The Antichrist

by F. W. Nietzsche

Styled by LimpidSoft

Contents

INTRODUCTION 4

PREFACE 32

THE ANTICHRIST 341 . . . . . . . . . . 352 . . . . . . . . . . 373 . . . . . . . . . . 384 . . . . . . . . . . 395 . . . . . . . . . . 406 . . . . . . . . . . 417 . . . . . . . . . . 438 . . . . . . . . . . 46

9 . . . . . . . . . . 4810 . . . . . . . . . 5011 . . . . . . . . . 5212 . . . . . . . . . 5413 . . . . . . . . . 5614 . . . . . . . . . 5815 . . . . . . . . . 6016 . . . . . . . . . 6217 . . . . . . . . . 6418 . . . . . . . . . 6719 . . . . . . . . . 6820 . . . . . . . . . 6921 . . . . . . . . . 72

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22 . . . . . . . . . 7423 . . . . . . . . . 7624 . . . . . . . . . 7925 . . . . . . . . . 8226 . . . . . . . . . 8527 . . . . . . . . . 8928 . . . . . . . . . 9229 . . . . . . . . . 9430 . . . . . . . . . 9631 . . . . . . . . . 9832 . . . . . . . . . 10133 . . . . . . . . . 10534 . . . . . . . . . 10735 . . . . . . . . . 10936 . . . . . . . . . 11037 . . . . . . . . . 11138 . . . . . . . . . 11339 . . . . . . . . . 11640 . . . . . . . . . 11941 . . . . . . . . . 12242 . . . . . . . . . 124

43 . . . . . . . . . 12744 . . . . . . . . . 13045 . . . . . . . . . 13446 . . . . . . . . . 13947 . . . . . . . . . 14248 . . . . . . . . . 14449 . . . . . . . . . 14750 . . . . . . . . . 14951 . . . . . . . . . 15152 . . . . . . . . . 15553 . . . . . . . . . 15854 . . . . . . . . . 16155 . . . . . . . . . 16456 . . . . . . . . . 16857 . . . . . . . . . 17058 . . . . . . . . . 17759 . . . . . . . . . 18160 . . . . . . . . . 18461 . . . . . . . . . 18662 . . . . . . . . . 189

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INTRODUCTION

SAVE for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, “EcceHomo,” “The Antichrist” is the last thing that Niet-

zsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a state-ment of some of his most salient ideas in their final form.Notes for it had been accumulating for years and it wasto have constituted the first volume of his long-projectedmagnum opus, “The Will to Power.” His full plan for thiswork, as originally drawn up, was as follows:

Vol. I. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism ofChristianity.

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Vol. II. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as aNihilistic Movement.

Vol. III. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, theMost Fatal Form of Ignorance.

Vol. IV. Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Recur-rence.

The first sketches for “The Will to Power” were madein 1884, soon after the publication of the first three partsof “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” and thereafter, for fouryears, Nietzsche piled up notes. They were written at allthe places he visited on his endless travels in search ofhealth–at Nice, at Venice, at Sils-Maria in the Engadine(for long his favourite resort), at Cannobio, at Zürich,at Genoa, at Chur, at Leipzig. Several times his workwas interrupted by other books, first by “Beyond Goodand Evil,” then by “The Genealogy of Morals” (writtenin twenty days), then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almostas often he changed his plan. Once he decided to expand“The Will to Power” to ten volumes, with “An Attempt ata New Interpretation of the World” as a general sub-title.Again he adopted the sub-title of “An Interpretation ofAll That Happens.” Finally, he hit upon “An Attempt at a

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Transvaluation of All Values,” and went back to four vol-umes, though with a number of changes in their arrange-ment. In September, 1888, he began actual work upon thefirst volume, and before the end of the month it was com-pleted. The Summer had been one of almost hystericalcreative activity. Since the middle of June he had writtentwo other small books, “The Case of Wagner” and “TheTwilight of the Idols,” and before the end of the year hewas destined to write “Ecce Homo.” Some time duringDecember his health began to fail rapidly, and soon afterthe New Year he was helpless. Thereafter he wrote nomore.

The Wagner diatribe and “The Twilight of the Idols”were published immediately, but “The Antichrist” didnot get into type until 1895. I suspect that the delaywas due to the influence of the philosopher’s sister, Elis-abeth Förster-Nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but byno means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas.During his dark days of neglect and misunderstanding,when even family and friends kept aloof, Frau Förster-Nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but therewere bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, andthose bounds were marked by crosses. One notes, in herbiography of him–a useful but not always accurate work–

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an evident desire to purge him of the accusation of mock-ing at sacred things. He had, she says, great admirationfor ”the elevating effect of Christianity ... upon the weakand ailing,” and ”a real liking for sincere, pious Chris-tians,” and ”a tender love for the Founder of Christian-ity.” All his wrath, she continues, was reserved for “St.Paul and his like,” who perverted the Beatitudes, whichChrist intended for the lowly only, into a universal re-ligion which made war upon aristocratic values. Here,obviously, one is addressed by an interpreter who can-not forget that she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastorand the grand-daughter of two others; a touch of con-science gets into her reading of “The Antichrist.” Sheeven hints that the text may have been garbled, after theauthor’s collapse, by some more sinister heretic. There isnot the slightest reason to believe that any such garblingever took place, nor is there any evidence that their com-mon heritage of piety rested upon the brother as heavilyas it rested upon the sister. On the contrary, it must bemanifest that Nietzsche, in this book, intended to attackChristianity headlong and with all arms, that for all hisrapid writing he put the utmost care into it, and that hewanted it to be printed exactly as it stands. The ideas init were anything but new to him when he set them down.

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He had been developing them since the days of his begin-ning. You will find some of them, clearly recognizable, inthe first book he ever wrote, “The Birth of Tragedy.” Youwill find the most important of all of them–the concep-tion of Christianity as ressentiment–set forth at length inthe first part of “The Genealogy of Morals,” publishedunder his own supervision in 1887. And the rest are scat-tered through the whole vast mass of his notes, some-times as mere questionings but often worked out verycarefully. Moreover, let it not be forgotten that it wasWagner’s yielding to Christian sentimentality in “Parsi-fal” that transformed Nietzsche from the first among hisliterary advocates into the most bitter of his opponents.He could forgive every other sort of mountebankery, butnot that. “In me,” he once said, ”the Christianity of myforbears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern in-tellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makesparamount turns against Christianity. In me Christianity... devours itself.”

In truth, the present philippic is as necessary to thecompleteness of the whole of Nietzsche’s system as thekeystone is to the arch. All the curves of his speculationlead up to it. What he flung himself against, from begin-ning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last

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analysis, Christianity in some form or other–Christianityas a system of practical ethics, Christianity as a politicalcode, Christianity as metaphysics, Christianity as a gaugeof the truth. It would be difficult to think of any intellec-tual enterprise on his long list that did not, more or lessdirectly and clearly, relate itself to this master enterpriseof them all. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of hisfathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, andparticularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him toevery other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civi-lized man. The will to power was his answer to Christian-ity’s affectation of humility and self-sacrifice; eternal re-currence was his mocking criticism of Christian optimismand millennialism; the superman was his candidate forthe place of the Christian ideal of the ”good” man, pru-dently abased before the throne of God. The things hechiefly argued for were anti-Christian things–the aban-donment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilita-tion of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timid-ity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocusof dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocra-cies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), therevival of the healthy, lordly ”innocence” that was Greek.If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born

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two thousand years too late. His dreams were thoroughlyHellenic; his whole manner of thinking was Hellenic; hispeculiar errors were Hellenic no less. But his Hellenism, Ineed not add, was anything but the pale neo-Platonismthat has run like a thread through the thinking of theWestern world since the days of the Christian Fathers.From Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us must get, buthis real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus thatone finds the germ of his primary view of the universe–a view, to wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon,but as mere aesthetic representation. The God that Ni-etzsche imagined, in the end, was not far from the Godthat such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines–a supremecraftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to anideal balancing of lines and forces, and yet always failingto work out the final harmony.

The late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury ofthe Western nations, and therewith all their ancient en-thusiasm for religious taboos and sanctions, naturally fo-cused attention upon Nietzsche, as upon the most daringand provocative of recent amateur theologians. The Ger-mans, with their characteristic tendency to explain theirevery act in terms as realistic and unpleasant as possi-ble, appear to have mauled him in a belated and unex-

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pected embrace, to the horror, I daresay, of the Kaiser,and perhaps to the even greater horror of Nietzsche’sown ghost. The folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with theirequally characteristic tendency to explain all their enter-prises romantically, simultaneously set him up as the An-tichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. The result wasa great deal of misrepresentation and misunderstandingof him. From the pulpits of the allied countries, and par-ticularly from those of England and the United States,a horde of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in ex-travagant terms as the author of all the horrors of thetime, and in the newspapers, until the Kaiser was electedsole bugaboo, he shared the honors of that office withvon Hindenburg, the Crown Prince, Capt. Boy-Ed, vonBernstorff and von Tirpitz. Most of this denunciation,of course, was frankly idiotic–the naïve pishposh of sub-urban Methodists, notoriety-seeking college professors,almost illiterate editorial writers, and other such num-skulls. In much of it, including not a few official hymns ofhate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the teacherof such spokesmen of the extremest sort of German na-tionalism as von Bernhardi and von Treitschke–whichwas just as intelligent as making George Bernard Shawthe mentor of Lloyd-George. In other solemn pronun-

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ciamentoes he was credited with being philosophicallyresponsible for various imaginary crimes of the enemy–the wholesale slaughter or mutilation of prisoners of war,the deliberate burning down of Red Cross hospitals, theutilization of the corpses of the slain for soap-making. Iamused myself, in those gaudy days, by collecting news-paper clippings to this general effect, and later on I shallprobably publish a digest of them, as a contribution tothe study of war hysteria. The thing went to unbelievablelengths. On the strength of the fact that I had published abook on Nietzsche in 1906, six years after his death, I wascalled upon by agents of the Department of Justice, elabo-rately outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I wasan intimate associate and agent of ”the German monster,Nietzsky.” I quote the official procès verbal, an indignantbut often misspelled document. Alas, poor Nietzsche!After all his laborious efforts to prove that he was not aGerman, but a Pole–even after his heroic readiness, viaanti-anti-Semitism, to meet the deduction that, if a Pole,then probably also a Jew!

But under all this alarmed and preposterous tosh therewas at least a sound instinct, and that was the instinctwhich recognized Nietzsche as the most eloquent, per-tinacious and effective of all the critics of the philoso-

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phy to which the Allies against Germany stood commit-ted, and on the strength of which, at all events in the-ory, the United States had engaged itself in the war. Hewas not, in point of fact, involved with the visible enemy,save in remote and transient ways; the German, officially,remained the most ardent of Christians during the warand became a democrat at its close. But he was plainlya foe of democracy in all its forms, political, religiousand epistemological, and what is worse, his oppositionwas set forth in terms that were not only extraordinar-ily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonlyoffensive. It was thus quite natural that he should havearoused a degree of indignation verging upon the patho-logical in the two countries that had planted themselvesupon the democratic platform most boldly, and that feltit most shaky, one may add, under their feet. I daresaythat Nietzsche, had he been alive, would have got a lot ofsatisfaction out of the execration thus heaped upon him,not only because, being a vain fellow, he enjoyed execra-tion as a tribute to his general singularity, and hence tohis superiority, but also and more importantly because,being no mean psychologist, he would have recognizedthe disconcerting doubts underlying it. If Nietzsche’scriticism of democracy were as ignorant and empty, say,

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INTRODUCTION

as the average evangelical clergyman’s criticism of Dar-win’s hypothesis of natural selection, then the advocatesof democracy could afford to dismiss it as loftily as theDarwinians dismiss the blather of the holy clerks. And ifhis attack upon Christianity were mere sound and fury,signifying nothing, then there would be no call for anath-emas from the sacred desk. But these onslaughts, in pointof fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and agreat deal of point and plausibility–there are, in brief, bul-lets in the gun, teeth in the tiger,–and so it is no wonderthat they excite the ire of men who hold, as a primaryarticle of belief, that their acceptance would destroy civ-ilization, darken the sun, and bring Jahveh to sobs uponHis Throne.

But in all this justifiable fear, of course, there remainsa false assumption, and that is the assumption that Ni-etzsche proposed to destroy Christianity altogether, andso rob the plain people of the world of their virtue, theirspiritual consolations, and their hope of heaven. Noth-ing could be more untrue. The fact is that Nietzsche hadno interest whatever in the delusions of the plain people–that is, intrinsically. It seemed to him of small momentwhat they believed, so long as it was safely imbecile. Whathe stood against was not their beliefs, but the elevation

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INTRODUCTION

of those beliefs, by any sort of democratic process, to thedignity of a state philosophy–what he feared most wasthe pollution and crippling of the superior minority byintellectual disease from below. His plain aim in “TheAntichrist” was to combat that menace by completingthe work begun, on the one hand, by Darwin and theother evolutionist philosophers, and, on the other hand,by German historians and philologians. The net effect ofthis earlier attack, in the eighties, had been the collapseof Christian theology as a serious concern of educatedmen. The mob, it must be obvious, was very little shaken;even to this day it has not put off its belief in the essentialChristian doctrines. But the intelligentsia, by 1885, hadbeen pretty well convinced. No man of sound informa-tion, at the time Nietzsche planned “The Antichrist,” ac-tually believed that the world was created in seven days,or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by a flood asa penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved theboa constrictor, the prairie dog and the pediculus capitisby taking a pair of each into the ark, or that Lot’s wifewas turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of theTrue Cross could cure hydrophobia. Such notions, still al-most universally prevalent in Christendom a century be-fore, were now confined to the great body of ignorant and

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INTRODUCTION

credulous men–that is, to ninety-five or ninety-six per-cent. of the race. For a man of the superior minority tosubscribe to one of them publicly was already sufficientto set him off as one in imminent need of psychiatrical at-tention. Belief in them had become a mark of inferiority,like the allied belief in madstones, magic and apparitions.

But though the theology of Christianity had thus sunkto the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, prop-agated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal par-asites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the ut-most acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance thanever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, thatthey simply must be saved from the wreck–that the worldwould vanish into chaos if they went the way of the rev-elations supporting them. In this fear a great many judi-cious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence,an absolutely new Christian cult–a cult, to wit, purgedof all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the oldercult by generations of theologians, and harking back towhat was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Je-sus. This cult still flourishes; Protestantism tends to be-come identical with it; it invades Catholicism as Mod-ernism; it is supported by great numbers of men whoseintelligence is manifest and whose sincerity is not open

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INTRODUCTION

to question. Even Nietzsche himself yielded to it in weakmoments, as you will discover on examining his some-what laborious effort to make Paul the villain of Christiantheology, and Jesus no more than an innocent bystander.But this sentimental yielding never went far enough todistract his attention for long from his main idea, whichwas this: that Christian ethics were quite as dubious, atbottom, as Christian theology–that they were founded,just as surely as such childish fables as the story of Jonahand the whale, upon the peculiar prejudices and creduli-ties, the special desires and appetites, of inferior men–thatthey warred upon the best interests of men of a bettersort quite as unmistakably as the most extravagant of ob-jective superstitions. In brief, what he saw in Christianethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altru-ism and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a demo-cratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong–a conspiracyof the chandala against the free functioning of their supe-riors, nay, against the free progress of mankind. This the-ory is the thing he exposes in “The Antichrist,” bringingto the business his amazingly chromatic and exigent elo-quence at its finest flower. This is the ”conspiracy” he setsforth in all the panoply of his characteristic italics, dashes,sforzando interjections and exclamation points.

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Well, an idea is an idea. The present one may beright and it may be wrong. One thing is quite certain:that no progress will be made against it by denouncingit as merely immoral. If it is ever laid at all, it mustbe laid evidentially, logically. The notion to the con-trary is thoroughly democratic; the mob is the most ruth-less of tyrants; it is always in a democratic society thatheresy and felony tend to be most constantly confused.One hears without surprise of a Bismarck philosophizingplacidly (at least in his old age) upon the delusion of So-cialism and of a Frederick the Great playing the hose ofhis cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identi-cal with his own person, but men in the mass never brookthe destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs,and that impatience is naturally most evident in thosesocieties in which men in the mass are most influential.Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem;democracy and free speech are eternal enemies. But inany battle between an institution and an idea, the idea, inthe long run, has the better of it. Here I do not ventureinto the absurdity of arguing that, as the world wags on,the truth always survives. I believe nothing of the sort.As a matter of fact, it seems to me that an idea that hap-pens to be true–or, more exactly, as near to truth as any

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INTRODUCTION

human idea can be, and yet remain generally intelligible–it seems to me that such an idea carries a special andoften fatal handicap. The majority of men prefer delu-sion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all,it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of falseappearances–of complex and irrational phenomena, de-fectively grasped. But though an idea that is true is thusnot likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a greatadvantage. The evidence behind it is now supported bysympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality–and sen-timentality is as powerful as an army with banners. Onenever hears of a martyr in history whose notions are seri-ously disputed today. The forgotten ideas are those of themen who put them forward soberly and quietly, hopingfatuously that they would conquer by the force of theirtruth; these are the ideas that we now struggle to redis-cover. Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake byoutraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been aglorious day for his doctrines. As it is, they are helpedon their way every time they are denounced as immoraland against God. The war brought down upon them themaledictions of vast herds of right-thinking men. Andnow “The Antichrist,” after fifteen years of neglect, is be-ing reprinted....

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One imagines the author, a sardonic wraith, snicker-ing somewhat sadly over the fact. His shade, wherever itsuffers, is favoured in these days by many such consola-tions, some of them of much greater horsepower. Thinkof the facts and arguments, even the underlying theoriesand attitudes, that have been borrowed from him, con-sciously and unconsciously, by the foes of Bolshevismduring these last thrilling years! The face of democracy,suddenly seen hideously close, has scared the guardiansof the reigning plutocracy half to death, and they havegone to the devil himself for aid. Southern Senators, al-most illiterate men, have mixed his acids with well waterand spouted them like affrighted geysers, not knowingwhat they did. Nor are they the first to borrow from him.Years ago I called attention to the debt incurred with char-acteristic forgetfulness of obligation by the late TheodoreRoosevelt, in “The Strenuous Life” and elsewhere. Roo-sevelt, a typical apologist for the existing order, adeptlydragging a herring across the trail whenever it was men-aced, yet managed to delude the native boobery, at leastuntil toward the end, into accepting him as a fiery expo-nent of pure democracy. Perhaps he even fooled himself;charlatans usually do so soon or late. A study of Niet-zsche reveals the sources of much that was honest in him,

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and exposes the hollowness of much that was sham. Niet-zsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect,was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldomallowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.What is called Bolshevism today he saw clearly a genera-tion ago and described for what it was and is–democracyin another aspect, the old ressentiment of the lower or-ders in free function once more. Socialism, Puritanism,Philistinism, Christianity–he saw them all as allotropicforms of democracy, as variations upon the endless strug-gle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timo-rous against the strong and enterprising, of the botchedagainst the fit. The world needed a staggering exagger-ation to make it see even half of the truth. It tremblestoday as it trembled during the French Revolution. Per-haps it would tremble less if it could combat the monsterwith a clearer conscience and less burden of compromis-ing theory–if it could launch its forces frankly at the fun-damental doctrine, and not merely employ them to policethe transient orgy.

Nietzsche, in the long run, may help it toward thatgreater honesty. His notions, propagated by cuttingsfrom cuttings from cuttings, may conceivably prepare theway for a sounder, more healthful theory of society and

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of the state, and so free human progress from the stupidi-ties which now hamper it, and men of true vision fromthe despairs which now sicken them. I say it is conceiv-able, but I doubt that it is probable. The soul and thebelly of mankind are too evenly balanced; it is not likelythat the belly will ever put away its hunger or forget itspower. Here, perhaps, there is an example of the eternalrecurrence that Nietzsche was fond of mulling over in hisblacker moods. We are in the midst of one of the peren-nial risings of the lower orders. It got under way longbefore any of the current Bolshevist demons was born; itwas given its long, secure start by the intolerable tyrannyof the plutocracy–the end product of the Eighteenth Cen-tury revolt against the old aristocracy. It found resistancesuddenly slackened by civil war within the plutocracyitself–one gang of traders falling upon another gang, tothe tune of vast hymn-singing and yells to God. Perhapsit has already passed its apogee; the plutocracy, chas-tened, shows signs of a new solidarity; the wheel contin-ues to swing ’round. But this combat between proletariatand plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferi-orities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.What actual difference does it make to a civilized man,when there is a steel strike, whether the workmen win or

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the mill-owners win? The conflict can interest him only asspectacle, as the conflict between Bonaparte and the oldorder in Europe interested Goethe and Beethoven. Thevictory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring chaosnearer, and so set the stage for a genuine revolution lateron, with (let us hope) a new feudalism or something bet-ter coming out of it, and a new Thirteenth Century atdawn. This seems to be the slow, costly way of the worstof habitable worlds.

In the present case my money is laid upon the plutoc-racy. It will win because it will be able, in the long run,to enlist the finer intelligences. The mob and its maudlincauses attract only sentimentalists and scoundrels, chieflythe latter. Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself toa mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat;even when a superior man prevails at that disgustinggame he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Notmany superior men make the attempt. The average greatcaptain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper overirremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that heis unconscious of his own hypocrisy–a slimy fellow, of-fensive to the nose. The plutocracy can recruit measur-ably more respectable janissaries, if only because it canmake self-interest less obviously costly to amour propre.

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Its defect and its weakness lie in the fact that it is stilltoo young to have acquired dignity. But lately sprungfrom the mob it now preys upon, it yet shows some ofthe habits of mind of that mob: it is blatant, stupid, ig-norant, lacking in all delicate instinct and governmentalfinesse. Above all, it remains somewhat heavily moral.One seldom finds it undertaking one of its characteris-tic imbecilities without offering a sonorous moral reason;it spends almost as much to support the Y. M. C. A.,vice-crusading, Prohibition and other such puerilities asit spends upon Congressmen, strike-breakers, gun-men,kept patriots and newspapers. In England the case is evenworse. It is almost impossible to find a wealthy industrialover there who is not also an eminent non-conformist lay-man, and even among financiers there are praying broth-ers. On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact thatthe plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish.Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counter-balances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined tolead the plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel hewill fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy–i. e., acaste of gentlemen–, but he will at least make it clever,and hence worthy of consideration. The case against theJews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand

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times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. Butwhenever you find a Davidsbündlerschaft making prac-tise against the Philistines, there you will find a Jew lay-ing on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche tospeak up for the children of Israel quite as often as hespoke against them. He was not blind to their faults, butwhen he set them beside Christians he could not denytheir general superiority. Perhaps in America and Eng-land, as on the Continent, the increasing Jewishness ofthe plutocracy, while cutting it off from all chance of everdeveloping into an aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a dig-nity that it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect.

But even so, it will remain in a sort of half-world, mid-way between the gutter and the stars. Above it will stillstand the small group of men that constitutes the perma-nent aristocracy of the race–the men of imagination andhigh purpose, the makers of genuine progress, the braveand ardent spirits, above all petty fears and discontentsand above all petty hopes and ideals no less. There wereheroes before Agamemnon; there will be Bachs after Jo-hann Sebastian. And beneath the Judaized plutocracy, thesublimated bourgeoisie, there the immemorial proletariat,I venture to guess, will roar on, endlessly tortured by itsvain hatreds and envies, stampeded and made to tremble

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by its ancient superstitions, prodded and made miserableby its sordid and degrading hopes. It seems to me verylikely that, in this proletariat, Christianity will continue tosurvive. It is nonsense, true enough, but it is sweet. Ni-etzsche, denouncing its dangers as a poison, almost fallsinto the error of denying it its undoubtedly sugary smack.Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jok-ers of the race, this is the one that offers most for the leastmoney, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out bydenying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equalin the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiorityinto a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid,and miserable, and sorely put upon–of such are the celes-tial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches,nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a millionDarwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great conso-lation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish isto make the superior orders of men acutely conscious ofthe exact nature of it, and so give them armament againstthe contagion. This is going on; this is being done. I thinkthat “The Antichrist” has a useful place in that enterprise.It is strident, it is often extravagant, it is, to many sensi-tive men, in the worst of possible taste, but at bottom it isenormously apt and effective–and on the surface it is un-

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doubtedly a good show. One somehow enjoys, with themalice that is native to man, the spectacle of anathemasbatted back; it is refreshing to see the pitchfork employedagainst gentlemen who have doomed such innumerablecaravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found, after manylong years, a foeman worthy of them–not a mere fancyswordsman like Voltaire, or a mob orator like Tom Paine,or a pedant like the heretics of exegesis, but a gladiatorarmed with steel and armoured with steel, and show-ing all the ferocious gusto of a mediaeval bishop. It isa pity that Holy Church has no process for the elevationof demons, like its process for the canonization of saints.There must be a long roll of black miracles to the dis-credit of the Accursed Friedrich–sinners purged of con-science and made happy in their sinning, clerics shakenin their theology by visions of a new and better holy city,the strong made to exult, the weak robbed of their old sadromance. It would be a pleasure to see the Advocatus Di-aboli turn from the table of the prosecution to the table ofthe defence, and move in solemn form for the damnationof the Naumburg hobgoblin....

Of all Nietzsche’s books, “The Antichrist” comes near-est to conventionality in form. It presents a connectedargument with very few interludes, and has a beginning,

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INTRODUCTION

a middle and an end. Most of his works are in the formof collections of apothegms, and sometimes the subjectchanges on every second page. This fact constitutes oneof the counts in the orthodox indictment of him: it is citedas proof that his capacity for consecutive thought waslimited, and that he was thus deficient mentally, and per-haps a downright moron. The argument, it must be ob-vious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives theprofessors is the traditional prolixity of philosophers. Be-cause the average philosophical writer, when he essaysto expose his ideas, makes such inordinate drafts uponthe parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emp-tied these defective observers jump to the conclusion thathis intrinsic notions are of corresponding weight. Thisis not unseldom quite untrue. What makes philosophyso garrulous is not the profundity of philosophers, buttheir lack of art; they are like physicians who sought tocure a slight hyperacidity by giving the patient a carloadof burned oyster-shells to eat. There is, too, the endlesspoll-parrotting that goes on: each new philosopher mustprove his learning by laboriously rehearsing the ideasof all previous philosophers.... Nietzsche avoided bothfaults. He always assumed that his readers knew thebooks, and that it was thus unnecessary to rewrite them.

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INTRODUCTION

And, having an idea that seemed to him to be novel andoriginal, he stated it in as few words as possible, and thenshut down. Sometimes he got it into a hundred words;sometimes it took a thousand; now and then, as in thepresent case, he developed a series of related ideas intoa connected book. But he never wrote a word too many.He never pumped up an idea to make it appear biggerthan it actually was. The pedagogues, alas, are not accus-tomed to that sort of writing in serious fields. They resentit, and sometimes they even try to improve it. There ex-ists, in fact, a huge and solemn tome on Nietzsche by alearned man of America in which all of his brilliancy ispainfully translated into the windy phrases of the semi-naries. The tome is satisfactorily ponderous, but the meatof the cocoanut is left out: there is actually no discussionof the Nietzschean view of Christianity!... Always Niet-zsche daunts the pedants. He employed too few wordsfor them–and he had too many ideas.

The present translation of “The Antichrist” is pub-lished by agreement with Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the

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INTRODUCTION

English edition of Nietzsche. There are two earlier trans-lations, one by Thomas Common and the other by An-thony M. Ludovici. That of Mr. Common follows thetext very closely, and thus occasionally shows some es-sentially German turns of phrase; that of Mr. Ludoviciis more fluent but rather less exact. I do not offer myown version on the plea that either of these is useless;on the contrary, I cheerfully acknowledge that they havemuch merit, and that they helped me at almost everyline. I began this new Englishing of the book, not in anyhope of supplanting them, and surely not with any no-tion of meeting a great public need, but simply as a pri-vate amusement in troubled days. But as I got on with it Ibegan to see ways of putting some flavour of Nietzsche’speculiar style into the English, and so amusement turnedinto a more or less serious labour. The result, of course,is far from satisfactory, but it at least represents a verydiligent attempt. Nietzsche, always under the influenceof French models, wrote a German that differs materiallyfrom any other German that I know. It is more nervous,more varied, more rapid in tempo; it runs to more effec-tive climaxes; it is never stodgy. His marks begin to showupon the writing of the younger Germans of today. Theyare getting away from the old thunderous manner, with

31

INTRODUCTION

its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexi-ties. In the course of time, I daresay, they will develop aGerman almost as clear as French and almost as colourfuland resilient as English.

I owe thanks to Dr. Levy for his imprimatur, to Mr.Theodor Hemberger for criticism, and to Messrs. Com-mon and Ludovici for showing me the way around manya difficulty.

H. L. MENCKEN.

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PREFACE

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps notone of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may beamong those who understand my “Zarathustra”: howcould I confound myself with those who are now sprout-ing 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 toowell. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, hemust carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness.He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops–andto looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and na-

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PREFACE

tionalism as beneath him. He must have become indif-ferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it bringsprofit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an in-clination, born of strength, for questions that no one hasthe courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestina-tion for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes.New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most dis-tant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto re-mained unheard. And the will to economize in the grandmanner–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, mytrue readers, my readers foreordained: of what accountare the rest?–The rest are merely humanity.–One mustmake one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in lofti-ness of soul,–in contempt.

FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.

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35

1

Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans–we know well enough how remote our place is. “Neitherby land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyper-boreans”: even Pindar,1 in his day, knew that much aboutus. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death–ourlife, our happiness.... We have discovered that happiness;we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thou-sands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?–The man of today?–“I don’t know either the way out orthe way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the wayout or the way in”–so sighs the man of today.... This isthe sort of modernity that made us ill,–we sickened onlazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuousdirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance andlargeur of the heart that ”forgives” everything because it”understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather liveamid the ice than among modern virtues and other such

1Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth book ofHerodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people be-yond the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They en-joyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth.

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south-winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neitherourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding outwhere to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they calledus fatalists. Our fate–it was the fulness, the tension, thestoring up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings andgreat deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happinessof the weakling, from ”resignation”... There was thunderin our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast–forwe had not yet found the way. The formula of our happi-ness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal....

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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 Re-naissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principleof our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?–Practical sympa-thy for the botched and the weak–Christianity....

3

The problem that I set here is not what shall replacemankind in the order of living creatures (–man is an end–): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, asbeing the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the mostsecure guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough inthe past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception,never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been pre-cisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the ter-ror of terrors;–and out of that terror the contrary type hasbeen willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal,the herd animal, the sick brute-man–the Christian....

4

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution towarda better or stronger or higher level, as progress is nowunderstood. This ”progress” is merely a modern idea,which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, inhis essential worth, falls far below the European of theRenaissance; the process of evolution does not necessar-ily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individualcases in various parts of the earth and under the mostwidely different cultures, and in these cases a higher typecertainly manifests itself; something which, compared tomankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Suchhappy 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 occasionallyrepresent such lucky accidents.

5

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: ithas waged a war to the death against this higher type ofman, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type un-der its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of theEvil One himself, out of these instincts–the strong man asthe typical reprobate, the ”outcast among men.” Chris-tianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, thebotched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all theself-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corruptedeven the faculties of those natures that are intellectuallymost vigorous, by representing the highest intellectualvalues as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. Themost lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, whobelieved that his intellect had been destroyed by originalsin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!–

6

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: Ihave drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man.This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspi-cion: that it involves a moral accusation against human-ity. It is used–and I wish to emphasize the fact again–without any moral significance: and this is so far truethat the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me pre-cisely in those quarters where there has been most aspira-tion, hitherto, toward ”virtue” and ”godliness.” As youprobably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense ofdécadence: my argument is that all the values on whichmankind now fixes its highest aspirations are décadence-values.

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, whenit loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, whatis injurious to it. A history of the ”higher feelings,” the”ideals of humanity”–and it is possible that I’ll have towrite it–would almost explain why man is so degenerate.Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for sur-vival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: wheneverthe will to power fails there is disaster. My contention isthat all the highest values of humanity have been emp-

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tied of this will–that the values of décadence, of nihilism,now prevail under the holiest names.

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Christianity is called the religion of pity.–Pity stands inopposition to all the tonic passions that augment the en-ergy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A manloses power when he pities. Through pity that drain uponstrength which suffering works is multiplied a thousand-fold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certaincircumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life andliving energy–a loss out of all proportion to the magni-tude of the cause (–the case of the death of the Nazarene).This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still moreimportant one. If one measures the effects of pity by thegravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a men-ace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwartsthe whole law of evolution, which is the law of naturalselection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; itfights on the side of those disinherited and condemnedby life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched ofall kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (–in every su-perior moral system it appears as a weakness–); goingstill further, it has been called the virtue, the source andfoundation of all other virtues–but let us always bear in

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mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophythat was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of lifewas inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that bymeans of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial–pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this de-pressing and contagious instinct stands against all thoseinstincts which work for the preservation and enhance-ment of life: in the rôle of protector of the miserable, it is aprime agent in the promotion of décadence–pity persuadesto extinction.... Of course, one doesn’t say ”extinction”:one says ”the other world,” or “God,” or ”the true life,” orNirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric,from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appearsa good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the ten-dency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the ten-dency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: thatis why pity appeared to him as a virtue.... Aristotle, as ev-ery one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state ofmind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative:he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of lifeshould prompt us to seek some means of puncturing anysuch pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity asthat appearing in Schopenhauer’s case (and also, alack, inthat of our whole literary décadence, from St. Petersburg

45

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to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst andbe discharged.... Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all ourunhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doc-tors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here–allthis is our business, all this is our sort of humanity, by thissign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!–

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It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antago-nists: theologians and all who have any theological bloodin their veins–this is our whole philosophy.... One musthave faced that menace at close hand, better still, onemust have had experience of it directly and almost suc-cumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (–the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiolo-gists seems to me to be a joke–they have no passion aboutsuch things; they have not suffered–). This poisoninggoes a great deal further than most people think: I findthe arrogant habit of the theologian among all who re-gard themselves as ”idealists”–among all who, by virtueof a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise abovereality, and to look upon it with suspicion.... The idealist,like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts inhis hand (–and not only in his hand!); he launches themwith benevolent contempt against ”understanding,” ”thesenses,” ”honor,” ”good living,” ”science”; he sees suchthings as beneath him, as pernicious and seductive forces,on which ”the soul” soars as a pure thing-in-itself–as ifhumility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not al-ready done much more damage to life than all imaginable

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horrors and vices.... The pure soul is a pure lie.... So longas the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poi-soner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, therecan be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth hasalready been stood on its head when the obvious attorneyof mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative....

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Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find thetracks of it everywhere. Whoever has theological bloodin his veins is shifty and dishonourable in all things. Thepathetic thing that grows out of this condition is calledfaith: in other words, closing one’s eyes upon one’s selfonce for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable false-hood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, ofholiness upon this false view of all things; they groundgood conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that noother sort of vision has value any more, once they havemade theirs sacrosanct with the names of “God,” ”salva-tion” and ”eternity.” I unearth this theological instinct inall directions: it is the most widespread and the most sub-terranean form of falsehood to be found on earth. What-ever a theologian regards as true must be false: there youhave almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinctof self-preservation stands against truth ever coming intohonour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever theinfluence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluationof values, and the concepts ”true” and ”false” are forcedto change places: whatever is most damaging to life isthere called ”true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it,

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approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is therecalled ”false.”... When theologians, working through the”consciences” of princes (or of peoples–), stretch out theirhands for power, there is never any doubt as to the funda-mental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic willexerts that power....

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Among Germans I am immediately understood whenI say that theological blood is the ruin of philoso-phy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of Ger-man philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum orig-inale. Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paraly-sis of Christianity–and of reason.... One need only utterthe words “Tübingen School” to get an understanding ofwhat German philosophy is at bottom–a very artful formof theology.... The Suabians are the best liars in Germany;they lie innocently.... Why all the rejoicing over the ap-pearance of Kant that went through the learned world ofGermany, three-fourths of which is made up of the sons ofpreachers and teachers–why the German conviction stillechoing, that with Kant came a change for the better? Thetheological instinct of German scholars made them seeclearly just what had become possible again.... A back-stairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept ofthe ”true world,” the concept of morality as the essenceof the world (–the two most vicious errors that ever ex-isted!), were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scep-ticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no longerrefutable.... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so

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far.... Out of reality there had been made ”appearance”;an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turnedinto reality.... The success of Kant is merely a theolog-ical success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but onemore impediment to German integrity, already far fromsteady.–

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A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue mustbe our invention; it must spring out of our personal needand defence. In every other case it is a source of danger.That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtuewhich 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 groundedupon impersonality or a notion of universal validity–these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an ex-pression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinesespirit of Königsberg. Quite the contrary is demandedby the most profound laws of self-preservation and ofgrowth: to wit, that every man find his own virtue, hisown categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces whenit confounds its duty with the general concept of duty.Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disasterthan every ”impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before theMoloch of abstraction.–To think that no one has thoughtof Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life!... Thetheological instinct alone took it under protection!–An ac-tion prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a rightaction by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and

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yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism,regarded pleasure as an objection.... What destroys a manmore quickly than to work, think and feel without in-ner necessity, without any deep personal desire, withoutpleasure–as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipefor décadence, and no less for idiocy.... Kant became anidiot.–And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe!This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the Ger-man philosopher–still passes today!... I forbid myself tosay what I think of the Germans.... Didn’t Kant see in theFrench Revolution the transformation of the state fromthe inorganic form to the organic? Didn’t he ask himself ifthere was a single event that could be explained save onthe assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on thebasis 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 andanything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German dé-cadence as a philosophy–that is Kant!–

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I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the his-tory of philosophy: the rest haven’t the slightest concep-tion of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, allthese great enthusiasts and prodigies–they regard ”beau-tiful feelings” as arguments, the ”heaving breast” as thebellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion oftruth. In the end, with “German” innocence, Kant triedto give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, thisdearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it ”practicalreason.” He deliberately invented a variety of reasonsfor use on occasions when it was desirable not to trou-ble with reason–that is, when morality, when the sublimecommand ”thou shalt,” was heard. When one recalls thefact that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no morethan a development from the old type of priest, this inher-itance from the priest, this fraud upon self, ceases to be re-markable. When a man feels that he has a divine mission,say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind–when a manfeels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he isthe mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives–when sucha mission inflames him, it is only natural that he shouldstand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judg-

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ment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mis-sion, that he is himself a type of a higher order!... Whathas a priest to do with philosophy! He stands far aboveit!–And hitherto the priest has ruled!–He has determinedthe meaning of ”true” and ”not true”!...

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Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, wefree spirits, are already a ”transvaluation of all values,”a visualized declaration of war and victory against all theold concepts of ”true” and ”not true.” The most valu-able intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valu-able of all are those which determine methods. All themethods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of to-day, were the targets for thousands of years of the mostprofound contempt; if a man inclined to them he wasexcluded from the society of ”decent” people–he passedas ”an enemy of God,” as a scoffer at the truth, as one”possessed.” As a man of science, he belonged to theChandala2.... We have had the whole pathetic stupid-ity of mankind against us–their every notion of what thetruth ought to be, of what the service of the truth oughtto be–their every ”thou shalt” was launched against us....Our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, dis-trustful manner–all appeared to them as absolutely dis-creditable and contemptible.–Looking back, one may al-most ask one’s self with reason if it was not actually an

2The lowest of the Hindu castes.

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aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what they de-manded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, andof the learned a strong appeal to their senses. It was ourmodesty that stood out longest against their taste.... Howwell they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God!

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We have unlearned something. We have become moremodest in every way. We no longer derive man from the”spirit,” from the ”godhead”; we have dropped him backamong the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of thebeasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereofis his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard our-selves against a conceit which would assert itself evenhere: that man is the great second thought in the pro-cess of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything butthe crown of creation: beside him stand many other an-imals, all at similar stages of development.... And evenwhen we say that we say a bit too much, for man, rela-tively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals andthe sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerouslyfrom his instincts–though for all that, to be sure, he re-mains the most interesting!–As regards the lower animals,it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daringto describe them as machina; the whole of our physiol-ogy is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine.Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartesdid: what we know of man today is limited precisely bythe extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a ma-

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chine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritancefrom some higher order of beings, what was called ”freewill”; now we have taken even this will from him, forthe term no longer describes anything that we can un-derstand. The old word ”will” now connotes only a sortof result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitablyupon a series of partly discordant and partly harmoniousstimuli–the will no longer ”acts,” or ”moves.”... Formerlyit was thought that man’s consciousness, his ”spirit,” of-fered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That hemight be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to drawhis senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, toshuffle off his mortal coil–then only the important partof him, the ”pure spirit,” would remain. Here again wehave thought out the thing better: to us consciousness,or ”the spirit,” appears as a symptom of a relative im-perfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping,a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up ner-vous force unnecessarily–we deny that anything can bedone perfectly so long as it is done consciously. The ”purespirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervoussystem and the senses, the so-called ”mortal shell,” andthe rest is miscalculation–that is all!...

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Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has anypoint of contact with actuality. It offers purely imagi-nary causes (“God,” ”soul,” ”ego,” ”spirit,” ”free will”–oreven ”unfree”), and purely imaginary effects (”sin,” ”sal-vation,” ”grace,” ”punishment,” ”forgiveness of sins”).Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,” ”spirits,””souls”); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; atotal denial of the concept of natural causes); an imagi-nary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpre-tations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings–forexample, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with thehelp of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash–,”repentance,” ”pangs of conscience,” ”temptation by thedevil,” ”the presence of God”); an imaginary teleology (the”kingdom of God,” ”the last judgment,” ”eternal life”).–This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, isto be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter atleast reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheap-ens it and denies it. Once the concept of ”nature” hadbeen opposed to the concept of “God,” the word ”natu-ral” necessarily took on the meaning of ”abominable”–the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred

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of the natural (–the real!–), and is no more than evidenceof a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality.... Thisexplains everything. Who alone has any reason for livinghis way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. Butto suffer from reality one must be a botched reality.... Thepreponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of thisfictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderancealso supplies the formula for décadence....

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A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitablyto the same conclusion.–A nation that still believes in it-self holds fast to its own god. In him it does honour tothe conditions which enable it to survive, to its virtues–itprojects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being towhom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give ofhis riches; a proud people need a god to whom they canmake sacrifices.... Religion, within these limits, is a formof gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: tothat end he needs a god.–Such a god must be able to workboth benefits and injuries; he must be able to play eitherfriend or foe–he is wondered at for the good he does aswell as for the evil he does. But the castration, againstall nature, of such a god, making him a god of goodnessalone, would be contrary to human inclination. Mankindhas just as much need for an evil god as for a good god; itdoesn’t have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarian-ism for its own existence.... What would be the value ofa god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn,cunning, violence? who had perhaps never experiencedthe rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? Noone would understand such a god: why should any one

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want him?–True enough, when a nation is on the down-ward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, itshope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to seesubmission as a first necessity and the virtues of submis-sion as measures of self-preservation, then it must over-haul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite, timorous anddemure; he counsels ”peace of soul,” hate-no-more, le-niency, ”love” of friend and foe. He moralizes endlessly;he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the godof every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopoli-tan.... Formerly he represented a people, the strength ofa people, everything aggressive and thirsty for power inthe soul of a people; now he is simply the good god.... Thetruth is that there is no other alternative for gods: eitherthey are the will to power–in which case they are nationalgods–or incapacity for power–in which case they have tobe good....

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Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in what-ever form, there is always an accompanying declinephysiologically, a décadence. The divinity of this décadence,shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is convertedperforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of theweak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak;they call themselves ”the good.”... No hint is needed toindicate the moments in history at which the dualisticfiction of a good and an evil god first became possible.The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reducetheir own god to ”goodness-in-itself” also prompts themto eliminate all good qualities from the god of their su-periors; they make revenge on their masters by making adevil of the latter’s god.–The good god, and the devil likehim–both are abortions of décadence.–How can we be sotolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to joinin their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of godfrom ”the god of Israel,” the god of a people, to the Chris-tian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described asprogress?–But even Renan does this. As if Renan had aright to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in theface. When everything necessary to ascending life; when

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all that is strong, courageous, masterful and proud hasbeen eliminated from the concept of a god; when he hassunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary,a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes thepoor man’s god, the sinner’s god, the invalid’s god parexcellence, and the attribute of ”saviour” or ”redeemer”remains as the one essential attribute of divinity–just whatis the significance of such a metamorphosis? what doessuch a reduction of the godhead imply?–To be sure, the”kingdom of God” has thus grown larger. Formerly hehad only his own people, his ”chosen” people. But sincethen he has gone wandering, like his people themselves,into foreign parts; he has given up settling down qui-etly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home ev-erywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan–until now hehas the ”great majority” on his side, and half the earth.But this god of the ”great majority,” this democrat amonggods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the con-trary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, agod of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the nois-esome quarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom, nowas always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrainkingdom, a ghetto kingdom.... And he himself is so pale,so weak, so décadent.... Even the palest of the pale are able

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to master him–messieurs the metaphysicians, those albi-nos of the intellect. They spun their webs around himfor so long that finally he was hypnotized, and began tospin himself, and became another metaphysician. There-after he resumed once more his old business of spin-ning the world out of his inmost being sub specie Spinozae;thereafter he became ever thinner and paler–became the”ideal,” became ”pure spirit,” became ”the absolute,” be-came ”the thing-in-itself.”... The collapse of a god: he be-came a ”thing-in-itself.”

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The Christian concept of a god–the god as the patron ofthe sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as aspirit–is one of the most corrupt concepts that has everbeen set up in the world: it probably touches low-watermark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God de-generated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being itstransfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declaredon life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes theformula for every slander upon the ”here and now,” andfor every lie about the ”beyond”! In him nothingness isdeified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!...

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The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did notrepudiate this Christian god does little credit to their giftfor religion–and not much more to their taste. They oughtto have been able to make an end of such a moribundand worn-out product of the décadence. A curse lies uponthem 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 moregods. Two thousand years have come and gone–and nota single new god! Instead, there still exists, and as if bysome intrinsic right,–as if he were the ultimatum and max-imum of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus inmankind–this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism!This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of empti-ness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all theinstincts of décadence, all the cowardices and wearinessesof the soul find their sanction!–

20

In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I dono injustice to a related religion with an even larger num-ber of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to bereckoned among the nihilistic religions–they are both dé-cadence religions–but they are separated from each otherin a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able tocompare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebtedto the scholars of India.–Buddhism is a hundred timesas realistic as Christianity–it is part of its living heritagethat it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; itis the product of long centuries of philosophical specula-tion. The concept, ”god,” was already disposed of beforeit appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive re-ligion to be encountered in history, and this applies evento its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism). Itdoes not speak of a ”struggle with sin,” but, yielding toreality, of the ”struggle with suffering.” Sharply differen-tiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deceptionthat lies in moral concepts behind it; it is, in my phrase,beyond good and evil.–The two physiological facts uponwhich it grounds itself and upon which it bestows itschief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to sen-

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sation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility topain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too pro-tracted concern with concepts and logical procedures, un-der the influence of which the instinct of personality hasyielded to a notion of the ”impersonal.” (–Both of thesestates will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objec-tivists, by experience, as they are to me). These physio-logical states produced a depression, and Buddha tried tocombat it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribeda life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in eating anda careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxi-cants; the same caution in arousing any of the passionsthat foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, noworry, either on one’s own account or on account of oth-ers. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet con-tentment or good cheer–he finds means to combat ideasof other sorts. He understands good, the state of good-ness, as something which promotes health. Prayer is notincluded, and neither is asceticism. There is no categori-cal imperative nor any disciplines, even within the wallsof a monastery (–it is always possible to leave–). Thesethings would have been simply means of increasing theexcessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For the samereason he does not advocate any conflict with unbeliev-

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ers; his teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as torevenge, aversion, ressentiment (–”enmity never brings anend to enmity”: the moving refrain of all Buddhism....)And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these pas-sions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, areunhealthful. The mental fatigue that he observes, alreadyplainly displayed in too much ”objectivity” (that is, in theindividual’s loss of interest in himself, in loss of balanceand of ”egoism”), he combats by strong efforts to leadeven the spiritual interests back to the ego. In Buddha’steaching egoism is a duty. The ”one thing needful,” thequestion ”how can you be delivered from suffering,” reg-ulates and determines the whole spiritual diet. (–Perhapsone will here recall that Athenian who also declared warupon pure ”scientificality,” to wit, Socrates, who also ele-vated egoism to the estate of a morality).

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The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild cli-mate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and nomilitarism; moreover, it must get its start among thehigher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness, quietand the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, andthey are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in whichperfection is merely an object of aspiration: perfection isactually normal.–

Under Christianity the instincts of the subjugated andthe oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who areat the bottom who seek their salvation in it. Here theprevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredomis the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition ofconscience; here the emotion produced by power (called“God”) is pumped up (by prayer); here the highest goodis regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as ”grace.” Here,too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and the dark-ened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hy-giene is denounced as sensual; the church even rangesitself against cleanliness (–the first Christian order afterthe banishment of the Moors closed the public baths, ofwhich there were 270 in Cordova alone). Christian, too, is

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a certain cruelty toward one’s self and toward others; ha-tred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and dis-quieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemedstates of mind, bearing the most respectable names, areepileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender mor-bid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian,again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, tothe ”aristocratic”–along with a sort of secret rivalry withthem (–one resigns one’s ”body” to them; one wants onlyone’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....

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When Christianity departed from its native soil, that ofthe lowest orders, the underworld of the ancient world,and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, itno longer had to deal with exhausted men, but with menstill inwardly savage and capable of self-torture–in brief,strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the caseof the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffer-ing through self, is not merely a general sensitiveness andsusceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinatethirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtainsubjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Chris-tianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations inorder to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, forexample, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinkingof blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and ofculture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not; thewhole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peo-ples in a further state of development, for races that havebecome kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (–Europe isnot yet ripe for it–): it is a summons that takes them backto peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of thespirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity

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aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is tomake them ill–to make feeble is the Christian recipe fortaming, for ”civilizing.” Buddhism is a religion for theclosing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianityappears before civilization has so much as begun–undercertain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof.

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Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere,more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify itspains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting thesethings in terms of sin–it simply says, as it simply thinks,“I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering in itselfis scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, isan explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinctprompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to en-dure it in silence.) Here the word ”devil” was a blessing:man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy–therewas no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands ofsuch an enemy.–

At the bottom of Christianity there are several sub-tleties that belong to the Orient. In the first place, it knowsthat it is of very little consequence whether a thing be trueor not, so long as it is believed to be true. Truth and faith:here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almosttwo diametrically opposite worlds–the road to the one andthe road to the other lie miles apart. To understand thatfact thoroughly–this is almost enough, in the Orient, tomake one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it,every student of the esoteric knows it. When, for exam-

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ple, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he hasbeen saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be ac-tually sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith isthus exalted above everything else, it necessarily followsthat reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to bediscredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbiddenroad.–Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal morepowerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy canever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope sohigh that no conflict with actuality can dash it–so high, in-deed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching outbeyond this world. (Precisely because of this power thathope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks re-garded it as the evil of evils, as the most malign of evils; itremained behind at the source of all evil.)3–In order thatlove may be possible, God must become a person; in or-der that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matterGod must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the womana beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to sat-isfy that of the men there must be a virgin. These thingsare necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship overa soil on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has

3That is, in Pandora’s box.

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already established a notion as to what a cult ought tobe. To insist upon chastity greatly strengthens the vehe-mence and subjectivity of the religious instinct–it makesthe cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.–Loveis the state in which man sees things most decidedly asthey are not. The force of illusion reaches its highest here,and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfigur-ing. When a man is in love he endures more than at anyother time; he submits to anything. The problem wasto devise a religion which would allow one to love: bythis means the worst that life has to offer is overcome–it is scarcely even noticed.–So much for the three Chris-tian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the threeChristian ingenuities.–Buddhism is in too late a stage ofdevelopment, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in anysuch way.–

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Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin ofChristianity. The first thing necessary to its solution isthis: that Christianity is to be understood only by exam-ining the soil from which it sprung–it is not a reactionagainst Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; itis simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of theJews. In the words of the Saviour, ”salvation is of theJews.”4–The second thing to remember is this: that thepsychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized,but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is atonce maimed and overladen with foreign features) that itcould serve in the manner in which it has been used: as atype of the Saviour of mankind.–

The Jews are the most remarkable people in the his-tory of the world, for when they were confronted with thequestion, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly un-earthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price involveda radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, ofall reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of theouter. They put themselves against all those conditions

4John iv, 22.

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under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, orhad even been permitted to live; out of themselves theyevolved an idea which stood in direct opposition to natu-ral conditions–one by one they distorted religion, civiliza-tion, morality, history and psychology until each becamea contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with thesame phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exagger-ated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, putbeside the ”people of God,” shows a complete lack of anyclaim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews arethe most fateful people in the history of the world: theirinfluence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in thismatter that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitismwithout realizing that it is no more than the final conse-quence of Judaism.

In my “Genealogy of Morals” I give the first psycholog-ical explanation of the concepts underlying those two an-tithetical things, a noble morality and a ressentiment moral-ity, the second of which is a mere product of the denial ofthe former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongsto the second division, and in every detail. In order tobe able to say Nay to everything representing an ascend-ing evolution of life–that is, to well-being, to power, tobeauty, to self-approval–the instincts of ressentiment, here

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become downright genius, had to invent an other worldin which the acceptance of life appeared as the most eviland abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, theJews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, somuch so that when they found themselves facing impos-sible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with aprofound talent for self-preservation, the side of all thoseinstincts which make for décadence–not as if mastered bythem, but as if detecting in them a power by which ”theworld” could be defied. The Jews are the very oppositeof décadents: they have simply been forced into appearingin that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching thenon plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed toput themselves at the head of all décadent movements (–for example, the Christianity of Paul–), and so make ofthem something stronger than any party frankly sayingYes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for power un-der Judaism and Christianity,–that is to say, to the priestlyclass–décadence is no more than a means to an end. Menof 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.

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The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history ofan attempt to denaturize all natural values: I point to fivefacts which bear this out. Originally, and above all in thetime of the monarchy, Israel maintained the right attitudeof things, which is to say, the natural attitude. Its Jahvehwas an expression of its consciousness of power, its joy initself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for vic-tory and salvation and through him they expected natureto give them whatever was necessary to their existence–above all, rain. Jahveh is the god of Israel, and conse-quently the god of justice: this is the logic of every racethat has power in its hands and a good conscience in theuse of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both as-pects of this self-approval stand revealed. The nation isgrateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtaindominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of theseasons, and for the good fortune attending its herds andits crops.–This view of things remained an ideal for a longwhile, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragicblows: anarchy within and the Assyrian without. Butthe people still retained, as a projection of their highestyearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a gallant

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warrior and an upright judge–a vision best visualized inthe typical prophet (i. e., critic and satirist of the moment),Isaiah.–But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old godno longer could do what he used to do. He ought to havebeen abandoned. But what actually happened? Simplythis: the conception of him was changed–the conception ofhim was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paidfor keeping him.–Jahveh, the god of ”justice”–he is in ac-cord with Israel no more, he no longer vizualizes the na-tional egoism; he is now a god only conditionally.... Thepublic notion of this god now becomes merely a weaponin the hands of clerical agitators, who interpret all hap-piness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishmentfor obedience or disobedience to him, for ”sin”: that mostfraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a”moral order of the world” is set up, and the fundamentalconcepts, ”cause” and ”effect,” are stood on their heads.Once natural causation has been swept out of the worldby doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of un-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other va-rieties of the denial of nature follow it. A god who de-mands–in place of a god who helps, who gives counsel,who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspira-tion of courage and self-reliance.... Morality is no longer a

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reflection of the conditions which make for the sound lifeand development of the people; it is no longer the pri-mary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and inopposition to life–a fundamental perversion of the fancy,an ”evil eye” on all things. What is Jewish, what is Chris-tian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhap-piness polluted with the idea of ”sin”; well-being repre-sented as a danger, as a ”temptation”; a physiological dis-order produced by the canker worm of conscience....

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The concept of god falsified; the concept of moralityfalsified;–but even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop.The whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: outwith it!–These priests accomplished that miracle of fal-sification of which a great part of the Bible is the doc-umentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unpar-alleled, and in the face of all tradition and all historicalreality, they translated the past of their people into reli-gious terms, which is to say, they converted it into an idi-otic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences againstJahveh were punished and all devotion to him was re-warded. We would regard this act of historical falsifica-tion as something far more shameful if familiarity withthe ecclesiastical interpretation of history for thousands ofyears had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness inhistoricis. And the philosophers support the church: thelie about a ”moral order of the world” runs through thewhole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the mean-ing of a ”moral order of the world”? That there is a thingcalled the will of God which, once and for all time, de-termines what man ought to do and what he ought not todo; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof,

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is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obeythis will of God; that the destinies of a people or of anindividual are controlled by this will of God, which re-wards or punishes according to the degree of obediencemanifested.–In place of all that pitiable lie reality has thisto say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can ex-ist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes thename of God in vain: he calls that state of human soci-ety in which he himself determines the value of all things”the kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby thatstate of affairs is attained ”the will of God”; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages andall individuals by the extent of their subservience or op-position to the power of the priestly order. One observeshim at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood thegreat age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, withits long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a pun-ishment for that great age–during which priests had notyet come into existence. Out of the powerful and whollyfree heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned, accordingto their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hyp-ocrites or men entirely ”godless.” They reduced everygreat event to the idiotic formula: ”obedient or disobedi-ent to God.”–They went a step further: the ”will of God”

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(in other words some means necessary for preserving thepower of the priests) had to be determined–and to this endthey had to have a ”revelation.” In plain English, a gigan-tic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and ”holy scrip-tures” had to be concocted–and so, with the utmost hi-erarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamen-tation over the long days of ”sin” now ended, they wereduly published. The ”will of God,” it appears, had longstood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had ne-glected the ”holy scriptures”.... But the ”will of God” hadalready been revealed to Moses.... What happened? Sim-ply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all timeand with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were tobe paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (–not for-getting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is agreat consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be knownjust what he wanted, what ”the will of God” was.... Fromthis time forward things were so arranged that the priestbecame indispensable everywhere; at all the great naturalevents of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death,not to say at the ”sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holyparasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denatur-ize it–in his own phrase, to ”sanctify” it.... For this shouldbe noted: that every natural habit, every natural institu-

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tion (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, thecare of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded bythe life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value initself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even madethe reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, ifyou chose, by the ”moral order of the world”). The factrequires a sanction–a power to grant values becomes nec-essary, and the only way it can create such values is bydenying nature.... The priest depreciates and desecratesnature: 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 pre-scribed for ”reconciliation with God” are, of course, pre-cisely the means which bring one most effectively underthe thumb of the priest; he alone can ”save”.... Psycholog-ically considered, ”sins” are indispensable to every soci-ety organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the onlyreliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it isnecessary to him that there be ”sinning”.... Prime axiom:“God forgiveth him that repenteth”–in plain English, himthat submitteth to the priest.

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Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it ev-erything natural, every natural value, every reality wasopposed by the deepest instincts of the ruling class–itgrew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, andas such it has never been surpassed. The ”holy peo-ple,” who had adopted priestly values and priestly namesfor all things, and who, with a terrible logical consis-tency, had rejected everything of the earth as ”unholy,””worldly,” ”sinful”–this people put its instinct into a finalformula that was logical to the point of self-annihilation:as Christianity it actually denied even the last form of re-ality, the ”holy people,” the ”chosen people,” Jewish real-ity itself. The phenomenon is of the first order of impor-tance: the small insurrectionary movement which tookthe name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish in-stinct redivivus–in other words, it is the priestly instinctcome to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priestas a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence evenmore fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life evenmore unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical orga-nization. Christianity actually denies the church....

I am unable to determine what was the target of

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the insurrection said to have been led (whether rightlyor wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the Jewish church–”church” being here used in exactly the same sense thatthe word has today. It was an insurrection against the”good and just,” against the ”prophets of Israel,” againstthe whole hierarchy of society–not against corruption, butagainst caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was unbe-lief in ”superior men,” a Nay flung at everything thatpriests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy thatwas called into question, if only for an instant, by thismovement was the structure of piles which, above every-thing, was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people inthe midst of the ”waters”–it represented their last possi-bility of survival; it was the final residuum of their inde-pendent political existence; an attack upon it was an at-tack upon the most profound national instinct, the mostpowerful national will to live, that has ever appeared onearth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people ofthe abyss, the outcasts and ”sinners,” the Chandala of Ju-daism, to rise in revolt against the established order ofthings–and in language which, if the Gospels are to becredited, would get him sent to Siberia today–this manwas certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it waspossible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community.

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This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof isto be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross.He died for his own sins–there is not the slightest groundfor believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that hedied for the sins of others.–

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As to whether he himself was conscious of thiscontradiction–whether, in fact, this was the only contra-diction he was cognizant of–that is quite another ques-tion. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem ofthe psychology of the Saviour.–I confess, to begin with, thatthere are very few books which offer me harder readingthan the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different fromthose which enabled the learned curiosity of the Germanmind 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 fastidiousphilologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.5 Atthat time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious forthat sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of”tradition”? How can any one call pious legends ”tradi-tions”? The histories of saints present the most dubiousvariety of literature in existence; to examine them by thescientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative doc-

5David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of “Das LebenJesu” (1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche hererefers to it.

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uments, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry fromthe start–it is simply learned idling....

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What concerns me is the psychological type of theSaviour. This type might be depicted in the Gospels, inhowever mutilated a form and however much overladenwith extraneous characters–that is, in spite of the Gospels;just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in hislegends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of meretruthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and howhe actually died; the question is, whether his type is stillconceivable, whether it has been handed down to us.–Allthe attempts that I know of to read the history of a ”soul”in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentablepsychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psy-chologicus, has contributed the two most unseemly notionsto this business of explaining the type of Jesus: the no-tion of the genius and that of the hero (”héros”). But ifthere is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely theconcept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctiveis precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all tastefor conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here con-verted into something moral: (”resist not evil!”–the mostprofound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true keyto them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness,

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the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of ”gladtidings”?–The true life, the life eternal has been found–itis not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the lifethat lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, fromall keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God–Jesus claims nothing for himself alone–as the child of Godeach man is the equal of every other man.... Imagine mak-ing Jesus a hero!–And what a tremendous misunderstand-ing appears in the word ”genius”! Our whole conceptionof the ”spiritual,” the whole conception of our civiliza-tion, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesuslived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite dif-ferent word ought to be used here.... We all know thatthere is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves whichcauses those suffering from it to recoil from every touch,and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Broughtto its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus be-comes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the”intangible,” into the ”incomprehensible”; a distaste forall formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for ev-erything established–customs, institutions, the church–; afeeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of re-ality survives, a merely ”inner” world, a ”true” world, an”eternal” world.... “The Kingdom of God is within you”....

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The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of anextreme susceptibility to pain and irritation–so great thatmerely to be ”touched” becomes unendurable, for everysensation is too profound.

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, allbounds and distances in feeling: the consequence of an ex-treme susceptibility to pain and irritation–so great that itsenses all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as un-bearable anguish (–that is to say, as harmful, as prohibitedby the instinct of self-preservation), and regards blessed-ness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessaryto offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evilor dangerous–love, as the only, as the ultimate possibilityof life....

These are the two physiological realities upon and out ofwhich the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call thema sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thor-oughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely re-lated to them, though with a large admixture of Greekvitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory ofsalvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical décadent:

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I was the first to recognize him.–The fear of pain, even ofinfinitely slight pain–the end of this can be nothing save areligion of love....

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I have already given my answer to the problem. Theprerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of theSaviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form.This distortion is very probable: there are many reasonswhy a type of that sort should not be handed down ina pure form, complete and free of additions. The milieuin which this strange figure moved must have left marksupon him, and more must have been imprinted by thehistory, the destiny, of the early Christian communities;the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retro-spectively with characters which can be understood onlyas serving the purposes of war and of propaganda. Thatstrange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us–a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which thescum of society, nervous maladies and ”childish” idiocykeep a tryst–must, in any case, have coarsened the type:the first disciples, in particular, must have been forcedto translate an existence visible only in symbols and in-comprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to un-derstand it at all–in their sight the type could take on re-ality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould....The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of

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morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist–all thesemerely presented chances to misunderstand it.... Finally,let us not underrate the proprium of all great, and espe-cially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from thevenerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies,often so painfully strange–it does not even see them. It isgreatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in theneighbourhood of this most interesting décadent–I meansome one who would have felt the poignant charm ofsuch a compound of the sublime, the morbid and thechildish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the dé-cadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex andcontradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of.Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, forin that case tradition would have been particularly accu-rate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assum-ing the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a contradiction be-tween the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shoreand the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soilvery unlike India’s, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortalenemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glori-fied by Renan’s malice as ”le grand maître en ironie.” I my-self haven’t any doubt that the greater part of this venom(and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the Mas-

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ter only as a result of the excited nature of Christian pro-paganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of sectari-ans when they set out to turn their leader into an apologiafor themselves. When the early Christians had need ofan adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously sub-tle theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a”god” that met that need, just as they put into his mouthwithout hesitation certain ideas that were necessary tothem but that were utterly at odds with the Gospels–”thesecond coming,” ”the last judgment,” all sorts of expecta-tions and promises, current at the time.–

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I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to in-trude the fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the veryword impérieux, used by Renan, is alone enough to annulthe type. What the ”glad tidings” tell us is simply thatthere are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heavenbelongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no morean embattled faith–it is at hand, it has been from the be-ginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of thespirit. The physiologists, at all events, are familiar withsuch a delayed and incomplete puberty in the living or-ganism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort isnot furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself:it does not come with ”the sword”–it does not realize howit will one day set man against man. It does not manifestitself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, orby ”scriptures”: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle,its own reward, its own promise, its own ”kingdom ofGod.” This faith does not formulate itself–it simply lives,and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the ac-cident of environment, of educational background givesprominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitiveChristianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic

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character (–that of eating and drinking at the last sup-per belongs to this category–an idea which, like every-thing else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church).But let us be careful not to see in all this anything morethan symbolical language, semantics6 an opportunity tospeak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work isto be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speakat all. Set down among Hindus he would have madeuse of the concepts of Sankhya,7 and among Chinese hewould have employed those of Lao-tse8–and in neithercase would it have made any difference to him.–With alittle freedom in the use of words, one might actually callJesus a ”free spirit”9–he cares nothing for what is estab-lished: the word killeth,10 whatever is established killeth.The idea of ”life” as an experience, as he alone conceivesit, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, for-

6The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable thatSemantik is what Nietzsche had in mind.

7One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.8The reputed founder of Taoism.9Nietzsche’s name for one accepting his own philosophy.

10That is, the strict letter of the law–the chief target of Je-sus’s early preaching.

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mula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of innerthings: ”life” or ”truth” or ”light” is his word for theinnermost–in his sight everything else, the whole of re-ality, all nature, even language, has significance only assign, as allegory.–Here it is of paramount importance tobe led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian,or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par ex-cellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship,all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, allknowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art–his ”wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance11 of all suchthings. He has never heard of culture; he doesn’t haveto make war on it–he doesn’t even deny it.... The samething may be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoisesocial order, of labour, of war–he has no ground for deny-ing ”the world,” for he knows nothing of the ecclesiasti-cal concept of ”the world”.... Denial is precisely the thingthat is impossible to him.–In the same way he lacks ar-gumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article offaith, a ”truth,” may be established by proofs (–his proofsare inner ”lights,” subjective sensations of happiness and

11A reference to the ”pure ignorance” (reine Thorheit) ofParsifal.

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self-approval, simple ”proofs of power”–). Such a doc-trine cannot contradict: it doesn’t know that other doc-trines exist, or can exist, and is wholly incapable of imag-ining anything opposed to it.... If anything of the sort isever encountered, it laments the ”blindness” with sinceresympathy–for it alone has ”light”–but it does not offer ob-jections....

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In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the conceptsof guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of re-ward. “Sin,” which means anything that puts a distancebetween God and man, is abolished–this is precisely the”glad tidings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, noris it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the onlyreality–what remains consists merely of signs useful inspeaking of it.

The results of such a point of view project themselvesinto a new way of life, the special evangelical way of life. Itis not a ”belief” that marks off the Christian; he is distin-guished 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 distinc-tion between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gen-tiles (”neighbour,” of course, means fellow-believer, Jew).He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. He nei-ther appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their man-dates (“Swear not at all”).12 He never under any circum-stances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her

12Matthew v, 34.

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infidelity.–And under all of this is one principle; all of itarises from one instinct.–

The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out ofthis way of life–and so was his death.... He no longerneeded any formula or ritual in his relations with God–not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jew-ish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew thatit was only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self”divine,” ”blessed,” ”evangelical,” a ”child of God.” Notby ”repentance,” not by ”prayer and forgiveness” is theway to God: only the Gospel way leads to God–it is itself“God!”–What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism inthe concepts of ”sin,” ”forgiveness of sin,” ”faith,” ”salva-tion through faith”–the whole ecclesiastical dogma of theJews was denied by the ”glad tidings.”

The deep instinct which prompts the Christian howto 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....

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If I understand anything at all about this great symbol-ist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities asrealities, as ”truths”–that he saw everything else, every-thing natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely assigns, as materials for parables. The concept of ”the Sonof God” does not connote a concrete person in history, anisolated and definite individual, but an ”eternal” fact, apsychological symbol set free from the concept of time.The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of theGod of this typical symbolist, of the ”kingdom of God,”and of the ”sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as aperson, of a ”kingdom of God” that is to come, of a ”king-dom of heaven” beyond, and of a ”son of God” as thesecond person of the Trinity. All this–if I may be forgiventhe phrase–is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (andwhat an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbolsamounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is never-theless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols“Father” and “Son”–not, of course, to every one–: theword “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that thereis a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and

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“Father” expresses that feeling itself –the sensation of eter-nity and of perfection.–I am ashamed to remind you ofwhat the church has made of this symbolism: has it notset an Amphitryon story13 at the threshold of the Chris-tian ”faith”? And a dogma of ”immaculate conception”for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception ofits immaculateness–

The ”kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart–not something to come ”beyond the world” or ”afterdeath.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from theGospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absentbecause it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparentworld, useful only as a symbol. The ”hour of death” is nota Christian idea–”hours,” time, the physical life and itscrises have no existence for the bearer of ”glad tidings.”...The ”kingdom of God” is not something that men waitfor: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it isnot going to come at a ”millennium”–it is an experienceof the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....

13Amphitryon was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. Hiswife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited byZeus, and bore Heracles.

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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 de-meanour before the judges, before the officers, before hisaccusers–his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist;he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to wardoff the most extreme penalty–more, he invites it.... And heprays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do himevil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not tolay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the EvilOne–to love him....

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We free spirits–we are the first to have the necessaryprerequisite to understanding what nineteen centurieshave misunderstood–that instinct and passion for in-tegrity which makes war upon the ”holy lie” even morethan upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably farfrom our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from thatdiscipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the so-lution of such strange and subtle things: what men al-ways sought, with shameless egoism, was their own ad-vantage therein; they created the church out of denial ofthe Gospels....

Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity’s handin the great drama of existence would find no small indi-cation thereof in the stupendous question-mark that is calledChristianity. That mankind should be on its knees be-fore the very antithesis of what was the origin, the mean-ing and the law of the Gospels–that in the concept of the”church” the very things should be pronounced holy thatthe ”bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him andbehind him–it would be impossible to surpass this as agrand example of world-historical irony–

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Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, couldit delude itself into believing that the crude fable of thewonder-worker and Saviour constituted the beginnings ofChristianity–and that everything spiritual and symbolicalin it only came later? Quite to the contrary, the whole his-tory of Christianity–from the death on the cross onward–is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstand-ing of an original symbolism. With every extension ofChristianity among larger and ruder masses, even lesscapable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it,the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and bar-barous–it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subter-ranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the absurditiesengendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fateof Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, aslow and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vul-gar to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism finallylifts itself to power as the church–the church, that incar-nation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness ofsoul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous andkindly humanity.–Christian values–noble values: it is onlywe, we free spirits, who have re-established this greatest

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of all antitheses in values!...

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I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are dayswhen I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackestmelancholy–contempt of man. Let me leave no doubt asto 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 tol-erance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomycaution 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 tohold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feelingchanges and breaks out irresistibly the moment I entermodern times, our times. Our age knows better.... Whatwas formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent–it isindecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust be-gins.–I look about me: not a word survives of what wasonce called ”truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priestpronounce the word. Even a man who makes the mostmodest pretensions to integrity must know that a theolo-gian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when hespeaks, but actually lies–and that he no longer escapes

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blame for his lie through ”innocence” or ”ignorance.”The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is nolonger any “God,” or any ”sinner,” or any “Saviour”–that ”free will” and the ”moral order of the world” arelies–: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of thespirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it....All the ideas of the church are now recognized for whatthey are–as the worst counterfeits in existence, inventedto debase nature and all natural values; the priest himselfis seen as he actually is–as the most dangerous form ofparasite, as the venomous spider of creation.... We know,our conscience now knows–just what the real value of allthose sinister inventions of priest and church has beenand what ends they have served, with their debasement ofhumanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight ofwhich excites loathing,–the concepts ”the other world,””the last judgment,” ”the immortality of the soul,” the”soul” itself: they are all merely so many instruments oftorture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomesmaster and remains master.... Every one knows this, butnevertheless things remain as before. What has become ofthe last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when ourstatesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men andthoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call them-

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selves Christians and go to the communion-table?... Aprince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the ex-pression of the egoism and arrogance of his people–andyet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Chris-tian!... Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what doesit call ”the world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be apatriot; to defend one’s self; to be careful of one’s honour;to desire one’s own advantage; to be proud ... every act ofeveryday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itselfin a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehoodthe modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, andwithout shame, a Christian!–

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I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic his-tory of Christianity.–The very word “Christianity” is amisunderstanding–at bottom there was only one Chris-tian, and he died on the cross. The “Gospels” died onthe cross. What, from that moment onward, was calledthe “Gospels” was the very reverse of what he had lived:”bad tidings,” a Dysangelium.14 It is an error amountingto nonsensicality to see in ”faith,” and particularly in faithin salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark ofthe Christian: only the Christian way of life, the life livedby him who died on the cross, is Christian.... To this daysuch a life is still possible, and for certain men even neces-sary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possiblein all ages.... Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance ofacts, a different state of being.... States of consciousness,faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anythingas true–as every psychologist knows, the value of thesethings is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared tothat of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept

14So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numerous coinages,obviously suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel.

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of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Chris-tian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth,to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulatethe negation of Christianity. In fact, there are no Chris-tians. The “Christian”–he who for two thousand yearshas 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 whatinstincts!–In all ages–for example, in the case of Luther–”faith” has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a cur-tain behind which the instincts have played their game–ashrewd blindness to the domination of certain of the in-stincts.... I have already called ”faith” the specially Chris-tian form of shrewdness–people always talk of their ”faith”and act according to their instincts.... In the world of ideasof the Christian there is nothing that so much as touchesreality: on the contrary, one recognizes an instinctive ha-tred of reality as the motive power, the only motive powerat 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 isto say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put agenuine reality in its place–and the whole of Christianitycrumbles to nothingness!–Viewed calmly, this strangest

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of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on er-rors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising injuri-ous errors, poisonous to life and to the heart–this remainsa spectacle for the gods–for those gods who are also philoso-phers, and whom I have encountered, for example, inthe celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment whentheir disgust leaves them (–and us!) they will be thankfulfor the spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps be-cause of this curious exhibition alone the wretched littleplanet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipo-tence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us notunderestimate the Christians: the Christian, false to thepoint of innocence, is far above the ape–in its application tothe Christians a well-known theory of descent becomes amere piece of politeness....

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The fate of the Gospels was decided by death–it hungon the ”cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected andshameful death; it was only the cross, which was usu-ally reserved for the canaille only–it was only this ap-palling paradox which brought the disciples face to facewith the real riddle: ”Who was it? what was it?”–The feel-ing of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspi-cion that such a death might involve a refutation of theircause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”–thisstate of mind is only too easy to understand. Here ev-erything must be accounted for as necessary; everythingmust have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of rea-son; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only thendid the chasm of doubt yawn: ”Who put him to death?who was his natural enemy?”–this question flashed likea lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its rulingclass. From that moment, one found one’s self in revoltagainst the established order, and began to understand Je-sus as in revolt against the established order. Until then thismilitant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his char-acter had been lacking; what is more, he had appearedto present its opposite. Obviously, the little community

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had not understood what was precisely the most impor-tant thing of all: the example offered by this way of dy-ing, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling ofressentiment–a plain indication of how little he was un-derstood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplishby his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possi-ble proof, or example, of his teachings in the most publicmanner.... But his disciples were very far from forgivinghis death–though to have done so would have accordedwith the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither werethey prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serenecalmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, itwas precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge,that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that thecause should perish with his death: ”recompense” and”judgment” became necessary (–yet what could be lessevangelical than ”recompense,” ”punishment,” and ”sit-ting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in thecoming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; atten-tion was rivetted upon an historical moment: the ”king-dom of God” is to come, with judgment upon his ene-mies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunder-standing: imagine the ”kingdom of God” as a last act, asa mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incar-

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nation, the fulfilment, the realization of this ”kingdom ofGod.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt forand bitterness against Pharisees and theologians beganto appear in the character of the Master–he was therebyturned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On theother hand, the savage veneration of these completely un-balanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doc-trine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to bechildren of God: their revenge took the form of elevat-ing Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separatinghim from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, torevenge themselves upon their enemies, separated them-selves from their God, and placed him on a great height.The One God and the Only Son of God: both were prod-ucts of ressentiment....

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And from that time onward an absurd problem offereditself: ”how could God allow it!” To which the derangedreason of the little community formulated an answer thatwas terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son as a sac-rifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an endof the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnox-ious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for thesins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!–Jesus him-self had done away with the very concept of ”guilt,” hedenied that there was any gulf fixed between God andman; he lived this unity between God and man, and thatwas precisely his ”glad tidings”.... And not as a mereprivilege!–From this time forward the type of the Saviourwas corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment andof the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacri-fice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of whichthe entire concept of ”blessedness,” the whole and onlyreality of the gospels, is juggled away–in favour of a stateof existence after death!... St. Paul, with that rabbinicalimpudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave alogical quality to that conception, that indecent concep-tion, in this way: ”If Christ did not rise from the dead,

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then all our faith is in vain!”–And at once there sprangfrom the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfill-able promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immor-tality.... Paul even preached it as a reward....

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One now begins to see just what it was that came toan end with the death on the cross: a new and thor-oughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace move-ment, and so establish happiness on earth–real, not merelypromised. For this remains–as I have already pointedout–the essential difference between the two religions ofdécadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually ful-fils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.–Hard upon the heels of the ”glad tidings” came the worstimaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the veryopposite of the ”bearer of glad tidings”; he representsthe genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relent-less logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysan-gelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: henailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, theteaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law ofthe whole gospels–nothing was left of all this after thatcounterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surelynot reality; surely not historical truth!... Once more thepriestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old mas-ter crime against history–he simply struck out the yes-terday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and

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invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going fur-ther, he treated the history of Israel to another falsifica-tion, so that it became a mere prologue to his achieve-ment: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred tohis “Saviour.”... Later on the church even falsified the his-tory of man in order to make it a prologue to Christian-ity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way oflife, his death, the meaning of his death, even the conse-quences of his death–nothing remained untouched, noth-ing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paulsimply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life toa place behind this existence–in the lie of the ”risen” Je-sus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour–what he needed was the death on the cross, and some-thing more. To see anything honest in such a man asPaul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical en-lightenment, when he converts an hallucination into aproof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believehis tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself–this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paulwilled the end; therefore he also willed the means.... Whathe himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enoughby the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.–Whathe wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more

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reached out for power–he had use only for such concepts,teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyranniz-ing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was theonly part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed lateron? Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestlytyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immor-tality of the soul–that is to say, the doctrine of ”judgment”....

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When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in lifeitself, but in ”the beyond”–in nothingness–then one hastaken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vastlie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natu-ral instinct–henceforth, everything in the instincts that isbeneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the futureis a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer hasany meaning: this is now the ”meaning” of life.... Whybe public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent andforefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, orconcern one’s self about the common welfare, and try toserve it?... Merely so many ”temptations,” so many stray-ings from the ”straight path.”–”One thing only is neces-sary”.... That every man, because he has an ”immortalsoul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infiniteuniverse of things the ”salvation” of every individual maylay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigotsand the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws ofnature are constantly suspended in their behalf–it is impos-sible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnifi-cation of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence.And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable

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flattery of personal vanity for its triumph–it was thus thatit lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen uponevil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of human-ity to its side. The ”salvation of the soul”–in plain En-glish: ”the world revolves around me.”... The poisonousdoctrine, ”equal rights for all,” has been propagated asa Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and cran-nies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly warupon all feelings of reverence and distance between manand man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to ev-ery step upward, to every development of civilization–out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chiefweapons against us, against everything noble, joyous andhigh-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth....To allow ”immortality” to every Peter and Paul was thegreatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanityever perpetrated.–And let us not underestimate the fa-tal influence that Christianity has had, even upon poli-tics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for spe-cial rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of hon-ourable pride in himself and his equals–for the pathos ofdistance.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!–The aristocratic attitude of mind has been underminedby the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the

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”privileges of the majority” makes and will continue tomake revolutions–it is Christianity, let us not doubt, andChristian valuations, which convert every revolution intoa carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt ofall creatures that creep on the ground against everythingthat is lofty: the gospel of the ”lowly” lowers....

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The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruptionthat was already persistent within the primitive commu-nity. That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi,later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely aprocess of decay that had begun with the death of theSaviour.–These gospels cannot be read too carefully; dif-ficulties lurk behind every word. I confess–I hope it willnot be held against me–that it is precisely for this rea-son that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist–as theopposite of all merely naïve corruption, as refinement parexcellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corrup-tion. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as awhole is not to be compared to them. Here we are amongJews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we arenot to lose the thread of the matter. This positive geniusfor conjuring up a delusion of personal ”holiness” un-matched anywhere else, either in books or by men; thiselevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level ofan art–all this is not an accident due to the chance tal-ents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. Thething responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears inChristianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there,

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after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hardpractice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stageof mastery. The Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, isthe Jew all over again–he is threefold the Jew.... The un-derlying will to make use only of such concepts, sym-bols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinc-tive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and ev-ery other method of estimating values and utilities–thisis not only tradition, it is inheritance: only as an inheri-tance is it able to operate with the force of nature. Thewhole of mankind, even the best minds of the best ages(with one exception, perhaps hardly human–), have per-mitted themselves to be deceived. The gospels have beenread as a book of innocence ... surely no small indicationof the high skill with which the trick has been done.–Ofcourse, if we could actually see these astounding bigotsand bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farcewould come to an end,–and it is precisely because I can-not read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudiniz-ing that I have made an end of them.... I simply cannot en-dure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.–For themajority, happily enough, books are mere literature.–Letus not be led astray: they say ”judge not,” and yet theycondemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting

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God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifyingGod they glorify themselves; in demanding that every oneshow the virtues which they themselves happen to be ca-pable of–still more, which they must have in order to re-main on top–they assume the grand air of men strugglingfor virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may pre-vail. “We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good”(–”the truth,” ”the light,” ”the kingdom of God”): inpoint of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing.Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, toslink along in the shadows, they convert their necessityinto a duty: it is on grounds of duty that they account fortheir lives of humility, and that humility becomes merelyone more proof of their piety.... Ah, that humble, chaste,charitable brand of fraud! “Virtue itself shall bear witnessfor us.”... One may read the gospels as books of moral se-duction: these petty folks fasten themselves to morality–they know the uses of morality! Morality is the best of alldevices for leading mankind by the nose!–The fact is thatthe conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itselfas modesty: it is in this way that they, the ”community,”the ”good and just,” range themselves, once and for al-ways, on one side, the side of ”the truth”–and the rest ofmankind, ”the world,” on the other.... In that we observe

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the most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has everseen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claimexclusive rights in the concepts of “God,” ”the truth,””the light,” ”the spirit,” ”love,” ”wisdom” and ”life,” asif these things were synonyms of themselves and therebythey sought to fence themselves off from the ”world”; lit-tle super-Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turnedvalues upside down in order to meet their notions, just asif the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standardand even the last judgment of all the rest.... The wholedisaster was only made possible by the fact that there al-ready existed in the world a similar megalomania, alliedto this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm beganto yawn between Jews and Judaeo-Christians, the latterhad no choice but to employ the self-preservative mea-sures that the Jewish instinct had devised, even againstthe Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employedthem only against non-Jews. The Christian is simply aJew of the ”reformed” confession.–

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I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty peo-ple have got into their heads–what they have put into themouth of the Master: the unalloyed creed of ”beautifulsouls.”–

“And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you,when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feetfor a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, itshall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in theday of judgment, than for that city” (Mark vi, 11)–Howevangelical!...

“And whosoever shall offend one of these little onesthat believe in me, it is better for him that a millstonewere hanged about his neck, and he were cast into thesea” (Mark ix, 42).–How evangelical!...

“And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is betterfor thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye,than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire; Where theworm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” (Mark ix,47.To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse48.)–It is not exactly the eye that is meant....

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“Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them thatstand here, which shall not taste of death, till they haveseen the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark ix,1.)–Well lied, lion!15...

“Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself,and take up his cross, and follow me. For...” (Note of apsychologist. Christian morality is refuted by its fors: itsreasons are against it,–this makes it Christian.) Mark viii,34.–

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measureye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthewvii, 1.16)–What a notion of justice, of a ”just” judge!...

“For if ye love them which love you, what reward haveye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye saluteyour brethren only, what do ye more than others? do noteven the publicans so?” (Matthew v, 46.17)–Principle of“Christian love”: it insists upon being well paid in theend....

15A paraphrase of Demetrius’ “Well roar’d, Lion!” in actv, scene 1 of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The lion, ofcourse, is the familiar Christian symbol for Mark.

16Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.17The quotation also includes verse 47.

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“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither willyour Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew vi, 15.)–Very compromising for the said ”father.”...

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righ-teousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”(Matthew vi, 33.)–All these things: namely, food, cloth-ing, all the necessities of life. An error, to put it mildly....A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in certaincases....

“Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold,your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner didtheir fathers unto the prophets.” (Luke vi, 23.)–Impudentrabble! It compares itself to the prophets....

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and thatthe spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile thetemple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple ofGod is holy, which temple ye are.” (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii,16.18)–For that sort of thing one cannot have enough con-tempt....

“Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unwor-

18And 17.

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thy to judge the smallest matters?” (Paul, 1 Corinthiansvi, 2.)–Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a lunatic....This frightful impostor then proceeds: “Know ye not thatwe shall judge angels? how much more things that per-tain to this life?”...

“Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wis-dom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness ofpreaching to save them that believe.... Not many wisemen after the flesh, not men mighty, not many nobleare called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of theworld to confound the wise; and God hath chosen theweak things of the world to confound the things whichare mighty; And base things of the world, and thingswhich are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and thingswhich are not, to bring to nought things that are: That noflesh should glory in his presence.” (Paul, 1 Corinthiansi, 20ff.19)–In order to understand this passage, a first-rateexample of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my “Geneal-ogy of Morals”: there, for the first time, the antagonismbetween a noble morality and a morality born of ressenti-

19Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.

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ment and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul wasthe greatest of all apostles of revenge....

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What follows, then? That one had better put on glovesbefore reading the New Testament. The presence of somuch filth makes it very advisable. One would as littlechoose ”early Christians” for companions as Polish Jews:not that one need seek out an objection to them.... Neitherhas a pleasant smell.–I have searched the New Testamentin vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is therethat is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it human-ity does not even make the first step upward–the instinctfor 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 hasread the New Testament: for example, immediately afterreading Paul I took up with delight that most charmingand wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may saywhat Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to theDuke of Parma: ”è tutto festo”–immortally healthy, im-mortally cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots makea capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything theyattack is thereby distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an”early Christian” is surely not befouled.... On the con-

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trary, it is an honour to have an ”early Christian” as anopponent. One cannot read the New Testament with-out acquired admiration for whatever it abuses–not tospeak of the ”wisdom of this world,” which an impu-dent wind-bag tries to dispose of ”by the foolishness ofpreaching.”... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefit-ted by such opposition: they must certainly have beenworth something to have been hated in such an inde-cent manner. Hypocrisy–as if this were a charge that the”early Christians” dared to make!–After all, they were theprivileged, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chan-dala needed no other excuse. The ”early Christian”–andalso, I fear, the ”last Christian,” whom I may perhaps live tosee–is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct–helives and makes war for ever for ”equal rights.”... Strictlyspeaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposesto represent, in his own person, the ”chosen of God”–orto be a ”temple of God,” or a ”judge of the angels”–thenevery other criterion, whether based upon honesty, uponintellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty andfreedom of the heart, becomes simply ”worldly”–evil initself.... Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an”early Christian” is a lie, and his every act is instinctivelydishonest–all his values, all his aims are noxious, but who-

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ever he hates, whatever he hates, has real value.... TheChristian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus acriterion of values.

–Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, thereappears but a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate,the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seri-ously–that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less–what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, beforewhom the word ”truth” was shamelessly mishandled, en-riched the New Testament with the only saying that hasany value–and that is at once its criticism and its destruc-tion: “What is truth?...”

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The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable tofind God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature–but that we regard what has been honoured as God, notas ”divine,” but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; notas a mere error, but as a crime against life.... We deny thatGod is God.... If any one were to show us this ChristianGod, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.–In a for-mula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.–Such a re-ligion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at asingle point and which goes to pieces the moment real-ity asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably thedeadly enemy of the ”wisdom of this world,” which is tosay, of science–and it will give the name of good to what-ever means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down allintellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in mat-ters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness andfreedom of the mind. “Faith,” as an imperative, vetoesscience–in praxi, lying at any price.... Paul well knew thatlying–that ”faith”–was necessary; later on the church bor-rowed the fact from Paul.–The God that Paul inventedfor himself, a God who ”reduced to absurdity” ”the wis-dom of this world” (especially the two great enemies of

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superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only anindication of Paul’s resolute determination to accomplishthat very thing himself: to give one’s own will the nameof God, thora–that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants todispose of the ”wisdom of this world”: his enemies arethe good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrineschool–on them he makes his war. As a matter of factno man can be a philologian or a physician without beingalso Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man seesbehind the ”holy books,” and as a physician he sees be-hind the physiological degeneration of the typical Chris-tian. The physician says ”incurable”; the philologian says”fraud.”...

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Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated storyat the beginning of the Bible–of God’s mortal terror of sci-ence?... No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great in-ner 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 boredand trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods strug-gle in vain.20 What does he do? He creates man–manis entertaining.... But then he notices that man is alsobored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that in-vades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwithcreates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man theseother animals were not entertaining–he sought dominionover them; he did not want to be an ”animal” himself.–So God created woman. In the act he brought boredomto an end–and also many other things! Woman was thesecond mistake of God.–“Woman, at bottom, is a serpent,

20A paraphrase of Schiller’s “Against stupidity even godsstruggle in vain.

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Heva”–every priest knows that; ”from woman comes ev-ery evil in the world”–every priest knows that, too. Ergo,she is also to blame for science.... It was through womanthat man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.–Whathappened? The old God was seized by mortal terror.Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had cre-ated a rival to himself; science makes men godlike–it is allup 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 originalsin. This is all there is of morality.–“Thou shall not know”:–the rest follows from that.–God’s mortal terror, however,did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one toprotect one’s self against science? For a long while thiswas the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise withman! Happiness, leisure, foster thought–and all thoughtsare bad thoughts!–Man must not think.–And so the priestinvents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth,all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sick-ness–nothing but devices for making war on science! Thetroubles of man don’t allow him to think.... Nevertheless–how terrible!–, the edifice of knowledge begins to toweraloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods–what is to bedone?–The old God invents war; he separates the peoples;

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he makes men destroy one another (–the priests have al-ways had need of war....). War–among other things, agreat disturber of science!–Incredible! Knowledge, de-liverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.–So theold God comes to his final resolution: “Man has becomescientific–there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”...

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I have been understood. At the opening of the Biblethere is the whole psychology of the priest.–The priestknows of only one great danger: that is science–the soundcomprehension of cause and effect. But science flour-ishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions–a man must have time, he must have an overflowing in-tellect, in order to ”know.”... ”Therefore, man must bemade unhappy,”–this has been, in all ages, the logic ofthe priest.–It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was thefirst thing to come into the world:–”sin.”... The conceptof guilt and punishment, the whole ”moral order of theworld,” was set up against science–against the deliveranceof man from priests.... Man must not look outward; hemust look inward. He must not look at things shrewdlyand cautiously, to learn about them; he must not lookat all; he must suffer.... And he must suffer so muchthat he is always in need of the priest.–Away with physi-cians! What is needed is a Saviour.–The concept of guilt andpunishment, including the doctrines of ”grace,” of ”sal-vation,” of ”forgiveness”–lies through and through, andabsolutely without psychological reality–were devised todestroy man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon

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the concept of cause and effect!–And not an attack withthe fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love!On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, themost crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack ofpriests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale,subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequencesof an act are no longer ”natural,” but are regarded as pro-duced by the ghostly creations of superstition–by “God,”by ”spirits,” by ”souls”–and reckoned as merely ”moral”consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, aslessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge isdestroyed–then the greatest of crimes against humanity hasbeen perpetrated.–I repeat that sin, man’s self-desecrationpar excellence, was invented in order to make science, cul-ture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossi-ble; the priest rules through the invention of sin.–

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In this place I can’t permit myself to omit a psychologyof ”belief,” of the ”believer,” for the special benefit of ”be-lievers.” If there remain any today who do not yet knowhow indecent it is to be ”believing”–or how much a sign ofdécadence, of a broken will to live–then they will know itwell enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the deaf.–It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, thatthere prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truththat is called ”proof by power.” “Faith makes blessed:therefore it is true.”–It might be objected right here thatblessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: ithangs upon ”faith” as a condition–one shall be blessedbecause one believes.... But what of the thing that thepriest promises to the believer, the wholly transcenden-tal ”beyond”–how is that to be demonstrated?–The ”proofby power,” thus assumed, is actually no more at bottomthan a belief that the effects which faith promises will notfail to appear. In a formula: “I believe that faith makesfor blessedness–therefore, it is true.”... But this is as far aswe may go. This ”therefore” would be absurdum itself asa criterion of truth.–But let us admit, for the sake of po-liteness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated

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(–not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by thesuspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessedness–in a technical term, pleasure–ever be a proof of truth? Solittle is this true that it is almost a proof against truthwhen sensations of pleasure influence the answer to thequestion “What is true?” or, at all events, it is enoughto make that ”truth” highly suspicious. The proof by”pleasure” is a proof of ”pleasure”–nothing more; whyin the world should it be assumed that true judgmentsgive more pleasure than false ones, and that, in confor-mity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarilybring agreeable feelings in their train?–The experience ofall disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary.Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and hashad to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that hu-man love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul isneeded for this business: the service of truth is the hard-est of all services.–What, then, is the meaning of integrityin things intellectual? It means that a man must be severewith his own heart, that he must scorn ”beautiful feel-ings,” and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter ofconscience!–Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies....

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The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, maywork for blessedness, but that this blessedness producedby an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, andthe fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but in-stead raises them up where there were none before: allthis is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lu-natic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instinctsprompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness andlunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity findssickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of asuperabundance of health–the actual ulterior purpose ofthe whole system of salvation of the church is to make peo-ple ill. And the church itself–doesn’t it set up a Catholiclunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?–The whole earth asa madhouse?–The sort of religious man that the churchwants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a reli-gious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epi-demics of nervous disorder; the ”inner world” of the reli-gious man is so much like the ”inner world” of the over-strung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish be-tween them; the ”highest” states of mind, held up beforemankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actu-

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ally epileptoid in form–the church has granted the nameof holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majoremdei honorem.... Once I ventured to designate the wholeChristian system of training21 in penance and salvation(now best studied in England) as a method of produc-ing a folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it,which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not ev-ery one may be a Christian: one is not ”converted” toChristianity–one must first be sick enough for it.... Weothers, who have the courage for health and likewise forcontempt,–we may well despise a religion that teachesmisunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itselfof the superstition about the soul! that makes a ”virtue”of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sortof enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that itis possible to carry about a ”perfect soul” in a cadaverof a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itselfa new concept of ”perfection,” a pale, sickly, idioticallyecstatic state of existence, so-called ”holiness”–a holinessthat is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impov-erished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... TheChristian movement, as a European movement, was from

21The word training is in English in the text.

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the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts ofoutcast and refuse elements (–who now, under cover ofChristianity, aspire to power). It does not represent thedecay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglom-eration of décadence products from all directions, crowd-ing together and seeking one another out. It was not,as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of no-ble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one can-not too sharply challenge the learned imbecility whichtoday maintains that theory. At the time when the sickand rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium wereChristianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached itsfinest and ripest development. The majority became mas-ter; 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 rancourof 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 earsand eyes. Again I remind you of Paul’s priceless saying:“And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, thefoolish things of the world, the base things of the world,

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and things which are despised”:22 this was the formula;in hoc signo the décadence triumphed.–God on the cross–isman always to miss the frightful inner significance of thissymbol?–Everything that suffers, everything that hangson the cross, is divine.... We all hang on the cross, conse-quently we are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christian-ity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was de-stroyed by it–Christianity remains to this day the greatestmisfortune of humanity.–

221 Corinthians i, 27, 28.

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Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectualwell-being,–sick reasoning is the only sort that it can useas Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything thatis idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon ”intellect,” upon thesuperbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inher-ent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christianstate of ”faith” must be a form of sickness too, and that allstraight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowl-edge must be banned by the church as forbidden ways.Doubt is thus a sin from the start.... The complete lackof psychological cleanliness in the priest–revealed by aglance at him–is a phenomenon resulting from décadence,–one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic chil-dren how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight inlying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for look-ing straight and walking straight are symptoms of déca-dence. “Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what istrue. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud becausehe is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall neverbe allowed its rights on any point. “Whatever makesfor illness is good; whatever issues from abundance, fromsuperabundance, from power, is evil”: so argues the be-

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liever. The impulse to lie–it is by this that I recognizeevery foreordained theologian.–Another characteristic ofthe theologian is his unfitness for philology. What I heremean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of readingwith profit–the capacity for absorbing facts without inter-preting them falsely, and without losing caution, patienceand subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philol-ogy as ephexis23 in interpretation: whether one be deal-ing with books, with newspaper reports, with the mostfateful events or with weather statistics–not to mentionthe ”salvation of the soul.”... The way in which a theolo-gian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain,say, a ”passage of Scripture,” or an experience, or a vic-tory by the national army, by turning upon it the highillumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daringthat it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. Butwhat shall he do when pietists and other such cows fromSuabia24 use the ”finger of God” to convert their miser-

23That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticismwas also occasionally called ephecticism.

24A reference to the University of Tübingen and its fa-mous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this schoolwas F. C. Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it

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ably commonplace and huggermugger existence into amiracle of ”grace,” a ”providence” and an ”experience ofsalvation”? The most modest exercise of the intellect, notto say of decency, should certainly be enough to convincethese interpreters of the perfect childishness and unwor-thiness of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity.However small our piety, if we ever encountered a godwho always cured us of a cold in the head at just theright time, or got us into our carriage at the very instantheavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a godthat he’d have to be abolished even if he existed. Godas a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man–at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sortof chance.... “Divine Providence,” which every third manin ”educated Germany” still believes in, is so strong an ar-gument against God that it would be impossible to thinkof a stronger. And in any case it is an argument againstGermans!...

was Nietzsche’s pet abomination, David F. Strauss, himself aSuabian. Vide § 10 and § 28.

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It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to thetruth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyrhas ever had anything to do with the truth at all. In thevery tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to betrue at the head of the world there appears so low a gradeof intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the prob-lem of ”truth,” that it is never necessary to refute him.Truth is not something that one man has and another manhas not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles likeLuther, can think of truth in any such way. One may restassured that the greater the degree of a man’s intellec-tual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discre-tion, on this point. To know in five cases, and to refuse,with delicacy, to know anything further.... “Truth,” as theword is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, ev-ery free-thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, issimply a complete proof that not even a beginning hasbeen made in the intellectual discipline and self-controlthat are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallesttruth.–The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in pass-ing, have been misfortunes of history: they have misled....The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come

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to, that there must be something in a cause for which anyone goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Chris-tianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)–this conclu-sion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing offacts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation.The martyrs have damaged the truth.... Even to this daythe crude fact of persecution is enough to give an hon-ourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.–But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact thatsome one had laid down his life for it?–An error that be-comes honourable is simply an error that has acquiredone seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs.Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be mar-tyred for your lies?–One best disposes of a cause by re-spectfully putting it on ice–that is also the best way todispose of theologians.... This was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gavethe appearance of honour to the cause they opposed–thatthey made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom....Women are still on their knees before an error becausethey have been told that some one died on the cross for it.Is the cross, then, an argument?–But about all these thingsthere is one, and one only, who has said what has beenneeded for thousands of years–Zarathustra.

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They made signs in blood along the way that theywent, and their folly taught them that the truth is provedby blood.

But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth;blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth itinto madness and hatred in the heart.

And when one goeth through fire for his teaching–what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one’s teach-ing cometh out of one’s own burning!25

25The quotations are from “Also sprach Zarathustra” ii,24: “Of Priests.”

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Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are scep-tical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedomwhich proceed from intellectual power, from a super-abundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves asscepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when itcomes to determining what is fundamental in values andlack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They donot see far enough, they do not see what is below them:whereas a man who would talk to any purpose aboutvalue and non-value must be able to see five hundredconvictions beneath him–and behind him.... A mind thataspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto,is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of convic-tion belongs to strength, and to an independent point ofview.... That grand passion which is at once the founda-tion and the power of a sceptic’s existence, and is bothmore enlightened and more despotic than he is himself,drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makeshim unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ un-holy means; under certain circumstances it does not be-grudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: onemay achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A

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grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; itdoes not yield to them–it knows itself to be sovereign.–On the contrary, the need of faith, of something uncon-ditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowedthe word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the ”be-liever” of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man–sucha man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goalswithin himself. The ”believer” does not belong to him-self; he can only be a means to an end; he must be usedup; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct givesthe highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he isprompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, hisexperience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an ev-idence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement.... Whenone reflects how necessary it is to the great majority thatthere be regulations to restrain them from without andhold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a highersense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makesfor the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especiallywoman, then one at once understands conviction and”faith.” To the man with convictions they are his back-bone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial aboutnothing, to be a party man through and through, to es-timate all values strictly and infallibly–these are condi-

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tions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by thesame token they are antagonists of the truthful man–of thetruth.... The believer is not free to answer the question,”true” or ”not true,” according to the dictates of his ownconscience: integrity on this point would work his in-stant downfall. The pathological limitations of his visionturn the man of convictions into a fanatic–Savonarola,Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon–these typesstand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. Butthe grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intel-lectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses–fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observingposes to listening to reasons....

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One step further in the psychology of conviction, of”faith.” It is now a good while since I first proposed forconsideration the question whether convictions are noteven more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. (“Hu-man, All-Too-Human,” I, aphorism 483.)26 This time Idesire to put the question definitely: is there any ac-tual difference between a lie and a conviction?–All theworld believes that there is; but what is not believed byall the world!–Every conviction has its history, its prim-itive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it be-comes 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 formsof conviction?–Sometimes all that is needed is a changein persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a con-viction in the son.–I call it lying to refuse to see whatone sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether the liebe uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is of

26The aphorism, which is headed “The Enemies of Truth,”makes the direct statement: “Convictions are more danger-ous enemies of truth than lies.”

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no consequence. The most common sort of lie is thatby which a man deceives himself: the deception of oth-ers is a relatively rare offence.–Now, this will not to seewhat one sees, this will not to see it as it is, is almost thefirst requisite for all who belong to a party of whateversort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. For exam-ple, the German historians are convinced that Rome wassynonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peo-ples brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what isthe difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it tobe wondered at that all partisans, including the Germanhistorians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of moralityupon their tongues–that morality almost owes its verysurvival to the fact that the party man of every sort hasneed of it every moment?–“This is our conviction: wepublish it to the whole world; we live and die for it–let usrespect all who have convictions!”–I have actually heardsuch sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On thecontrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not be-come more respectable because he lies on principle.... Thepriests, who have more finesse in such matters, and whowell understand the objection that lies against the notionof a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that be-comes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose,

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have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneak-ing in the concepts, “God,” ”the will of God” and ”therevelation of God” at this place. Kant, too, with his cat-egorical imperative, was on the same road: this was hispractical reason.27 There are questions regarding the truthor untruth of which it is not for man to decide; all the cap-ital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, arebeyond human reason.... To know the limits of reason–that alone is genuine philosophy.... Why did God make arevelation to man? Would God have done anything su-perfluous? Man could not find out for himself what wasgood and what was evil, so God taught him His will....Moral: the priest does not lie–the question, ”true” or ”un-true,” has nothing to do with such things as the priest dis-cusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. In orderto lie here it would be necessary to know what is true. Butthis is more than man can know; therefore, the priest issimply the mouthpiece of God.–Such a priestly syllogismis by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right tolie and the shrewd dodge of ”revelation” belong to the gen-eral priestly type–to the priest of the décadence as well as

27A reference, of course, to Kant’s “Kritik der praktischenVernunft” (Critique of Practical Reason).

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to the priest of pagan times (–Pagans are all those whosay yes to life, and to whom “God” is a word signifyingacquiescence in all things).–The ”law,” the ”will of God,”the ”holy book,” and ”inspiration”–all these things aremerely words for the conditions under which the priestcomes to power and with which he maintains his power,–these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestlyorganizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophicalschemes of governments. The ”holy lie”–common aliketo Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and tothe Christian church–is not even wanting in Plato. “Truthis here”: this means, no matter where it is heard, the priestlies....

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In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end oflying? The fact that, in Christianity, ”holy” ends are notvisible is my objection to the means it employs. Only badends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denialof life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin–therefore, itsmeans are also bad.–I have a contrary feeling when I readthe Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual andsuperior work, which it would be a sin against the intel-ligence to so much as name in the same breath with theBible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philos-ophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess ofJewish rabbinism and superstition,–it gives even the mostfastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into.And, not to forget what is most important, it differs fun-damentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it thenobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, itshows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, andtriumphant feeling toward self and life–the sun shinesupon the whole book.–All the things on which Christian-ity vents its fathomless vulgarity–for example, procre-

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ation, women and marriage–are here handled earnestly,with reverence and with love and confidence. How canany one really put into the hands of children and ladiesa book which contains such vile things as this: ”to avoidfornication, let every man have his own wife, and let ev-ery woman have her own husband; ... it is better to marrythan to burn”?28 And is it possible to be a Christian solong as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say,befouled, by the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio?... Iknow of no book in which so many delicate and kindlythings are said of women as in the Code of Manu; theseold grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallantto women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to sur-pass. “The mouth of a woman,” it says in one place, ”thebreasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smokeof sacrifice are always pure.” In another place: ”there isnothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow castby a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden.” Fi-nally, in still another place–perhaps this is also a holy lie–:”all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, andall below are impure. Only in the maiden is the wholebody pure.”

281 Corinthians vii, 2, 9.

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One catches the unholiness of Christian means in fla-granti by the simple process of putting the ends soughtby Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code ofManu–by putting these enormously antithetical ends un-der a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evadethe necessity of making Christianity contemptible.–A bookof laws such as the Code of Manu has the same originas every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experi-ence, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of longcenturies; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longercreates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort isrecognition of the fact that the means which establish theauthority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are fun-damentally different from those which one would makeuse of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility,the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for ifit did so it would lose the imperative tone, the ”thoushall,” on which obedience is based. The problem liesexactly here.–At a certain point in the evolution of a peo-ple, the class within it of the greatest insight, which isto say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares thatthe series of experiences determining how all shall live–

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or can live–has come to an end. The object now is toreap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible fromthe days of experiment and hard experience. In conse-quence, the thing that is to be avoided above everythingis further experimentation–the continuation of the state inwhich values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and crit-icized ad infinitum. Against this a double wall is set up:on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption thatthe reasons lying behind the laws are not of human ori-gin, that they were not sought out and found by a slowprocess and after many errors, but that they are of divineancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, withouta history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand,tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stoodunchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impiousand a crime against one’s forefathers to bring it into ques-tion. The authority of the law is thus grounded on thethesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.–The highermotive of such procedure lies in the design to distractconsciousness, step by step, from its concern with notionsof right living (that is to say, those that have been provedto be right by wide and carefully considered experience),so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism–a primarynecessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of per-

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fection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book asManu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of fu-ture mastery, of attainable perfection–it permits them toaspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that endthe thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of ev-ery holy lie.–The order of castes, the highest, the dominat-ing law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, ofa natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitraryfiat, no ”modern idea,” can exert any influence. In everyhealthy society there are three physiological types, grav-itating toward differentiation but mutually conditioningone another, and each of these has its own hygiene, itsown sphere of work, its own special mastery and feel-ing of perfection. It is not Manu but nature that sets offin one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in anotherthose who are marked by muscular strength and temper-ament, and in a third those who are distinguished in nei-ther one way or the other, but show only mediocrity–thelast-named represents the great majority, and the first twothe select. The superior caste–I call it the fewest–has, as themost perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for hap-piness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Onlythe most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, tothe beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being

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weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:29 goodness isa privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to themthan uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eyethat sees ugliness–or indignation against the general as-pect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chan-dala; so is pessimism. ”The world is perfect”–so promptsthe instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man whosays yes to life. “Imperfection, whatever is inferior to us,distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala them-selves are parts of this perfection.” The most intelligentmen, like the strongest, find their happiness where otherswould find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hardwith themselves and with others, in effort; their delightis in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second na-ture, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult taskas a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with bur-dens that would crush all others.... Knowledge–a form ofasceticism.–They are the most honourable kind of men:but that does not prevent them being the most cheer-ful and most amiable. They rule, not because they wantto, but because they are; they are not at liberty to playsecond.–The second caste: to this belong the guardians of

29Few men are noble

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the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noblewarriors, above all, the king as the highest form of war-rior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rankconstitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the nextto them in rank, taking from them all that is rough in thebusiness of ruling–their followers, their right hand, theirmost apt disciples.–In all this, I repeat, there is nothingarbitrary, nothing ”made up”; whatever is to the contraryis made up–by it nature is brought to shame.... The orderof castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supremelaw of life itself; the separation of the three types is nec-essary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolutionof higher types, and the highest types–the inequality ofrights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.–Aright is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges thataccord with his state of existence. Let us not underesti-mate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harderas one mounts the heights–the cold increases, responsibil-ity increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can standonly on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strongand soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts,commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, inbrief, the whole range of occupational activities, are com-patible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such

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callings would be out of place for exceptional men; theinstincts which belong to them stand as much opposed toaristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is pub-licly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidenceof a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the onlysort of happiness that the majority are capable of, thatmakes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre medi-ocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinctfor mastering one thing, for specialization. It would bealtogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see any-thing 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 civiliza-tion. When the exceptional man handles the mediocreman with more delicate fingers than he applies to himselfor to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart–it issimply his duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily amongthe rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apos-tles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’sinstincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with hispetty existence–who make him envious and teach him re-venge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in theassertion of ”equal” rights.... What is bad? But I have al-ready answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from

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envy, from revenge.–The anarchist and the Christian havethe same ancestry....

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In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a greatdifference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys.There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anar-chist: their object, their instinct, points only toward de-struction. One need only turn to history for a proof ofthis: there it appears with appalling distinctness. Wehave just studied a code of religious legislation whoseobject it was to convert the conditions which cause life toflourish into an ”eternal” social organization,–Christianityfound its mission in putting an end to such an organi-zation, because life flourished under it. There the benefitsthat reason had produced during long ages of experimentand insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, andan effort was made to bring in a harvest that should beas large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, onthe contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight.... Thatwhich stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum,the most magnificent form of organization under difficultconditions that has ever been achieved, and compared towhich everything before it and after it appears as patch-work, bungling, dilletantism–those holy anarchists madeit a matter of ”piety” to destroy ”the world,” which is to

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say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stonestood upon another–and even Germans and other suchlouts were able to become its masters.... The Christianand the anarchist: both are décadents; both are incapableof any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degen-erating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal ha-tred of everything that stands up, and is great, and hasdurability, and promises life a future.... Christianity wasthe vampire of the imperium Romanum,–overnight it de-stroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the con-quest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time.Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The im-perium Romanum that we know, and that the history of theRoman provinces teaches us to know better and better,–this most admirable of all works of art in the grand man-ner was merely the beginning, and the structure to fol-low was not to prove its worth for thousands of years.To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni hasbeen brought into being, or even dreamed of!–This orga-nization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors:the accident of personality has nothing to do with suchthings–the first principle of all genuinely great architec-ture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against thecorruptest of all forms of corruption–against Christians....

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These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night,mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, suck-ing him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of allinstinct 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 mer-itorious, manly and noble natures that had found in thecause of Rome their own cause, their own serious pur-pose, 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 inthe drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fireof revenge, of Chandala revenge–all that sort of thing be-came master of Rome: the same kind of religion which,in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One hasbut to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made warupon–not paganism, but “Christianity,” which is to say,the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt,punishment and immortality.–He combatted the subter-ranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity–to denyimmortality was already a form of genuine salvation.–Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellectin Rome was Epicurean–when Paul appeared ... Paul, theChandala hatred of Rome, of ”the world,” in the flesh

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and inspired by genius–the Jew, the eternal Jew par excel-lence.... What he saw was how, with the aid of the smallsectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Ju-daism, a ”world conflagration” might be kindled; how,with the symbol of “God on the cross,” all secret sedi-tions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire,might be amalgamated into one immense power. “Sal-vation is of the Jews.”–Christianity is the formula for ex-ceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all va-rieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that ofMithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact thegenius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so surethat, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideaswhich lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religioninto the mouth of the “Saviour” as his own inventions,and not only into the mouth–he made out of him some-thing that even a priest of Mithras could understand....This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the factthat he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob”the world” of its value, that the concept of ”hell” wouldmaster Rome–that the notion of a ”beyond” is the death oflife.... Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, andthey do more than rhyme....

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The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught:I have no word to describe the feelings that such anenormity arouses in me.–And, considering the fact thatits labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantineself-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a workto go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of an-tiquity disappears!... To what end the Greeks? to whatend the Romans?–All the prerequisites to a learned cul-ture, all the methods of science, were already there; manhad already perfected the great and incomparable art ofreading profitably–that first necessity to the tradition ofculture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, inalliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on theright road,–the sense of fact, the last and more valuableof all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions werealready 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, aremethods, and also the most difficult to develop, and thelongest opposed by habit and laziness. What we havetoday reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, forourselves–for certain bad instincts, certain Christian in-

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stincts, still lurk in our bodies–that is to say, the keen eyefor reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness inthe smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge–allthese things were already there, and had been there fortwo thousand years! More, there was also a refined andexcellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Notas “German” culture, with its loutish manners! But asbody, as bearing, as instinct–in short, as reality.... All gonefor naught! Overnight it became merely a memory!–TheGreeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, method-ical inquiry, genius for organization and administration,faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yesto everything entering into the imperium Romanum andpalpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyondmere art, but had become reality, truth, life....–All over-whelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature!Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavyhoof! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible,anæmic vampires! Not conquered,–only sucked dry!...Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Every-thing wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by badfeelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at onceon top!–One needs but read any of the Christian agitators,for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to

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smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be anerror, however, to assume that there was any lack of un-derstanding 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 some-thing quite different. Nature neglected–perhaps forgot–to give them even the most modest endowment of re-spectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts.... Between our-selves, they are not even men.... If Islam despises Chris-tianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at leastassumes that it is dealing with men....

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Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of an-cient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us thewhole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonder-ful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamen-tally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses andtastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down(–I do not say by what sort of feet–) Why? Because ithad to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin–because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refinedluxuriousness of Moorish life!... The crusaders later madewar on something before which it would have been morefitting for them to have grovelled in the dust–a civiliza-tion beside which even that of our nineteenth centuryseems very poor and very ”senile.”–What they wanted,of course, was booty: the orient was rich.... Let us putaside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher formof piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which isfundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there:the church knew only too well how the German nobilitywas to be won.... The German noble, always the “Swissguard” of the church, always in the service of every badinstinct of the church–but well paid.... Consider the fact

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that it is precisely the aid of German swords and Germanblood and valour that has enabled the church to carrythrough its war to the death upon everything noble onearth! At this point a host of painful questions suggestthemselves. The German nobility stands outside the his-tory of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious....Christianity, alcohol–the two great means of corruption....Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Is-lam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and aJew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains atliberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or heis not.... “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friend-ship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, ofthat great free spirit, that genius among German emper-ors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius,a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’t make outhow a German could ever feel Christian....

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Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that mustbe a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Ger-mans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvestof civilization that Europe was ever to reap–the Renais-sance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood,what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christianvalues,–an attempt with all available means, all instinctsand all the resources of genius to bring about a triumphof the opposite values, the more noble values.... This hasbeen the one great war of the past; there has never beena more critical question than that of the Renaissance–itis my question too–; there has never been a form of at-tack more fundamental, more direct, or more violentlydelivered by a whole front upon the center of the en-emy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat ofChristianity, and there enthrone the more noble values–that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, intothe most fundamental needs and appetites of those sit-ting there ... I see before me the possibility of a perfectlyheavenly enchantment and spectacle:–it seems to me toscintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicatebeauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infer-

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nally divine, that one might search in vain for thousandsof years for another such possibility; I see a spectacleso rich in significance and at the same time so wonder-fully full of paradox that it should arouse all the godson Olympus to immortal laughter–Cæsar Borgia as pope!...Am I understood?... Well then, that would have been thesort of triumph that I alone am longing for today–: byit Christianity would have been swept away!–What hap-pened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. Thismonk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessfulpriest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissancein Rome.... Instead of grasping, with profound thanks-giving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest ofChristianity at its capital–instead of this, his hatred wasstimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks onlyof himself.–Luther saw only the depravity of the papacyat the very moment when the opposite was becoming ap-parent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Chris-tianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! In-stead there was life! Instead there was the triumph oflife! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautifuland daring things!... And Luther restored the church: heattacked it.... The Renaissance–an event without mean-ing, a great futility!–Ah, these Germans, what they have

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not cost us! Futility–that has always been the work of theGermans.–The Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and so-calledGerman philosophy; the war of ”liberation”; the empire–every time a futile substitute for something that once ex-isted, for something irrecoverable.... These Germans, I con-fess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanlinessin concept and valuation, their cowardice before everyhonest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years theyhave tangled and confused everything their fingers havetouched; they have on their conscience all the half-waymeasures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Eu-rope is sick of,–they also have on their conscience the un-cleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the mostincurable and indestructible–Protestantism.... If mankindnever manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans willbe to blame....

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With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judg-ment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Chris-tian church the most terrible of all the accusations thatan accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, thegreatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work theultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. TheChristian church has left nothing untouched by its de-pravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, andevery truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness ofsoul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its ”humanitar-ian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against anyeffort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates dis-tress to make itself immortal.... For example, the wormof sin: it was the church that first enriched mankindwith this misery!–The ”equality of souls before God”–thisfraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded–this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modernidea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole socialorder–this is Christian dynamite.... The ”humanitarian”blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of human-itas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will tolie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good

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and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the ”humanitari-anism” of Christianity!–Parasitism as the only practice ofthe church; with its anæmic and ”holy” ideals, sucking allthe blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyondas the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguish-ing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heardof,–against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindnessof soul–against life itself....

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shallwrite upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found–Ihave letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I callChristianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsicdepravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which nomeans are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean andsmall enough,–I call it the one immortal blemish upon thehuman race....

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus whenthis fatality befell–from the first day of Christianity!–Whynot rather from its last?–From today?–The transvaluation ofall values!...

THE END

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