THE ANTICHRIST ............................................................................................................................................1

Friedrich Nietzsche..................................................................................................................................1

PREFACE ...............................................................................................................................................1

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may

be among those who understand my "Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those who are now

sprouting ears?First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands meI know them only too

well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness.

He must be accustomed to living on mountain topsand to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and

nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it

brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no

one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of

seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that

have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand mannerto hold together his

strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.....

Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account

are the rest?The rest are merely humanity.One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in

Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreanswe know well enough how remote our place is.

"Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in his day, knew that

much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond deathour life, our happiness...We have

discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the

labyrinth. Who else has found it?The man of today?"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am

whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"so sighs the man of today...This is the sort of

modernity that made us ill,we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness

of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that "forgives" everything because it

"understands" everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other

such southwinds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long

time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fateit was the

fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as

possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation" . . . There was thunder in our air; nature, as

we embodied it, became overcastfor we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a

What is good?Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?The feeling that power

increasesthat resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war;

not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid). The weak and the

botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than

The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (man is an

end): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of

This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an

exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been

almost the terror of terrors ;and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained:

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now

understood. This "progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in

his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most

widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which,

compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have

always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of

man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the

Evil One himself, out of these instinctsthe strong man as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men."

Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to

all the selfpreservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are

intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of

temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of

man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against

humanity. It is usedand I wish to emphasize the fact againwithout any moral significance: and this is so

far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been

most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness

in the sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers,

what is injurious to it. A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"and it is possible that I'll

have to write itwould almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for

growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is

disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this willthat the

Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment

the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that

drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity;

under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energya loss out of all

proportion to the magnitude of the cause (the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it;

there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions

it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of

evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the

side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it

gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (in every superior

moral system it appears as a weakness); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and

foundation of all other virtuesbut let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a

philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was

right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denialpity is the technic of nihilism.

Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the

preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the

promotion of decadencepity persuades to extinction....Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says

"the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric,

from the realm of religiousethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the

tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to

life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and

dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that

purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and

dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also, alack, in that of our

whole literary decadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be

discharged. . . Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the

doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife hereall this is our business, all this is our sort of

It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists: theologians and all who have any theological

blood in their veinsthis is our whole philosophy. . . . One must have faced that menace at close hand, better

still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be

taken lightly (the alleged freethinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be a jokethey

have no passion about such things; they have not suffered). This poisoning goes a great deal further than

most people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as

"idealists"among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to

look upon it with suspicion. . . The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand

(and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "the

senses," "honor," "good living," "science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious and seductive

forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure thinginitselfas if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word,

holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices. . . The pure

soul is a pure lie. . . So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is

accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already

been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.

Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it everywhere. Whoever has theological blood

in his veins is shifty and dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is

called faith: in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of

incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all

things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any

more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation" and "eternity." I unearth

this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of

falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a

criterion of truth. His profound instinct of selfpreservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in

any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of

values, and the concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change places: what ever is most damaging to life is

there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is

there called "false."... When theologians, working through the "consciences" of princes (or of peoples),

stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an

Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological blood is the ruin of philosophy.

The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale.

Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianityand of reason. ... One need only utter the

words "Tubingen School" to get an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottoma very artful

form of theology. . . The Suabians are the best liars in Germany; they lie innocently. . . . Why all the rejoicing

over the appearance of Kant that went through the learned world of Germany, threefourths of which is made

up of the sons of preachers and teacherswhy the German conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a

change for the better? The theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what had

become possible again. . . . A backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the "true world,"

the concept of morality as the essence of the world (the two most vicious errors that ever existed!), were

once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no longer

refutable... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so far. . . Out of reality there had been made

"appearance"; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality. . . . The success of Kant is

merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal

need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces

it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of "virtue," as Kant would have it, is pernicious.

"Virtue," "duty," "good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal

validitythese are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of

life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of

selfpreservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown virtue, his own categorical imperative. A

nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more

complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of

abstraction.To think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The

theological instinct alone took it under protection !An action prompted by the lifeinstinct proves that it is

a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian

dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection . . . What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and

feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasureas a mere automaton of

duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.And such a man was

the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopherstill

passes today! . . . I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant see in the French

Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn't he ask himself if

there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on

the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's

answer: "That is revolution." Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature,

I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the rest haven't the slightest

conception of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigiesthey

regard "beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving breast" as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction

as the criterion of truth. In the end, with "German" innocence, Kant tried to give a scientific flavour to this

form of corruption, this dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it "practical reason." He deliberately

invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it was desirable not to trouble with reasonthat is,

when morality, when the sublime command "thou shalt," was heard. When one recalls the fact that, among all

peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development from the old type of priest, this inheritance from the

priest, this fraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable. When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift

up, to save or to liberate mankindwhen a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the

mouthpiece of supernatural imperativeswhen such a mission in. flames him, it is only natural that he

should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by

this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! . . . What has a priest to do with philosophy! He

stands far above it!And hitherto the priest has ruled!He has determined the meaning of "true" and "not

Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a "transvaluation of all

values," a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of "true" and "not true." The

most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine

methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of

years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent"

peoplehe passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." As a man of science,

he belonged to the Chandala2... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against ustheir every

notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to betheir every "thou shalt" was

launched against us. . . . Our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful mannerall appeared to

them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.Looking back, one may almost ask one's self with

reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth

was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. It was our modesty that

stood out longest against their taste...How well they guessed that, these turkeycocks of God!

We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from

the "spirit," from the "godhead"; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the

strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other

hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second

thought in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything but the crown of creation: beside him

stand many other animals, all at similar stages of development... And even when we say that we say a bit too

much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has

wandered the most dangerously from his instinctsthough for all that, to be sure, he remains the most

interesting!As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to

describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine.

Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely

by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his

inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we have taken even this will

from him, for the term no longer describes anything that we can understand. The old word "will" now

connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant

and partly harmonious stimulithe will no longer "acts," or "moves." . . . Formerly it was thought that man's

consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he

was advised, tortoiselike, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his

mortal coilthen only the important part of him, the "pure spirit," would remain. Here again we have

thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom of a relative

imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up

nervous force unnecessarilywe deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously.

The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the socalled

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely

imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary effects

("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginarybeings

("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginarynatural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of

natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or

disagreeable general feelingsfor example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the

signlanguage of religioethical balderdash, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the

devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginaryteleology (the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal

life").This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of

dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the

concept of "nature" had been opposed to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on the

meaning of "abominable"the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (the

real!), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This explains

everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to

suffer from reality one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause

of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence...

A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same conclusion.A nation that still

believes in itself holds fast to its own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to survive,

to its virtuesit projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He

who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices. . . Religion,

within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a

god.Such a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or

foehe is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all

nature, of such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination. Mankind

has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god; it doesn't have to thank mere tolerance and

humanitarianism for its own existence. . . . What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger,

revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory

and of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why should any one want him?True enough,

when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping

from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of

selfpreservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he

counsels "peace of soul," hatenomore, leniency, "love" of friend and foe. He moralizes endlessly; he

creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a

cosmopolitan. . . Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsty

for power in the soul of a people; now he is simply the good god...The truth is that there is no other

alternative for gods: either they are the will to powerin which case they are national godsor incapacity

Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline

physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is

converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course, they do not call

themselves the weak; they call themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate the moments in

history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first became possible. The same instinct which

prompts the inferior to reduce their own god to "goodnessinitself" also prompts them to eliminate all good

qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's

god.The good god, and the devil like himboth are abortions of decadence.How can we be so tolerant

of the navet of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god

from "the god of Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be

described as progress?But even Renan does this. As if Renan had a right to be nave! The contrary actually

stares one in the face. When everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is strong, courageous,

masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the

level of a staff for the weary, a sheetanchor for the drowning; when he be comes the poor man's god, the

sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and the attribute of "saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one

essential attribute of divinityjust what is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a

reduction of the godhead imply?To be sure, the "kingdom of God" has thus grown larger. Formerly he had

only his own people, his "chosen" people. But since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves,

into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home

everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitanuntil now he has the "great majority" on his side, and half the

earth. But this god of the "great majority," this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god:

on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of

all the noisesome quarters of the world! . . His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the

underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom. . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so decadent . . .

Even the palest of the pale are able to master himmessieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the

intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin

himself, and became another metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old business of spinning

the world out of his inmost being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he be came ever thinner and palerbecame

the "ideal," became "pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the thinginitself." . . . The collapse of a

The Christian concept of a godthe god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god

as a spiritis one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches

lowwater mark in the ebbing evolution of the godtype. God degenerated into the contradiction of life.

Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to

live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the

"beyond"! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! . . .

The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this Christian god does little credit to their

gift for religionand not much more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of such a

moribund and wornout product of the decadence. A curse lies upon them because they were not equal to it;

they made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part of their instinctsand since then they have not

managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come and goneand not a single new god!

Instead, there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the

power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankindthis pitiful god of Christian monotonotheism!

This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the

instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!

In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger

number of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religionsthey are

both decadence religionsbut they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that

he is able to compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.Buddhism is a

hundred times as realistic as Christianityit is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems

objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, "god,"

was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be

encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism) It does

not speak of a "struggle with sin," but, yielding to reality, of the "struggle with suffering." Sharply

differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the selfdeception that lies in moral concepts be hind it; it is, in

my phrase,beyond good and evil.The two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and upon which

it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to sensation, which manifests itself as a

refined susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted concern with

concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of which the instinct of personality has yielded to a

notion of the "impersonal." (Both of these states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objectivists,

by experience, as they are to me). These physiological states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to

combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in

eating and a careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of

the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no worry, either on one's own account or on

account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good cheerhe finds

means to combat ideas of other sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as something which

promotes health. Prayer is not included, and neither is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative nor any

disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery (it is always possible to leave). These things would

have been simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For the same reason he

does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to

revenge, aversion, ressentiment ("enmity never brings an end to enmity": the moving refrain of all

Buddhism. . .) And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these passions which, in view of his main

regiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too

much "objectivity" (that is, in the individual's loss of interest in himself, in loss of balance and of "egoism"),

he combats by strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego. In Buddha's teaching egoism

is a duty. The "one thing needful," the question "how can you be delivered from suffering," regulates and

determines the whole spiritual diet. (Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who also declared war

upon pure "scientificality," to wit, Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality) .

The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and no

militarism; moreover, it must get its start among the higher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet

and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which

perfection is merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.Under Christianity the instincts

of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their

salvation in it. Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin,

selfcriticism, the inquisition of conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called "God") is pumped

up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as "grace." Here, too, open dealing

is lacking; concealment and the darkened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is

denounced as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness (the first Christian order after the

banishment of the Moors closed the public baths, of which there were 270 in Cordova alone) . Christian, too;

is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre

and disquieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most respectable

names are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender morbid symptoms and overstimulate the nerves.

Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the "aristocratic"along with a sort of

secret rivalry with them (one resigns one's "body" to themone wantsonly one's "soul" . . . ). And

Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage of freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is

When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the underworld of the ancient

world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men, but

with men still inwardly savage and capable of self torturein brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here,

unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely a

general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on

others, a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to embrace

barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the

sacrifices of the firstborn, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture;

torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples

in a further state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and overspiritualized (Europe is

not yet ripe for it): it is a summons 'that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing

of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus

operandi is to make them illto make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for "civilizing." Buddhism is

a religion for the closing, overwearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so

Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify

its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sinit simply says, as it

simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he

needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering

altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent

and terrible enemythere was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.

At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the Orient. In the first place, it

knows that it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed to be true.

Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite

worldsthe road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact

thoroughlythis is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it,

every student of the esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he

has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when

faith is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry

have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road.Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great

deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in

suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash itso high, indeed, that no fulfillment

can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of

making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most malign of evils; it

remained behind at the source of all evil.)3In order that love may be possible, God must become a person;

in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the

woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin. These

things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis

cult has already established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly strengthens

the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinctit makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more

soulful.Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of illusion

reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. When a man is in love he

endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which

would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer is overcomeit is scarcely even

noticed.So much for the three Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian

ingenuities.Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such

Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is

this: that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprungit is not a

reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the aweinspiring

logic of the Jews. In the words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." 4The second thing to remember is

this: that the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate

form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in

The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with

the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price

involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well

as of the outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able

to live, or had even been permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct

opposition to natural conditionsone by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and

psychology until each became a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon

later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people

of God," shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most

fateful people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this

matter that today the Christian can cherish antiSemitism without realizing that it is no more than the final

In my "Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation of the concepts underlying those two

antithetical things, a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of the

denial of the former. The JudaeoChristian moral system belongs to the second division, and in every detail.

In order to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of lifethat is, to

wellbeing, to power, to beauty, to selfapprovalthe instincts of ressentiment, here become downright

genius, had to invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable

thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so

that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a

profound talent for selfpreservation, the side of all those instincts which make for decadencenot as if

mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which "the world" could be defied. The Jews are the

very opposite of decadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of

skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of

all decadent movements (for example, the Christianity of Paul), and so make of them something

stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism

and Christianity,that is to say, to the priestly classdecadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of

this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true"

and "false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.

The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt to denaturize all natural values: I point to

five facts which bear this out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel maintained the

right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness

of power, its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory and salvation and through

him they expected nature to give them whatever was necessary to their existenceabove all, rain. Jahveh is

the god of Israel, and consequently the god of justice: this is the logic of every race that has power in its

hands and a good conscience in the use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this

selfapproval stand revealed. The nation is grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain

dominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its herds

and its crops.This view of things remained an ideal for a long while, even after it had been robbed of

validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained, as a

projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a gallant warrior and an upright

judgea vision best visualized in the typical prophet (i.e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah. But

every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do what he used to do. He ought to have been

abandoned. But what actually happened? simply this: the conception of him was changedthe conception of

him was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paid for keeping him.Jahveh, the god of

"justice"he is in accord with Israel no more, he no longer visualizes the national egoism; he is now a god

only conditionally. . . The public notion of this god now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of clerical

agitators, who interpret all happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or

disobedience to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order

of the world" is set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on their heads. Once

natural causation has been swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of

unnatural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. A god who

demandsin place of a god who helps, who gives counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy

inspiration of courage and selfreliance. . . Morality is no longer a reflection of the conditions which make

for the sound life and development of the people; it is no longer the primary lifeinstinct; instead it has

become abstract and in opposition to lifea fundamental perversion of the fancy, an "evil eye" on all things.

What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the

idea of "sin"; wellbeing represented as a danger, as a "temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the

The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified ;but even here Jewish priest craft did not

stop. The whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!These priests accomplished that

miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the documentary evidence; with a degree of

contempt unparalleled, and in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of their

people into religious terms, which is to say, they converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby

all offences against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard this act of

historical falsification as something far more shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of

history for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And the

philosophers support the church: the lie about a "moral order of the world" runs through the whole of

philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a "moral order of the world"? That there is a thing

called the will of God which, once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought not

to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to he measured by the extent to which they or

he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual arecontrolled by this will of God,

which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.In place of all that pitiable lie

reality has this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound

view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself

determines the value of all things "the kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is

attained "the will of God"; with coldblooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals

by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. One observes him at work:

under the hand of the Jewish priesthood the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its

long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that great ageduring which priests had not

yet come into existence. Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel's history they fashioned,

according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely "godless." They

reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: "obedient or disobedient to God."They went a step

further: the "will of God" (in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had

to be determinedand to this end they had to have a "revelation." In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud

had to be perpetrated, and "holy scriptures" had to be concoctedand so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp,

and days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of "sin" now ended, they were duly published.

The "will of God," it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected the

"holy scriptures". . . But the ''will of God'' had already been revealed to Moses. . . . What happened? Simply

this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to

be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the

priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what "the will of

God" was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable

everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the

"sacrifice" (that is, at mealtimes), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize itin

his own phrase, to "sanctify" it. . . . For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution

(the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded

by the lifeinstinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and

even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral order of the

world"). The fact requires a sanctiona power to grant values becomes necessary, and the only way it can

create such values is by denying nature. . . . The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this

price that he can exist at all.Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest, to "the law," now

gets the name of "sin"; the means prescribed for "reconciliation with God" are, of course, precisely the means

which bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can "save". Psychologically

considered, "sins" are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only

reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning". . . . Prime

axiom: "God forgiveth him that repenteth"in plain English, him that submitteth to the priest.

Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural value, every reality was

opposed by the deepest instincts of the ruling classit grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and

as such it has never been surpassed. The "holy people," who had adopted priestly values and priestly names

for all things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as "unholy,"

"worldly," "sinful"this people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the point of

selfannihilation: asChristianity it actually denied even the last form of reality, the "holy people," the "chosen

people," Jewish reality itself. The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small insurrectionary

movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivusin other words,

it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery

of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that

necessary to an ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actually denies the church...

I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to have been led (whether rightly or

wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the Jewish church"church" being here used in exactly the same sense that

the word has today. It was an insurrection against the "good and just," against the "prophets of Israel," against

the whole hierarchy of societynot against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was

unbelief in "superior men," a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy

that was called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which, above

everything, was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the midst of the "waters"it represented

theirlast possibility of survival; it was the final residuum of their independent political existence; an attack

upon it was an attack upon the most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to live, that

has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and

"sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of thingsand in language

which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia todaythis man was certainly a

political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community. This is

what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross.

He died for his own sinsthere is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted,

As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradictionwhether, in fact, this was the only

contradiction he was cognizant ofthat is quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the

problem of the psychology of the Saviour.I confess, to begin with, that there are very few books which

offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the

learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while

since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the

work of the incomparable Strauss.5At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of

thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious legends "traditions"?

The histories of saints present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the

scientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents, seems to me to condemn the whole

What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might be depicted in the Gospels, in

however mutilated a form and however much overladen with extraneous charactersthat is, in spite of the

Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends. It is not a

question of mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the question is,

whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us.All the attempts that I know of

to read the history of a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable psychological levity. M.

Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of

explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero ("heros"). But if there is anything

essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely

the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted

into something moral: ("resist not evil !"the most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to

them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of

"glad tidings"?The true life, the life eternal has been foundit is not merely promised, it is here, it is in

you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every

one is the child of GodJesus claims nothing for himself aloneas the child of God each man is the equal

of every other man. . . .Imagine making Jesus a hero!And what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in

the word "genius"! Our whole conception of the "spiritual," the whole conception of our civilization, could

have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different

word ought to be used here. . . . We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which

causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object.

Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a

flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time

and space, for everything establishedcustoms, institutions, the church; a feeling of being at home in a

world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal" world. . . .

The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritationso great

that merely to be "touched" becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling: the consequence of

an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritationso great that it senses all resistance, all compulsion to

resistance, as unbearable anguish (that is to say, as harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of

selfpreservation), and regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer

resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerouslove, as the only, as the ultimate possibility

These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call

them a sublime superdevelopment of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most

closely related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerveforce, is epicureanism, the

theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical decadent: I was the first to recognize him.The fear

of pain, even of infinitely slight painthe end of this can be nothing save a religion of love. . . .

I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the

Saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many

reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions.

The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been

imprinted by the history, the destiny, of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have

embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of

war and of propaganda. That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead usa world apparently

out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and "childish" idiocy keep a

trystmust, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to

translate an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to

understand it at allin their sight the type could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar

mould.... The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, John the

Baptistall these merely presented chances to misunderstand it . . . . Finally, let us not underrate the

proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all

its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strangeit does not even see them. It is greatly to be

regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadentI mean some

one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish.

In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and

contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it,

for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for

assuming the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the

seashore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike India's, and the aggressive

fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's malice as "le

grand maitre en ironie." I myself haven't any doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit)

got itself into the concept of the Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all

know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their leader into an apologia for

themselves. When the early Christians had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle

theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a "god" that met that need, just as they put into his mouth

without hesitation certain ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the

Gospels"the second coming," "the last judgment," all sorts of expectations and promises, current at the

I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the

very word imperieux, used by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What the "glad tidings" tell us is

simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is

voiced here is no more an embattled faithit is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of

recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at all events, are familiar with such a delayed and

incomplete puberty in the living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not furious, it does

not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with "the sword"it does not realize how it will one

day set man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by

"scriptures": it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own "kingdom of

God." This faith does not formulate itselfit simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure,

the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in

primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a JudaeoSemitic character (that of eating and drinking

at the last supper belongs to this categoryan idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly

mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language,

semantics6 an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally

that this antirealist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts

of Sankhya,7and among Chinese he would have employed those of Laotse 8and in neither case would it

have made any difference to him.With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a

"free spirit"9he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,10 a whatever is established killeth.

'The idea of "life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of

word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: "life" or "truth" or "light" is his word

for the innermostin his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has

significance only as sign, as allegory. Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the

temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands

outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all

knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all arthis "wisdom" is precisely a pure ignorance11 of all

such things. He has never heard of culture; he doesn't have to make war on ithe doesn't even deny it. . .

The same thing may be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour, of warhe has no

ground for denying" the world," for he knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept of "the world" . . . Denial

is precisely the thing that is impossible to him.In the same way he lacks argumentative capacity, and has

no belief that an article of faith, a "truth," may be established by proofs (his proofs are inner "lights,"

subjective sensations of happiness and selfapproval, simple "proofs of power"). Such a doctrine cannot

contradict: it doesn't know that other doctrines exist, or can exist, and is wholly incapable of imagining

anything opposed to it. . . If anything of the sort is ever encountered, it laments the "blindness" with sincere

In the whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of

reward. "Sin," which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolishedthis is

precisely the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is

conceived as the only realitywhat remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.

The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the special evangelical way of

life. It is not a "belief" that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts

differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws

no distinction between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles ("neighbour," of course, means

fellowbeliever, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of

justice nor heeds their mandates ("Swear not at all") .12 He never under any circumstances divorces his wife,

even when he has proofs of her infidelity.And under all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one

The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of lifeand so was his death. . . He no longer

needed any formula or ritual in his relations with Godnot even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the

Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel

one's self "divine," "blessed," "evangelical," a "child of God."Not by "repentance,"not by "prayer and

forgiveness" is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to Godit is itself "God!"What the Gospels

abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of "sin," "forgiveness of sin," "faith," "salvation through

faith"the wholeecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the "glad tidings."

The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is "in heaven" and is

"immortal," despite many reasons for feeling that he isnot "in heaven": this is the only psychological reality

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as

realities, as "truths"hat he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely

as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in

history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological symbol set free from the

concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the

"kingdom of God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing could he more unChristian than the crude

ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven"

beyond, and of a "son of God" as the second person of the Trinity. All thisif I may be forgiven the

phraseis like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols

amounting to worldhistorical cynicism. . . .But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the

symbols "Father" and "Son"not, of course, to every one: the word "Son" expresses entrance into the

feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and "Father" expresses that feeling

itselfthe sensation of eternity and of perfection.I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has

made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story13 at the threshold of the Christian "faith"? And a

dogma of "immaculate conception" for good measure? . . And thereby it has robbed conception of its

The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heartnot something to come "beyond the world" or "after death."

The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent

because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death"

isnot a Christian idea"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of "glad

The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it

is not going to come at a "millennium"it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere. . .

This "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taughtnot to "save mankind," but to show mankind how

to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers,

before his accusershis demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes

no effort to ward off the most extreme penaltymore, he invites it. . . And he prays, suffers and loves with

those, in those, who do him evil . . . Not to defend one's self, not to show anger, not to lay blames. . . On the

We free spiritswe are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen

centuries have misunderstoodthat instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie"

even more than upon all other lies. . . Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious

neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and

subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created

Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great drama of existence would find no small

indication thereof in the stupendous questionmark that is called Christianity. That mankind should be on its

knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospelsthat in the

concept of the "church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad tidings" regards as

beneath him and behind himit would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of worldhistorical

Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into believing that the crude fable

of the wonderworker and Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianityand that everything spiritual

and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary, the whole history of Christianityfrom the death

on the cross onwardis the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism.

With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the

principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarousit absorbed

the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the absurdities

engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as

sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. A sickly

barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the churchthe church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all

honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly

humanity.Christian valuesnoble values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have reestablished this

I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest

melancholycontempt of man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of

today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of todayI am suffocated by his foul

breath! . . . Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous

selfcontrol: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this mad house of a world, call it

"Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you willI take care not to hold mankind

responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern

times,our times. Our age knows better. . . What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecentit is

indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins.I look about me: not a word survives of what

was once called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes

the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs

when he speaks, but actually liesand that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or

"ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any

"Saviour"that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies: serious reflection, the profound

selfconquest of the spirit,allow no man to pretend that he does not know it. . . All the ideas of the church are

now recognized for what they areas the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all

natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually isas the most dangerous form of parasite, as the

venomous spider of creation. . We know, our conscience now knowsjust what the real value of all

those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what ends they have served, with their debasement

of humanity to a state of selfpollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,the concepts "the other

world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many in

instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master. . .Every

one knows this,but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling,

of selfrespect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly antiChristian

in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of his

armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his peopleand yet acknowledging,

without any shame, that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call "the

world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's honour; to

desire one's own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows

itself in a deed, is now antiChristian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself

I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.The very word "Christianity" is a

misunderstandingat bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The "Gospels" died on

the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the "Gospels" was the very reverse of what he had

lived: "bad tidings," a Dysangelium.14It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in "faith," and

particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian

way of life, the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian. . . To this day such a life is still possible,

and for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages. . . . Not

faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a

sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as trueas every psychologist knows, the value of these things

is perfectly indifferent and fifthrate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of

intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth,

to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact, there are no

Christians. The "Christian"he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christianis simply a

psychological selfdelusion. Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his "faith," he has been ruled only

by his instinctsand what instincts!In all agesfor example, in the case of Luther"faith" has been no

more than a cloak, a pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts have played their gamea shrewd

blindness to the domination of certain of the instincts . . .I have already called "faith" the specially Christian

form of shrewdnesspeople always talk of their "faith" and act according to their instincts. . . In the world of

ideas of the Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an

instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What

follows therefrom? That even here, in psychologicis, there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning

fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its

placeand the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness !Viewed calmly, this strangest of all

phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising injurious

errors, poisonous to life and to the heartthis remains a spectacle for the godsfor those gods who are also

philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the

moment when their disgust leaves them (and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the

Christians: perhaps because of this curious exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves

a glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest. . . . Therefore, let us not underestimate the Christians:

the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the apein its application to the Christians a

The fate of the Gospels was decided by deathit hung on the "cross.". . . It was only death, that

unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille onlyit

was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: "Who was it?

what was it?"The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might

involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, "Why just in this way?"this state of mind is only

too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a

meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the

chasm of doubt yawn: "Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?"this question flashed like a

lightningstroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one's self in

revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order.

Until then this militant, this naysaying, naydoing element in his character had been lacking; what is more,

he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was

precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and

superiority to every feeling of ressentimenta plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that

Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example,

of his teachings in the most public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his deaththough

to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared

to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death. . . . On the contrary, it was

precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the

cause should perish with his death: "recompense" and "judgment" became necessary (yet what could be

less evangelical than "recompense," "punishment," and "sitting in judgment"!) Once more the popular

belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was riveted upon an historical

moment: the "kingdom of God" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies. . . But in all this there was a

wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom of God" as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels

had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfillment, therealization of this "kingdom of God." It was only now

that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the

character of the Master was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the

savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught

by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in

an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to

revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a great

height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products of resentment . . . .

And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how could God allow it!" To which the

deranged reason of the little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave

his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin,

and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What

appalling paganism !Jesus himself had done away with the very concept of "guilt," he denied that there

was any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was precisely

his "glad tidings". . . And not as a mere privilege!From this time forward the type of the Saviour was

corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a

sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the whole

and only reality of the gospels, is juggled awayin favour of a state of existence after death! . . . St. Paul,

with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception,

that indecent conception, in this way: "If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in

vain!"And at once there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the

shameless doctrine of personal immortality. . . Paul even preached it as a reward . . .

One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly

original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earthreal, not merely

promised. For this remainsas I have already pointed outthe essential difference between the two

religions of decadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything,

but fulfills nothing.Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In

Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the

vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred!

Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of

Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospelsnothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in

hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! . . . Once more the priestly

instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against historyhe simply struck out the yesterday

and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going

further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his

achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour." . . . Later on the church even

falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity . . . The figure of the Saviour, his

teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his deathnothing

remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of

gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existencein the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had

no use for the life of the Saviourwhat he needed was the death on the cross, and something more. To see

anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he

converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he

suffered from this hallucination himselfthis would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the

end; therefore he also willed the means. What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by

the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more

reached out for powerhe had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of

tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed

borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the

belief in the immortality of the soulthat is to say, the doctrine of "judgment".

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond"in nothingnessthen one

has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all

natural instincthenceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards

the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the "meaning" of

life. . . . Why be publicspirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust

one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? . . . Merely so many

"temptations," so many strayings from the "straight path.""One thing only is necessary". . . That every

man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things

the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the

threefourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalfit is

impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to

insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its

triumphit was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse

and offscouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul"in plain English: "the world revolves

around me." . . . The poisonous doctrine, "equal rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle:

out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of

reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step

upward, to every development of civilizationout of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief

weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on

earth . . . To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon

noble humanity ever perpetrated.And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had,

even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for

feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equalsfor the pathos of distance. . . Our politics is sick with

this lack of courage!The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of

souls; and if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to make revolutionit is

Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of

blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is

The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already persistent within the primitive

community. That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom

merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the Saviour.These gospels cannot be read too

carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confessI hope it will not be held against methat it is

precisely for this reason that they offer firstrate joy to a psychologistas the opposite of all merely naive

corruption, as refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption. The gospels, in

fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the

first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring

up a delusion of personal "holiness" unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of

fraud in word and attitude to the level of an artall this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an

individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears in

Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and

hard practice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The Christian, that ultima ratio of

lying, is the Jew all over againhe is threefold the Jew. . . The underlying will to make use only of such

concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode of

thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilitiesthis is not only tradition, it is inheritance:

only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best

minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human), have permitted themselves to be

deceived. The gospels have been read as a book of innocence. . . surely no small indication of the high skill

with which the trick has been done.Of course, if we could actually see these astounding bigots and bogus

saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an end,and it is precisely because I cannot read

a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made am end of them. . . . I simply cannot

endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.For the majority, happily enough, books are mere

literature.Let us not be led astray: they say "judge not," and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in

their way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in

demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be capable ofstill more,

which they must have in order to remain on topthey assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of

men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good" ("the

truth," "the light," "the kingdom of God"): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing.

Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their

necessity into aduty: it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility, and that humility

becomes merely one more proof of their piety. . . Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! "Virtue

itself shall bear witness for us.". . . . One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction: these petty folks

fasten themselves to moralitythey know the uses of morality! Morality is the best of all devices for leading

mankind by the nose!The fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty:

it is in this way that they, the "community," the "good and just," range themselves, once and for always, on

one side, the side of "the truth"and the rest of mankind, "the world," on the other. . . In that we observe the

most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim

exclusive rights in the concepts of "God," "the truth," "the light," "the spirit," "love," "wisdom" and "life," as

if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the

"world"; little superJews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to meet their

notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even thelast judgment of all the

rest. . . . The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a

similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn between Jews

and JudaeoChristians, the latter had no choice but to employ the selfpreservative measures that the Jewish

instinct had devised, even against the Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them only against

I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into their headswhat they have

"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your

feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha

"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone

were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42) .How evangelical!

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye,

than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." (Mark

"Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste death, till they have

seen the kingdom of God come with power." (Mark ix, 1.)Well lied, lion!16 . . . .

"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For . . ." (Note of

a psychologist. Christian morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,this makes it Christian.)

"Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." (Matthew

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye

salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew V,

46.)18Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid in the end. . . .

"But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." (Matthew vi,

"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."

(Matthew vi, 33.)All these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error, to put it

mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in certain cases.

"Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner

did their fathers unto the prophets." (Luke vi, 23.)Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the prophets. . .

"Know yea not that yea are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelt in you? If any man defile the

temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple yea are." (Paul, 1

Corinthians iii, 16.)19For that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt. . . .

"Do yea not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are yea

unworthy to judge the smallest matters?" (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)Unfortunately, not merely the speech

This frightful impostor then proceeds: "Know yea not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that

"Hat not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by

wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. . . . Not

many wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called: But God hat chosen the foolish

things of the world to confound the wise; and God hat chosen the weak things of the world confound the

things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hat God chosen, yea,

and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence." (Paul,

1 Corinthians i, 20ff.)20 In order to understand this passage, a first rate example of the psychology

underlying every Chandalamorality, one should read the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for

the first time, the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of ressentiment and impotent

vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge. . . .

What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of

so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions as Polish

Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them . . . Neither has a pleasant smell.I have searched the

New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, openhearted or

upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upwardthe instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . .

Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is

all a shutting of the eyes, a selfdeception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New

Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and

wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Ceasar Borgia to

the Duke of Parma: "e tutto Iesto"immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound. . . .These petty

bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished.

Whoever is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely not befouled . . . On the contrary, it is an honour to have

an "early Christian" as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for

whatever it abusesnot to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind bag tries to dispose

of "by the foolishness of preaching." . . . Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition:

they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner.

Hypocrisyas if this were a charge that the "early Christians" dared to make!After all, they were the

privileged, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early

Christian"and also, I fear, the "last Christian," whom I may perhaps live to seeis a rebel against all

privilege by profound instincthe lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights." . . .Strictly speaking, he

has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"or to be a

"temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"then every other criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon

intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply

"worldly"evil in itself. . . Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and

his every act is instinctively dishonestall his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates,

whatever he hates, has real value . . . The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a criterion of

Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate,

the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriouslythat was quite beyond him. One Jew more or

less what did it matter? . . . The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly

mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has any valueand that is at once its

The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind

naturebut that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as

injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life. . . We deny that God is God . . . If any one were to

show us this Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus

creavit, dei negatio.Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which

goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the

"wisdom of this world," which is to say, of scienceand it will give the name of good to whatever means

serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of

intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes

sciencein praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew that lyingthat "faith"was necessary; later on

the church borrowed the fact from Paul.The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to

absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and

medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing

himself: to give one's own will the name of God, thorathat is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of

the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine

schoolon them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without

being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the "holy books," and as a physician

he sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the

Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bibleof God's mortal

terror of science? . . . No one, in fact, has understood it. This priestbook par excellence opens, as is fitting,

with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, "God" faces only one great

The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the highpriest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored

and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He creates

manman is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored. God's pity for the only form of

distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first

mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaininghe sought dominion over them; he did not want

to be an "animal" himself.So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an endand also

many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God."Woman, at bottom, is a serpent,

Heva"every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"every priest knows that, too.

Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of

knowledge.What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest

blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlikeit is all up with priests and gods

when man becomes scientific!Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the

first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality."Thou shalt not

know"the rest follows from that.God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd.

How is one to protect one's self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out

of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thoughtand all thoughts are bad thoughts!Man must not

think.And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age,

decrepitude, above all, sicknessnothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't

allow him to think. . . Neverthelesshow terrible!, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft,

invading heaven, shadowing the godswhat is to be done?The old God invents war; he separates the

peoples; he makes men destroy one another (the priests have always had need of war....). Waramong

other things, a great disturber of science !Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in

spite of war.So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientificthere is no help for

I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest.The

priest knows of only one great danger: that is sciencethe sound comprehension of cause and effect. But

science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditionsa man must have time, he must have an

overflowing intellect, in order to "know." . . ."Therefore, man must be made unhappy,"this has been, in all

ages, the logic of the priest.It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the

world :"sin." . . . The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up

against scienceagainst the deliverance of man from priests. . . . Man must not look outward; he must look

inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he

must suffer . . . And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.Away with physicians!

What is needed is a Saviour.The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of

"salvation," of "forgiveness"lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological realitywere

devised to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect !And

not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the

most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites!

The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches! . . . When the natural consequences of an act are no longer

"natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstitionby "God," by "spirits," by

"souls"and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons,

then the whole groundwork of knowledge is destroyedthen the greatest of crimes against humanity has

been perpetrated.I repeat that sin, man's selfdesecration par excellence, was invented in order to make

science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention

In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief," of the "believer," for the special benefit

of 'believers." If there remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be "believing"or how

much a sign of decadence, of a broken will to livethen they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice

reaches even the deaf.It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among

Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore it is

true."It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs

upon "faith" as a conditionone shall be blessed because one believes. . . . But what of the thing that the

priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"how is that to be demonstrated?The

"proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith

promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessednesstherefore, it is

true." . . But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be absurdum itself as a criterion of

truth.But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (not

merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessednessin

a technical term, pleasureever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth

when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough

to make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof of "pleasurenothing more; why

in the world should it be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in

conformity to some preestablished harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?The

experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every atom of

the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to.

Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.What, then, is

the meaning of integrityin things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he

must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!Faith makes

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced

by an idee fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains,

but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through

a lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness

and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had

need of a superabundance of healththe actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the

church is to make people ill. And the church itselfdoesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate

ideal?The whole earth as a madhouse?The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical

decadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of

nervous disorder; the inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung

and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up be fore

mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in formthe church has granted the

name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem. . . . Once I ventured to designate

the whole Christian system of training22in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method

of producing a folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy.

Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianityone must first be sick enough for

it. . . .We others, who have the courage for health and likewise for contempt,we may well despise a

religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul!

that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation!

that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this

end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence,

socalled "holiness"a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and

incurably disordered body! . . . The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no

more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (who now, under cover of

Christianity, aspire to power) It does not represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a

conglomeration of decadence products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It

was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity

possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the

time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary type,

the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its

Christian instincts, triumphed . . . Christianity was not "national," it was not based on raceit appealed to all

the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at

its very corethe instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is wellconstituted, proud,

gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless

saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of

the world, and things which are despised":23 this was the formula; in hoc signo the decadence

triumphed.God on the crossis man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this

symbol?Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We all hang on the cross,

consequently we are divine. . . . We alone are divine. . . . Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of

mind was destroyed by itChristianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.

Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual wellbeing,sick reasoning is the only sort that it

can use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon

"intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that

the typically Christian state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and

scientific paths to knowledge must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the

start. . . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priestrevealed by a glance at himis a

phenomenon resulting from decadence,one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how

regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking

straight and walking straight are symptoms of decadence. "Faith" means the will to avoid knowing what is

true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall

never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever makes for illness is good; whatever issues from

abundance, from superabundance, from power, is evil": so argues the believer. The impulse to lieit is by

this that I recognize every foreordained theologian.Another characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness

for philology. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profitthe

capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and

subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis24 in interpretation: whether one be dealing

with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather statisticsnot to mention

the "salvation of the soul." . . . The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to

explain, say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it

the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a philologian run

up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia25 use the "finger of God" to

convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence"

and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should

certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a

misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always

cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain

began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a

domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanacmanat bottom, he is' a mere name for the stupidest

sort of chance. . . . "Divine Providence," which every third man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so

strong an argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an

It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any

martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he

fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such

insensibility to the problem of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not something that one

man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant apostles like Luther, can think of truth in

any such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience the greater

will be his modesty, his discretion, on this point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know

anything further . . . "Truth," as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every freethinker,

every Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been made in

the intellectual discipline and selfcontrol that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest

truth.The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have

misled . . . The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a

cause for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of

deathseeking)this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole

spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have damaged the truth. . . . Even to this day the crude fact of

persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.But why? Is the

worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?An error that becomes

honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs.

Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?One best disposes of a cause

by respectfully putting it on icethat is also the best way to dispose of theologians. . . . This was precisely

the worldhistorical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they

opposedthat they made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom. . . .Women are still on their knees

before an error because they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. Is the cross, then, an

argument?But about all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for

They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly taught them that the truth is proved by

blood. But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and

turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart. And when one goeth through fire for his teachingwhat doth

that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning!26

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the

freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest

themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is

fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they

do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and nonvalue

must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath himand behind him. . . . A mind that aspires to great

things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs

to strength, and to an independent point of view. . . That grand passion which is at once the foundation and

the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts

the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy

means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one

may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it

does not yield to themit knows itself to be sovereign.On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing

unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of

faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent mansuch a man cannot posit himself as a goal,

nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an

end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic

of selfeffacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity.

Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of selfeffacement, of selfestrangement. . . When one reflects how

necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast,

and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the

wellbeing of the weakwilled man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and

"faith." To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial

about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infalliblythese are

conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the

truthful manof the truth. . . . The believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according

to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The

pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanaticSavonarola, Luther,

Rousseau, Robespierre, SaintSimonthese types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But

the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great

massesfanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons. . . .

One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is now a good while since I first proposed

for consideration the question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies.

("Human, AllTooHuman," I, aphorism 483.)27 This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there

any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?All the world believes that there is; but what is not

believed by all the world!Every conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and

error: it becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long time, not one, and then, for an even longer

time, hardly one. What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?Sometimes all that

is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.I call it lying

to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not

before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself:

the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.Now, this will not to see what one sees, this will not to

see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man

becomes inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous

with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the

difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including the German

historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their tonguesthat morality almost owes its

very survival to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?"This is our

conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for itlet us respect all who have

convictions!"I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of antiSemites. On the contrary,

gentlemen! An antiSemite surely does not become more respectable because he lies on principle. . . The

priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies against the

notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because it serves a

purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the will of

God" and "the revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same

road: this was hispractical reason.28 There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not for

man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason. . . .

To know the limits of reasonthat alone is genuine. philosophy. Why did God make a revelation to man?

Would God have done anything superfluous? Man could not find out for himself what was good and what

was evil, so God taught him His will. Moral: the priest does not liethe question, "true" or "untrue," has

nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie

here it would be necessary to knowwhat is true. But this is more than man can know; therefore, the priest is

simply the mouthpiece of God.Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the

right to lie and the shrewd dodge of "revelation" belong to the general priestly typeto the priest of the

decadence as well as to the priest of pagan times (Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom

"God" is a word signifying acquiescence in all things) The "law," the "will of God," the "holy book," and

"inspiration"all these things are merely words for the conditionsunder which the priest comes to power and

with which he maintains his power,these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly

organizations, and of all priestly or priestlyphilosophical schemes of governments. The "holy

lie"common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian churchis not

even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies. . . .

In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are

not visible is my objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation,

the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and selfcontamination of man by the concept of

sintherefore, its means are also bad.I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an

incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much

as name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it,

not merely an evilsmelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,it gives even the most fastidious

psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what is most important, it differs

fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the

whiphand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of

life, and triumphant feeling toward self and lifethe sun shines upon the whole book.All the things on

which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarityfor example, procreation, women and marriageare here

handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of

children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have

his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; . . . it is better to marry than to burn"?29 And is it

possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by the

doctrine of the immaculata conceptio? . . . I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are

said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old greybeards and saints have a way of being gallant to

women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the

breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there

is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a

maiden." Finally, in still another placeperhaps this is also a holy lie: "all the orifices of the body above

the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."

One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the simple process of putting the ends sought

by Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manuby putting these enormously antithetical ends

under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity

contemptible.A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good

lawbook: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it

brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition

of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are

fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A lawbook never recites the

utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the

"thou shalt," on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.At a certain point in the evolution

of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight,

declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall liveor can livehas come to an end. The

object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard

experience. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentationthe

continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infnitum. Against

this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind

the laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many

errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free

gift, a miracle . . . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stood

unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into

question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.The

higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern

with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully

considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatisma primary necessity to every sort of

mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a lawbook as Manu's means to lay

before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfectionit permits them to aspire to the

highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every

holy lie.The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of

nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any

influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but

mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own

special mastery and feeling of perfection. It isnot Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are

chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third

those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocritythe lastnamed

represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The superior casteI call it the fewesthas, as the

most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth.

Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape

being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:30 goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more

unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees uglinessor indignation

against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world

is perfect"so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life.

"Imperfection, what ever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are

parts of this perfection. "The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would

find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in

selfmastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task

as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others. . . . Knowledgea

form of asceticism.They are the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the

most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are; they are not at

liberty to play second.The second caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and

security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of

the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking

from them all that is rough in the business of rulingtheir followers, their right hand, their most apt

disciples.In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the contrary is

made upby it nature is brought to shame. . . The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the

supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to

the evolution of higher types, and the highest typesthe inequality of rights is essential to the existence of

any rights at all.A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of

existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the

heightsthe cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a

broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts,

commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are

compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional

men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a

man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society,

but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the

mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for

specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in

mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary

condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more

delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heartit is simply

his duty. . . . Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles

to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his

petty existencewho make him envious and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it

lies in the assertion of "equal" rights. . . . What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from

weakness, from envy, from revenge.The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .

In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference: whether one preserves thereby or

destroys. There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only

toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling

distinctness. We have just studied a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions

which cause life to flourish into an "eternal" social organization,Christianity found its mission in putting

an end to such an organization, because life flourished under it. There the benefits that reason had produced

during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made

to bring in a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, on the contrary, the

harvest is blighted overnight. . . .That which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most

magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to

which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantismthose holy anarchists

made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world,"which is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end

not a stone stood upon anotherand even Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters. . . .

The Christian and the anarchist: both are decadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating,

poisonous, degenerating, bloodsucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up,

and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future. . . . Christianity was the vampire of the imperium

Romanum, overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great

culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that

we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,this most

admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was

not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been

brought into being, or even dreamed of!This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors:

the accident of personality has nothing to do with such thingsthe first principle of all genuinely great

architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of

corruptionagainst Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity,

crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for

realitythis cowardly, effeminate and sugarcoated gang gradually alienated all "souls," step by step, from

that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the

cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy,

the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio

mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revengeall

that sort of thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a preexistent form, Epicurus

had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war uponnot paganism, but

"Christianity," which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and

immortality.He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianityto deny immortality

was already a form of genuine salvation.Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome

was Epicureanwhen Paul appeared. . . Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world," in the flesh and

inspired by geniusthe Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence. . . . What he saw was how, with the aid of the

small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world conflagration" might be kindled;

how, with the symbol of "God on the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the

empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the Jews."Christianity is the

formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great

Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His

instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to

every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into the

mouthhe made out of him something that even a priest of Mithras could understand. . . This was his

revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob "the

world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master Romethat the notion of a "beyond" is the death

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

The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an

enormity arouses in me.And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with

adamantine selfconsciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the

whole meaning of antiquity disappears! . . To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?All the

prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected

the great and incomparable art of reading profitablythat first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity

of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right

road,the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were

already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning of the work was

ready;and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to

develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have to day reconquered, with unspeakable

selfdiscipline, for ourselvesfor certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our

bodiesthat is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest

things, the whole integrity of knowledgeall these things were already there, and had been there for two

thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere braindrilling! Not

as "German" culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinctin short, as reality. . . All

gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory !The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility,

taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the will to secure the future

of man, a great yes to everything entering into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand

style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, life . . All overwhelmed in a night, but not by

a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by

crafty, sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered,only sucked dry! . . . Hidden vengefulness,

petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole

ghettoworld of the soul, was at once on top!One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for

example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be

an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian

movement:ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they

lacked was something quite different. Nature neglectedperhaps forgotto give them even the most

modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts. . . Between ourselves, they are not even

men. . . . If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is

Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the

whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was

fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was

trampled down (I do not say by what sort of feet) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly

instincts for its originbecause it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life!

. . . The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to

have grovelled in the dusta civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor

and very "senile."What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put aside our

prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is

fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German

nobility was to be won . . . The German noble, always the "Swiss guard" of the church, always in the service

of every bad instinct of the churchbut well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German

swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon

everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility

stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious. . . Christianity, alcoholthe two

great means of corruption. . . . Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity

than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to

choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not. . . . "War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship

with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German

emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I

Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The

Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reapthe

Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The

transvaluation of Christian values,an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of

genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values. . . . This has been the one great

war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissanceit is my question

too; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a

whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and

there enthrone the more noble valuesthat is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most

fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there . . . I see before me the possibility of a perfectly

heavenly enchantment and spectacle :it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and

delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for

thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time

so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughterCaesar

Borgia as pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am

longing for today: by it Christianity would have been swept away!What happened? A German monk,

Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a

rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle

that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capitalinstead of this, his hatred was stimulated by

the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself.Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the

very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale,

Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of

life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things! . . . And Luther restored the church:

he attacked it. . . . The Renaissancean event without meaning, a great futility !Ah, these Germans, what

they have not cost us! Futilitythat has always been the work of the Germans.The Reformation; Liebnitz;

Kant and socalled German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empireevery time a futile substitute for

something that once existed, for something irrecoverable . . . These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I

despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. For

nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on

their conscience all the halfway measures, all the threeeighthsway measures, that Europe is sick

of,they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most

incurable and indestructibleProtestantism. . . . If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the

With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the

Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me,

the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible

corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into

worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak

to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it

lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal. . . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the

church that first enriched mankind with this misery!The "equality of souls before God"this fraud, this

pretext for the rancunes of all the basemindedthis explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern

idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social orderthis is Christian dynamite. . . . The

"humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a selfcontradiction, an art of

selfpollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this,

to me, is the "humanitarianism" of Christianity!Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its

anaemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to

deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard

of,against health, beauty, wellbeing, intellect, kindness of soulagainst life itself. . . .

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be foundI

have letters that even the blind will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great

intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret,

subterranean and small enough,I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race. . . .

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befellfrom the first day of

Christianity!Why not rather from its last?From today?The transvaluation of all values! . . .

1. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth hook of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical

people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual

5. David Friedrich Strauss (180874), author of "Das Leben Jesu" (18356), a very famous work in its day.

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

10. That is, the strict letter of the lawthe chief target of Jesus's early preaching.

13. Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was

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

16. A paraphrase of Demetrius' "Well roar'd, Lion!" in act v, scene 1 of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The

24. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism.

25. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its famous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this

school was F. C. Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination, David F.

27. The aphorism, which is headed "The Enemies of Truth," makes the direct statement: "Convictions are

28. A reference, of course, to Kant's "Kritik der praktischen Vernunft" (Critique of Practical Reason).