Translation
by H.L. Mencken
Published 1920
PREFACE
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is
yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand
my "Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those who
are now sprouting ears?--First the day after tomorrow must come for
me. Some men are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands
me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion,
he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must
be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched
gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become
indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit
to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of
strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage
for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience
of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most
distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard.
And the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his
strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self; love of self; absolute
freedom of self.....
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers,
my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?--The rest are
merely humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in
power, in loftiness of soul,--in contempt.
FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.
1.
--Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well
enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will
you find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in his day,
knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death--our
life, our happiness...We have discovered that happiness; we know the
way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth.
Who else has found it?--The man of today?--"I don't know either
the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way
out or the way in"--so sighs the man of today...This is the sort
of modernity that made us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly
compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay.
This tolerance and largeur of the heart that "forgives" everything
because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to us. Rather
live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!
. . . We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others;
but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We
grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate--it was the fulness,
the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings
and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the
weakling, from "resignation" . . . There was thunder in our
air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast--for we had not yet
found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight
line, a goal...
2.
What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power,
power itself, in man.
What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?--The feeling that power increases--that resistance
is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not
virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue
free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.
And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy for the botched
and the weak--Christianity...
3.
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the
order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man
must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy
of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always
as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed.
Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been
almost the terror of terrors ;--and out of that terror the contrary
type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal,
the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian. . .
4.
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger
or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress"
is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European
of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the
Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation,
enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various
parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and
in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which,
compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such
happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain
possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and
nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.
5.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war
to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of
evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man
as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity
has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made
an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of
sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that
are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual
values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable
example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had
been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by
Christianity!--
6.
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn
back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth,
is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation
against humanity. It is used--and I wish to emphasize the fact again--without
any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness
I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where
there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue"
and "godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness
in the sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which
mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its
instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it.
A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and
it is possible that I'll have to write it--would almost explain why
man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth,
for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the
will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the
highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that the
values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
7.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands in opposition
to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of
aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through
pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a
thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances
it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a loss out
of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of the death
of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a
still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the
gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life
appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution,
which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe
for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned
by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds,
it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured
to call pity a virtue (--in every superior moral system it appears as
a weakness--); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the
source and foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in
mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic,
and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer
was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy
of denial--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing
and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work
for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector
of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence--pity
persuades to extinction....Of course, one doesn't say "extinction":
one says "the other world," or "God," or "the
true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent
rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a
good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it
conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer
was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue. .
. . Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous
state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he
regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt
us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous
accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also,
alack, in that of our whole literary decadence, from St. Petersburg
to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged.
. . Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than
Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield
the knife here--all this is our business, all this is our sort of humanity,
by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans !--
8.
It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists: theologians
and all who have any theological blood in their veins--this is our whole
philosophy. . . . One must have faced that menace at close hand, better
still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed
to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (--the alleged
free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be
a joke--they have no passion about such things; they have not suffered--).
This poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find
the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves
as "idealists"--among all who, by virtue of a higher point
of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon
it with suspicion. . . The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries
all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (--and not only in his hand!);
he launches them with benevolent contempt against "understanding,"
"the senses," "honor," "good living,"
"science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious
and seductive forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure
thing-in-itself--as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness,
had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors
and vices. . . The pure soul is a pure lie. . . So long as the priest,
that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted
as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question,
What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious
attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.
9.
Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it everywhere.
Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonourable
in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is
called faith: in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once
for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People
erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false
view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision;
they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once they
have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation"
and "eternity." I unearth this theological instinct in all
directions: it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form
of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as
true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His
profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming
into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence
of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the
concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change
places: what ever is most damaging to life is there called "true,"
and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and
makes it triumphant is there called "false."... When theologians,
working through the "consciences" of princes (or of peoples--),
stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to the
fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts
that power...
10.
Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological
blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather
of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale.
Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity--and
of reason. ... One need only utter the words "Tubingen School"
to get an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottom--a very
artful form of theology. . . The Suabians are the best liars in Germany;
they lie innocently. . . . Why all the rejoicing over the appearance
of Kant that went through the learned world of Germany, three-fourths
of which is made up of the sons of preachers and teachers--why the German
conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a change for the better?
The theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just
what had become possible again. . . . A backstairs leading to the old
ideal stood open; the concept of the "true world," the concept
of morality as the essence of the world (--the two most vicious errors
that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism,
if not actually demonstrable, then at least no longer refutable... Reason,
the prerogative of reason, does not go so far. . . Out of reality there
had been made "appearance"; an absolutely false world, that
of being, had been turned into reality. . . . The success of Kant is
merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but
one more impediment to German integrity, already far from steady.--
11.
A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention;
it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other
case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life
menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept
of "virtue," as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue,"
"duty," "good for its own sake," goodness grounded
upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity--these are all
chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the
last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary
is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth:
to wit, that every man find hisown virtue, his own categorical imperative.
A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general
concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster
than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch
of abstraction.--To think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical
imperative as dangerous to life!...The theological instinct alone took
it under protection !--An action prompted by the life-instinct proves
that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it:
and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded
pleasure as an objection . . . What destroys a man more quickly than
to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal
desire, without pleasure--as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe
for decadence, and no less for idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.--And
such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of
cobwebs passed for the German philosopher--still passes today! . . .
I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant
see in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the
inorganic form to the organic? Didn't he ask himself if there was a
single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral
faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind
toward the good" could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's
answer: "That is revolution." Instinct at fault in everything
and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German decadence
as a philosophy--that is Kant!----
12.
I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy:
the rest haven't the slightest conception of intellectual integrity.
They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies--they
regard "beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving
breast" as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the
criterion of truth. In the end, with "German" innocence, Kant
tried to give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this
dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it "practical reason."
He deliberately invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when
it was desirable not to trouble with reason--that is, when morality,
when the sublime command "thou shalt," was heard. When one
recalls the fact that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no more
than a development from the old type of priest, this inheritance from
the priest, this fraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable. When a man
feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate
mankind--when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes
that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives--when such a mission
in. flames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely
reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified
by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! . . .
What has a priest to do with philosophy! He stands far above it!--And
hitherto the priest has ruled!--He has determined the meaning of "true"
and "not true"!
13.
Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits,
are already a "transvaluation of all values," a visualized
declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of "true"
and "not true." The most valuable intuitions are the last
to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods.
All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today,
were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt;
if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent"
people--he passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the
truth, as one "possessed." As a man of science, he belonged
to the Chandala2... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind
against us--their every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what
the service of the truth ought to be--their every "thou shalt"
was launched against us. . . . Our objectives, our methods, our quiet,
cautious, distrustful manner--all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable
and contemptible.--Looking back, one may almost ask one's self with
reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind
so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness,
and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. It was our modesty
that stood out longest against their taste...How well they guessed that,
these turkey-cocks of God!
14.
We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every way.
We no longer derive man from the "spirit," from the "god-head";
we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest
of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof
is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against
a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great
second thought in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth,
anything but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals,
all at similar stages of development... And even when we say that we
say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched
of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously
from his instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the
most interesting!--As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who
first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the
whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this
doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did:
what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which
we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man,
as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called
"free will"; now we have taken even this will from him, for
the term no longer describes anything that we can understand. The old
word "will" now connotes only a sort of result, an individual
reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant
and partly harmonious stimuli--the will no longer "acts,"
or "moves." . . . Formerly it was thought that man's consciousness,
his "spirit," offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity.
That he might be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his
senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his
mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the "pure spirit,"
would remain. Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us
consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom of a
relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping,
a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily--we
deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously.
The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away
the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal shell,"
and the rest is miscalculation--that is all!...
15.
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact
with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul,"
"ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even
"unfree"), and purely imaginary effects ("sin" "salvation"
"grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins").
Intercourse between imaginarybeings ("God," "spirits,"
"souls"); an imaginarynatural history (anthropocentric; a
total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology
(misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable
general feelings--for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus
with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash--,
"repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation
by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginaryteleology
(the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal
life").--This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage,
is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least
reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies
it. Once the concept of "nature" had been opposed to the concept
of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on
the meaning of "abominable"--the whole of that fictitious
world has its sources in hatred of the natural (--the real!--), and
is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of
reality. . . . This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for
living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to
suffer from reality one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance
of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and
religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence...
16.
A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the
same conclusion.--A nation that still believes in itself holds fast
to its own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable
it to survive, to its virtues--it projects its joy in itself, its feeling
of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich
will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can
make sacrifices. . . Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude.
A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.--Such
a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able
to play either friend or foe--he is wondered at for the good he does
as well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all nature,
of such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary
to human inclination. Mankind has just as much need for an evil god
as for a good god; it doesn't have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism
for its own existence. . . . What would be the value of a god who knew
nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps
never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction?
No one would understand such a god: why should any one want him?--True
enough, when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief
in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins
to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission
as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He
then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels "peace
of soul," hate-no-more, leniency, "love" of friend and
foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he
becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan.
. . Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything
aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is
simply the good god...The truth is that there is no other alternative
for gods: either they are the will to power--in which case they are
national gods--or incapacity for power--in which case they have to be
good.
17.
Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there
is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The
divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions,
is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of
the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call
themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate
the moments in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and
an evil god first became possible. The same instinct which prompts the
inferior to reduce their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also
prompts them to eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors;
they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's
god.--The good god, and the devil like him--both are abortions of decadence.--How
can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians
as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god
from "the god of Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian
god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?--But
even Renan does this. As if Renan had a right to be naïve! The
contrary actually stares one in the face. When everything necessary
to ascending life; when all that is strong, courageous, masterful and
proud has been eliminated from the concept of a god; when he has sunk
step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for
the drowning; when he be comes the poor man's god, the sinner's god,
the invalid's god par excellence, and the attribute of "saviour"
or "redeemer" remains as the one essential attribute of divinity--just
what is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a reduction
of the godhead imply?--To be sure, the "kingdom of God" has
thus grown larger. Formerly he had only his own people, his "chosen"
people. But since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves,
into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere;
finally he has come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan--until
now he has the "great majority" on his side, and half the
earth. But this god of the "great majority," this democrat
among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he
remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks
and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world! . . His earthly
kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain
kingdom, a ghetto kingdom. . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so
decadent . . . Even the palest of the pale are able to master
him--messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. They
spun their webs around him for so long that finally he was hypnotized,
and began to spin himself, and became another metaphysician. Thereafter
he resumed once more his old business of spinning the world out of his
inmost being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he be came ever thinner
and paler--became the "ideal," became "pure spirit,"
became "the absolute," became "the thing-in-itself."
. . . The collapse of a god: he became a "thing-in-itself."
18.
The Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the
god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most
corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably
touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God
degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its transfiguration
and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will
to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here
and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! In him
nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! .
. .
19.
The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate
this Christian god does little credit to their gift for religion--and
not much more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an
end of such a moribund and worn-out product of the decadence. A curse
lies upon them because they were not equal to it; they made illness,
decrepitude and contradiction a part of their instincts--and since then
they have not managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have
come and gone--and not a single new god! Instead, there still exists,
and as if by some intrinsic right,--as if he were the ultimatum and
maximum of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind--this
pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay,
conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which
all the instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of
the soul find their sanction!--
20.
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to
a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude
to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions--they
are both decadence religions--but they are separated from each other
in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them
at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.--Buddhism
is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity--it is part of its living
heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it
is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept,
"god," was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism
is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history,
and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism)
--It does not speak of a "struggle with sin," but, yielding
to reality, of the "struggle with suffering." Sharply differentiating
itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral
concepts be hind it; it is, in my phrase,beyond good and evil.--The
two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and upon which
it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness
to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to
pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted
concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of
which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the "impersonal."
(--Both of these states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the
objectivists, by experience, as they are to me). These physiological
states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to combat it by hygienic
measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel;
moderation in eating and a careful selection of foods; caution in the
use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of the passions
that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no worry, either
on one's own account or on account of others. He encourages ideas that
make for either quiet contentment or good cheer--he finds means to combat
ideas of other sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as
something which promotes health. Prayer is not included, and neither
is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative nor any disciplines,
even within the walls of a monastery (--it is always possible to leave--).
These things would have been simply means of increasing the excessive
sensitiveness above mentioned. For the same reason he does not advocate
any conflict with unbelievers; his teaching is antagonistic to nothing
so much as to revenge, aversion, ressentiment (--"enmity never
brings an end to enmity": the moving refrain of all Buddhism. .
.) And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these passions
which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The mental
fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too much "objectivity"
(that is, in the individual's loss of interest in himself, in loss of
balance and of "egoism"), he combats by strong efforts to
lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego. In Buddha's teaching
egoism is a duty. The "one thing needful," the question "how
can you be delivered from suffering," regulates and determines
the whole spiritual diet. (--Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian
who also declared war upon pure "scientificality," to wit,
Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality) .
21.
The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of
great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must
get its start among the higher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness,
quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are
attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an
object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.--Under Christianity
the instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore:
it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it.
Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the
discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here
the emotion produced by power (called "God") is pumped up
(by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a
gift, as "grace." Here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment
and the darkened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene
is denounced as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness
(--the first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed
the public baths, of which there were 270 in Cordova alone) . Christian,
too; is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred
of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas
are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the
most respectable names are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to
engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian, again,
is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the "aristocratic"--along
with a sort of secret rivalry with them (--one resigns one's "body"
to them--one wantsonly one's "soul" . . . ). And Christian
is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage of freedom, of
intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the senses, of
joy in the senses, of joy in general . . .
22.
When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest
orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power
among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men,
but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self torture--in brief,
strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists,
the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely
a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary,
an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain
subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had
to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery
over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the
first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the
intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or
not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples
in a further state of development, for races that have become kind,
gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet ripe for it--): it
is a summons 'that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful
rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity
aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them
ill--to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for "civilizing."
Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization.
Christianity appears before civilization has so much as begun--under
certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof.
23.
Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more
objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility
to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply
says, as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however,
suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first
of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts
him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here
the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent
and terrible enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at
the hands of such an enemy.
--At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong
to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little
consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed
to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds
of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds--the road to the
one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact
thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage.
The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows
it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that
he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually
sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is thus exalted above
everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient
inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden
road.--Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans
to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained
in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash
it--so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching
out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has
of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil
of evils, as the most malign of evils; it remained behind at the source
of all evil.)3--In order that love may be possible, God must become
a person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter
God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint
must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must
be a virgin. These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume
lordship over a soil on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has
already established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. To insist
upon chastity greatly strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of
the religious instinct--it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic,
more soulful.--Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly
as they are not. The force of illusion reaches its highest here, and
so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. When a man is
in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything.
The problem was to devise a religion which would allow one to love:
by this means the worst that life has to offer is overcome--it is scarcely
even noticed.--So much for the three Christian virtues: faith, hope
and charity: I call them the three Christian ingenuities.--Buddhism
is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be
shrewd in any such way.--
24.
Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity.
The first thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity
is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it
is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product;
it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In
the words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." 4--The
second thing to remember is this: that the psychological type of the
Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate
form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that
it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of
the Saviour of mankind.
--The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world,
for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be,
they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price:
this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness,
of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer. They
put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a
people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out
of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition
to natural conditions--one by one they distorted religion, civilization,
morality, history and psychology until each became a contradiction of
its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on,
in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian
church, put beside the "people of God," shows a complete lack
of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are
the most fateful people in the history of the world: their influence
has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today
the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is
no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
In my "Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological
explanation of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things,
a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is
a mere product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral
system belongs to the second division, and in every detail. In order
to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution
of life--that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval--the
instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent
an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most
evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are
a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when
they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose
voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side
of all those instincts which make for decadence--not as if mastered
by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which "the world"
could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have
simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of
skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have
managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements (--for
example, the Christianity of Paul--), and so make of them something
stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men
who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,--that is to
say, to the priestly class-decadence is no more than a means to an end.
Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in
confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true"
and "false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life,
but also slanders it.
25.
The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt
to denaturize all natural values: I point to five facts which bear this
out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel maintained
the right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural attitude.
Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power, its joy
in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory
and salvation and through him they expected nature to give them whatever
was necessary to their existence--above all, rain. Jahveh is the god
of Israel, and consequently the god of justice: this is the logic of
every race that has power in its hands and a good conscience in the
use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this
self-approval stand revealed. The nation is grateful for the high destiny
that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the benign
procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its herds
and its crops.--This view of things remained an ideal for a long while,
even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows: anarchy within
and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained, as a projection
of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a
gallant warrior and an upright judge--a vision best visualized in the
typical prophet (i.e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah. --But
every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do what
he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But what actually happened?
simply this: the conception of him was changed--the conception of him
was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paid for keeping
him.--Jahveh, the god of "justice"--he is in accord with Israel
no more, he no longer visualizes the national egoism; he is now a god
only conditionally. . . The public notion of this god now becomes merely
a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who interpret all happiness
as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or disobedience
to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of all imaginable
interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is set
up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect,"
are stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out
of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of unnatural
causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of
nature follow it. A god who demands--in place of a god who helps, who
gives counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration
of courage and self-reliance. . . Morality is no longer a reflection
of the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the
people; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become
abstract and in opposition to life--a fundamental perversion of the
fancy, an "evil eye" on all things. What is Jewish, what is
Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted
with the idea of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger,
as a "temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the
canker worm of conscience...
26.
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified ;--but
even here Jewish priest craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel
ceased to be of any value: out with it!--These priests accomplished
that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is
the documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and
in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated
the past of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they
converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences
against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We
would regard this act of historical falsification as something far more
shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history
for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness
in historicis. And the philosophers support the church: the lie about
a "moral order of the world" runs through the whole of philosophy,
even the newest. What is the meaning of a "moral order of the world"?
That there is a thing called the will of God which, once and for all
time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that
the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to he measured
by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies
of a people or of an individual arecontrolled by this will of God, which
rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.--In
place of all that pitiable lie reality has this to say: the priest,
a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every
sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state
of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things
"the kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby that state
of affairs is attained "the will of God"; with cold-blooded
cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the
extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly
order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood
the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its
long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that
great age-during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out
of the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel's history they fashioned,
according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites
or men entirely "godless." They reduced every great event
to the idiotic formula: "obedient or disobedient to God."--They
went a step further: the "will of God" (in other words some
means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had to be determined--and
to this end they had to have a "revelation." In plain English,
a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and "holy scriptures"
had to be concocted--and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and
days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of "sin"
now ended, they were duly published. The "will of God," it
appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had
neglected the "holy scriptures". . . But the ''will
of God'' had already been revealed to Moses. . . . What happened? Simply
this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the
strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the
largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of
meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he
let it be known just what he wanted, what "the will of God"
was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest
became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of
life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the
"sacrifice" (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put
in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it--in his own phrase,
to "sanctify" it. . . . For this should be noted: that every
natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration
of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything
demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value
in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse
of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral
order of the world"). The fact requires a sanction--a power to
grant values becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such
values is by denying nature. . . . The priest depreciates and desecrates
nature: it is only at this price that he can exist at all.--Disobedience
to God, which actually means to the priest, to "the law,"
now gets the name of "sin"; the means prescribed for "reconciliation
with God" are, of course, precisely the means which bring one most
effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can "save".
Psychologically considered, "sins" are indispensable to every
society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable
weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him
that there be "sinning". . . . Prime axiom: "God forgiveth
him that repenteth"--in plain English, him that submitteth to the
priest.
27.
Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural,
every natural value, every reality was opposed by the deepest instincts
of the ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality,
and as such it has never been surpassed. The "holy people,"
who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and
who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of
the earth as "unholy," "worldly," "sinful"--this
people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the
point of self-annihilation: asChristianity it actually denied even the
last form of reality, the "holy people," the "chosen
people," Jewish reality itself. The phenomenon is of the first
order of importance: the small insurrectionary movement which took the
name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus--in
other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it
can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a
state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision
of life even more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization.
Christianity actually denies the church...
I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said
to have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not
the Jewish church--"church" being here used in exactly the
same sense that the word has today. It was an insurrection against the
"good and just," against the "prophets of Israel,"
against the whole hierarchy of society--not against corruption, but
against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was unbelief in "superior
men," a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood
for. But the hierarchy that was called into question, if only for an
instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which, above everything,
was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the midst of the
"waters"--it represented theirlast possibility of survival;
it was the final residuum of their independent political existence;
an attack upon it was an attack upon the most profound national instinct,
the most powerful national will to live, that has ever appeared on earth.
This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts
and "sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt
against the established order of things--and in language which, if the
Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today--this
man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it was
possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community. This is what
brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription
that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins--there is not
the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted,
that he died for the sins of others.--
28.
As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction--whether,
in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of--that is
quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem
of the psychology of the Saviour.--I confess, to begin with, that there
are very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My
difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned
curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable
triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars,
enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist
the work of the incomparable Strauss.5At that time I was twenty years
old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for
the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious
legends "traditions"? The histories of saints present the
most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them by
the scientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents,
seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start--it is simply
learned idling.
29.
What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type
might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and however
much overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in spite of the
Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his
legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of mere truthful
evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the
question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been
handed down to us.--All the attempts that I know of to read the history
of a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable
psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has
contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining
the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero ("heros").
But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the
concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely
the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very
incapacity for resistance is here converted into something moral: ("resist
not evil !"--the most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps
the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness,
the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of "glad tidings"?--The
true life, the life eternal has been found--it is not merely promised,
it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from
all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every one
is the child of God--Jesus claims nothing for himself alone--as the
child of God each man is the equal of every other man. . . .Imagine
making Jesus a hero!--And what a tremendous misunderstanding appears
in the word "genius"! Our whole conception of the "spiritual,"
the whole conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning
in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist,
a quite different word ought to be used here. . . . We all know that
there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those
suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort
to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological
habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into
the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a
distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for
everything established--customs, institutions, the church--; a feeling
of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a
merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal"
world. . . . "The Kingdom of God is withinyou". . . .
30.
The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility
to pain and irritation--so great that merely to be "touched"
becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.
The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds
and distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility
to pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (--that is to say, as
harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and regards
blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to
offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerous--love,
as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life. . .
These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the
doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-development
of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely
related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and
nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus
was a typical decadent: I was the first to recognize him.--The fear
of pain, even of infinitely slight pain--the end of this can be nothing
save a religion of love. . . .
31.
I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it
is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in
a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are
many reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a
pure form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this
strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have
been imprinted by the history, the destiny, of the early Christian communities;
the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with
characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war
and of propaganda. That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels
lead us--a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum
of society, nervous maladies and "childish" idiocy keep a
tryst--must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples,
in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible
only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in
order to understand it at all--in their sight the type could take on
reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould.... The prophet,
the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of
wonders, John the Baptist--all these merely presented chances to misunderstand
it . . . . Finally, let us not underrate the proprium of all great,
and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the
venerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often
so painfully strange--it does not even see them. It is greatly to be
regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most
interesting decadent--I mean some one who would have felt the poignant
charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish.
In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence, may actually
have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is
not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be
against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly
accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary.
Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of
the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha
on a soil very unlike India's, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal
enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's
malice as "le grand maitre en ironie." I myself haven't any
doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit) got
itself into the concept of the Master only as a result of the excited
nature of Christian propaganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of
sectarians when they set out to turn their leader into an apologia for
themselves. When the early Christians had need of an adroit, contentious,
pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other theologians,
they created a "god" that met that need, just as they put
into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas that were necessary
to them but that were utterly at odds with the Gospels--"the second
coming," "the last judgment," all sorts of expectations
and promises, current at the time.--
32.
I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the
fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the very word imperieux, used
by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What the "glad tidings"
tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom
of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more
an embattled faith--it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it
is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists,
at all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty
in the living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this
sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself:
it does not come with "the sword"--it does not realize how
it will one day set man against man. It does not manifest itself either
by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by "scriptures":
it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own
promise, its own "kingdom of God." This faith does not formulate
itself--it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be
sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence
to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only
concepts of a Judaeo--Semitic character (--that of eating and drinking
at the last supper belongs to this category--an idea which, like everything
else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful
not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics6
an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no
work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak
at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts
of Sankhya,7and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse
8--and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.--With
a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus
a "free spirit"9--he cares nothing for what is established:
the word killeth,10 a whatever is established killeth. 'The idea of
"life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands
opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and
dogma. He speaks only of inner things: "life" or "truth"
or "light" is his word for the innermost--in his sight everything
else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance
only as sign, as allegory. --Here it is of paramount importance to be
led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical
prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion,
all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly
experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books,
all art--his "wisdom" is precisely a pure ignorance11 of all
such things. He has never heard of culture; he doesn't have to make
war on it--he doesn't even deny it. . . The same thing may be said of
the state, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour, of war--he
has no ground for denying" the world," for he knows nothing
of the ecclesiastical concept of "the world" . . . Denial
is precisely the thing that is impossible to him.--In the same way he
lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith,
a "truth," may be established by proofs (--his proofs are
inner "lights," subjective sensations of happiness and self-approval,
simple "proofs of power"--). Such a doctrine cannot contradict:
it doesn't know that other doctrines exist, or can exist, and is wholly
incapable of imagining anything opposed to it. . . If anything of the
sort is ever encountered, it laments the "blindness" with
sincere sympathy--for it alone has "light"--but it does not
offer objections . . .
33.
In the whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt
and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. "Sin,"
which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished--this
is precisely the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely
promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the
only reality--what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking
of it.
The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way
of life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a "belief"
that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode
of action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either by word
or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction
between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles ("neighbour,"
of course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and
he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor
heeds their mandates ("Swear not at all") .12 He never under
any circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her
infidelity.--And under all of this is one principle; all of it arises
from one instinct.--
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life--and
so was his death. . . He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his
relations with God--not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the
Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only
by a way of life that one could feel one's self "divine,"
"blessed," "evangelical," a "child of God."Not
by "repentance,"not by "prayer and forgiveness"
is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God--it is itself "God!"--What
the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of "sin,"
"forgiveness of sin," "faith," "salvation through
faith"--the wholeecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by
the "glad tidings."
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he
will feel that he is "in heaven" and is "immortal,"
despite many reasons for feeling that he isnot "in heaven":
this is the only psychological reality in "salvation."--A
new way of life, not a new faith.
34.
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this:
that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as "truths"--hat
he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical,
merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of "the
Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated
and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological
symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and
in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the "kingdom
of God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing could he
more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a
person, of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom
of heaven" beyond, and of a "son of God" as the second
person of the Trinity. All this--if I may be forgiven the phrase--is
like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels:
a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism. . .
.But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols
"Father" and "Son"--not, of course, to every one--:
the word "Son" expresses entrance into the feeling that there
is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and "Father"
expresses that feeling itself--the sensation of eternity and of perfection.--I
am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism:
has it not set an Amphitryon story13 at the threshold of the Christian
"faith"? And a dogma of "immaculate conception"
for good measure? . . --And thereby it has robbed conception of its
immaculateness--
The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something
to come "beyond the world" or "after death." The
whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not
a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite
different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The "hour
of death" isnot a Christian idea--"hours," time, the
physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of "glad
tidings." . . .
The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it
had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come
at a "millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is
everywhere and it is nowhere. . . .
35.
This "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taught--not
to "save mankind," but to show mankind how to live. It was
a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges,
before the officers, before his accusers--his demeanour on the cross.
He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort
to ward off the most extreme penalty--more, he invites it. . . And he
prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil . . .
Not to defend one's self, not to show anger, not to lay blames. . .
On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One--to love him. . . .
36.
--We free spirits--we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite
to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood--that instinct
and passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie"
even more than upon all other lies. . . Mankind was unspeakably far
from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of
the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and
subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their
own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the
Gospels. . . .
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great
drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the stupendous
question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind should be on
its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning
and the law of the Gospels--that in the concept of the "church"
the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad
tidings" regards as beneath him and behind him--it would be impossible
to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical irony--
37.
--Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude
itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and
Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity--and that everything
spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary,
the whole history of Christianity--from the death on the cross onward--is
the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original
symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder
masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth
to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous--it
absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the
imperium Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly
reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become
as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar
to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself
to power as the church--the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility
to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit,
to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.--Christian values--noble values:
it is only we, we free spirits, who have re-established this greatest
of all antitheses in values!. . . .
38.
--I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited
by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--contempt of man.
Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the
man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The
man of today--I am suffocated by his foul breath! . . . Toward the past,
like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous
self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of
this mad house of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian
faith" or the "Christian church," as you will--I take
care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling
changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times,our
times. Our age knows better. . . What was formerly merely sickly now
becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my
disgust begins.--I look about me: not a word survives of what was once
called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce
the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity
must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs
when he speaks, but actually lies--and that he no longer escapes blame
for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance."
The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God,"
or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free
will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies--:
serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit,allow no
man to pretend that he does not know it. . . All the ideas of the church
are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence,
invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself
is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as
the venomous spider of creation. . - - We know, our conscience now knows--just
what the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church
has been and what ends they have served, with their debasement of humanity
to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the
concepts "the other world," "the last judgment,"
"the immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself:
they are all merely so many in instruments of torture, systems of cruelty,
whereby the priest becomes master and remains master. . .Every one knows
this,but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the
last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise
an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their
acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion table?
. . . A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression
of the egoism and arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, without
any shame, that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity
deny? what does it call "the world"? To be a soldier, to be
a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's
honour; to desire one's own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of
everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed,
is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must
be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!--
39.
--I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.--The
very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding--at bottom
there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The "Gospels"
died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the "Gospels"
was the very reverse of what he had lived: "bad tidings,"
a Dysangelium.14It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in
"faith," and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ,
the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of
life, the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian. . .
To this day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even
necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all
ages. . . . Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a
different state of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a
sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true--as every psychologist
knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate
compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept
of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the
state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon
of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact,
there are no Christians. The "Christian"--he who for two thousand
years has passed as a Christian--is simply a psychological self-delusion.
Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his "faith,"
he has been ruled only by his instincts--and what instincts!--In all
ages--for example, in the case of Luther--"faith" has been
no more than a cloak, a pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts
have played their game--a shrewd blindness to the domination of certain
of the instincts . . .I have already called "faith" the specially
Christian form of shrewdness--people always talk of their "faith"
and act according to their instincts. . . In the world of ideas of the
Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary,
one recognizes an instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power,
the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom?
That even here, in psychologicis, there is a radical error, which is
to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance.
Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place--and the whole
of Christianity crumbles to nothingness !--Viewed calmly, this strangest
of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive
and ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and
to the heart--this remains a spectacle for the gods--for those gods
who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example,
in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their disgust
leaves them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded
by the Christians: perhaps because of this curious exhibition alone
the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipotence,
a show of divine interest. . . . Therefore, let us not underestimate
the Christians: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far
above the ape--in its application to the Christians a well--known theory
of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness. . . .
40.
--The fate of the Gospels was decided by death--it hung on the "cross.".
. . It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only
the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only--it was
only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face
with the real riddle: "Who was it? what was it?"--The feeling
of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a
death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question,
"Why just in this way?"--this state of mind is only too easy
to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything
must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love
of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt
yawn: "Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?"--this
question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism,
its ruling class. From that moment, one found one's self in revolt against
the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against
the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing
element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared
to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood
what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered
by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling
of ressentiment--a plain indication of how little he was understood
at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself,
was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings
in the most public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving
his death--though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels
in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves,
with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death. . . .
On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings,
revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause
should perish with his death: "recompense" and "judgment"
became necessary (--yet what could be less evangelical than "recompense,"
"punishment," and "sitting in judgment"!) --Once
more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground;
attention was riveted upon an historical moment: the "kingdom of
God" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies. . . But in all
this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom
of God" as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been,
in fact, the incarnation, the fulfillment, therealization of this "kingdom
of God." It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and
bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the
character of the Master was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian
himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely
unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught
by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their
revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion,
and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times,
the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves
from their God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the
Only Son of God: both were products of resentment . . . .
41.
--And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how
could God allow it!" To which the deranged reason of the little
community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity:
God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once
there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most
obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins
of the guilty! What appalling paganism !--Jesus himself had done away
with the very concept of "guilt," he denied that there was
any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between God
and man, and that was precisely his "glad tidings". . . And
not as a mere privilege!--From this time forward the type of the Saviour
was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second
coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection,
by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the
whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away--in favour of
a state of existence after death! . . . St. Paul, with that rabbinical
impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality
to that conception, that indecent conception, in this way: "If
Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!"--And
at once there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable
promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immortality. . . Paul even
preached it as a reward . . .
42.
One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the
death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a
Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth--real,
not merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed out--the
essential difference between the two religions of decadence: Buddhism
promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything,
but fulfills nothing.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings"
came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the
very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents
the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of
hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred!
Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the
example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law
of the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter
in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not
historical truth! . . . Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated
the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the
yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented
his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated
the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a
mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared,
had referred to his "Saviour." . . . Later on the church even
falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity
. . . The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his
death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing
remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality.
Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place
behind this existence--in the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At
bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed was
the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything honest in
such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment,
when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of
the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this
hallucination himself--this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist.
Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means. --What he himself
didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom
he spread his teaching.--What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest
once more reached out for power--he had use only for such concepts,
teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the
masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of Christianity that
Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his device for establishing
priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality
of the soul--that is to say, the doctrine of "judgment".
43.
When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but
in "the beyond"--in nothingness--then one has taken away its
centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys
all reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the instincts
that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future
is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning:
this is now the "meaning" of life. . . . Why be public-spirited?
Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together,
trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and
try to serve it? . . . Merely so many "temptations,"
so many strayings from the "straight path."--"One thing
only is necessary". . . That every man, because he has an "immortal
soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe
of things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim
to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths
insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in
their behalf--it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such
a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence.
And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery
of personal vanity for its triumph--it was thus that it lured all the
botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse
and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the
soul"--in plain English: "the world revolves around me."
. . . The poisonous doctrine, "equal rights for all," has
been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and
crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all
feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to
say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development
of civilization--out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged
its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high
spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth . . . To allow
"immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the
most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.--And let
us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had,
even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special
rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride
in himself and his equals--for the pathos of distance. . . Our politics
is sick with this lack of courage!--The aristocratic attitude of mind
has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief
in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue
to make revolution--it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian
valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood
and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the
ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly"
lowers . . .
44.
--The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was
already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul,
with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was
at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of
the Saviour.--These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties
lurk behind every word. I confess--I hope it will not be held against
me--that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate
joy to a psychologist--as the opposite of all merely naive corruption,
as refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological
corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole
is not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first
thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter.
This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal "holiness"
unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of
fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art--all this is not an
accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation
of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears
in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after
many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of Jewish
technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The Christian,
that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again--he is threefold
the Jew. . . The underlying will to make use only of such concepts,
symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive
repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other method of
estimating values and utilities--this is not only tradition, it is inheritance:
only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the force of nature.
The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best ages (with one
exception, perhaps hardly human--), have permitted themselves to be
deceived. The gospels have been read as a book of innocence. . . surely
no small indication of the high skill with which the trick has been
done.--Of course, if we could actually see these astounding bigots and
bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an
end,--and it is precisely because I cannot read a word of theirs without
seeing their attitudinizing that I have made am end of them. . . . I
simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.--For
the majority, happily enough, books are mere literature.--Let us not
be led astray: they say "judge not," and yet they condemn
to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment
they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in
demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen
to be capable of--still more, which they must have in order to remain
on top--they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men
engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we die, we
sacrifice ourselves for the good" (--"the truth," "the
light," "the kingdom of God"): in point of fact, they
simply do what they cannot help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be
sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert
their necessity into aduty: it is on grounds of duty that they account
for their lives of humility, and that humility becomes merely one more
proof of their piety. . . Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand
of fraud! "Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.". . .
. One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction: these petty
folks fasten themselves to morality--they know the uses of morality!
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!--The
fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself
as modesty: it is in this way that they, the "community,"
the "good and just," range themselves, once and for always,
on one side, the side of "the truth"--and the rest of mankind,
"the world," on the other. . . In that we observe the most
fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions
of bigots and liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts
of "God," "the truth," "the light," "the
spirit," "love," "wisdom" and "life,"
as if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought
to fence themselves off from the "world"; little super-Jews,
ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to
meet their notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt,
the standard and even thelast judgment of all the rest. . . . The whole
disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed
in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit,
the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn between Jews and Judaeo-Christians,
the latter had no choice but to employ the self-preservative measures
that the Jewish instinct had devised, even against the Jews themselves,
whereas the Jews had employed them only against non-Jews. The Christian
is simply a Jew of the "reformed" confession.--
45.
--I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have
got into their heads--what they have put into the mouth of the Master:
the unalloyed creed of "beautiful souls."--
"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them.
Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha
in the day of judgment, than for that city" (Mark vi, 11)--How
evangelical!
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe
in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and he were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42) .--How evangelical!
--
"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee
to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes
to be cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is
not quenched." (Mark ix, 47)15--It is not exactly the eye that
is meant.
"Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here,
which shall not taste death, till they have seen the kingdom of God
come with power." (Mark ix, 1.)--Well lied, lion!16 . . . .
"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up
his cross, and follow me. For . . ." (Note of a psychologist. Christian
morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,--this makes
it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.--
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it
shall be measured to you again." (Matthew vii, l.)17--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.)18--Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon
being well paid in the end. . . .
"But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your
Father forgive your trespasses." (Matthew vi, 15.)--Very compromising
for the said "father."
"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and
all these things shall be added unto you." (Matthew vi, 33.)--All
these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An
error, to put it mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a tailor,
at least in certain cases.
"Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward
is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the
prophets." (Luke vi, 23.)--Impudent rabble! It compares itself
to the prophets. . .
"Know yea not that yea are the temple of God, and that the spirit
of God dwelt in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall
God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple yea are."
(Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.)19--For that sort of thing one cannot
have enough contempt. . . .
"Do yea not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if
the world shall be judged by you, are yea unworthy to judge the smallest
matters?" (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)--Unfortunately, not merely
the speech of a lunatic. . .
This frightful impostor then proceeds: "Know yea not that we shall
judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?".
. .
"Hat not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that
in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God
by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. . . . Not
many wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called:
But God hat chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;
and God hat chosen the weak things of the world confound the things
which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are
despised, hat God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to
nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence."
(Paul, 1 Corinthians i, 20ff.)20 --In order to understand this passage,
a first rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality,
one should read the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals":
there, for the first time, the antagonism between a noble morality and
a morality born of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness is exhibited.
Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge. . . .
46.
--What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading
the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable.
One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions
as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them . .
. Neither has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in
vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free,
kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the
first step upward--the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . . Only
evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these
evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes,
a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read
the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took
up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius,
of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Ceasar Borgia to
the Duke of Parma: "e tutto Iesto"--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 is an honour to have an "early
Christian" as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without
acquired admiration for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom
of this world," which an impudent wind bag tries to dispose of
"by the foolishness of preaching." . . . Even the scribes
and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly
have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner.
Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early Christians"
dared to make!--After all, they were the privileged, and that was enough:
the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early Christian"--and
also, I fear, the "last Christian," whom I may perhaps live
to see--is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct--he lives
and makes war for ever for "equal rights." . . .Strictly speaking,
he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own
person, the "chosen of God"--or to be a "temple of God,"
or a "judge of the angels"--then every other criterion, whether
based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon
beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--evil
in itself. . . Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early
Christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all
his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever
he hates, has real value . . . The Christian, and particularly the Christian
priest, is thus a criterion of values.
--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary
figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish
imbroglio seriously--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less--
what did it matter? . . . The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the
word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New
Testament with the only saying that has any value--and that is at once
its criticism and its destruction: "What is truth?". . .
47.
--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable,
as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against
life. . . We deny that God is God . . . If any one were to show us this
Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a
formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a religion
as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and
which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point,
must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world,"
which is to say, of science--and it will give the name of good to whatever
means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline,
all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and
all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an
imperative, vetoes science--in praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul
well knew that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on
the church borrowed the fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented
for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom
of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition,
philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute
determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own
will the name of God, thora--that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants
to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are
the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them
he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or
a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian
a man sees behind the "holy books," and as a physician he
sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian.
The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud.".
. .
48.
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning
of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in fact,
has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting,
with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great
danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great danger.--
The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly
perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time.
Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He creates
man--man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored.
God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises
knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first
mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought
dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So
God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also
many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.--"Woman,
at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from
woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that,
too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman
that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened?
The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest
blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike--it
is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--Moral:
science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the
first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there
is of morality.--"Thou shalt not know"--the rest follows from
that.--God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd.
How is one to protect one's self against science? For a long while this
was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness,
leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must
not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers
of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all,
sickness--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles
of man don't allow him to think. . . Nevertheless--how terrible!--,
the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing
the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates
the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always
had need of war....). War--among other things, a great disturber of
science !--Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers
in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man
has become scientific--there is no help for it: he must be drowned!".
. . .
49.
--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole
psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger:
that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science
flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must
have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to "know."
. . ."Therefore, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been,
in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just what,
by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world :--"sin."
. . . The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order
of the world," was set up against science--against the deliverance
of man from priests. . . . Man must not look outward; he must look inward.
He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them;
he must not look at all; he must suffer . . . And he must suffer so
much that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians!
What is needed is a Saviour.--The concept of guilt and punishment, including
the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--lies
through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were
devised to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon
the concept of cause and effect !--And not an attack with the fist,
with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one
inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of
instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism
of pale, subterranean leeches! . . . When the natural consequences of
an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced
by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits,"
by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences,
as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work
of knowledge is destroyed--then the greatest of crimes against humanity
has been perpetrated.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration par
excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every
elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through
the invention of sin.--
50.
--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief,"
of the "believer," for the special benefit of 'believers."
If there remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to
be "believing"--or how much a sign of decadence, of a broken
will to live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice
reaches even the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed,
that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that
is called "proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore
it is true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness
is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon "faith"
as a condition--one shall be blessed because one believes. . . . But
what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly
transcendental "beyond"--how is that to be demonstrated?--The
"proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom
than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to
appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness--therefore,
it is true." . . But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore"
would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit,
for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated
(--not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips
of a priest): even so, could blessedness--in a technical term, pleasure--ever
be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof
against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the
question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to
make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure"
is a proof of "pleasure--nothing more; why in the world should
it be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones,
and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily
bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all disciplined
and profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every
atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that
the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of
soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest
of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of integrityin things intellectual?
It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must
scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and
Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed:therefore, it lies.
. . .
51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness,
but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by no means makes
the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains,
but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is
made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of
course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness
is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity
finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance
of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation
of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself--doesn't
it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole
earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church wants
is a typical decadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates
a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the inner
world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world"
of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish
between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up be fore
mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid
in form--the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or
to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem. . . . Once I ventured to
designate the whole Christian system of training22in penance and salvation
(now best studied in England) as a method of producing a folie circulaire
upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly
unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted"
to Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it. . . .We others,
who have the courage for health and likewise for contempt,--we may well
despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses
to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue"
of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy,
devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to carry
about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to
this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection,"
a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a
holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished,
enervated and incurably disordered body! . . . The Christian movement,
as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising
of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover
of Christianity, aspire to power)-- It does not represent the decay
of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of decadence
products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply
challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory.
At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium
were Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached its finest
and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with
its Christian instincts, triumphed . . . Christianity was not "national,"
it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited
by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour
of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the healthy, against
health. Everything that is well--constituted, proud, gallant and, above
all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you
of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things
of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the
world, and things which are despised":23 this was the formula;
in hoc signo the decadence triumphed.--God on the cross--is man always
to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything
that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We
all hang on the cross, consequently we are divine. . . . We alone are
divine. . . . Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of
mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest
misfortune of humanity.--
52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,--sick
reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it
takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse
upon "intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect.
Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically
Christian state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too,
and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge
must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin
from the start. . . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness
in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon resulting
from decadence,--one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic
children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying
for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and
walking straight are symptoms of decadence. "Faith" means
the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either
sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth
shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever makes
for illness is good; whatever issues from abundance, from super-abundance,
from power, is evil": so argues the believer. The impulse to lie--it
is by this that I recognize every foreordained theologian.--Another
characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness for philology. What
I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading
with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them
falsely, and without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort
to understand them. Philology as ephexis24 in interpretation: whether
one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful
events or with weather statistics--not to mention the "salvation
of the soul." . . . The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin
or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a "passage of Scripture,"
or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon
it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daring
that it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall
he do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia25 use the "finger
of God" to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger
existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence"
and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise
of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough
to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness
of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our
piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in
the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the
very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god
that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic
servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac--man--at bottom, he is'
a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance. . . . "Divine Providence,"
which every third man in "educated Germany" still believes
in, is so strong an argument against God that it would be impossible
to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument against Germans!
. . .
53.
--It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of
a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything
to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings
what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so
low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem
of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth
is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best,
only peasants, or peasant apostles like Luther, can think of truth in
any such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a
man's intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discretion,
on this point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy,
to know anything further . . . "Truth," as the word is understood
by every prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist
and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning
has been made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are
necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.--The deaths
of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of
history: they have misled . . . The conclusion that all idiots, women
and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which
any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity,
sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has been an unspeakable
drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and
investigation. The martyrs have damaged the truth. . . . Even to this
day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name
to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--But why? Is the worth of a
cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?--An
error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has acquired one
seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that
we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?--One best
disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice--that is also
the best way to dispose of theologians. . . . This was precisely the
world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the
appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they made it a
present of the fascination of martyrdom. . . .Women are still on their
knees before an error because they have been told that some one died
on the cross for it. Is the cross, then, an argument?--But about all
these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been
needed for thousands of years--Zarathustra.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly
taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth
even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the
heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove?
Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning!26
54.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra
is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual
power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves
as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to
determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of
convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see
what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about
value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath
him--and behind him. . . . A mind that aspires to great things, and
that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from
any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point
of view. . . That grand passion which is at once the foundation and
the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and
more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect
into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to
employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge
him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good
deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses
up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On
the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned by yea
or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness.
The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily
a dependent man--such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can
he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong
to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he
needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours
to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything:
his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in
itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement. .
. When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there
be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and
to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and
only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man,
and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith."
To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many
things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and
through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are conditions
necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they
are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. . . . The believer
is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true,"
according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point
would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his
vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther,
Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition
to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these
sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon
the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing
poses to listening to reasons. . . .
55.
--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith."
It is now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the
question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to
truth than lies. ("Human, All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)27
This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any actual
difference between a lie and a conviction?--All the world believes that
there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--Every conviction
has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and
error: it becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long time,
not one, and then, for an even longer time, hardly one. What if falsehood
be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all that
is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes
a conviction in the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one
sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before
witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common
sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of
others is a relatively rare offence.--Now, this will not to see what
one sees, this will not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite
for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes
inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced
that Rome was synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples
brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference
between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all
partisans, including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine
phrases of morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its
very survival to the fact that the party man of every sort has need
of it every moment?--"This is our conviction: we publish it to
the whole world; we live and die for it--let us respect all who have
convictions!"--I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths
of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does
not become more respectable because he lies on principle. . . The priests,
who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection
that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a
falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose,
have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts,
"God," "the will of God" and "the revelation
of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative,
was on the same road: this was hispractical reason.28 There are questions
regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not for man to decide;
all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are
beyond human reason. . . . To know the limits of reason--that alone
is genuine. philosophy. Why did God make a revelation to man? Would
God have done anything superfluous? Man could not find out for himself
what was good and what was evil, so God taught him His will. Moral:
the priest does not lie--the question, "true" or "untrue,"
has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible
to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary
to knowwhat is true. But this is more than man can know; therefore,
the priest is simply the mouth-piece of God.--Such a priestly syllogism
is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the
shrewd dodge of "revelation" belong to the general priestly
type--to the priest of the decadence as well as to the priest of pagan
times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "God"
is a word signifying acquiescence in all things) --The "law,"
the "will of God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all
these things are merely words for the conditionsunder which the priest
comes to power and with which he maintains his power,--these concepts
are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of
all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy
lie"--common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed
and to the Christian church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth
is here": this means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies.
. . .
56.
--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The
fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is
my objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning,
the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the
degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--therefore,
its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code
of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which
it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the
same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine
philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish
rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist
something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what is most important,
it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the
nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the
majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection,
an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life--the
sun shines upon the whole book.--All the things on which Christianity
vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and
marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and
confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and
ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid
fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have
her own husband; . . . it is better to marry than to burn"?29 And
is it possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized,
which is to say, befouled, by the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio?
. . . I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things
are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and
saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible,
perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one
place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the
smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there
is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow,
air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still
another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices
of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only
in the maiden is the whole body pure."
57.
One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the simple
process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends sought
by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously antithetical ends under
a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity
of making Christianity contemptible.--A book of laws such as the Code
of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes
the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long
centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The
prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact
that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully
attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one would
make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds,
the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose
the imperative tone, the "thou shalt," on which obedience
is based. The problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in the
evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight,
which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that
the series of experiences determining how all shall live--or can live--has
come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a
harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience.
In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is
further experimentation--the continuation of the state in which values
are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infnitum. Against
this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is
the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human
origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and
after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into
being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle
. . . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that
the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious
and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question. The
authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and
the fathers lived it.--The higher motive of such procedure lies in the
design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with
notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved
to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct
attains to a perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of
mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up
such a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility
of future mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire
to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must
be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The order of
castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification
of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which
no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence.
In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating
toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each
of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special
mastery and feeling of perfection. It isnot Manu but nature that sets
off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those
who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third
those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show
only mediocrity--the last-named represents the great majority, and the
first two the select. The superior caste--I call it the fewest--has,
as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness,
for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual
of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can
goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:30 goodness
is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth
manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness--or indignation
against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of
the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world is perfect"--so
prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who
says yes to life. "Imperfection, what ever is inferior to us, distance,
the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this
perfection. "The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find
their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth,
in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight
is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity,
an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them
a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others. . . .
Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They are the most honourable kind
of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most
amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are;
they are not at liberty to play second.--The second caste: to this belong
the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more
noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior,
judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive
arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them
all that is rough in the business of ruling-their followers, their right
hand, their most apt disciples.--In all this, I repeat, there is nothing
arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the contrary
is made up--by it nature is brought to shame. . . The order of castes,
the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself;
the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of
society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types--the
inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at
all.--A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord
with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges
of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights--the
cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid:
it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong
and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture,
science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational
activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration;
such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts
which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism.
The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function,
is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the
only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes
them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness;
they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization.
It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything
objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite
to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to
a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the
mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or
to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart--it is simply his
duty. . . . Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today?
The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine
the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment
with his petty existence--who make him envious and teach him revenge.
. . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of
"equal" rights. . . . What is bad? But I have already answered:
all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.--The anarchist
and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .
58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference:
whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness
between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points
only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of
this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied
a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions
which cause life to flourish into an "eternal" social organization,--Christianity
found its mission in putting an end to such an organization, because
life flourished under it. There the benefits that reason had produced
during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the most
remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in a harvest that should
be as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, on the contrary,
the harvest is blighted overnight. . . .That which stood there aere
perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization
under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared
to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling,
dilletantism--those holy anarchists made it a matter of "piety"
to destroy "the world,"which is to say, the imperium Romanum,
so that in the end not a stone stood upon another--and even Germans
and other such louts were able to become its masters. . . . The Christian
and the anarchist: both are decadents; both are incapable of any act
that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking;
both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up,
and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future. . . .
Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,-- overnight it
destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil
for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact
is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the
history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this
most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the
beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for
thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie
aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This organization
was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality
has nothing to do with such things--the first principle of all genuinely
great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against
the corruptest of all forms of corruption--against Christians. . . .
These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity,
crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest
in real things, of all instinct for reality--this cowardly, effeminate
and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all "souls," step
by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious,
manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own
cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness
of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell,
such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking
of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala
revenge--all that sort of thing became master of Rome: the same kind
of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One
has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon--not paganism,
but "Christianity," which is to say, the corruption of souls
by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.--He combatted
the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity--to deny immortality
was already a form of genuine salvation.--Epicurus had triumphed, and
every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean--when Paul appeared.
. . Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world," in
the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence.
. . . What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian
movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world conflagration"
might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on the cross,"
all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the
empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation
is of the Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding and
summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris,
that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment
of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here
so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas
which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth
of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into
the mouth--he made out of him something that even a priest of Mithras
could understand. . . This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped
the fact that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob "the
world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would
master Rome--that the notion of a "beyond" is the death of
life. Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more
than rhyme.
59.
The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word
to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--And,
considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with
adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work
to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!
. . To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?--All the prerequisites
to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there;
man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading
profitably--that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity
of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics
and mechanics, were on the right road,--the sense of fact, the last
and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions
were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential
to the beginning of the work was ready;--and the most essential, it
cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to
develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have
to day reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves--for
certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our
bodies--that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand,
patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity
of knowledge--all these things were already there, and had been there
for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent
tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as "German"
culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct--in
short, as reality. . . All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely
a memory !--The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical
inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the
will to secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering
into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style
that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, life . . --All
overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled
to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by
crafty, sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered,--only sucked
dry! . . . Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything
wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole
ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on top!--One needs but read any
of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to
realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It
would be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding
in the leaders of the Christian movement:--ah, but they were clever,
clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they
lacked was something quite different. Nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to
give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright,
of cleanly instincts. . . Between ourselves, they are not even men.
. . . If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to
do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men. . . .
60.
Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization,
and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization.
The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally
nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of
Rome and Greece, was trampled down (--I do not say by what sort of feet--)
Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin--because
it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish
life! . . . The crusaders later made war on something before which it
would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust--a
civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems
very poor and very "senile."--What they wanted, of course,
was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put aside our prejudices!
The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German
nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element
there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to
be won . . . The German noble, always the "Swiss guard" of
the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--but
well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German
swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry
through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this
point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility
stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is
obvious. . . Christianity, alcohol--the two great means of corruption.
. . . Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and
Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is
already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a
man is a Chandala or he is not. . . . "War to the knife with Rome!
Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was
the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors,
Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit,
before he can feel decently? I can't make out how a German could ever
feel Christian. . . .
61.
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred
times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe
the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the
Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what
the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,--an attempt
with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius
to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values.
. . . This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been
a more critical question than that of the Renaissance--it is my question
too--; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more
direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center
of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity,
and there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say, to insinuate
them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites
of those sitting there . . . I see before me the possibility of a perfectly
heavenly enchantment and spectacle :--it seems to me to scintillate
with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it
there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search
in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a
spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully
full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal
laughter--Caesar Borgia as pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well then,
that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for
today--: by it Christianity would have been swept away!--What happened?
A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful
instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against
the Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving,
the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its
capital--instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle.
A religious man thinks only of himself.--Luther saw only the depravity
of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent:
the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no
longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there
was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty,
beautiful and daring things! . . . And Luther restored the church:
he attacked it. . . . The Renaissance--an event without meaning, a great
futility !--Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility--that
has always been the work of the Germans.--The Reformation; Liebnitz;
Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war of "liberation";
the empire-every time a futile substitute for something that once existed,
for something irrecoverable . . . These Germans, I confess, are my enemies:
I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice
before every honest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have
tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have
on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way
measures, that Europe is sick of,--they also have on their conscience
the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable
and indestructible--Protestantism. . . . If mankind never manages to
get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame. . . .
62.
--With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn
Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible
of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It
is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work
the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian
church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every
value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity
into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian"
blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish
distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.
. . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched
mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls before God"--this
fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded--this explosive
concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing
the whole social order--this is Christian dynamite. . . . The "humanitarian"
blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction,
an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and
contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the
"humanitarianism" of Christianity!--Parasitism as the only
practice of the church; with its anaemic and "holy" ideals,
sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond
as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark
of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,--against health,
beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul--against life itself.
. . .
This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all
walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the
blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse,
the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge,
for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and
small enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.
. . .
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell--from
the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from its last?--From
today?--The transvaluation of all values! . . .
THE END
FOOTNOTES
created and inserted by H.L. Mencken:
1.
Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth hook of Herodotus. The
Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in
the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth.
2. The lowest of the Hindu castes.
3. That is, in Pandora's box.
4. John iv, 22.
5. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of "Das Leben Jesu"
(1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.
6. The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable that Semantik
is what Nietzsche had in mind.
7. One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.
8. The reputed founder of Taoism.
9. Nietzsche's name for one accepting his own philosophy.
10. That is, the strict letter of the law--the chief target of Jesus's
early preaching.
11. A reference to the "pure ignorance" (reine Thorheit) of
Parsifal.
12. Matthew v, 34.
13. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was
Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.
14. So in the text. One of Nietzsche's numerous coinages, obviously
suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel.
15. To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48.
16. 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.
17. Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.
18. The quotation also includes verse 47.
19. And 17.
20. Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.
21. A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even gods struggle
in vain."
22. The word training is in English in the text.
23. I Corinthians i, 27, 28.
24. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also
occasionally called ephecticism.
25. 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 influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination,
David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28.
26. The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii,
24: "Of Priests."
27. The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth,"
makes the direct statement: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies
of truth than lies."
28. A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft"
(Critique of Practical Reason).
29. I Corinthians vii, 2, 9.
30. Few men are noble.