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
Savior—The concept of guilt and punishment, including the
doctrines of “grace,” of “salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies through
and through, and absolutely without psychological reality—were
devised to destroy man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon
the concept of cause and effect!—And not an attack with the fist,
with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one
inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of
instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism
of pale, subterranean leeches! ... When the natural consequences
of an act are no longer “natural,” but are regarded as produced by
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 71

the ghostly creations of superstition—by “God,” by “spirits,” by

“souls*—and reckoned as merely “moral” consequences, as
rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole
ground-work of knowledge is destroyed—then the greatest of crimes
against humanity has been perpetrated.—I repeat that sin, man’s self- |
desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science,
culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the
priest rules through the invention of sin.

50

—lIn 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 asign of decadence, of a broken will
to live, then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice
reaches even the deaf .—It appears, unless I have been incorrectly
informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion
of truth that is called “proof by power.” “Faith makes blessed:
therefore it is true.—It might be objected right here that blessed-
ness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon “faith”
as a condition—one shall be blessed because one believes. . . But
what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the
wholly transcendental “beyond”—how is that to be demonstrated?
—The “proof by power,” thus assumed, is actually no more at
bottom than abelief 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 absurditself 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 blessed-
So
ness—in a technical term, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth?
when
little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth
question, “What
sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the
“truth” highly
is true?” or, at all events, it is enough to make that
suspect. The proof by “pleasure” is a proof of “pleasure”—nothing
more; why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments
to some
give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity
 72 « Friedrich Nietzsche

pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings

in their train?p—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 intel-
lectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that
he must scorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makes every Yea and
Nay a matter of conscience!—Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies.

51
The fact [is] that faith, under certain circumstances, may work
for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by
no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact [is] 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’ tit set up
a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth
as a madhouse? —The sort of religious man that the church wants
is a typical decadent; the moment at which a religious crisis
dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous
disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the
“inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to
distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up
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 [to the greater glory of God]....
Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of
training in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as
a method of producing a [whirling madness] 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
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 73

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 out-
cast and refuse elements (—who now, under cover of Christianity,
aspire to power). It does not represent the decay of a race; it
represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of decadence products
from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too
sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that
theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in
the whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary type, the
nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority
became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, triumphed.
... Christianity was not “national,” it was not based on race—it
appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its
allies everywhere. Christianity has the 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 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” (I Corinthians I, 27-28): this was the formula;
[in this sign (the cross) you will conquer],' the decadence triumphed.
—God on the cross—is man always to miss the frightful inner
significance of this symbol?— Everything that suffers, everything

r
1. Refers to the symbol of the prince of peace, which the Roman empero
Constantine placed on the banners and shields of his conquer ing army.
 74 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

that hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We all hang on the cross,

consequently weare divine. ... We alone are divine. . . . Christianity
was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by
it—Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of
humanity.
52

Christianity also stands in opposition to all zntellectual 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 [pride] of the
healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherentin 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 phe-
nomenon resultingfrom decadence—one may observe in hysterical
women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of
instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity
for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of decadence.
“Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist,
the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct
demands that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any
point. “Whatever makes for illness is good; whatever issues from
abundance, from 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 theo-
logian is his wnfttness 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 [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,
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
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 75

enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do

when pietists and other such cows from Suabia' use the “finger of
God” to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger
existence into a miracle of “grace,” a “providence” and an
“experience of salvation”? The most modest exercise of the
intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to
convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and
unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity.
However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always
cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into
our Carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would
seem so absurd a god that he’d have to be abolished even if he
existed. God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an
almanac-man—at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort
of chance .. . . “Divine Providence,” which every third man in
“educated Germany” still believes in, is so strong an argument
against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And
in any case it is an argument against Germans! .. .

53

—It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of
a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had
anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a
martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world
there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such
insensibility to the problem of “truth” that it is never necessary to
refute him. Truth is not something that one man has and another
man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther,
can think of truth in any such way. One may rest assured that the
_ greater the degree of a man’s intellectual conscience the greater
will be his modesty, his discretion, on this point. To know in five
cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything further....
“Truth,” as the word is understood by every prophet, every sec-

1. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its famous school of Biblical

criticism. The leader of this school was F.C. Baur, and one of the men greatly
himself a
influenced by it was Nietzsche’s pet abomination, David F. Strauss,
Suabian.
 76 @ Friedrich Nietzsche

tarian, 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 honorable name to the most empty sort of
sectarianism.—But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact
that some one has laid down his life for it?—An error that becomes
honorable 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
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.

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 itinto 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!!

1. Thus Sprach Zarathustra ii:24—” Of Priests”

 The Anti-Christ « 77

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 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 ofa 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 year 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 aman
cannot posit himselfas 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 honors 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
to
necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations
extent
restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what

progressive
1. Refers to Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the influential and
Scottish author/historian.
 78 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 convic-
tions 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 sickintellects,
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, 1, aphorism
483)' This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any
actual difference between a lie and a conviction?—All the world
believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the
world!—Every conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its
stage of tentativeness and error: it becomes a conviction only after
having been, for along 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

1. The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the direct
statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 79

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 in-
evitably 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 anda 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.' 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 whatis true. But this is more than man
can know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouthpiece of God.

ft (Critique of
1. A reference, of course, to Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernun
Practical Reason).
 80 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

—Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and

Christian; the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of “revelation”
belong to the general priestly type—to the priest of the decadence
as well as to the priest of pagan times. (—Pagans are all those who
say yes to life, and to whom “God” is a word signifying acquiescence
in all things.) —The “law,” the “will of God,” the “holy book,” and
“inspiration”—all these things are merely words for the conditions
underwhich 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 Con-
fucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian
church—is not even wanting in Plato. “Truth is here”: this means,
no matter where it is heard, the priest lies. . . .

56

—In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying?
The fact that, in Christianity, “holy” ends are not visible is my
objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the
poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the
body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the
concept of sin—therefore, its means are also bad.—I have a contrary
feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more
intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the
intellect 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 ofJewish 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 per-
fection, 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 anyone
really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which
 The Anti-Christ ¢ 81

contains such vile things as this: “to avoid fornication, let every man
have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; ..
. itis better to marry than to burn”? [I Corinthians vii, 2,9] 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 im-
maculate conception? . . . I know of no book in which so many
delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of
Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant
to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. “The
mouth of a woman,” it says in one place, “the breasts of a maiden,
the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure.” In
another place: “there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the
shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden.”
Finally, in still another place—perhaps this is also a holy lie: “all the
orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are
impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure.”

57

One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the

simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the
ends sought by the Code of Manu—by putting these enormously
antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity
cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity contemptible—A
book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every
other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and
the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a
conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification
of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish
the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are funda-
mentally different from those which one would make use of to
prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the
casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the
imperative tone, the “thou shalt,” on which obedience is based.
The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain point in the evolution
of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to
say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of
experiences determining how all shall live—or can live—has come
to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a
 82 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experi-

ence. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above every-
thing 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 tempera-
ment, 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
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 83

have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can good-
ness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum [few
men are noble]: goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more un-
becoming 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. “Im-
perfection, whatever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of
distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this per-
fection.” 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 honorable 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 civil
zation is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary
prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The
 84 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 soczety, 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 frrst prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional:
itis a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the
exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate
fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely
kindness of heart—it is simply his duty... . Whom do I hate most
heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the
apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s
instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty
existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge. . . .
Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of
“equal” rights. ... What is bad? But I have already answered: all that
proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge——The anarchist
and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .

58

In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great
difference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a
perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their
instinct, points only toward destruction. One need only turn to
history for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling
distinctness. We have just studied a code of religious legislation
whose object it was to convert the conditions which cause life to
flourish into an “eternal” social organization—Christianity found its
mission in putting an end to such an organization, because life
flourished under it. There the benefits that reason had produced
during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the
 The Anti-Christ @ 85

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 [through the ages], the imperium Romanum, the most magnifi-
cent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever
been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and
after it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy
anarchists made it a matter of “piety” to destroy “the world,” which
is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone
stood upon another—and even Germans and other such louts were
able to become its masters. . . . The Christian and the anarchist:
both are decadents; both are incapable of any act that is not dis-
integrating, 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 fora 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 artin 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 alike
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,
 86 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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 subter-
ranean 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 “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” 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 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
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 87

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 offact, 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 two thousand years! More, there was also a refined and
excellent tact and taste! Notas mere brain-drilling! Notas “German”
culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as
instinct—in short, as reality... . All gone for naught! Overnight it
became merely a memory!—The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive
nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and
administration, faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a
great yes to everything entering into the imperium Romanum and
palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art,
but had become reality, truth, life. . . . —All overwhelmed in a
night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by
Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty,
sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered—only sucked
dry! . . . Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Every-
thing wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the
needs but
whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on top/—One
in
read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine,
order to realize,in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the
there was any
top. It would be an error, however, to assume that
lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement.
holiness, these
—ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of
quite
fathers of the church! What they lacked was something
even
different. Nature neglected—perhaps forgot—to give them
 88 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

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
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 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,
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 89

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 trans-
valuation 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 noblevalues. ... 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 funda-
mental needs and appetites of those sitting there . . . I see before
me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spec-
tacle:—it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine
and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so
infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of
years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in
significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox
that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal
laughter—Caesar Borgia as pope!... Am I understood? . . . Well
then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am
longing for today—: by it Christianity would have been swept
away!—What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome.
This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest
in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome. .
that
Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle
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
the
at the very momentwhen the opposite was becoming apparent:
 90 ¢ Friedrich Nietzsche

old corruption, the peccatum originale [original sin], Christianity

itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life!
Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea
to all lofty, beautiful and daring things! . .. And Luther restored the
church: he attacked it. . . . The Renaissance—an event without
meaning, a great futility!—Ah, these Germans, what they have not
cost us! Futility—that has always been the work of the Germans.
—The Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant and so-called German philoso-
phy; the war of “liberation”; the empire—every time a futile
substitute for something that once existed, for something irre-
coverable. . .. 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 judg-

ment. 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 un-
touched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worth-
lessness, and every truth intoalie, 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 [rancors] of all the
base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the
modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social
 The Anti-Christ _¢ 91

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 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
atself.
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 [evil day] when this fatality
Why not rather from its
befell—from the first day of Christianity!—
last?—From today?—The transvaluation of all values.
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 In truth, the Anti-Christ
is as necessary to the
completeness of the
whole of Nietzsche’s
SAcoreaWe- om aloe Coasclceatoes
is to the arch. all the
curves of his speculation
lead up to it. what he
flung himself against,
from the beginning to
the end of his days of
writing, was al
the last analysis
Christianity.
—_

from H.L.Mencken’s Ii 725-BAA-771 : r IF REFUND

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