The Antichrist

Nietzsche

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PREFACE

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Per-haps not one of them is yet alive. It is possiblethat they may be among those who understandmy “Zarathustra”: how could I confound myselfwith those who are now sprouting ears?—Firstthe day after tomorrow must come for me. So-me men are born posthumously.

The conditions under which any one under-stands me, and necessarily understands me—Iknow them only too well. Even to endure myseriousness, my passion, he must carry intellec-tual integrity to the verge of hardness. He mustbe accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble ofpolitics and nationalism as beneath him. Hemust have become indifferent; he must neverask of the truth whether it brings profit to himor a fatality to him.... He must have an inclina-

tion, born of strength, for questions that no onehas the courage for; the courage for the forbid-den; predestination for the labyrinth. The ex-perience of seven solitudes. New ears for newmusic. New eyes for what is most distant. Anew conscience for truths that have hithertoremained unheard. And the will to economizein the grand manner—to hold together hisstrength, his enthusiasm.... Reverence for self;love of self; absolute freedom of self....

Very well, then! of that sort only are my read-ers, my true readers, my readers foreordained:of what account are the rest?—The rest are me-rely humanity.—One must make one’s self su-perior to humanity, in power, in loftiness ofsoul,—in contempt.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche.

THE ANTICHRIST

1.

—Let us look each other in the face. We areHyperboreans—we know well enough howremote our place is. “Neither by land nor bywater will you find the road to the Hyperbo-reans”: even Pindar,[1] in his day, knew thatmuch about us. Beyond the North, beyond theice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... Wehave discovered that happiness; we know theway; we got our knowledge of it from thou-sands of years in the labyrinth. Who else hasfound it?—The man of today?—“I don’t knoweither the way out or the way in; I am whateverdoesn’t know either the way out or the wayin”—so sighs the man of today.... This is thesort of modernity that made us ill,—we sick-ened on lazy peace, cowardly compro mise, thewhole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and

Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that“forgives” everything because it “understands”everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amidthe ice than among modern virtues and othersuch south-winds!... We were brave enough;we spared neither ourselves nor others; but wewere a long time finding out where to direct ourcourage. We grew dismal; they called us fatal-ists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension,the storing up of powers. We thirsted for thelightnings and great deeds; we kept as far aspossible from the happiness of the weakling,from “resignation”... There was thunder in ourair; nature, as we embodied it, became over-cast—for we had not yet found the way. The for-mula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straightline, a goal....

[1] Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourthbook of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were amythical people beyond the Rhipaean moun-

tains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbrokenhappiness and perpetual youth.

2.

What is good?—Whatever augments the feelingof power, the will to power, power itself, inman.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weak-ness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that powerincreases—that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace atany price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency(virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtuefree of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: firstprinciple of our charity. And one should helpthem to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practicalsympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....

3.

The problem that I set here is not what shallreplace mankind in the order of living creatures(—man is an end—): but what type of manmust be bred, must be willed, as being the mostvaluable, the most worthy of life, the most se-cure guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared oftenenough in the past: but always as a happy acci-dent, as an exception, never as deliberately wi-lled. Very often it has been precisely the mostfeared; hitherto it has been almost the terror ofterrors;—and out of that terror the contrarytype has been willed, cultivated and attained:the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sickbrute-man—the Christian....

4.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolutiontoward a better or stronger or higher level, asprogress is now understood. This “progress” ismerely a modern idea, which is to say, a falseidea. The European of today, in his essentialworth, falls far below the European of the Ren-aissance; the process of evolution does not nec-essarily mean elevation, enhancement,strengthening.

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and indi-vidual cases in various parts of the earth andunder the most widely different cultures, andin these cases a higher type certainly manifestsitself; something which, compared to mankindin the mass, appears as a sort of superman.Such happy strokes of high success have al-ways been possible, and will remain possible,perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races,

tribes and nations may occasionally representsuch lucky accidents.

5.

We should not deck out and embellish Christi-anity: it has waged a war to the death againstthis higher type of man, it has put all the deep-est instincts of this type under its ban, it hasdeveloped its concept of evil, of the Evil Onehimself, out of these instincts—the strong manas the typical reprobate, the “outcast amongmen.” Christianity has taken the part of all theweak, the low, the botched; it has made anideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has cor-rupted even the faculties of those natures thatare intellectually most vigorous, by represent-ing the highest intellectual values as sinful, asmisleading, as full of temptation. The most la-mentable example: the corruption of Pascal,who believed that his intellect had been de-

stroyed by original sin, whereas it was actuallydestroyed by Christianity!—

6.

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that risesbefore me: I have drawn back the curtain fromthe rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth,is at least free from one suspicion: that it in-volves a moral accusation against humanity. Itis used—and I wish to emphasize the factagain—without any moral significance: andthis is so far true that the rottenness I speak ofis most apparent to me precisely in those quar-ters where there has been most aspiration, hith-erto, toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As youprobably surmise, I understand rottenness inthe sense of décadence: my argument is that allthe values on which mankind now fixes itshighest aspirations are décadence-values.

I call an animal, a species, an individual cor-rupt, when it loses its instincts, when it

chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it.A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals ofhumanity”—and it is possible that I’ll have towrite it—would almost explain why man is sodegenerate. Life itself appears to me as an in-stinct for growth, for survival, for the accumu-lation of forces, for power: whenever the will topower fails there is disaster. My contention isthat all the highest values of humanity havebeen emptied of this will—that the values ofdécadence, of nihilism, now prevail under theholiest names.

7.

Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pitystands in opposition to all the tonic passionsthat augment the energy of the feeling of alive-ness: it is a depressant. A man loses powerwhen he pities. Through pity that drain uponstrength which suffering works is multiplied athousandfold. Suffering is made contagious bypity; under certain circumstances it may lead to

a total sacrifice of life and living energy—a lossout of all proportion to the magnitude of thecause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene).This is the first view of it; there is, however, astill more important one. If one measures theeffects of pity by the gravity of the reactions itsets up, its character as a menace to life appearsin a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the wholelaw of evolution, which is the law of naturalselection. It preserves whatever is ripe for de-struction; it fights on the side of those disinher-ited and condemned by life; by maintaining lifein so many of the botched of all kinds, it giveslife itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Man-kind has ventured to call pity a virtue (—inevery superior moral system it appears as aweakness—); going still further, it has beencalled the virtue, the source and foundation ofall other virtues—but let us always bear inmind that this was from the standpoint of aphilosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whoseshield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopen-

hauer was right in this: that by means of pitylife is denied, and made worthy of denial—pity isthe technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this de-pressing and contagious instinct stands againstall those instincts which work for the preserva-tion and enhancement of life: in the rôle of pro-tector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in thepromotion of décadence—pity persuades to ex-tinction.... Of course, one doesn’t say “extinc-tion”: one says “the other world,” or “God,” or“the true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessed-ness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm ofreligious-ethical balderdash, appears a good dealless innocent when one reflects upon the ten-dency that it conceals beneath sublime words:the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer washostile to life: that is why pity appeared to himas a virtue.... Aristotle, as every one knows, sawin pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind,the remedy for which was an occasional purga-tive: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. Theinstinct of life should prompt us to seek some

means of puncturing any such pathological anddangerous accumulation of pity as that appear-ing in Schopenhauer’s case (and also, alack, inthat of our whole literary décadence, from St.Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner),that it may burst and be discharged.... Nothingis more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy mo-dernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctorshere, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knifehere—all this is our business, all this is our sortof humanity, by this sign we are philosophers,we Hyperboreans!—

8.

It is necessary to say just whom we regard asour antagonists: theologians and all who haveany theological blood in their veins—this is ourwhole philosophy.... One must have faced thatmenace at close hand, better still, one musthave had experience of it directly and almostsuccumbed to it, to realize that it is not to betaken lightly (—the alleged free-thinking of

our naturalists and physiologists seems to meto be a joke—they have no passion about suchthings; they have not suffered—). This poison-ing goes a great deal further than most peoplethink: I find the arrogant habit of the theologianamong all who regard themselves as “ideal-ists”—among all who, by virtue of a higherpoint of departure, claim a right to rise abovereality, and to look upon it with suspicion....The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sortsof lofty concepts in his hand (—and not only inhis hand!); he launches them with benevolentcontempt against “understanding,” “thesenses,” “honor,” “good living,” “science”; hesees such things as beneath him, as perniciousand seductive forces, on which “the soul” soarsas a pure thing-in-itself—as if humility, chas-tity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not al-ready done much more damage to life than allimaginable horrors and vices.... The pure soul isa pure lie.... So long as the priest, that profes-sional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life,

is accepted as a higher variety of man, there canbe no answer to the question, What is truth?Truth has already been stood on its head whenthe obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mis-taken for its representative....

9.

Upon this theological instinct I make war: I findthe tracks of it everywhere. Whoever has theo-logical blood in his veins is shifty and dishon-ourable in all things. The pathetic thing thatgrows out of this condition is called faith: inother words, closing one’s eyes upon one’s selfonce for all, to avoid suffering the sight of in-curable falsehood. People erect a concept ofmorality, of virtue, of holiness upon this falseview of all things; they ground good conscienceupon faulty vision; they argue that no other sortof vision has value any more, once they havemade theirs sacrosanct with the names of“God,” “salvation” and “eternity.” I unearththis theological instinct in all directions: it is the

most widespread and the most subterraneanform of falsehood to be found on earth. What-ever a theologian regards as true must be false:there you have almost a criterion of truth. Hisprofound instinct of self-preservation standsagainst truth ever coming into honour in anyway, or even getting stated. Wherever thein fluence of theologians is felt there is a trans-valuation of values, and the concepts “true”and “false” are forced to change places: what-ever is most damaging to life is there called“true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it,approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphantis there called “false.”... When theologians,working through the “consciences” of princes(or of peoples—), stretch out their hands forpower, there is never any doubt as to the fun-damental issue: the will to make an end, thenihilistic will exerts that power....

10.

Among Germans I am immediately understoodwhen I say that theological blood is the ruin ofphilosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grand-father of German philosophy; Protestantismitself is its peccatum originale. Definition of Prot-estantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christian-ity—and of reason.... One need only utter thewords “Tübingen School” to get an under-standing of what German philosophy is at bot-tom—a very artful form of theology.... The Su-abians are the best liars in Germany; they lieinnocently.... Why all the rejoicing over theappearance of Kant that went through thelearned world of Germany, three-fourths ofwhich is made up of the sons of preachers andteachers—why the German conviction stillechoing, that with Kant came a change for thebetter? The theological instinct of Germanscholars made them see clearly just what hadbecome possible again.... A backstairs leading

to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the“true world,” the concept of morality as theessence of the world (—the two most viciouserrors that ever existed!), were once more,thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, if notactually demonstrable, then at least no longerrefutable.... Reason, the prerogative of reason,does not go so far.... Out of reality there hadbeen made “appearance”; an absolutely falseworld, that of being, had been turned into real-ity.... The success of Kant is merely a theologi-cal success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz,but one more impediment to German integrity,already far from steady.—

11.

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A vir-tue must be our invention; it must spring out ofour personal need and defence. In every othercase it is a source of danger. That which doesnot belong to our life menaces it; a virtue whichhas its roots in mere respect for the concept of

“virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious.“Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its own sake,”goodness grounded upon impersonality or anotion of universal validity—these are all chi-meras, and in them one finds only an expres-sion of the decay, the last collapse of life, theChinese spirit of Königsberg. Quite the con-trary is demanded by the most profound lawsof self-preservation and of growth: to wit, thatevery man find his own virtue, his own categori-cal imperative. A nation goes to pieces when itconfounds its duty with the general concept ofduty. Nothing works a more complete andpenetrating disaster than every “impersonal”duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of ab-straction.—To think that no one has thought ofKant’s categorical imperative as dangerous tolife!... The theological instinct alone took it un-der protection!—An action prompted by thelife-instinct proves that it is a right action by theamount of pleasure that goes with it: and yetthat Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian

dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection....What destroys a man more quickly than towork, think and feel without inner necessity,without any deep personal desire, withoutpleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That isthe recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy....Kant became an idiot.—And such a man wasthe contemporary of Goethe! This calamitousspinner of cobwebs passed for the German phi-losopher—still passes today!... I forbid myselfto say what I think of the Germans.... Didn’tKant see in the French Revolution the trans-formation of the state from the inorganic formto the organic? Didn’t he ask himself if therewas a single event that could be explained saveon the assumption of a moral faculty in man, sothat on the basis of it, “the tendency of man-kind toward the good” could be explained, onceand for all time? Kant’s answer: “That is revo-lution.” Instinct at fault in everything and any-thing, instinct as a revolt against nature, Ger-man décadence as a philosophy—that is Kant! —

12.

I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decencyin the history of philosophy: the rest haven’tthe slightest conception of intellectual integrity.They behave like women, all these great enthu-siasts and prodigies—they regard “beautifulfeelings” as arguments, the “heaving breast” asthe bellows of divine inspiration, conviction asthe criterion of truth. In the end, with “German”innocence, Kant tried to give a scientific flavourto this form of corruption, this dearth of intel-lectual conscience, by calling it “practical rea-son.” He deliberately invented a variety of rea-sons for use on occasions when it was desirablenot to trouble with reason—that is, when mo-rality, when the sublime command “thoushalt,” was heard. When one recalls the factthat, among all peoples, the philosopher is nomore than a development from the old type ofpriest, this inheritance from the priest, thisfraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable. When a

man feels that he has a divine mission, say tolift up, to save or to liberate mankind—when aman feels the divine spark in his heart and be-lieves that he is the mouthpiece of su-per natural imperatives—when such a missioninflames him, it is only natural that he shouldstand beyond all merely reasonable standardsof judgment. He feels that he is himself sancti-fied by this mission, that he is himself a type ofa higher order!... What has a priest to do withphilosophy! He stands far above it!—And hith-erto the priest has ruled!—He has determinedthe meaning of “true” and “not true”!...

13.

Let us not underestimate this fact: that we our-selves, we free spirits, are already a “transvalua-tion of all values,” a visualized declaration ofwar and victory against all the old concepts of“true” and “not true.” The most valuable intui-tions are the last to be attained; the most valu-able of all are those which determine methods.

All the methods, all the principles of the scien-tific spirit of today, were the targets for thou-sands of years of the most profound contempt;if a man inclined to them he was excluded fromthe society of “decent” people—he passed as“an enemy of God,” as a scoffer at the truth, asone “possessed.” As a man of science, he be-longed to the Chandala[2].... We have had thewhole pathetic stupidity of mankind againstus—their every notion of what the truth oughtto be, of what the service of the truth ought tobe—their every “thou shalt” was launchedagainst us.... Our objectives, our methods, ourquiet, cautious, distrustful manner—all ap-peared to them as absolutely discreditable andcontemptible.—Looking back, one may almostask one’s self with reason if it was not actuallyan aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long:what they demanded of the truth was pictur-esque effectiveness, and of the learned a strongappeal to their senses. It was our modesty thatstood out longest against their taste.... How

well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks ofGod!

[2] The lowest of the Hindu castes.14.

We have unlearned something. We have be-come more modest in every way. We no longerderive man from the “spirit,” from the “god-head”; we have dropped him back among thebeasts. We regard him as the strongest of thebeasts because he is the craftiest; one of there sults thereof is his intellectuality. On the ot-her hand, we guard ourselves against a conceitwhich would assert itself even here: that man isthe great second thought in the process of or-ganic evolution. He is, in truth, anything butthe crown of creation: beside him stand manyother animals, all at similar stages of develop-ment.... And even when we say that we say abit too much, for man, relatively speaking, isthe most botched of all the animals and the

sickliest, and he has wandered the most dan-gerously from his instincts—though for all that,to be sure, he remains the most interesting!—Asregards the lower animals, it was Descarteswho first had the really admirable daring todescribe them as machina; the whole of ourphysiology is directed toward proving the truthof this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to setman apart, as Descartes did: what we know ofman today is limited precisely by the extent towhich we have regarded him, too, as a ma-chine. Formerly we accorded to man, as hisinheritance from some higher order of beings,what was called “free will”; now we have takeneven this will from him, for the term no longerdescribes anything that we can understand. Theold word “will” now connotes only a sort ofresult, an individual reaction, that follows in-evitably upon a series of partly discordant andpartly harmonious stimuli—the will no longer“acts,” or “moves.”... Formerly it was thoughtthat man’s consciousness, his “spirit,” offered

evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That hemight be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like,to draw his senses in, to have no traffic withearthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil—then only the important part of him, the “purespirit,” would remain. Here again we havethought out the thing better: to us conscious-ness, or “the spirit,” appears as a symptom of arelative imperfection of the organism, as anexperiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, asan affliction which uses up nervous force un-necessarily—we deny that anything can bedone perfectly so long as it is done consciously.The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity:take away the nervous system and the senses,the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest is mis-calculation—that is all!...

15.

Under Christianity neither morality nor relig-ion has any point of contact with actuality. Itoffers purely imaginary causes (“God,” “soul,”

“ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—or even “unfree”),and purely imaginary effects (“sin,” “salvation,”“grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”).Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,”“spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural history(anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept ofnatural causes); an imaginary psychology (mis-understandings of self, misinterpretations ofagreeable or disagreeable general feelings—forexample, of the states of the nervus sympathicuswith the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash—, “repentance,” “pangs ofconscience,” “temptation by the devil,” “thepresence of God”); an imaginary teleology (the“kingdom of God,” “the last judgment,” “eter-nal life”).—This purely fictitious world, greatlyto its disadvantage, is to be differentiated fromthe world of dreams; the latter at least reflectsreality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapensit and denies it. Once the concept of “nature”had been opposed to the concept of “God,” theword “natural” necessarily took on the mean-

ing of “abominable”—the whole of that ficti-tious world has its sources in hatred of thenatural (—the real!—), and is no more thanevidence of a profound uneasiness in the pres-ence of reality.... This explains everything. Whoalone has any reason for living his way out ofreality? The man who suffers under it. But tosuffer from reality one must be a botched real-ity.... The preponderance of pains over pleas-ures is the cause of this fictitious morality andreligion: but such a preponderance also sup-plies the formula for décadence....

16.

A criticism of the Christian concept of God leadsinevitably to the same conclusion.—A nationthat still believes in itself holds fast to its owngod. In him it does honour to the conditionswhich enable it to survive, to its virtues—itprojects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, intoa being to whom one may offer thanks. He whois rich will give of his riches; a proud people

need a god to whom they can make sacrifices....Religion, within these limits, is a form of grati-tude. A man is grateful for his own existence: tothat end he needs a god.—Such a god must beable to work both benefits and injuries; he mustbe able to play either friend or foe—he is won-dered at for the good he does as well as for theevil he does. But the castration, against all na-ture, of such a god, making him a god of good-ness alone, would be contrary to human incli-nation. Mankind has just as much need for anevil god as for a good god; it doesn’t have tothank mere tolerance and humanitarianism forits own existence.... What would be the value ofa god who knew nothing of anger, revenge,envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had per-haps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs ofvictory and of destruction? No one would un-derstand such a god: why should any one wanthim?—True enough, when a nation is on thedownward path, when it feels its belief in itsown future, its hope of freedom slipping from

it, when it begins to see submission as a firstnecessity and the virtues of submission asmeasures of self-preservation, then it mustoverhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite,timorous and demure; he counsels “peace ofsoul,” hate-no-more, leniency, “love” of friendand foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps intoevery private virtue; he becomes the god ofevery man; he becomes a private citizen, a cos-mopolitan.... Formerly he represented a people,the strength of a people, everything aggressiveand thirsty for power in the soul of a people;now he is simply the good god.... The truth isthat there is no other alternative for gods: eitherthey are the will to power—in which case theyare national gods—or incapacity for power—inwhich case they have to be good....

17.

Wherever the will to power begins to decline,in whatever form, there is always an accompa-nying decline physiologically, a décadence. The

divinity of this décadence, shorn of its masculinevirtues and passions, is converted perforce intoa god of the physiologically degraded, of theweak. Of course, they do not call themselves theweak; they call themselves “the good.”... Nohint is needed to indicate the moments in his-tory at which the dualistic fiction of a good andan evil god first became possible. The sameinstinct which prompts the inferior to reducetheir own god to “goodness-in-itself” alsoprompts them to eliminate all good qualitiesfrom the god of their superiors; they make re-venge on their masters by making a devil of thelatter’s god.—The good god, and the devil likehim—both are abortions of décadence.—Howcan we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christiantheologians as to join in their doctrine that theevolution of the concept of god from “the godof Israel,” the god of a people, to the Christiangod, the essence of all goodness, is to be de-scribed as progress?—But even Renan does this.As if Renan had a right to be naïve! The con-

trary actually stares one in the face. When eve-rything necessary to ascending life; when all thatis strong, courageous, masterful and proud hasbeen eliminated from the concept of a god;when he has sunk step by step to the level of astaff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drow-ning; when he becomes the poor man’s god, thesinner’s god, the invalid’s god par excellence,and the attribute of “saviour” or “redeemer”remains as the one essential attribute of divin-ity—just what is the significance of such a me-tamorphosis? what does such a reduction of thegodhead imply?—To be sure, the “kingdom ofGod” has thus grown larger. Formerly he hadonly his own people, his “chosen” people. Butsince then he has gone wandering, like his peo-ple themselves, into foreign parts; he has givenup settling down quietly anywhere; finally hehas come to feel at home everywhere, and is thegreat cosmopolitan—until now he has the“great majority” on his side, and half the earth.But this god of the “great majority,” this de-

mocrat among gods, has not become a proudheathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew,he remains a god in a corner, a god of all thedark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesomequarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom,now as always, is a kingdom of the under-world, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto king-dom.... And he himself is so pale, so weak, sodécadent.... Even the palest of the pale are ableto master him—messieurs the metaphysicians,those albinos of the intellect. They spun theirwebs around him for so long that finally he washypnotized, and began to spin himself, andbecame another metaphysician. Thereafter heresumed once more his old busi ness of spin-ning the world out of his inmost being sub spe-cie Spinozae; thereafter he became ever thinnerand paler—became the “ideal,” became “purespirit,” became “the absolute,” became “thething-in-itself.”... The collapse of a god: he becamea “thing-in-itself.”

18.

The Christian concept of a god—the god as thepatron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cob-webs, the god as a spirit—is one of the mostcorrupt concepts that has ever been set up inthe world: it probably touches low-water markin the ebbing evolution of the god-type. Goddegenerated into the contradiction of life. Insteadof being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! Inhim war is declared on life, on nature, on thewill to live! God becomes the formula for everyslander upon the “here and now,” and for eve-ry lie about the “beyond”! In him nothingnessis deified, and the will to nothingness is madeholy!...

19.

The fact that the strong races of northern Euro-pe did not repudiate this Christian god doeslittle credit to their gift for religion—and not

much more to their taste. They ought to havebeen able to make an end of such a moribundand worn-out product of the décadence. A curselies upon them because they were not equal toit; they made illness, decrepitude and contra-diction a part of their instincts—and since thenthey have not managed to create any more gods.Two thousand years have come and gone—andnot a single new god! Instead, there still exists,and as if by some intrinsic right,—as if he werethe ultimatum and maximum of the power tocreate gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind—this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism!This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out ofemptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, inwhich all the instincts of décadence, all the cow-ardices and wearinesses of the soul find theirsanction!—

20.

In my condemnation of Christianity I surelyhope I do no injustice to a related religion with

an even larger number of believers: I allude toBuddhism. Both are to be reckoned among thenihilistic religions—they are both décadencereligions—but they are separated from eachother in a very remarkable way. For the factthat he is able to compare them at all the critic ofChristianity is indebted to the scholars of In-dia.—Buddhism is a hundred times as realisticas Christianity—it is part of its living heritagethat it is able to face problems objectively andcoolly; it is the product of long centuries of phi-losophical speculation. The concept, “god,” wasalready disposed of before it appeared. Bud-dhism is the only genuinely positive religion tobe encountered in history, and this applies evento its epistemology (which is a strict phenome-nalism). It does not speak of a “struggle withsin,” but, yielding to reality, of the “strugglewith suffering.” Sharply differentiating itselffrom Christianity, it puts the self-deception thatlies in moral concepts behind it; it is, in myphrase, beyond good and evil.—The two physio-

logical facts upon which it grounds itself andupon which it bestows its chief attention are:first, an excessive sensitiveness to sensation,which manifests itself as a refined susceptibilityto pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spiritu-ality, a too protracted concern with conceptsand logical procedures, under the influence ofwhich the instinct of personality has yielded toa notion of the “impersonal.” (—Both of thesestates will be familiar to a few of my readers,the objectivists, by experience, as they are tome). These physiological states produced a de-pression, and Buddha tried to combat it by hy-gienic measures. Against it he prescribed a lifein the open, a life of travel; moderation in eat-ing and a careful selection of foods; caution inthe use of intoxicants; the same caution inarousing any of the passions that foster a bil-ious habit and heat the blood; finally, no worry,either on one’s own account or on account ofothers. He encourages ideas that make for ei-ther quiet contentment or good cheer—he finds

means to combat ideas of other sorts. He un-derstands good, the state of goodness, as some-thing which promotes health. Prayer is not in-cluded, and neither is asceticism. There is nocategorical imperative nor any disciplines, evenwithin the walls of a monastery (—it is alwayspossible to leave—). These things would havebeen simply means of increasing the excessivesensitiveness above mentioned. For the samereason he does not advocate any conflict withunbelievers; his teaching is antagonistic tonothing so much as to revenge, aversion, ressen-timent (—“enmity never brings an end to en-mity”: the moving refrain of all Buddhism....)And in all this he was right, for it is preciselythese passions which, in view of his mainregiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The mentalfatigue that he observes, already plainly dis-played in too much “objectivity” (that is, in theindividual’s loss of interest in himself, in loss ofbalance and of “egoism”), he combats by strongefforts to lead even the spiritual interests back

to the ego. In Buddha’s teaching egoism is aduty. The “one thing needful,” the question“how can you be delivered from suffering,”regulates and determines the whole spiritualdiet. (—Perhaps one will here recall that Athe-nian who also declared war upon pure “scien-tificality,” to wit, Socrates, who also elevatedegoism to the estate of a morality).

21.

The things necessary to Buddhism are a verymild climate, customs of great gentleness andliberality, and no militarism; moreover, it mustget its start among the higher and betteredu cated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet and theabsence of desire are the chief desiderata, andthey are attained. Buddhism is not a religion inwhich perfection is merely an object of aspira-tion: perfection is actually normal.—

Under Christianity the instincts of the subju-gated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is

only those who are at the bottom who seektheir salvation in it. Here the prevailing pas-time, the favourite remedy for boredom is thediscussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisitionof conscience; here the emotion produced bypower (called “God”) is pumped up (by prayer);here the highest good is regarded as unattain-able, as a gift, as “grace.” Here, too, open deal-ing is lacking; concealment and the darkenedroom are Christian. Here body is despised andhygiene is denounced as sensual; the churcheven ranges itself against cleanliness (—the firstChristian order after the banishment of theMoors closed the public baths, of which therewere 270 in Cordova alone). Christian, too, is acertain cruelty toward one’s self and towardothers; hatred of unbelievers; the will to perse-cute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in theforeground; the most esteemed states of mind,bearing the most respectable names, are epilep-toid; the diet is so regulated as to engendermorbid symptoms and over-stimulate the ner-

ves. Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to therulers of the earth, to the “aristocratic”—alongwith a sort of secret rivalry with them (—oneresigns one’s “body” to them; one wants onlyone’s “soul”...). And Christian is all hatred ofthe intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, ofintellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred ofthe senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in gen-eral....

22.

When Christianity departed from its native soil,that of the lowest orders, the underworld of theancient world, and began seeking poweramong barbarian peoples, it no longer had todeal with exhausted men, but with men still in-wardly savage and capable of self-torture—inbrief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unli-ke in the case of the Buddhists, the cause ofdiscontent with self, suffering through self, isnot merely a general sensitiveness and suscep-tibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordi-

nate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a ten-dency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hos-tile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to em-brace barbaric concepts and valuations in orderto obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort,for example, are the sacrifices of the first-born,the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the dis-dain of the intellect and of culture; torture in allits forms, whether bodily or not; the wholepomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion forpeoples in a further state of development, forraces that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (—Europe is not yet ripe for it—):it is a summons that takes them back to peaceand cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of thespirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Chris-tianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its mo-dus operandi is to make them ill—to make fee-ble is the Christian recipe for taming, for “civi-lizing.” Buddhism is a religion for the closing,over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianityappears before civilization has so much as be-

gun—under certain circumstances it lays thevery foundations thereof.

23.

Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times moreaustere, more honest, more objective. It no lon-ger has to justify its pains, its susceptibility tosuffering, by interpreting these things in termsof sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, “Isuffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering initself is scarcely understandable: what heneeds, first of all, is an explanation as to why hesuffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to denyhis suffering altogether, or to endure it in si-lence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing:man had to have an omnipotent and terribleenemy—there was no need to be ashamed ofsuffering at the hands of such an enemy.—

At the bottom of Christianity there are severalsubtleties that belong to the Orient. In the firstplace, it knows that it is of very little conse-

quence whether a thing be true or not, so longas it is believed to be true. Truth and faith: herewe have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas,almost two diametrically opposite worlds—theroad to the one and the road to the other liemiles apart. To understand that fact thor-oughly—this is almost enough, in the Orient, tomake one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Platoknew it, every student of the esoteric knows it.When, for example, a man gets any pleasure outof the notion that he has been saved from sin, itis not necessary for him to be actually sinful,but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is thusexalted above everything else, it necessarilyfollows that reason, knowledge and patientinquiry have to be discredited: the road to thetruth becomes a forbidden road.—Hope, in itsstronger forms, is a great deal more powerfulstimulans to life than any sort of realized joy canever be. Man must be sustained in suffering bya hope so high that no conflict with actualitycan dash it—so high, indeed, that no fulfilment

can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond thisworld. (Precisely because of this power thathope has of making the suffering hold out, theGreeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as themost malign of evils; it remained behind at thesource of all evil.)[3]—In order that love may bepossible, God must become a person; in orderthat the lower instincts may take a hand in thematter God must be young. To satisfy the ardorof the woman a beautiful saint must appear onthe scene, and to satisfy that of the men theremust be a virgin. These things are necessary ifChristianity is to assume lordship over a soil onwhich some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult hasalready established a notion as to what a cultought to be. To insist upon chastity greatlystrengthens the vehemence and subjectivity ofthe religious instinct—it makes the cult war-mer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.—Love isthe state in which man sees things most decid-edly as they are not. The force of illusion rea-ches its highest here, and so does the capacity

for sweetening, for transfiguring. When a man isin love he endures more than at any other time;he submits to anything. The problem was todevise a religion which would allow one tolove: by this means the worst that life has tooffer is overcome—it is scarcely even noticed.—So much for the three Christian virtues: faith,hope and charity: I call them the three Christianingenuities.—Buddhism is in too late a stage ofdevelopment, too full of positivism, to beshrewd in any such way.—

[3] That is, in Pandora’s box. 24.

Here I barely touch upon the problem of theorigin of Christianity. The first thing necessaryto its solution is this: that Christianity is to beunderstood only by examining the soil fromwhich it sprung—it is not a reaction againstJewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; itis simply one more step in the awe-inspiring

logic of the Jews. In the words of the Saviour,“salvation is of the Jews.”[4]—The second thingto remember is this: that the psychological typeof the Galilean is still to be recognized, but itwas only in its most degenerate form (which isat once maimed and overladen with foreignfeatures) that it could serve in the manner inwhich it has been used: as a type of the Saviourof mankind.—

[4] John iv, 22.

The Jews are the most remarkable people in thehistory of the world, for when they were con-fronted with the question, to be or not to be,they chose, with perfectly unearthly delibera-tion, to be at any price: this price involved a ra-dical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness,of all reality, of the whole inner world, as wellas of the outer. They put themselves against allthose conditions under which, hitherto, a peo-ple had been able to live, or had even been per-mitted to live; out of themselves they evolved

an idea which stood in direct opposition to na-tural conditions—one by one they distortedreligion, civilization, morality, history and psy-chology until each became a contradiction of itsnatural significance. We meet with the samephenomenon later on, in an incalculably exag-gerated form, but only as a copy: the Christianchurch, put beside the “people of God,” showsa complete lack of any claim to originality. Pre-cisely for this reason the Jews are the most fate-ful people in the history of the world: their in-fluence has so falsified the reasoning of man-kind in this matter that today the Christian cancherish anti-Semitism without realizing that itis no more than the final consequence of Judaism.

In my “Genealogy of Morals” I give the firstpsychological explanation of the concepts un-derlying those two antithetical things, a noblemorality and a ressentiment morality, the secondof which is a mere product of the denial of theformer. The Judaeo-Christian moral system

belongs to the second division, and in everydetail. In order to be able to say Nay to every-thing representing an ascending evolution oflife—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty,to self-approval—the instincts of ressentiment,here become downright genius, had to inventan other world in which the acceptance of lifeappeared as the most evil and abominablething imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews area people gifted with the very strongest vitality,so much so that when they found themselvesfacing impossible conditions of life they chosevoluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instinctswhich make for décadence—not as if masteredby them, but as if detecting in them a power bywhich “the world” could be defied. The Jews arethe very opposite of décadents: they have simplybeen forced into appearing in that guise, andwith a degree of skill approaching the non plusultra of histrionic genius they have managed toput themselves at the head of all décadent mo-

vements (—for example, the Christianity ofPaul—), and so make of them something stron-ger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. Tothe sort of men who reach out for power underJudaism and Christianity,—that is to say, to thepriestly class—décadence is no more than ameans to an end. Men of this sort have a vitalinterest in making mankind sick, and in confus-ing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and“false” in a manner that is not only dangerousto life, but also slanders it.

25.

The history of Israel is invaluable as a typicalhistory of an attempt to denaturize all naturalvalues: I point to five facts which bear this out.Originally, and above all in the time of the mo-narchy, Israel maintained the right attitude ofthings, which is to say, the natural attitude. ItsJahveh was an expression of its consciousnessof power, its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: tohim the Jews looked for victory and salvation

and through him they expected nature to givethem whatever was necessary to their exis-tence—above all, rain. Jahveh is the god of Is-rael, and consequently the god of justice: this isthe logic of every race that has power in itshands and a good conscience in the use of it. Inthe religious ceremonial of the Jews both as-pects of this self-approval stand revealed. Thenation is grateful for the high destiny that hasenabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful forthe benign procession of the seasons, and forthe good fortune attending its herds and itscrops.—This view of things remained an idealfor a long while, even after it had been robbedof validity by tragic blows: anarchy within andthe Assyrian without. But the people still re-tained, as a projection of their highest yearn-ings, that vision of a king who was at once agallant warrior and an upright judge—a visionbest visualized in the typical prophet (i. e., criticand satirist of the moment), Isaiah.—But everyhope remained unfulfilled. The old god no

longer could do what he used to do. He ought tohave been abandoned. But what actually hap-pened? Simply this: the conception of him waschanged—the conception of him was denatur-ized; this was the price that had to be paid forkeeping him.—Jahveh, the god of “justice”—heis in accord with Israel no more, he no longervizualizes the national egoism; he is now a godonly conditionally.... The public notion of thisgod now becomes merely a weapon in thehands of clerical agitators, who interpret allhappiness as a reward and all unhappiness as apunishment for obedience or disobedience tohim, for “sin”: that most fraudulent of all imag-inable interpretations, whereby a “moral orderof the world” is set up, and the fundamentalconcepts, “cause” and “effect,” are stood ontheir heads. Once natural causation has beenswept out of the world by doctrines of rewardand punishment some sort of un-natural causa-tion becomes necessary: and all other varietiesof the denial of nature follow it. A god who

demands—in place of a god who helps, whogives counsel, who is at bottom merely a namefor every happy inspiration of courage and self-reliance.... Morality is no longer a reflection ofthe conditions which make for the sound lifeand development of the people; it is no longerthe primary life-instinct; instead it has becomeabstract and in opposition to life—a fundamen-tal perversion of the fancy, an “evil eye” on allthings. What is Jewish, what is Christian moral-ity? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappi-ness polluted with the idea of “sin”; well-beingrepresented as a danger, as a “temptation”; aphysiological disorder produced by the cankerworm of conscience....

26.

The concept of god falsified; the concept of mo-rality falsified;—but even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israelceased to be of any value: out with it!—Thesepriests accomplished that miracle of falsifica-

tion of which a great part of the Bible is thedocumentary evidence; with a degree of con-tempt unparalleled, and in the face of all tradi-tion and all historical reality, they translatedthe past of their people into religious terms,which is to say, they converted it into an idioticmechanism of salvation, whereby all offencesagainst Jahveh were punished and all devotionto him was rewarded. We would regard this actof historical falsification as something far moreshameful if familiarity with the ecclesiasticalinterpretation of history for thousands of yearshad not blunted our inclinations for upright-ness in historicis. And the philosophers supportthe church: the lie about a “moral order of theworld” runs through the whole of philosophy,even the newest. What is the meaning of a “mo-ral order of the world”? That there is a thingcalled the will of God which, once and for alltime, determines what man ought to do andwhat he ought not to do; that the worth of apeople, or of an individual thereof, is to be

measured by the extent to which they or heobey this will of God; that the destinies of apeople or of an individual are controlled by thiswill of God, which rewards or punishes accord-ing to the degree of obedience manifested.—Inplace of all that pitiable lie reality has this tosay: the priest, a parasitical variety of man whocan exist only at the cost of every sound view oflife, takes the name of God in vain: he calls thatstate of human society in which he himself de-termines the value of all things “the kingdomof God”; he calls the means whereby that stateof affairs is attained “the will of God”; withcold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples,all ages and all individuals by the extent oftheir subservience or opposition to the powerof the priestly order. One observes him at work:under the hand of the Jewish priesthood thegreat age of Israel became an age of decline; theExile, with its long series of misfortunes, wastransformed into a punishment for that greatage—during which priests had not yet come

into existence. Out of the powerful and whollyfree heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned,according to their changing needs, either wret-ched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely“godless.” They reduced every great event tothe idiotic formula: “obedient or disobedient toGod.”—They went a step further: the “will ofGod” (in other words some means necessaryfor preserving the power of the priests) had tobe determined—and to this end they had to havea “revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic liter-ary fraud had to be perpetrated, and “holyscriptures” had to be concocted—and so, withthe utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of pen-ance and much lamentation over the long daysof “sin” now ended, they were duly published.The “will of God,” it appears, had long stoodlike a rock; the trouble was that mankind hadneglected the “holy scriptures”.... But the “willof God” had already been revealed to Moses....What happened? Simply this: the priest hadformulated, once and for all time and with the

strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to bepaid to him, from the largest to the smallest (—not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat,for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks);in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted,what “the will of God” was.... From this timeforward things were so arranged that the priestbecame indispensable everywhere; at all the greatnatural events of life, at birth, at marriage, insickness, at death, not to say at the “sacrifice”(that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put inhis appearance, and proceeded to denaturizeit—in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it.... For thisshould be noted: that every natural habit, everynatural institution (the state, the administrationof justice, marriage, the care of the sick and ofthe poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any valuein itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessnessand even made the reverse of valuable by theparasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the“moral order of the world”). The fact requires a

sanction—a power to grant values becomes nec-essary, and the only way it can create such val-ues is by denying nature.... The priest depreci-ates and desecrates nature: it is only at thisprice that he can exist at all.—Disobedience toGod, which actually means to the priest, to“the law,” now gets the name of “sin”; themeans prescribed for “reconciliation with God”are, of course, precisely the means which bringone most effectively under the thumb of thepriest; he alone can “save”.... Psychologicallyconsidered, “sins” are indispensable to everysociety organized on an ecclesiastical basis;they are the only reliable weapons of power;the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to himthat there be “sinning”.... Prime axiom: “Godforgiveth him that repenteth”—in plain Eng-lish, him that submitteth to the priest.

27.

Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt thaton it everything natural, every natural value,

every reality was opposed by the deepest in-stincts of the ruling class—it grew up as a sortof war to the death upon reality, and as such ithas never been surpassed. The “holy people,”who had adopted priestly values and priestlynames for all things, and who, with a terriblelogical consistency, had rejected everything ofthe earth as “unholy,” “worldly,” “sinful”—thispeople put its instinct into a final for mula thatwas logical to the point of self-annihilation: asChristianity it actually denied even the last formof reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen peo-ple,” Jewish reality itself. The phenomenon is ofthe first order of importance: the small insur-rectionary movement which took the name ofJesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinctredivivus—in other words, it is the priestly in-stinct come to such a pass that it can no longerendure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery ofa state of existence even more fantastic thanany before it, of a vision of life even more unreal

than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organi-zation. Christianity actually denies the church....

I am unable to determine what was the targetof the insurrection said to have been led (whet-her rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not theJewish church—“church” being here used inexactly the same sense that the word has today.It was an insurrection against the “good andjust,” against the “prophets of Israel,” againstthe whole hierarchy of society—not againstcorruption, but against caste, privilege, order,formalism. It was unbelief in “superior men,” aNay flung at everything that priests and theo-logians stood for. But the hierarchy that wascalled into question, if only for an instant, bythis movement was the structure of pileswhich, above everything, was necessary to thesafety of the Jewish people in the midst of the“waters”—it represented their last possibility ofsurvival; it was the final residuum of their inde-pendent political existence; an attack upon it

was an attack upon the most profound nationalinstinct, the most powerful national will to live,that has ever appeared on earth. This saintlyanarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss,the outcasts and “sinners,” the Chandala ofJudaism, to rise in revolt against the establishedorder of things—and in language which, if theGospels are to be credited, would get him sentto Siberia today—this man was certainly a po-litical criminal, at least in so far as it was possi-ble to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a com-munity. This is what brought him to the cross:the proof thereof is to be found in the inscrip-tion that was put upon the cross. He died forhis own sins—there is not the slightest groundfor believing, no matter how often it is asserted,that he died for the sins of others. —

28.

As to whether he himself was conscious of thiscontradiction—whether, in fact, this was theonly contradiction he was cognizant of—that is

quite another question. Here, for the first time, Itouch upon the problem of the psychology of theSaviour.—I confess, to begin with, that there arevery few books which offer me harder readingthan the Gospels. My difficulties are quite dif-ferent from those which enabled the learnedcuriosity of the German mind to achieve one ofits most unforgettable triumphs. It is a longwhile since I, like all other young scholars, en-joyed with all the sapient laboriousness of afastidious philologist the work of the incompa-rable Strauss.[5] At that time I was twentyyears old: now I am too serious for that sort ofthing. What do I care for the contradictions of“tradition”? How can any one call pious leg-ends “traditions”? The histories of saints pre-sent the most dubious variety of literature inexistence; to examine them by the scientificmethod, in the entire ab sence of corroborative do-cuments, seems to me to condemn the wholeinquiry from the start—it is simply learnedidling....

[5] David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of“Das Leben Jesu” (1835-6), a very famous workin its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.

29.

What concerns me is the psychological type ofthe Saviour. This type might be depicted in theGospels, in however mutilated a form andhowever much overladen with extraneous cha-racters—that is, in spite of the Gospels; just asthe figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in hislegends in spite of his legends. It is not a ques-tion of mere truthful evidence as to what hedid, what he said and how he actually died; thequestion is, whether his type is still conceiv-able, whether it has been handed down to us.—All the attempts that I know of to read the his-tory of a “soul” in the Gospels seem to me toreveal only a lamentable psychological levity.M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus,has contributed the two most unseemly notionsto this business of explaining the type of Jesus:

the notion of the genius and that of the hero(“héros”). But if there is anything essentiallyunevangelical, it is surely the concept of thehero. What the Gospels make instinctive isprecisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of alltaste for conflict: the very incapacity for resis-tance is here converted into something moral:(“resist not evil!”—the most profound sentencein the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them),to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness,the inability to be an enemy. What is the mean-ing of “glad tidings”?—The true life, the lifeeternal has been found—it is not merely prom-ised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that liesin love free from all retreats and exclusions,from all keeping of distances. Every one is thechild of God—Jesus claims nothing for himselfalone—as the child of God each man is theequal of every other man.... Imagine makingJesus a hero!—And what a tremendous misun-derstanding appears in the word “genius”! Ourwhole conception of the “spiritual,” the whole

conception of our civilization, could have hadno meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. Inthe strict sense of the physiologist, a quite dif-ferent word ought to be used here.... We allknow that there is a morbid sensibility of thetactile nerves which causes those sufferingfrom it to recoil from every touch, and fromevery effort to grasp a solid object. Brought toits logical conclusion, such a physiological habi-tus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality,a flight into the “intangible,” into the “incom-prehensible”; a distaste for all formulae, for allconceptions of time and space, for everythingestablished—customs, institutions, thechurch—; a feeling of being at home in a worldin which no sort of reality survives, a merely“inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal”world.... “The Kingdom of God is withinyou”....

30.

The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequenceof an extreme susceptibility to pain and irrita-tion—so great that merely to be “touched” be-comes unendurable, for every sensation is tooprofound.

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostil-ity, all bounds and distances in feeling: the conse-quence of an extreme susceptibility to pain andirritation—so great that it senses all resistance,all compulsion to resistance, as unbearable an-guish (—that is to say, as harmful, as prohibitedby the instinct of self-preservation), and re-gards blessedness (joy) as possible only whenit is no longer necessary to offer resistance toanybody or anything, however evil or danger-ous—love, as the only, as the ultimate possibil-ity of life....

These are the two physiological realities uponand out of which the doctrine of salvation hassprung. I call them a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughlyunsalubrious soil. What stands most closelyrelated to them, though with a large admixtureof Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicurean-ism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicu-rus was a typical décadent: I was the first to rec-ognize him.—The fear of pain, even of infi-nitely slight pain—the end of this can be noth-ing save a religion of love....

31.

I have already given my answer to the problem.The prerequisite to it is the assumption that thetype of the Saviour has reached us only in agreatly distorted form. This distortion is veryprobable: there are many reasons why a type ofthat sort should not be handed down in a pureform, complete and free of additions. The mi-lieu in which this strange figure moved must

have left marks upon him, and more must havebeen imprinted by the history, the destiny, ofthe early Christian communities; the latter in-deed, must have embellished the type retro-spectively with characters which can be under-stood only as serving the purposes of war andof propaganda. That strange and sickly worldinto which the Gospels lead us—a world ap-parently out of a Russian novel, in which thescum of society, nervous maladies and “child-ish” idiocy keep a tryst—must, in any case,have coarsened the type: the first disciples, inparticular, must have been forced to translatean existence visible only in symbols and in-comprehensibilities into their own crudity, inorder to understand it at all—in their sight thetype could take on reality only after it had beenrecast in a familiar mould.... The prophet, themessiah, the future judge, the teacher of mor-als, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist—all these merely presented chances to misun-derstand it.... Finally, let us not underrate the

proprium of all great, and especially all sectarianveneration: it tends to erase from the veneratedobjects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies,often so painfully strange—it does not even seethem. It is greatly to be regretted that noDostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of thismost interesting décadent—I mean some onewho would have felt the poignant charm ofsuch a compound of the sublime, the morbidand the childish. In the last analysis, the type,as a type of the décadence, may actually havebeen peculiarly complex and contradictory:such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nev-ertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it,for in that case tradition would have been par-ticularly accurate and objective, whereas wehave reasons for assuming the contrary.Meanwhile, there is a contradiction betweenthe peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a newBuddha on a soil very unlike India’s, and theaggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theolo-

gians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified byRenan’s malice as “le grand maître en ironie.” Imyself haven’t any doubt that the greater partof this venom (and no less of esprit) got itselfinto the concept of the Master only as a result ofthe excited nature of Christian propaganda: weall know the unscrupulousness of sectarianswhen they set out to turn their leader into anapologia for themselves. When the early Chris-tians had need of an adroit, contentious, pug-nacious and maliciously subtle theologian totackle other theologians, they created a “god”that met that need, just as they put into hismouth without hesitation certain ideas thatwere necessary to them but that were utterly atodds with the Gospels—“the second coming,”“the last judgment,” all sorts of expectationsand promises, current at the time.—

32.

I can only repeat that I set myself against allefforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of

the Saviour: the very word impérieux, used byRenan, is alone enough to annul the type. Whatthe “glad tidings” tell us is simply that thereare no more contradictions; the kingdom ofheaven belongs to children; the faith that is voi-ced here is no more an embattled faith—it is athand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sortof recrudescent childishness of the spirit. Thephysiologists, at all events, are familiar withsuch a delayed and incomplete puberty in theliving organism, the result of degeneration. Afaith of this sort is not furious, it does notde nounce, it does not defend itself: it does notcome with “the sword”—it does not realizehow it will one day set man against man. Itdoes not manifest itself either by miracles, or byrewards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it isitself, first and last, its own miracle, its ownreward, its own promise, its own “kingdom ofGod.” This faith does not formulate itself—itsimply lives, and so guards itself against formu-lae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of

educational background gives prominence toconcepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christi-anity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinkingat the last supper belongs to this category—anidea which, like everything else Jewish, hasbeen badly mauled by the church). But let us becareful not to see in all this anything more thansymbolical language, semantics[6] an opportu-nity to speak in parables. It is only on the the-ory that no work is to be taken literally that thisanti-realist is able to speak at all. Set downamong Hindus he would have made use of theconcepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese hewould have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—andin neither case would it have made any differ-ence to him.—With a little freedom in the use ofwords, one might actually call Jesus a “freespirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is estab-lished: the word killeth,[10] whatever is estab-lished killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience,as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his

mind to every sort of word, formula, law, beliefand dogma. He speaks only of inner things:“life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for theinnermost—in his sight everything else, thewhole of reality, all nature, even language, hassignificance only as sign, as allegory.—Here itis of paramount importance to be led into noerror by the temptations lying in Christian, orrather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbol-ism par excellence stands outside all religion, allnotions of worship, all history, all natural sci-ence, all worldly experience, all knowledge, allpolitics, all psychology, all books, all art—his“wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] ofall such things. He has never heard of culture;he doesn’t have to make war on it—he doesn’teven deny it.... The same thing may be said ofthe state, of the whole bourgeoise social order,of labour, of war—he has no ground for deny-ing “the world,” for he knows nothing of theecclesiastical concept of “the world”.... Denial isprecisely the thing that is impossible to him.—

In the same way he lacks argumentative capac-ity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a“truth,” may be established by proofs (—hisproofs are inner “lights,” subjective sensationsof happiness and self-approval, simple “proofsof power”—). Such a doctrine cannot contradict:it doesn’t know that other doctrines exist, or canexist, and is wholly incapable of imagining any-thing opposed to it.... If anything of the sort isever encountered, it laments the “blindness”with sincere sympathy—for it alone has“light”—but it does not offer objections....

[6] The word Semiotik is in the text, but it isprobable that Semantik is what Nietzsche had inmind.

[7] One of the six great systems of Hindu phi-losophy.

[8] The reputed founder of Taoism.

[9] Nietzsche’s name for one accepting his ownphilosophy.

[10] That is, the strict letter of the law—thechief target of Jesus’s early preaching.

[11] A reference to the “pure ignorance” (reineThorheit) of Parsifal.

33.

In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” theconcepts of guilt and punishment are lacking,and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which meansanything that puts a distance between God andman, is abolished—this is precisely the “glad tid-ings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, noris it bound up with conditions: it is conceivedas the only reality—what remains consists me-rely of signs useful in speaking of it.

The results of such a point of view projectthemselves into a new way of life, the special

evangelical way of life. It is not a “belief” thatmarks off the Christian; he is distinguished by adifferent mode of action; he acts differently. Heoffers no resistance, either by word or in hisheart, to those who stand against him. Hedraws no distinction between strangers andcountrymen, Jews and Gentiles (“neighbour,”of course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He isangry with no one, and he despises no one. Heneither appeals to the courts of justice norheeds their mandates (“Swear not at all”).[12]He never under any circumstances divorces hiswife, even when he has proofs of her infidel-ity.—And under all of this is one principle; allof it arises from one instinct.—

[12] Matthew v, 34.

The life of the Saviour was simply a carryingout of this way of life—and so was his death....He no longer needed any formula or ritual inhis relations with God—not even prayer. Hehad rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of

repentance and atonement; he knew that it wasonly by a way of life that one could feel one’sself “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “childof God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayerand forgiveness” is the way to God: only theGospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism inthe concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,”“faith,” “salvation through faith”—the wholeecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied bythe “glad tidings.”

The deep instinct which prompts the Christianhow to live so that he will feel that he is “inheaven” and is “immortal,” despite many rea-sons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: thisis the only psychological reality in “salva-tion.”—A new way of life, not a new faith....

34.

If I understand anything at all about this greatsymbolist, it is this: that he regarded only sub-

jective realities as realities, as “truths” —that hesaw everything else, everything natural, tem-poral, spatial and historical, merely as signs, asmaterials for parables. The concept of “the Sonof God” does not connote a concrete person inhistory, an isolated and definite individual, butan “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol setfree from the concept of time. The same thing istrue, and in the highest sense, of the God of thistypical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,”and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could bemore un-Christian than the crude ecclesiasticalnotions of God as a person, of a “kingdom ofGod” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven”beyond, and of a “son of God” as the secondperson of the Trinity. All this—if I may be for-given the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fistinto the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: adisrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvi-ous enough what is meant by the symbols “Fa-ther” and “Son”—not, of course, to every one—

: the word “Son” expresses entrance into thefeeling that there is a general transformation ofall things (beatitude), and “Father” expressesthat feeling itself—the sensation of eternity andof perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you ofwhat the church has made of this symbolism:has it not set an Amphitryon story[13] at thethreshold of the Christian “faith”? And adogma of “immaculate conception” for goodmeasure?... And thereby it has robbed conception ofits immaculateness—

[13] Amphitryon was the son of Alcaeus, Kingof Tiryns. His wife was Alcmene. During hisabsence she was visited by Zeus, and boreHeracles.

The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of theheart—not something to come “beyond theworld” or “after death.” The whole idea of na-tural death is absent from the Gospels: death isnot a bridge, not a passing; it is absent becauseit belongs to a quite different, a merely appar-

ent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hourof death” is not a Christian idea—“hours,” time,the physical life and its crises have no existencefor the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “king-dom of God” is not something that men waitfor: it had no yesterday and no day after tomor-row, it is not going to come at a “millen-nium”—it is an experience of the heart, it iseverywhere and it is nowhere....

35.

This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he livedand taught—not to “save mankind,” but toshow mankind how to live. It was a way of lifethat he bequeathed to man: his demeanour be-fore the judges, before the officers, before hisaccusers—his demeanour on the cross. He doesnot resist; he does not defend his rights; he ma-kes no effort to ward off the most extreme pen-alty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffersand loves with those, in those, who do himevil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show an-

ger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, tosubmit even to the Evil One—to love him....

36.

—We free spirits—we are the first to have thenecessary prerequisite to understanding whatnineteen centuries have misunderstood—thatinstinct and passion for integrity which makeswar upon the “holy lie” even more than uponall other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably farfrom our benevolent and cautious neutrality,from that discipline of the spirit which alonemakes possible the solution of such strange andsubtle things: what men always sought, withshameless egoism, was their own advantagetherein; they created the church out of denial ofthe Gospels....

Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divin-ity’s hand in the great drama of existencewould find no small indication thereof in thestupendous question-mark that is called Christian-

ity. That mankind should be on its knees beforethe very antithesis of what was the origin, themeaning and the law of the Gospels—that in theconcept of the “church” the very things shouldbe pronounced holy that the “bearer of gladtidings” regards as beneath him and behindhim—it would be impossible to surpass this asa grand example of world-historical irony—

37.

—Our age is proud of its historical sense: how,then, could it delude itself into believing thatthe crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviourconstituted the beginnings of Christianity—andthat everything spiritual and symbolical in itonly came later? Quite to the contrary, the who-le history of Christianity—from the death onthe cross onward—is the history of a progres-sively clumsier misunderstanding of an originalsymbolism. With every extension of Christian-ity among larger and ruder masses, even lesscapable of grasping the principles that gave

birth to it, the need arose to make it more andmore vulgar and barbarous—it absorbed the tea-chings and rites of all the subterranean cults ofthe imperium Romanum, and the absurditiesengendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. Itwas the fate of Christianity that its faith had tobecome as sickly, as low and as vulgar as theneeds were sickly, low and vulgar to which ithad to administer. A sickly barbarism finally liftsitself to power as the church—the church, thatincarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, toall loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit,to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian values—noble values: it is only we, wefree spirits, who have re-established this great-est of all antitheses in values!...

38.

—I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There aredays when I am visited by a feeling blackerthan the blackest melancholy—contempt of man.Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise,

whom I despise: it is the man of today, the manwith whom I am unhappily contemporaneous.The man of today—I am suffocated by his foulbreath!... Toward the past, like all who under-stand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say,generous self-control: with gloomy caution Ipass through whole millenniums of this mad-house of a world, call it “Christianity,” “Chris-tian faith” or the “Christian church,” as youwill—I take care not to hold mankind responsi-ble for its lunacies. But my feeling changes andbreaks out irresistibly the moment I enter mod-ern times, our times. Our age knows better....What was formerly merely sickly now becomesindecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today.And here my disgust begins.—I look about me:not a word survives of what was once called“truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priestpronounce the word. Even a man who makesthe most modest pretensions to integrity mustknow that a theologian, a priest, a pope of to-day not only errs when he speaks, but actually

lies—and that he no longer escapes blame forhis lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.” Thepriest knows, as every one knows, that there isno longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any“Saviour”—that “free will” and the “moral or-der of the world” are lies—: serious reflection,the profound self-conquest of the spirit, allowno man to pretend that he does not know it....All the ideas of the church are now recognizedfor what they are—as the worst counterfeits inexistence, invented to debase nature and allnatural values; the priest himself is seen as heactually is—as the most dangerous form ofparasite, as the venomous spider of creation....We know, our conscience now knows—just whatthe real value of all those sinister inventions ofpriest and church has been and what ends theyhave served, with their debasement of humanityto a state of self-pollution, the very sight ofwhich excites loathing,—the concepts “theother world,” “the last judgment,” “the immor-tality of the soul,” the “soul” itself: they are all

merely so many instruments of torture, systemsof cruelty, whereby the priest becomes masterand remains master.... Every one knows this,but nevertheless things remain as before. What hasbecome of the last trace of decent feeling, ofself-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise anunconventional class of men and thoroughlyanti-Christian in their acts, now call themselvesChristians and go to the communion-table?... Aprince at the head of his armies, magnificent asthe expression of the egoism and arrogance ofhis people—and yet acknowledging, withoutany shame, that he is a Christian!... Whom,then, does Christianity deny? what does it call“the world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to bea patriot; to defend one’s self; to be careful ofone’s honour; to desire one’s own advantage; tobe proud ... every act of everyday, every instinct,every valuation that shows itself in a deed, isnow anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehoodthe modern man must be to call himself never-theless, and without shame, a Christian!—

39.

—I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentichistory of Christianity.—The very word “Chris-tianity” is a misunderstanding—at bottom the-re was only one Christian, and he died on thecross. The “Gospels” died on the cross. What,from that moment onward, was called the“Gospels” was the very reverse of what he hadlived: “bad tidings,” a Dysangelium.[14] It is anerror amounting to nonsensicality to see in“faith,” and particularly in faith in salvationthrough Christ, the distinguishing mark of theChristian: only the Christian way of life, the lifelived by him who died on the cross, is Chris-tian.... To this day such a life is still possible,and for certain men even necessary: genuine,primitive Christianity will remain possible inall ages.... Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoi-dance of acts, a different state of being.... States ofconsciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance,for example, of anything as true—as every psy-

chologist knows, the value of these things isperfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared tothat of the instincts: strictly speaking, the wholeconcept of intellectual causality is false. To re-duce being a Christian, the state of Christianity,to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenome-non of consciousness, is to formulate the nega-tion of Christianity. In fact, there are no Chris-tians. The “Christian”—he who for two thou-sand years has passed as a Christian—is simplya psycho logical self-delusion. Closely exam-ined, it appears that, despite all his “faith,” hehas been ruled only by his instincts—and whatinstincts!—In all ages—for example, in the caseof Luther—“faith” has been no more than acloak, a pretense, a curtain behind which theinstincts have played their game—a shrewdblindness to the domination of certain of the in-stincts.... I have already called “faith” the spe-cially Christian form of shrewdness—peoplealways talk of their “faith” and act according totheir instincts.... In the world of ideas of the

Christian there is nothing that so much as tou-ches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes aninstinctive hatred of reality as the motive power,the only motive power at the bottom of Christi-anity. What follows therefrom? That even here,in psychologicis, there is a radical error, which isto say one conditioning fundamentals, which isto say, one in substance. Take away one ideaand put a genuine reality in its place—and thewhole of Christianity crumbles to nothing-ness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phe-nomena, a religion not only depending on er-rors, but inventive and ingenious only in devis-ing injurious errors, poisonous to life and tothe heart—this remains a spectacle for the gods—for those gods who are also philosophers, andwhom I have encountered, for example, in thecelebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the momentwhen their disgust leaves them (—and us!) theywill be thankful for the spectacle afforded bythe Christians: perhaps because of this curiousexhibition alone the wretched little planet ca-

lled the earth deserves a glance from omnipo-tence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, letus not underestimate the Christians: the Chris-tian, false to the point of innocence, is far abovethe ape—in its application to the Christians awell-known theory of descent becomes a merepiece of politeness....

[14] So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numer-ous coinages, obviously suggested by Evan-gelium, the German for gospel.

40.

—The fate of the Gospels was decided bydeath—it hung on the “cross.”... It was onlydeath, that unexpected and shameful death; itwas only the cross, which was usually reservedfor the canaille only—it was only this appallingparadox which brought the disciples face toface with the real riddle: “Who was it? what wasit?”—The feeling of dis may, of profound af-front and injury; the suspicion that such a death

might involve a refutation of their cause; theterrible question, “Why just in this way?”—thisstate of mind is only too easy to understand.Here everything must be accounted for as nec-essary; everything must have a meaning, a rea-son, the highest sort of reason; the love of adisciple excludes all chance. Only then did thechasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death?who was his natural enemy?”—this questionflashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: domi-nant Judaism, its ruling class. From that mo-ment, one found one’s self in revolt against theestablished order, and began to understandJesus as in revolt against the established order. Un-til then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doingelement in his character had been lacking; whatis more, he had appeared to present its oppo-site. Obviously, the little community had notunderstood what was precisely the most im-portant thing of all: the example offered by thisway of dying, the freedom from and superior-ity to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain in-

dication of how little he was understood at all!All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by hisdeath, in itself, was to offer the strongest pos-sible proof, or example, of his teachings in themost public manner.... But his disciples werevery far from forgiving his death—though tohave done so would have accorded with theGospels in the highest degree; and neither werethey prepared to offer themselves, with gentleand serene calmness of heart, for a similardeath.... On the contrary, it was precisely themost unevangelical of feelings, revenge, thatnow possessed them. It seemed impossible thatthe cause should perish with his death: “rec-ompense” and “judgment” became necessary(—yet what could be less evangelical than “rec-ompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting injudgment”!). Once more the popular belief inthe coming of a messiah appeared in the fore-ground; attention was rivetted upon an histori-cal moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come,with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all

this there was a wholesale misunderstanding:imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, asa mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact,the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization ofthis “kingdom of God.” It was only now that allthe familiar contempt for and bitterness againstPharisees and theologians began to appear inthe character of the Master—he was therebyturned into a Pharisee and theologian himself!On the other hand, the savage veneration ofthese completely unbalanced souls could nolonger endure the Gospel doctrine, taught byJesus, of the equal right of all men to be chil-dren of God: their revenge took the form ofelevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion, andthus separating him from themselves: just as, inearlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselvesupon their enemies, separated themselves fromtheir God, and placed him on a great height.The One God and the Only Son of God: bothwere products of ressentiment....

41.

—And from that time onward an absurd prob-lem offered itself: “how could God allow it!” Towhich the deranged reason of the little com-munity formulated an answer that was terrify-ing in its absurdity: God gave his son as a sacri-fice for the forgiveness of sins. At once therewas an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, andin its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sac-rifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty!What appalling paganism!—Jesus him self haddone away with the very concept of “guilt,” hedenied that there was any gulf fixed betweenGod and man; he lived this unity between Godand man, and that was precisely his “glad tid-ings”.... And not as a mere privilege!—Fromthis time forward the type of the Saviour wascorrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judg-ment and of the second coming, the doctrine ofdeath as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrec-tion, by means of which the entire concept of

“blessedness,” the whole and only reality of thegospels, is juggled away—in favour of a state ofexistence after death!... St. Paul, with that rab-binical impudence which shows itself in all hisdoings, gave a logical quality to that concep-tion, that indecent conception, in this way: “IfChrist did not rise from the dead, then all ourfaith is in vain!”—And at once there sprangfrom the Gospels the most contemptible of allunfulfillable promises, the shameless doctrine ofpersonal immortality.... Paul even preached itas a reward....

42.

One now begins to see just what it was that ca-me to an end with the death on the cross: anew and thoroughly original effort to found aBuddhistic peace movement, and so establishhappiness on earth—real, not merely promised.For this remains—as I have already pointedout—the essential difference between the tworeligions of décadence: Buddhism promises not-

hing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promiseseverything, but fulfils nothing.—Hard upon theheels of the “glad tidings” came the worst ima-ginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated thevery opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; herepresents the genius for hatred, the vision ofhatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, in-deed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to ha-tred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him tohis own cross. The life, the example, the teach-ing, the death of Christ, the meaning and thelaw of the whole gospels—nothing was left ofall this after that counterfeiter in hatred hadreduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surelynot historical truth!... Once more the priestlyinstinct of the Jew perpetrated the same oldmaster crime against history—he simply struckout the yesterday and the day before yesterdayof Christianity, and invented his own history ofChristian beginnings. Going further, he treatedthe history of Israel to another falsification, sothat it became a mere prologue to his achieve-

ment: all the prophets, it now appeared, hadreferred to his “Saviour.”... Later on the churcheven falsified the history of man in order tomake it a prologue to Christianity.... The figureof the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, hisdeath, the meaning of his death, even the con-sequences of his death—nothing remained un-touched, nothing remained in even remote con-tact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centreof gravity of that whole life to a place behindthis existence—in the lie of the “risen” Jesus. Atbottom, he had no use for the life of the Sav-iour—what he needed was the death on thecross, and something more. To see anythinghonest in such a man as Paul, whose home wasat the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, whenhe converts an hallucination into a proof of theresurrection of the Saviour, or even to believehis tale that he suffered from this hallucinationhimself—this would be a genuine niaiserie in apsychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore healso willed the means.... What he himself didn’t

believe was swallowed readily enough by theidiots among whom he spread his teaching.—What he wanted was power; in Paul the priestonce more reached out for power—he had useonly for such concepts, teachings and symbolsas served the purpose of tyrannizing over themasses and organizing mobs. What was theonly part of Christianity that Mohammed bor-rowed later on? Paul’s invention, his device forestablishing priestly tyranny and organizingthe mob: the belief in the immortality of thesoul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment”....

43.

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, notin life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothing-ness—then one has taken away its centre ofgravity altogether. The vast lie of personal im-mortality destroys all reason, all natural in-stinct—henceforth, everything in the instinctsthat is beneficial, that fosters life and that safe-guards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to

live that life no longer has any meaning: this isnow the “meaning” of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent andforefathers? Why labour together, trust oneanother, or concern one’s self about the com-mon welfare, and try to serve it?... Merely somany “temptations,” so many strayings fromthe “straight path.”—“One thing only is neces-sary”.... That every man, because he has an“immortal soul,” is as good as every other man;that in an infinite universe of things the “salva-tion” of every individual may lay claim to eter-nal importance; that insignificant bigots and thethree-fourths insane may assume that the lawsof nature are constantly suspended in their be-half—it is impossible to lavish too much con-tempt upon such a magnification of every sortof selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yetChristianity has to thank precisely this miser-able flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dis-satisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole

refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side.The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English:“the world revolves around me.”... The poison-ous doctrine, “equal rights for all,” has beenpropagated as a Christian principle: out of thesecret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Chris-tianity has waged a deadly war upon all feel-ings of reverence and distance between manand man, which is to say, upon the first prereq-uisite to every step upward, to every develop-ment of civilization—out of the ressentiment ofthe masses it has forged its chief weaponsagainst us, against everything noble, joyous andhigh-spirited on earth, against our happinesson earth.... To allow “immortality” to everyPeter and Paul was the greatest, the most vi-cious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpe-trated.—And let us not underestimate the fatalinfluence that Christianity has had, even uponpolitics! Nowadays no one has courage anymore for special rights, for the right of domin-ion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself

and his equals—for the pathos of distance.... Ourpolitics is sick with this lack of courage!—Thearistocratic attitude of mind has been under-mined by the lie of the equality of souls; and ifbelief in the “privileges of the majority” makesand will continue to make revolutions—it isChristianity, let us not doubt, and Christianvaluations, which convert every revolution intoa carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is arevolt of all creatures that creep on the groundagainst everything that is lofty: the gospel of the“lowly” lowers....

44.

—The gospels are invaluable as evidence of thecorruption that was already persistent withinthe primitive community. That which Paul,with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later devel-oped to a conclusion was at bottom merely aprocess of decay that had begun with the deathof the Saviour.—These gospels cannot be readtoo carefully; difficulties lurk behind every

word. I confess—I hope it will not be heldagainst me—that it is precisely for this reasonthat they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist—as the opposite of all merely naïve corruption, asrefinement par excellence, as an artistic triumphin psychological corruption. The gospels, infact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not tobe compared to them. Here we are among Jews:this is the first thing to be borne in mind if weare not to lose the thread of the matter. Thispositive genius for conjuring up a delusion ofpersonal “holiness” unmatched anywhere else,either in books or by men; this elevation offraud in word and attitude to the level of anart—all this is not an accident due to the chancetalents of an individual, or to any violation ofnature. The thing responsible is race. The who-le of Judaism appears in Christianity as the artof concocting holy lies, and there, after manycenturies of earnest Jewish training and hardpractice of Jewish technic, the business comesto the stage of mastery. The Christian, that ul-

tima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again—heis threefold the Jew.... The underlying will tomake use only of such concepts, symbols andattitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinc-tive repudiation of every other mode ofthought, and every other method of estimatingvalues and utilities—this is not only tradition, itis inheritance: only as an inheritance is it able tooperate with the force of nature. The whole ofmankind, even the best minds of the best ages(with one exception, perhaps hardly human—),have permitted themselves to be deceived. Thegospels have been read as a book of innocence ...surely no small indication of the high skill withwhich the trick has been done.—Of course, ifwe could actually see these astounding bigotsand bogus saints, even if only for an instant, thefarce would come to an end,—and it is pre-cisely because I cannot read a word of theirswithout seeing their attitudinizing that I havemade an end of them.... I simply cannot endurethe way they have of rolling up their eyes.—For

the majority, happily enough, books are mereliterature.—Let us not be led astray: they say“judge not,” and yet they condemn to hellwhoever stands in their way. In letting God sitin judgment they judge themselves; in glorify-ing God they glorify themselves; in demandingthat every one show the virtues which theythemselves happen to be capable of—still more,which they must have in order to remain ontop—they assume the grand air of men strug-gling for virtue, of men engaging in a war thatvirtue may prevail. “We live, we die, we sacri-fice ourselves for the good” (—“the truth,” “thelight,” “the kingdom of God”): in point of fact,they simply do what they cannot help doing.Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide incorners, to slink along in the shadows, theyconvert their necessity into a duty: it is ongrounds of duty that they account for theirlives of humility, and that humility becomesmerely one more proof of their piety.... Ah, thathumble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! “Vir-

tue itself shall bear witness for us.”... One mayread the gospels as books of moral seduction:these petty folks fasten themselves to moral-ity—they know the uses of morality! Moralityis the best of all devices for leading mankind bythe nose!—The fact is that the conscious conceitof the chosen here disguises itself as modesty: itis in this way that they, the “community,” the“good and just,” range themselves, once andfor always, on one side, the side of “thetruth”—and the rest of mankind, “the world,”on the other.... In that we observe the most fatalsort of megalomania that the earth has everseen: little abortions of bigots and liars began toclaim exclusive rights in the concepts of “God,”“the truth,” “the light,” “the spirit,” “love,”“wisdom” and “life,” as if these things weresynonyms of themselves and thereby theysought to fence themselves off from the“world”; little super-Jews, ripe for some sort ofmadhouse, turned values upside down in orderto meet their notions, just as if the Christian

were the meaning, the salt, the standard andeven the last judgment of all the rest.... Thewhole disaster was only made possible by thefact that there already existed in the world asimilar megalomania, allied to this one in race,to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawnbetween Jews and Judaeo-Christians, the latterhad no choice but to employ the self-preservative measures that the Jewish instincthad devised, even against the Jews themselves,whereas the Jews had employed them onlyagainst non-Jews. The Christian is simply a Jewof the “reformed” confession.—

45.

—I offer a few examples of the sort of thingthese petty people have got into their heads—what they have put into the mouth of the Master:the unalloyed creed of “beautiful souls.”—

“And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hearyou, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust

under your feet for a testimony against them.Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerablefor Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judg-ment, than for that city” (Mark vi, 11)—Howevangelical!...

“And whosoever shall offend one of these littleones that believe in me, it is better for him thata millstone were hanged about his neck, and hewere cast into the sea” (Mark ix, 42).—Howevangelical!...

“And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it isbetter for thee to enter into the kingdom of Godwith one eye, than having two eyes to be castinto hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, andthe fire is not quenched.” (Mark ix, 47.[15])—Itis not exactly the eye that is meant....

[15] To which, without mentioning it, Nietzscheadds verse 48.

“Verily I say unto you, That there be some ofthem that stand here, which shall not taste ofdeath, till they have seen the kingdom of Godcome with power.” (Mark ix, 1.)—Well lied,lion![16]....

[16] A paraphrase of Demetrius’ “Well roar’d,Lion!” in act v, scene 1 of “A MidsummerNight’s Dream.” The lion, of course, is the fa-miliar Christian symbol for Mark.

“Whosoever will come after me, let him denyhimself, and take up his cross, and follow me.For...” (Note of a psychologist. Christian moralityis refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,—this makes it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.—

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. With whatmeasure ye mete, it shall be measured to youagain.” (Matthew vii, 1.[17])—What a notion ofjustice, of a “just” judge!...

[17] Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.

“For if ye love them which love you, what re-ward have ye? do not even the publicans thesame? And if ye salute your brethren only,what do ye more than others? do not even thepublicans so?” (Matthew v, 46.[18])—Principleof “Christian love”: it insists upon being wellpaid in the end....

[18] The quotation also includes verse 47.

“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, nei-ther will your Father forgive your trespasses.”(Matthew vi, 15.)—Very compromising for thesaid “father.”...

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and hisrighteousness; and all these things shall be ad-ded unto you.” (Matthew vi, 33.)—All thesethings: namely, food, clothing, all the necessi-ties of life. An error, to put it mildly.... A bitbefore this God appears as a tailor, at least incertain cases....

“Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for,behold, your reward is great in heaven: for inthe like manner did their fathers unto the prop-hets.” (Luke vi, 23.)—Impudent rabble! It com-pares itself to the prophets....

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God,and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? Ifany man defile the temple of God, him shall Goddestroy; for the temple of God is holy, whichtemple ye are.” (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.[19])—For that sort of thing one cannot have enoughcontempt....

[19] And 17.

“Do ye not know that the saints shall judge theworld? and if the world shall be judged by you,are ye unworthy to judge the smallest mat-ters?” (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)—Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a luna-tic.... This frightful impostor then proceeds:

“Know ye not that we shall judge angels? howmuch more things that pertain to this life?”...

“Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of thisworld? For after that in the wisdom of God theworld by wisdom knew not God, it pleasedGod by the foolishness of preaching to savethem that believe.... Not many wise men afterthe flesh, not men mighty, not many noble arecalled: But God hath chosen the foolish things ofthe world to confound the wise; and God hathchosen the weak things of the world to con-found the things which are mighty; And basethings of the world, and things which are de-spised, hath God chosen, yea, and things whichare not, to bring to nought things that are: Thatno flesh should glory in his presence.” (Paul,1 Corinthians i, 20ff.[20])—In order to under-stand this passage, a first-rate example of thepsychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my“Genealogy of Morals”: there, for the first time,

the antagonism between a noble morality and amorality born of ressentiment and impotentvengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatestof all apostles of revenge....

[20] Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.46.

—What follows, then? That one had better put ongloves before reading the New Testament. Thepresence of so much filth makes it very advis-able. One would as little choose “early Chris-tians” for companions as Polish Jews: not thatone need seek out an objection to them.... Nei-ther has a pleasant smell.—I have searched theNew Testament in vain for a single sympathetictouch; nothing is there that is free, kindly,open-hearted or upright. In it humanity doesnot even make the first step upward—the in-stinct for cleanliness is lacking.... Only evil in-stincts are there, and there is not even the cour-age of these evil instincts. It is all coward ice; it

is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception.Every other book becomes clean, once one hasread the New Testament: for example, immedi-ately after reading Paul I took up with delightthat most charming and wanton of scoffers,Petronius, of whom one may say what Dome-nico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to theDuke of Parma: “è tutto festo”—immortallyhealthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... The-se petty bigots make a capital miscalculation.They attack, but everything they attack is the-reby distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an“early Christian” is surely not befouled.... Onthe contrary, it is an honour to have an “earlyChristian” as an opponent. One cannot read theNew Testament without acquired admirationfor whatever it abuses—not to speak of the“wisdom of this world,” which an impudentwind-bag tries to dispose of “by the foolishnessof preaching.”... Even the scribes and phariseesare benefitted by such opposition: they mustcertainly have been worth something to have

been hated in such an indecent manner. Hy-pocrisy—as if this were a charge that the “earlyChristians” dared to make!—After all, they werethe privileged, and that was enough: the hatredof the Chandala needed no other excuse. The“early Christian”—and also, I fear, the “lastChristian,” whom I may perhaps live to see—is arebel against all privilege by profound in-stinct—he lives and makes war for ever for“equal rights.”... Strictly speaking, he has noalternative. When a man proposes to represent,in his own person, the “chosen of God”—or tobe a “temple of God,” or a “judge of the an-gels”—then every other criterion, whether ba-sed upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manli-ness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom ofthe heart, becomes simply “worldly”—evil initself.... Moral: every word that comes from thelips of an “early Christian” is a lie, and his eve-ry act is instinctively dishonest—all his values,all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates,whatever he hates, has real value.... The Chris-

tian, and particularly the Christian priest, isthus a criterion of values.

—Must I add that, in the whole New Testa-ment, there appears but a solitary figure worthyof honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To re-gard a Jewish imbroglio seriously—that wasquite beyond him. One Jew more or less—whatdid it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman,before whom the word “truth” was shame-lessly mishandled, enriched the New Testa-ment with the only saying that has any value—and that is at once its criticism and its destruc-tion: “What is truth?...”

47.

—The thing that sets us apart is not that we areunable to find God, either in history, or in na-ture, or behind nature—but that we regardwhat has been honoured as God, not as “di-vine,” but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious;not as a mere error, but as a crime against life....

We deny that God is God.... If any one were toshow us this Christian God, we’d be still lessinclined to believe in him.—In a formula: deus,qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.—Such a relig-ion as Christianity, which does not touch real-ity at a single point and which goes to piecesthe moment reality asserts its rights at anypoint, must be inevitably the deadly enemy ofthe “wisdom of this world,” which is to say, ofscience—and it will give the name of good towhatever means serve to poison, calumniateand cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucid-ity and strictness in matters of intellectual con-science, and all noble coolness and freedom ofthe mind. “Faith,” as an imperative, vetoes sci-ence—in praxi, lying at any price.... Paul wellknew that lying—that “faith”—was necessary;later on the church borrowed the fact fromPaul.—The God that Paul invented for himself,a God who “reduced to absurdity” “the wis-dom of this world” (especially the two greatenemies of superstition, philology and medi-

cine), is in truth only an indication of Paul’sresolute determination to accomplish that verything himself: to give one’s own will the nameof God, thora—that is essentially Jewish. Paulwants to dispose of the “wisdom of this world”:his enemies are the good philologians and phy-sicians of the Alexandrine school—on them hemakes his war. As a matter of fact no man canbe a philologian or a physician without beingalso Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian aman sees behind the “holy books,” and as aphysician he sees behind the physiological de-generation of the typical Christian. The physi-cian says “incurable”; the philologian says“fraud.”...

48.

—Has any one ever clearly understood the ce-lebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—ofGod’s mortal terror of science?... No one, in fact,has understood it. This priest-book par excel-lence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner

difficulty of the priest: he faces only one greatdanger; ergo, “God” faces only one great dan-ger.—

The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his gar-den: he is bored and trying to kill time. Againstboredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] Whatdoes he do? He creates man—man is entertain-ing.... But then he notices that man is also bo-red. God’s pity for the only form of distress thatinvades all paradises knows no bounds: so heforthwith creates other animals. God’s first mis-take: to man these other animals were not en-tertaining—he sought dominion over them; hedid not want to be an “animal” himself.—SoGod created woman. In the act he brought bo-redom to an end—and also many other things!Woman was the second mistake of God.—“Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”—everypriest knows that; “from woman comes everyevil in the world”—every priest knows that,

too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.... Itwas through woman that man learned to tasteof the tree of knowledge.—What happened?The old God was seized by mortal terror. Manhimself had been his greatest blunder; he hadcreated a rival to himself; science makes mengodlike—it is all up with priests and gods whenman becomes scientific!—Moral: science is theforbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science isthe first of sins, the germ of all sins, the originalsin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shallnot know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’smortal terror, however, did not hinder himfrom being shrewd. How is one to protect one’sself against science? For a long while this wasthe capital problem. Answer: Out of paradisewith man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man mustnot think.—And so the priest invents distress,death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sortsof misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sick-ness—nothing but devices for making war on

science! The troubles of man don’t allow him tothink.... Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edi-fice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invad-ing heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to bedone?—The old God invents war; he separatesthe peoples; he makes men destroy one another(—the priests have always had need of war....).War—among other things, a great disturber ofscience!—Incredible! Knowledge, deliverancefrom the priests, prospers in spite of war.—Sothe old God comes to his final resolution: “Manhas become scientific—there is no help for it: hemust be drowned!”...

[21] A paraphrase of Schiller’s “Against stupid-ity even gods struggle in vain.”

49.

—I have been understood. At the opening ofthe Bible there is the whole psychology of thepriest.—The priest knows of only one greatdanger: that is science—the sound comprehen-

sion of cause and effect. But science flourishes,on the whole, only under favourable condi-tions—a man must have time, he must have anoverflowing intellect, in order to “know.”... “The-refore, man must be made unhappy,”—this hasbeen, in all ages, the logic of the priest.—It iseasy to see just what, by this logic, was the firstthing to come into the world:—“sin.”... Theconcept of guilt and punishment, the whole“moral order of the world,” was set up againstscience—against the deliverance of man frompriests.... Man must not look outward; he mustlook inward. He must not look at thingsshrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them;he must not look at all; he must suffer.... And hemust suffer so much that he is always in needof the priest.—Away with physicians! What isneeded is a Saviour.—The concept of guilt andpunishment, including the doctrines of “grace,”of “salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies throughand through, and absolutely without psycho-logical reality—were devised to destroy man’s

sense of causality: they are an attack upon theconcept of cause and effect!—And not an attackwith the fist, with the knife, with honesty inhate and love! On the contrary, one inspired bythe most cowardly, the most crafty, the mostignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! Anattack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, sub-terranean leeches!... When the natural conse-quences of an act are no longer “natural,” butare regarded as produced by the ghostly crea-tions of superstition—by “God,” by “spirits,”by “souls”—and reckoned as merely “moral”consequences, as rewards, as punishments, ashints, as lessons, then the whole ground-workof knowledge is destroyed—then the greatest ofcrimes against humanity has been perpetrated.—Irepeat that sin, man’s self-desecration par excel-lence, was invented in order to make science,culture, and every elevation and ennobling ofman impossible; the priest rules through theinvention of sin.—

50.

—In this place I can’t permit myself to omit apsychology of “belief,” of the “believer,” for thespecial benefit of “believers.” If there remainany today who do not yet know how indecent itis to be “believing”—or how much a sign ofdécadence, of a broken will to live—then theywill know it well enough tomorrow. My voicereaches even the deaf.—It appears, unless Ihave been incorrectly informed, that there pre-vails among Christians a sort of criterion oftruth that is called “proof by power.” “Faithmakes blessed: therefore it is true.”—It might beobjected right here that blessedness is not de-m onstrated, it is merely promised: it hangsupon “faith” as a condition—one shall be bles-sed because one believes.... But what of the thingthat the priest promises to the believer, thewholly transcendental “beyond”—how is thatto be demonstrated?—The “proof by power,”thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom

than a belief that the effects which faith prom-ises will not fail to appear. In a formula: “I be-lieve that faith makes for blessedness—therefore,it is true.”... But this is as far as we may go. This“therefore” would be absurdum itself as a crite-rion of truth.—But let us admit, for the sake ofpoliteness, that blessedness by faith may bedemonstrated (—not merely hoped for, and notmerely promised by the suspicious lips of apriest): even so, could blessedness—in a techni-cal term, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth? Solittle is this true that it is almost a proof againsttruth when sensations of pleasure influence theanswer to the question “What is true?” or, at allevents, it is enough to make that “truth” highlysuspicious. The proof by “pleasure” is a proofof “pleasure”—nothing more; why in the worldshould it be assumed that true judgments givemore pleasure than false ones, and that, in con-formity to some pre-established harmony, theynecessarily bring agreeable feelings in theirtrain?—The experience of all disciplined and

profound minds teaches the contrary. Man hashad to fight for every atom of the truth, and hashad to pay for it almost everything that theheart, that human love, that human trust clingto. Greatness of soul is needed for this business:the service of truth is the hardest of all ser-vices.—What, then, is the meaning of integrityin things intellectual? It means that a man mustbe severe with his own heart, that he mustscorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makesevery Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!—Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies....

51.

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances,may work for blessedness, but that this bless-edness produced by an idée fixe by no meansmakes the idea itself true, and the fact that faithactually moves no mountains, but instead raisesthem up where there were none before: all this ismade sufficiently clear by a walk through alunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his

instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness isnot sickness and lunatic asylums not lunaticasylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary,just as the Greek spirit had need of a supera-bundance of health—the actual ulterior pur-pose of the whole system of salvation of thechurch is to make people ill. And the churchitself—doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asy-lum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth asa madhouse?—The sort of religious man thatthe church wants is a typical décadent; the mo-ment at which a religious crisis dominates apeople is always marked by epidemics of nerv-ous disorder; the “inner world” of the religiousman is so much like the “inner world” of theoverstrung and exhausted that it is difficult todistinguish between them; the “highest” statesof mind, held up before mankind by Christian-ity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoidin form—the church has granted the name ofholy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds inmajorem dei honorem.... Once I ventured to des-

ignate the whole Christian system of train-ing[22] in penance and salvation (now beststudied in England) as a method of producing afolie circulaire upon a soil already prepared forit, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy.Not every one may be a Christian: one is not“converted” to Christianity—one must first besick enough for it.... We others, who have thecourage for health and likewise for contempt,—we may well despise a religion that teachesmisunderstanding of the body! that refuses torid itself of the superstition about the soul! thatmakes a “virtue” of insufficient nourishment!that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil,temptation! that persuades itself that it is pos-sible to carry about a “perfect soul” in a ca-daver of a body, and that, to this end, had todevise for itself a new concept of “perfection,”a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of exis-tence, so-called “holiness”—a holiness that isitself merely a series of symptoms of an impov-erished, enervated and incurably disordered

body!... The Christian movement, as a Euro-pean movement, was from the start no morethan a general uprising of all sorts of outcastand refuse elements (—who now, under coverof Christianity, aspire to power). It does notrepresent the decay of a race; it represents, onthe contrary, a conglomeration of décadenceproducts from all directions, crowding togetherand seeking one another out. It was not, as hasbeen thought, the corruption of antiquity, ofnoble antiquity, which made Christianity pos-sible; one cannot too sharply challenge thelearned imbecility which today maintains thattheory. At the time when the sick and rottenChandala classes in the whole imperium wereChristianized, the contrary type, the nobility,reached its finest and ripest development. Themajority became master; democracy, with itsChristian instincts, triumphed.... Christianitywas not “national,” it was not based on race—itappealed to all the varieties of men disinheritedby life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity

has the rancour of the sick at its very core—theinstinct against the healthy, against health. Eve-rything that is well-constituted, proud, gallantand, above all, beautiful gives offence to its earsand eyes. Again I remind you of Paul’s price-less saying: “And God hath chosen the weakthings of the world, the foolish things of theworld, the base things of the world, and thingswhich are despised”:[23] this was the formula; inhoc signo the décadence triumphed.—God on thecross—is man always to miss the frightful innersignificance of this symbol?—Everything thatsuffers, everything that hangs on the cross, isdivine.... We all hang on the cross, consequentlywe are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christi-anity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude ofmind was destroyed by it—Christianity re-mains to this day the greatest misfortune ofhumanity.—

[22] The word training is in English in the text.

[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.

52.

Christianity also stands in opposition to all in-tellectual well-being,—sick reasoning is the onlysort that it can use as Christian reasoning; ittakes the side of everything that is idiotic; itpronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon thesuperbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness isinherent in Christianity, it follows that the typi-cally Christian state of “faith” must be a form ofsickness too, and that all straight, straightfor-ward and scientific paths to knowledge must bebanned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubtis thus a sin from the start.... The complete lackof psychological cleanliness in the priest—revealed by a glance at him—is a phenomenonresulting from décadence,—one may observe inhysterical women and in rachitic children howregularly the falsification of instincts, delight inlying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacityfor looking straight and walking straight aresymptoms of décadence. “Faith” means the will

to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, thepriest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick:his instinct demands that the truth shall never beallowed its rights on any point. “Whatever ma-kes for illness is good; whatever issues fromabundance, from superabundance, from power,is evil”: so argues the believer. The impulse tolie—it is by this that I recognize every foreor-dained theologian.—Another characteristic ofthe theologian is his unfitness for philology. WhatI here mean by philology is, in a general sense,the art of reading with profit—the capacity forabsorbing facts without interpreting them false-ly, and without losing caution, patience andsubtlety in the effort to understand them. Phi-lology as ephexis[24] in interpretation: whetherone be dealing with books, with newspaperreports, with the most fateful events or withweather statistics—not to mention the “salva-tion of the soul.”... The way in which a theolo-gian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready toexplain, say, a “passage of Scripture,” or an

experience, or a victory by the national army,by turning upon it the high illumination of thePsalms of David, is always so daring that it isenough to make a philologian run up a wall.But what shall he do when pietists and othersuch cows from Suabia[25] use the “finger ofGod” to convert their miserably commonplaceand huggermugger existence into a miracle of“grace,” a “providence” and an “experience ofsalvation”? The most modest exercise of theintellect, not to say of decency, should certainlybe enough to convince these interpreters of theperfect childishness and unworthiness of such amisuse of the divine digital dexterity. Howeversmall our piety, if we ever encountered a godwho always cured us of a cold in the head atjust the right time, or got us into our carriage atthe very instant heavy rain began to fall, hewould seem so absurd a god that he’d have tobe abolished even if he existed. God as a do-mestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an alma-nac-man—at bottom, he is a mere name for the

stupidest sort of chance.... “DivineProv idence,” which every third man in “edu-cated Germany” still believes in, is so strong anargument against God that it would be impos-sible to think of a stronger. And in any case it isan argument against Germans!...

[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among theGreeks scepticism was also occasionally calledephecticism.

[25] A reference to the University of Tübingenand its famous school of Biblical criticism. Theleader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one ofthe men greatly influenced by it was Nietzs-che’s pet abomination, David F. Strauss, him-self a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28.

53.

—It is so little true that martyrs offer any sup-port to the truth of a cause that I am inclined todeny that any martyr has ever had anything to

do with the truth at all. In the very tone inwhich a martyr flings what he fancies to be trueat the head of the world there appears so low agrade of intellectual honesty and such insensi-bility to the problem of “truth,” that it is nevernecessary to refute him. Truth is not somethingthat one man has and another man has not: atbest, only peasants, or peasant-apostles likeLuther, can think of truth in any such way. Onemay rest assured that the greater the degree ofa man’s intellectual conscience the greater willbe his modesty, his discretion, on this point. Toknow in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy,to know anything further.... “Truth,” as theword is understood by every prophet, everysectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialistand every churchman, is simply a completeproof that not even a beginning has been madein the intellectual discipline and self-controlthat are necessary to the unearthing of even thesmallest truth.—The deaths of the martyrs, itmay be said in passing, have been misfortunes

of history: they have misled.... The conclusionthat all idiots, women and plebeians come to,that there must be something in a cause forwhich any one goes to his death (or which, asunder primitive Christianity, sets off epidemicsof death-seeking)—this conclusion has been anunspeakable drag upon the testing of facts,upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investiga-tion. The martyrs have damaged the truth....Even to this day the crude fact of persecution isenough to give an honourable name to the mostempty sort of sectarianism.—But why? Is theworth of a cause altered by the fact that someone had laid down his life for it?—An error thatbecomes honourable is simply an error that hasacquired one seductive charm the more: do yousuppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shallgive you the chance to be martyred for yourlies?—One best disposes of a cause by respect-fully putting it on ice—that is also the best wayto dispose of theologians.... This was preciselythe world- historical stupidity of all the perse-

cutors: that they gave the appearance of honourto the cause they opposed—that they made it apresent of the fascination of martyrdom....Women are still on their knees before an errorbecause they have been told that some one diedon the cross for it. Is the cross, then, an argu-ment?—But about all these things there is one,and one only, who has said what has been nee-ded for thousands of years—Zarathustra.

They made signs in blood along the way thatthey went, and their folly taught them that thetruth is proved by blood.

But blood is the worst of all testimonies to thetruth; blood poisoneth even the purest teachingand turneth it into madness and hatred in theheart.

And when one goeth through fire for his teach-ing—what doth that prove? Verily, it is morewhen one’s teaching cometh out of one’s ownburning![26]

[26] The quotations are from “Also sprach Za-rathustra” ii, 24: “Of Priests.”

54.

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellectsare sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. Thestrength, the freedom which proceed from intel-lectual power, from a superabundance of intel-lectual power, manifest themselves asscep ticism. Men of fixed convictions do notcount when it comes to determining what isfundamental in values and lack of values. Menof convictions are prisoners. They do not see farenough, they do not see what is below them:whereas a man who would talk to any purposeabout value and non-value must be able to seefive hundred convictions beneath him—andbehind him.... A mind that aspires to greatthings, and that wills the means thereto, is nec-essarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort ofconviction belongs to strength, and to an inde-pendent point of view.... That grand passion

which is at once the foundation and the powerof a sceptic’s existence, and is both more en-lightened and more despotic than he is himself,drafts the whole of his intellect into its service;it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him cour-age to employ unholy means; under certaincircumstances it does not begrudge him evenconvictions. Conviction as a means: one mayachieve a good deal by means of a conviction.A grand passion makes use of and uses upconvictions; it does not yield to them—it knowsitself to be sovereign.—On the contrary, theneed of faith, of something unconditioned byyea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowedthe word, is a need of weakness. The man offaith, the “believer” of any sort, is necessarily adependent man—such a man cannot posit him-self as a goal, nor can he find goals within him-self. The “believer” does not belong to himself;he can only be a means to an end; he must beused up; he needs some one to use him up. Hisinstinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of

self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace itby everything: his prudence, his experience, hisvanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evi-dence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement....When one reflects how necessary it is to thegreat majority that there be regulations to re-strain them from without and hold them fast,and to what extent control, or, in a higher sen-se, slavery, is the one and only condition whichmakes for the well-being of the weak-willedman, and especially woman, then one at onceunderstands conviction and “faith.” To the manwith convictions they are his backbone. Toavoid seeing many things, to be impartial aboutnothing, to be a party man through andthrough, to estimate all values strictly and in-fallibly—these are conditions necessary to theexistence of such a man. But by the same tokenthey are antagonists of the truthful man—of thetruth.... The believer is not free to answer thequestion, “true” or “not true,” according to thedictates of his own conscience: integrity on this

point would work his instant downfall. Thepathological limitations of his vision turn theman of convictions into a fanatic—Savonarola,Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to the strong,emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes ofthese sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics,are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefersobserving poses to listening to reasons....

55.

—One step further in the psychology of convic-tion, of “faith.” It is now a good while since Ifirst proposed for consideration the questionwhether convictions are not even more danger-ous enemies to truth than lies. (“Human, All-Too-Human,” I, aphorism 483.)[27] This time Idesire to put the question definitely: is thereany actual difference between a lie and a con-viction?—All the world believes that there is;but what is not believed by all the world!—

Every conviction has its history, its primitiveforms, its stage of tentativeness and error: itbecomes a conviction only after having been, fora long time, not one, and then, for an even lon-ger time, hardly one. What if falsehood be alsoone of these embryonic forms of conviction?—Sometimes all that is needed is a change in per-sons: what was a lie in the father becomes aconviction in the son.—I call it lying to refuse tosee what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is:whether the lie be uttered before witnesses ornot before witnesses is of no consequence. Themost common sort of lie is that by which a mandeceives himself: the deception of others is arelatively rare offence.—Now, this will not tosee what one sees, this will not to see it as it is,is almost the first requisite for all who belong toa party of whatever sort: the party man be-comes inevitably a liar. For example, the Ger-man historians are convinced that Rome wassynonymous with despotism and that the Ger-manic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into

the world: what is the difference between thisconviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered atthat all partisans, including the German histo-rians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of mo-rality upon their tongues—that morality almostowes its very survival to the fact that the partyman of every sort has need of it every mo-ment?—“This is our conviction: we publish it tothe whole world; we live and die for it—let usrespect all who have convictions!”—I have ac-tually heard such sentiments from the mouthsof anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! Ananti-Semite surely does not become more re-spectable because he lies on principle.... Thepriests, who have more finesse in such matters,and who well understand the objection that liesagainst the notion of a conviction, which is tosay, of a falsehood that becomes a matter ofprinciple because it serves a purpose, have bor-rowed from the Jews the shrewd device ofsneaking in the concepts, “God,” “the will ofGod” and “the revelation of God” at this place.

Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, wason the same road: this was his practical rea-son.[28] There are questions regarding the truthor untruth of which it is not for man to decide;all the capital questions, all the capital prob-lems of valuation, are beyond human reason....To know the limits of reason—that alone isgenuine philosophy.... Why did God make arevelation to man? Would God have done any-thing superfluous? Man could not find out forhimself what was good and what was evil, soGod taught him His will.... Moral: the priestdoes not lie—the question, “true” or “untrue,”has nothing to do with such things as the priestdiscusses; it is impossible to lie about thesethings. In order to lie here it would be neces-sary to know what is true. But this is more thanman can know; therefore, the priest is simplythe mouthpiece of God.—Such a priestly syllo-gism is by no means merely Jewish and Chris-tian; the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of “re-velation” belong to the general priestly type—

to the priest of the décadence as well as to thepriest of pagan times (—Pagans are all thosewho say yes to life, and to whom “God” is aword signifying acquiescence in all things).—The “law,” the “will of God,” the “holy book,”and “inspiration”—all these things are merelywords for the conditions under which the priestcomes to power and with which he maintainshis power,—these concepts are to be found atthe bottom of all priestly organizations, and ofall priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes ofgovernments. The “holy lie”—common alike toConfucius, to the Code of Manu, to Moham-med and to the Christian church—is not evenwanting in Plato. “Truth is here”: this means,no matter where it is heard, the priest lies....

[27] The aphorism, which is headed “The Ene-mies of Truth,” makes the direct statement:“Convictions are more dangerous enemies oftruth than lies.”

[28] A reference, of course, to Kant’s “Kritik derpraktischen Vernunft” (Critique of PracticalReason).

56.

—In the last analysis it comes to this: what isthe end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity,“holy” ends are not visible is my objection tothe means it employs. Only bad ends appear:the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial oflife, the despising of the body, the degradationand self-contamination of man by the conceptof sin—therefore, its means are also bad.—I havea contrary feeling when I read the Code of Ma-nu, an incomparably more intellectual and su-perior work, which it would be a sin against theintelligence to so much as name in the samebreath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: the-re is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, notmerely an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rab-binism and superstition,—it gives even themost fastidious psychologist something to sink

his teeth into. And, not to forget what is mostimportant, it differs fundamentally from everykind of Bible: by means of it the nobles, the phi-losophers and the warriors keep the whip-handover the majority; it is full of noble valuations,it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptanceof life, and triumphant feeling toward self andlife—the sun shines upon the whole book.—Allthe things on which Christianity vents its fath-omless vulgarity—for example, procreation,women and marriage—are here handled ear-nestly, with reverence and with love and confi-dence. How can any one really put into thehands of children and ladies a book which con-tains such vile things as this: “to avoid fornica-tion, let every man have his own wife, and letevery woman have her own husband; ... it isbetter to marry than to burn”?[29] And is itpossible to be a Christian so long as the origin ofman is Christianized, which is to say, befouled,by the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio?... Iknow of no book in which so many delicate

and kindly things are said of women as in theCode of Manu; these old grey-beards andsaints have a way of being gallant to womenthat it would be impossible, perhaps, to sur-pass. “The mouth of a woman,” it says in oneplace, “the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of achild and the smoke of sacrifice are always pu-re.” In another place: “there is nothing purerthan the light of the sun, the shadow cast by acow, air, water, fire and the breath of a mai-den.” Finally, in still another place—perhapsthis is also a holy lie—: “all the orifices of thebody above the navel are pure, and all beloware impure. Only in the maiden is the wholebody pure.”

[29] 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9.57.

One catches the unholiness of Christian meansin flagranti by the simple process of putting theends sought by Christianity beside the ends

sought by the Code of Manu—by putting theseenormously antithetical ends under a stronglight. The critic of Christianity cannot evade thenecessity of making Christianity contemptible.—A book of laws such as the Code of Manu hasthe same origin as every other good law-book:it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity andthe ethical experimentation of long centuries; itbrings things to a conclusion; it no longer cre-ates. The prerequisite to a codification of thissort is recognition of the fact that the meanswhich establish the authority of a slowly andpainfully attained truth are fundamentally dif-ferent from those which one would make use ofto prove it. A law-book never recites the utility,the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of alaw: for if it did so it would lose the imperativetone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience isbased. The problem lies exactly here.—At acertain point in the evolution of a people, theclass within it of the greatest insight, which isto say, the greatest hindsight and foresight,

declares that the series of experiences determin-ing how all shall live—or can live—has come toan end. The object now is to reap as rich and ascomplete a harvest as possible from the days ofexperiment and hard experience. In conse-quence, the thing that is to be avoided aboveeverything is further experimentation—thecontinuation of the state in which values arefluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized adinfinitum. Against this a double wall is set up:on the one hand, revelation, which is the as-sumption that the reasons lying behind thelaws are not of human origin, that they were notsought out and found by a slow process andafter many errors, but that they are of divineancestry, and came into being complete, per-fect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle...;and on the other hand, tradition, which is theassumption that the law has stood unchangedfrom time immemorial, and that it is impiousand a crime against one’s forefathers to bring itinto question. The authority of the law is thus

grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and thefathers lived it.—The higher motive of such pro-cedure lies in the design to distract conscious-ness, step by step, from its concern with notionsof right living (that is to say, those that havebeen proved to be right by wide and carefullyconsidered experience), so that instinct attainsto a perfect automatism—a primary necessityto every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfec-tion in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay before a peoplethe possibility of future mastery, of attainableperfection—it permits them to aspire to thehighest reaches of the art of life. To that end thething must be made unconscious: that is the aim ofevery holy lie.—The order of castes, the highest,the dominating law, is merely the ratification ofan order of nature, of a natural law of the firstrank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modernidea,” can exert any influence. In every healthysociety there are three physiological types, gra-vitating toward differentiation but mutually

conditioning one another, and each of these hasits own hygiene, its own sphere of work, itsown special mastery and feeling of perfection.It is not Manu but nature that sets off in oneclass those who are chiefly intellectual, in an-other those who are marked by muscularstrength and temperament, and in a third thosewho are distinguished in neither one way orthe other, but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority, and thefirst two the select. The superior caste—I call itthe fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privi-leges of the few: it stands for happiness, forbeauty, for everything good upon earth. Onlythe most intellectual of men have any right tobeauty, to the beautiful; only in them cangoodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum estpaucorum hominum:[30] goodness is a privilege.Nothing could be more unbecoming to themthan uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, oran eye that sees ugliness—or indignationagainst the general aspect of things. In-

digna tion is the privilege of the Chandala; so ispessimism. “The world is perfect”—so promptsthe instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of theman who says yes to life. “Imperfection, what-ever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of dis-tance, even the Chandala themselves are partsof this perfection.” The most intelligent men,like the strongest, find their happiness whereothers would find only disaster: in the laby-rinth, in being hard with themselves and withothers, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery;in them asceticism becomes second nature, anecessity, an instinct. They regard a difficulttask as a privilege; it is to them a recreation toplay with burdens that would crush all oth-ers.... Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—Theyare the most honourable kind of men: but thatdoes not prevent them being the most cheerfuland most amiable. They rule, not because theywant to, but because they are; they are not atliberty to play second.—The second caste: to thisbelong the guardians of the law, the keepers of

order and security, the more noble warriors,above all, the king as the highest form of war-rior, judge and preserver of the law. The secondin rank constitute the executive arm of the intel-lectuals, the next to them in rank, taking fromthem all that is rough in the business of ruling—their followers, their right hand, their most aptdisciples.—In all this, I repeat, there is nothingarbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is tothe contrary is made up—by it nature is broughtto shame.... The order of castes, the order of rank,simply formulates the supreme law of life itself;the separation of the three types is necessary tothe maintenance of society, and to the evolutionof higher types, and the highest types—the ine-quality of rights is essential to the existence ofany rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Everyone enjoys the privileges that accord with hisstate of existence. Let us not underestimate theprivileges of the mediocre. Life is always harderas one mounts the heights—the cold increases,responsibility increases. A high civilization is a

pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; itsprimary prerequisite is a strong and soundlyconsolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts,commerce, agriculture, science, the greater partof art, in brief, the whole range of occupationalactivities, are compatible only with mediocreability and aspiration; such callings would beout of place for exceptional men; the instinctswhich belong to them stand as much opposedto aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that aman is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, afunction, is evidence of a natural predisposi-tion; it is not society, but the only sort of happi-ness that the majority are capable of, that ma-kes them intelligent machines. To the mediocremediocrity is a form of happiness; they have anatural instinct for mastering one thing, forspecialization. It would be altogether unworthyof a profound intellect to see anything objec-tionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, thefirst prerequisite to the appearance of the ex-ceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high

degree of civilization. When the exceptionalman handles the mediocre man with more deli-cate fingers than he applies to himself or to hisequals, this is not merely kindness of heart—itis simply his duty.... Whom do I hate most hear-tily among the rabbles of today? The rabble ofSocialists, the apostles to the Chandala, whoundermine the workingman’s instincts, hispleasure, his feeling of contentment with hispetty existence—who make him envious andteach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in un-equal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal”rights.... What is bad? But I have already an-swered: all that proceeds from weakness, fromenvy, from revenge.—The anarchist and theChristian have the same ancestry....

[30] Few men are noble.58.

In point of fact, the end for which one lies ma-kes a great difference: whether one preserves

thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likenessbetween Christian and anarchist: their object,their instinct, points only toward destruction.One need only turn to history for a proof ofthis: there it appears with appalling distinct-ness. We have just studied a code of religiouslegislation whose object it was to convert theconditions which cause life to flourish into an“eternal” social organization,—Christianityfound its mission in putting an end to such anorganization, because life flourished under it. The-re the benefits that reason had produced duringlong ages of experiment and insecurity wereapplied to the most remote uses, and an effortwas made to bring in a harvest that should beas large, as rich and as complete as possible;here, on the contrary, the harvest is blightedovernight.... That which stood there aere peren-nis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnifi-cent form of organization under difficult con-ditions that has ever been achieved, and com-pared to which everything before it and after it

appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made it a matter of “pi-ety” to destroy “the world,” which is to say, theimperium Romanum, so that in the end not astone stood upon another—and even Germansand other such louts were able to become itsmasters.... The Christian and the anarchist: bothare décadents; both are incapable of any act thatis not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating,blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortalhatred of everything that stands up, and isgreat, and has durability, and promises life afuture.... Christianity was the vampire of theimperium Romanum,—overnight it destroyed thevast achievement of the Romans: the conquestof the soil for a great culture that could await itstime. Can it be that this fact is not yet under-stood? The imperium Romanum that we know,and that the history of the Roman provincesteaches us to know better and better,—thismost admirable of all works of art in the grandmanner was merely the beginning, and the

structure to follow was not to prove its worthfor thousands of years. To this day, noth ing ona like scale sub specie aeterni has been broughtinto being, or even dreamed of!—This organi-zation was strong enough to withstand bademperors: the accident of personality has noth-ing to do with such things—the first principleof all genuinely great architecture. But it wasnot strong enough to stand up against the cor-ruptest of all forms of corruption—againstChristians.... These stealthy worms, which un-der the cover of night, mist and duplicity, creptupon every individual, sucking him dry of allearnest interest in real things, of all instinct forreality—this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all “souls,”step by step, from that colossal edifice, turningagainst it all the meritorious, manly and noblenatures that had found in the cause of Rometheir own cause, their own serious purpose,their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy,the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black

as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, theunio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all,the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chan-dala revenge—all that sort of thing becamemaster of Rome: the same kind of religionwhich, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus hadcombatted. One has but to read Lucretius toknow what Epicurus made war upon—not pa-ganism, but “Christianity,” which is to say, thecorruption of souls by means of the concepts ofguilt, punishment and immortality.—He com-batted the subterranean cults, the whole of latentChristianity—to deny immortality was alreadya form of genuine salvation.—Epicurus had tri-umphed, and every respectable intellect inRome was Epicurean—when Paul appeared ...Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of “theworld,” in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence.... What hesaw was how, with the aid of the small sectar-ian Christian movement that stood apart fromJudaism, a “world conflagration” might be kin-

dled; how, with the symbol of “God on thecross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of anar-chistic intrigues in the empire, might be amal-gamated into one immense power. “Salvation isof the Jews.”—Christianity is the formula forexceeding and summing up the subterraneancults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of theGreat Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: inhis discernment of this fact the genius of Paulshowed itself. His instinct was here so surethat, with reckless violence to the truth, he putthe ideas which lent fascination to every sort ofChandala religion into the mouth of the “Sav-iour” as his own inventions, and not only intothe mouth—he made out of him something thateven a priest of Mithras could understand....This was his revelation at Damascus: he gras-ped the fact that he needed the belief in immor-tality in order to rob “the world” of its value,that the concept of “hell” would master Ro-me—that the notion of a “beyond” is the death

of life.... Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme inGerman, and they do more than rhyme....

59.

The whole labour of the ancient world gone fornaught: I have no word to describe the feelingsthat such an enormity arouses in me.—And,considering the fact that its labour was merelypreparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for awork to go on for thousands of years, the wholemeaning of antiquity disappears!... To what endthe Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All theprerequisites to a learned culture, all the meth-ods of science, were already there; man hadalready perfected the great and incomparableart of read ing profitably—that first necessity tothe tradition of culture, the unity of the sci-ences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mat-hematics and mechanics, were on the rightroad,—the sense of fact, the last and more valu-able of all the senses, had its schools, and its

traditions were already centuries old! Is all thisproperly understood? Every essential to the be-ginning of the work was ready:—and the mostessential, it cannot be said too often, are meth-ods, and also the most difficult to develop, andthe longest opposed by habit and laziness.What we have today reconquered, with un-speakable self-discipline, for ourselves—forcertain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts,still lurk in our bodies—that is to say, the keeneye for reality, the cautious hand, patience andseriousness in the smallest things, the wholeintegrity of knowledge—all these things werealready there, and had been there for two thou-sand years! More, there was also a refined andexcellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as “German” culture, with its lout-ish manners! But as body, as bearing, as in-stinct—in short, as reality.... All gone for naught!Overnight it became merely a memory!—TheGreeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste,methodical inquiry, genius for organization

and administration, faith in and the will to se-cure the future of man, a great yes to every-thing entering into the imperium Romanum andpalpable to all the senses, a grand style that wasbeyond mere art, but had become reality, truth,life....—All overwhelmed in a night, but not bya convulsion of nature! Not trampled to deathby Teutons and others of heavy hoof! Butbrought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible,anæmic vampires! Not conquered,—only suc-ked dry!... Hidden vengefulness, petty envy,became master! Everything wretched, intrinsi-cally ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, thewhole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once ontop!—One needs but read any of the Christianagitators, for example, St. Augustine, in orderto realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellowscame to the top. It would be an error, however,to assume that there was any lack of under-standing in the leaders of the Christian move-ment:—ah, but they were clever, clever to thepoint of holiness, these fathers of the church!

What they lacked was something quite differ-ent. Nature neglected—perhaps forgot—to givethem even the most modest endowment ofrespectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts....Between ourselves, they are not even men.... IfIslam despises Christianity, it has a thousand-fold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that itis dealing with men....

60.

Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvestof ancient civilization, and later it also de-stroyed for us the whole harvest of Moham-medan civilization. The wonderful culture of theMoors in Spain, which was fundamentally nea-rer to us and appealed more to our senses andtastes than that of Rome and Greece, was tram-pled down (—I do not say by what sort of feet—)Why? Because it had to thank noble and manlyinstincts for its origin—because it said yes tolife, even to the rare and refined luxuriousnessof Moorish life!... The crusaders later made war

on something before which it would have beenmore fitting for them to have grovelled in thedust—a civilization beside which even that ofour nineteenth century seems very poor andvery “senile.”—What they wanted, of course,was booty: the orient was rich.... Let us putaside our prejudices! The crusades were a hig-her form of piracy, nothing more! The Germannobility, which is fundamentally a Viking no-bility, was in its element there: the church knewonly too well how the German nobility was tobe won.... The German noble, always the “Swissguard” of the church, always in the service ofevery bad instinct of the church—but wellpaid.... Consider the fact that it is precisely theaid of German swords and German blood andvalour that has enabled the church to carrythrough its war to the death upon everythingnoble on earth! At this point a host of painfulquestions suggest themselves. The Germannobility stands outside the history of the highercivilization: the reason is obvious.... Christian-

ity, alcohol—the two great means of corrup-tion.... Intrinsically there should be no morechoice between Islam and Christianity thanthere is between an Arab and a Jew. The deci-sion is already reached; nobody remains at lib-erty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandalaor he is not.... “War to the knife with Rome!Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was thefeeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit,that genius among German emperors, Freder-ick II. What! must a German first be a genius, afree spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’tmake out how a German could ever feel Chris-tian....

61.

Here it becomes necessary to call up a memorythat must be a hundred times more painful toGermans. The Germans have destroyed forEurope the last great harvest of civilization thatEurope was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is itunderstood at last, will it ever be understood,

what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation ofChristian values,—an attempt with all availablemeans, all instincts and all the resources of gen-ius to bring about a triumph of the opposite val-ues, the more noble values.... This has been theone great war of the past; there has never beena more critical question than that of the Renais-sance—it is my question too—; there has neverbeen a form of attack more fundamental, moredirect, or more violently delivered by a wholefront upon the center of the enemy! To attack atthe critical place, at the very seat of Christian-ity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the in-stincts, into the most fundamental needs andappetites of those sitting there.... I see beforeme the possibility of a perfectly heavenly en-chantment and spectacle:—it seems to me toscintillate with all the vibrations of a fine anddelicate beauty, and within it there is an art sodivine, so infernally divine, that one mightsearch in vain for thousands of years for an-

other such possibility; I see a spectacle so richin significance and at the same time so wonder-fully full of paradox that it should arouse allthe gods on Olympus to immortal laughter—Cæsar Borgia as pope!... Am I understood?... Wellthen, that would have been the sort of triumphthat I alone am longing for today—: by it Chris-tianity would have been swept away!—Whathappened? A German monk, Luther, came toRome. This monk, with all the vengeful in-stincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised arebellion against the Renaissance in Rome....Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiv-ing, the miracle that had taken place: the con-quest of Christianity at its capital—instead ofthis, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle.A religious man thinks only of himself.—Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy atthe very moment when the oppo site was be-coming apparent: the old corruption, the pecca-tum originale, Christianity itself, no longer oc-cupied the papal chair! Instead there was life!

Instead there was the triumph of life! Insteadthere was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful anddaring things!... And Luther restored the church:he attacked it.... The Renaissance—an eventwithout meaning, a great futility!—Ah, theseGermans, what they have not cost us! Futility—that has always been the work of the Ger-mans.—The Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant andso-called German philosophy; the war of “lib-eration”; the empire—every time a futile substi-tute for something that once existed, for some-thing irrecoverable.... These Germans, I confess,are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanli-ness in concept and valuation, their cowardicebefore every honest yea and nay. For nearly athousand years they have tangled and confusedeverything their fingers have touched; theyhave on their conscience all the half-way meas-ures, all the three-eighths-way measures, thatEurope is sick of,—they also have on their con-science the uncleanest variety of Christianitythat exists, and the most incurable and inde-

structible—Protestantism.... If man kind nevermanages to get rid of Christianity the Germanswill be to blame....

62.

—With this I come to a conclusion and pro-nounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; Ibring against the Christian church the mostterrible of all the accusations that an accuserhas ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, thegreatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeksto work the ultimate corruption, the worst pos-sible corruption. The Christian church has leftnothing untouched by its depravity; it hasturned every value into worthlessness, andevery truth into a lie, and every integrity intobaseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak tome of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepestnecessities range it against any effort to abolishdistress; it lives by distress; it creates distress tomake itself immortal.... For example, the wormof sin: it was the church that first enriched

mankind with this misery!—The “equality ofsouls before God”—this fraud, this pretext forthe rancunes of all the base-minded—this explo-sive concept, ending in revolution, the modernidea, and the notion of overthrowing the wholesocial order —this is Christian dynamite.... The“humanitarian” blessings of Christianity for-sooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will tolie at any price, an aversion and contempt forall good and honest instincts! All this, to me, isthe “humanitarianism” of Christianity!—Parasitism as the only practice of the church;with its anæmic and “holy” ideals, sucking allthe blood, all the love, all the hope out of life;the beyond as the will to deny all reality; thecross as the distinguishing mark of the mostsubterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect,kindness of soul—against life itself....

This eternal accusation against Christianity Ishall write upon all walls, wherever walls areto be found—I have letters that even the blindwill be able to see.... I call Christianity the onegreat curse, the one great intrinsic depravity,the one great instinct of revenge, for which nomeans are venomous enough, or secret, subter-ranean and small enough,—I call it the one im-mortal blemish upon the human race....

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefas-tus when this fatality befell—from the first dayof Christianity!—Why not rather from its last?—From today?—The transvaluation of all values!...