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THE ANTICHRIST 
 
Mr. Mencken has also written 
 
 PREJUDICES 
 Five Volumes 
 SELECTED PREJUDICES 
 A BOOK OF BURLESQUES 
 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN 
 THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 
 NOTES ON DEMOCRACY 
 TREATISE ON THE GODS 
 
 He has translated 
 
 THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 by F. W. Nietzsche 
 He has edited 
 
 menckeniana: a schimpflexikon 
 
 He has written introductions to 
 
 VENTURES in COMMON SENSE 
 
 by E. W. Howe 
 
 MAJOR CONFLICTS 
 
 by Stephen Crane 
 
 THE AMERICAN DEMOCRAT 
 
 by James Fenimore Cooper 
 
 THESE ARE BORZOI BOOKS PUBLISHED 
 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF 
 
THE 
 
 ANTICHRIST 
 
 By F. W. NIETZSCHE 
 
 Translated ß-om the German 
 with an Introduction by 
 
 H. L. MENCKEN 
 
 ALFREDAKNOPF 
 
COPYRIGHT 1918 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC, 
 All rights reserved 
 
 No part of this book may be reprinted in any form 
 without permission in writing from the publisher 
 
 Published February, 1920 
 Pocket Book Edition, Published September, 1923 
 Reprinted Twice 
 New edition September, 1931 
 
 MANUFACTURED IN 
 O F A M 
 
 THE UNITED STA 
 ERICA 
 
 T E S 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction by H. L. Mencken 
 Author’s Preface 
 
 The Antichrist 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiog- 
 raphy, “Ecce Homo,” “The Antichrist” is the 
 last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it 
 may be accepted as a statement of some of his 
 most salient ideas in their final form. Notes for 
 it had been accumulating for years and it was to 
 have constituted the first volume of his long- 
 projected magnum, opus, “The Will to Power.” 
 His full plan for this work, as originally drawn 
 up, was as follows: 
 
 Vol. I. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism 
 of Christianity. 
 
 Vol. II. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy 
 as a Nihilistic Movement. 
 
 Vol. III. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, 
 the Most Fatal Form of Ignorance. 
 
 Vol. IV. Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Re- 
 currence. 
 
 The first sketches for “The Will to Power” 
 were made in 1884, soon after the publication of 
 the first three parts of “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” 
 — 7 — 
 
 ^ 9 O 
 
 — ’ } h. (V V' 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 and thereafter, for four years, Nietzsche piled up 
 notes. They were written at all the places he 
 visited on his endless travels in search of health 
 — at Nice, at Venice, at Sils-Maria in the Enga- 
 dine (for long his favourite resort), at Cannobio, 
 at Zürich, at Genoa, at Chur, at Leipzig. Sev- 
 eral times his work was interrupted by other 
 books, first by “Beyond Good and Evil,” then by 
 “The Genealogy of Morals” (written in twenty 
 days), then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almost 
 as often he changed his plan. Once he decided 
 to expand “The Will to Power” to ten volumes, 
 with “An Attempt at a New Interpretation of 
 the World” as a general sub-title. Again he 
 adopted the sub-title of “An Interpretation of All 
 That Happens.” Finally, he hit upon “An At- 
 tempt at a Transvaluation of All Values,” and 
 went back to four volumes, though with a num- 
 ber of changes in their arrangement. In Sep- 
 tember, 1888 , he began actual work upon the 
 first volume, and before the end of the month it 
 was completed. The Summer had been one of 
 almost hysterical creative activity. Since the 
 middle of June he had written two other small 
 books, “The Case of Wagner” and “The Twi- 
 light of the Idols,” and before the end of the 
 — 8 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 year he was destined to write “Ecce Homo.” 
 Some time during December his health began to 
 fail rapidly, and soon after the New Year he was 
 helpless. Thereafter he wrote no more. 
 
 The Wagner diatribe and “The Twilight of the 
 Idols” were published immediately, but “The 
 Antichrist” did not get into type until 1895. I 
 suspect that the delay was due to the influence 
 of the philosopher’s sister, Elisabeth Förster- 
 Nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but by no 
 means uniformly judicious propagandist of his 
 ideas. During his dark days of neglect and mis- 
 understanding, when even family and friends 
 kept aloof, Frau Förster-Nietzsche went with him 
 farther than any other, but there were bounds be- 
 yond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those 
 bounds were marked by crosses. One notes, in 
 her biography of him — a useful but not always 
 accurate work — an evident desire to purge him 
 of the accusation of mocking at sacred things. 
 He had, she says, great admiration for “the ele- 
 vating effect of Christianity . . . upon the weak 
 and ailing,” and “a real liking for sincere, pious 
 Christians,” and “a tender love for the Founder 
 of Christianity.” All his wrath, she continues, 
 was reserved for “St. Paul and his like,” who 
 — 9 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 perverted the Beatitudes, which Christ intended 
 for the lowly only, into a universal religion which 
 made war upon aristocratic values. Here, obvi- 
 ously, one is addressed by an interpreter who 
 cannot forget that she is the daughter of a Lu- 
 theran pastor and the grand-daughter of two 
 others; a touch of conscience gets into her read- 
 ing of “The Antichrist.” She even hints that 
 the text may have been garbled, after the author’s 
 collapse, by some more sinister heretic. There 
 is not the slightest reason to believe that any such 
 garbling ever took place, nor is there any evi- 
 dence that their common heritage of piety rested 
 upon the brother as heavily as it rested upon the 
 sister. On the contrary, it must be manifest that 
 Nietzsche, in this book, intended to attack Chris- 
 tianity headlong and with all arms, that for all 
 his rapid writing he put the utmost care into it, 
 and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it 
 stands. The ideas in it were anything but new 
 to him when he set them down. He had been de- 
 veloping them since the days of his beginning. 
 You will find some of them, clearly recognizable, 
 in the first book he ever wrote, “The Birth of 
 Tragedy.” [y ou will find the most important of 
 all of them — the conception of Christianity as 
 — 10 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ressentiment — set forth at length in the first part 
 of “The Genealogy of Morals,” published under 
 his own supervision in 1887. And the rest are 
 scattered through the whole vast mass of his 
 notes, sometimes as mere questionings hut 
 often worked out very carefully. Moreover, 
 let it not be forgotten that it was Wagner’s yield- 
 ing to Christian sentimentality in “Parsifal” 
 that transformed Nietzsche from the first among 
 his literary advocates into the most bitter of 
 his opponents. He could forgive every other 
 sort of mountebankery, but not that. f‘In me,” 
 he once said, “the Christianity of my forbears 
 reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stem 
 intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters 
 and makes paramount turns against Christian- 
 ity. In me Christianity . . . devours itself.”*( 
 In truth, the present philippic is as necessary 
 to the completeness of the whole of Nietzsche’s 
 system as the keystone is to the arch. All the 
 curves of his speculation lead up to it. What he 
 flung himself against, from beginning to end of 
 his days of writing, was always, in the last an- 
 alysis, Christianity in some form or other^ — 
 Christianity as a system of practical ethics, Chris- 
 tianity as a political code, Christianity as meta- 
 — 11 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 physics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth. It 
 would be difficult to think of any intellectual en- 
 terprise on his long list that did not, more or less 
 directly and clearly, relate itself to this master 
 enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostaey 
 from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the 
 ! fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the 
 convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other 
 element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized 
 man. The will to power was his answer to 
 Christianity’s affectation of humility and self- 
 sacrifice; eternal recurrence was his moeking 
 criticism of Christian optimism and millennial- 
 ism; the superman was his candidate for the 
 place of the Christian ideal of the “good” man, 
 prudently abased before the throne of God. The 
 things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian 
 things — the abandonment of the purely moral 
 view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the de- 
 thronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, 
 the renuneiation of the whole hocus-pocus of dog- 
 matic religion, the extermination of false aristoc- 
 racies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plu- 
 tocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly “inno- 
 cence” that was Greek. If he was anything in a 
 word, Nietzsche was a Greek bom two thousand 
 — 12 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 years too late. His dreams were thoroughly 
 Hellenic; his whole manner of thinking was Hel- 
 lenic; his peculiar errors were Hellenic no less. 
 But his Hellenism, I need not add, was anything 
 hut the pale neo-Platonism that has run like a 
 thread through the thinking of the Western world 
 since the days of the Christian Fathers. [From 
 Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us must get, 
 but his real forefather was Heraclitus^ It is in 
 Heraclitus that one finds the germ of his primary 
 view of the universe — a view, to wit, that sees it, 
 not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic 
 representation. The God that Nietzsche imag- 
 ined, in the end, was not far from the God that 
 such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines — a sii- 
 preme craftsman, ever experimenting, ever com- 
 ing closer to an ideal balancing of lines and 
 forces, and yet always failing to work out the 
 final harmony. 
 
 The late war, awakening all the primitive ra- 
 cial fury of the Western nations, and therewith 
 all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos 
 and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon 
 Nietzsche, as upon the most daring and provoca- 
 tive of recent amateur theologians. The Ger- 
 mans, with their characteristic tendency to ex- 
 — 13 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 plain their every act, in terms as realistic and un- 
 pleasant as possible, appear to have mauled him 
 in a belated and unexpected embrace, to the hor- 
 ror, I daresay, of the Kaiser, and perhaps to the 
 even greater horror of Nietzsche’s own ghost. 
 The folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with their equally 
 characteristic tendency to explain all their enter- 
 prises romantically, simultaneously set him up as 
 the Antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. 
 The result was a great deal of misrepresentation 
 and misunderstanding of him. From the pulpits 
 of the allied countries, and particularly from 
 those of England and the United States, a horde 
 of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in ex- 
 travagant terms as the author of all the horrors of 
 the time, and in the newspapers, until the Kaiser 
 was elected sole bugaboo, he shared the honors of 
 that office with von Hindenburg, the Crown 
 Prince, Capt. Boy-Ed, von Bernstorff and von 
 Tirpitz. Most of this denunciation, of course, 
 was frankly idiotic — the naive prattle of su- 
 burban Methodists, notoriety-seeking college pro- 
 fessors, almost illiterate editorial writers, and 
 other such numskulls. In much of it, including 
 not a few official hymns of hate, Nietzsche was 
 gravely discovered to be the teacher of such 
 — 14 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 spokesmen of the extremest sort of German na- 
 tionalism as von Bemhardi and von Treitschke 
 — ^which was just as intelligent as making George 
 Bernard Shaw the mentor of Lloyd-George. In 
 other solemn pronunciamentoes he was credited 
 with being philosophically responsible for vari- 
 ous imaginary crimes of the enemy — the whole- 
 sale slaughter or mutilation of prisoners of war, 
 the deliberate burning down of Red Cross hos- 
 pitals, the utilization of the corpses of the slain 
 for soap-making. I amused myself, in those 
 gaudy days, by collecting newspaper clippings 
 to this general effect, and later on I shall prob- 
 ably publish a digest of them, as a contribution 
 to the study of war hysteria. The thing went to 
 unbelievable lengths. On the strength of the 
 fact that I had published a book on Nietzsche in 
 1906, six years after his death, I was called 
 upon by agents of the Department of Justice, 
 elaborately outfitted with badges, to meet the 
 charge that I was an intimate associate and 
 agent of “the German monster, Nietzsky.” I 
 quote the official proces verbal, an indignant but 
 often misspelled document. Alas, poor Nietz- 
 sche! After all his laborious efforts to prove 
 that he was not a German, but a Pole — even 
 — 15 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 after his heroic readiness, via anti-anti-Semi- 
 tism, to meet the deduction that, if a Pole, then 
 probably also a Jew! 
 
 But under all this alarmed and preposterous 
 tosh there was at least a sound instinct, and that 
 was the instinct which recognized Nietzsche as 
 the most eloquent, pertinacious and effective of 
 all the critics of the philosophy to which the Al- 
 lies against Germany stood committed, and on 
 the strength of which, at all events in theory, the 
 United States had engaged itself in the war. He 
 was not, in point of fact, involved with the vis- 
 ible enemy, save in remote and transient ways; 
 the German, officially, remained the most ardent 
 of Christians during the war and became a demo- 
 crat at its close. But he was plainly a foe of de- 
 mocracy in all its forms, political, religious and 
 epistemological, and what is worse, his opposi- 
 tion was set forth in terms that were not only ex- 
 traordinarily penetrating and devastating, but 
 also uncommonly offensive. It was thus quite 
 natural that he should have aroused a degree of 
 indignation verging upon the pathological in the 
 two countries that had planted themselves upon 
 the democratic platform most boldly, and that 
 felt it most shaky, one may add, under their feet. 
 
 — 16 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I daresay that Nietzsche, had he been alive, 
 would have got a lot of satisfaction out of the 
 execration thus heaped upon him, not only be- 
 cause, being a vain fellow, he enjoyed execra- 
 tion as a tribute to his general singularity, and 
 hence to his superiority, but also and more im- 
 portantly because, being no mean psychologist, 
 he would have recognized the disconcerting 
 doubts underlying it. If Nietzsche’s criticism 
 of democracy were as ignorant and empty, say, 
 as the average evangelical clergyman’s criticism 
 of Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection, then 
 the advocates of democracy could afford to dis- 
 miss it as loftily as the Darwinians dismiss the 
 blather of the holy clerks. And if his attack 
 upon Christianity were mere sound and fury, 
 signifying nothing, then there would be no call 
 for anathemas from the sacred desk. But these 
 onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a 
 tremendous learning and a great deal of point 
 and plausibility — there are, in brief, bullets in 
 the gun, teeth in the tiger, — and so it is no won- 
 der that they excite the ire of men who hold, as a 
 primary article of belief, that their acceptance 
 would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and 
 bring Jahveh to sobs upon His Throne. 
 
 — 17 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 But in all this justifiable fear, of course, there 
 remains a false assumption, and that is the as- 
 sumption that Nietzsche proposed to destroy 
 Christianity altogether, and so rob the plain peo- 
 ple of the world of their virtue, their spiritual 
 consolations, and their hope of heaven. Noth- 
 ing could be more untrue. The fact is that 
 Nietzsche had no interest whatever in the delu- 
 sions of the plain people — that is, intrinsically. 
 It seemed to him of small moment what they be- 
 lieved, so long as it was safely imbecile. What 
 he stood against was not their beliefs, but the 
 elevation of those beliefs, by any sort of demo- 
 cratic process, to the dignity of a state philos- 
 ophy — what he feared most was the pollution 
 and crippling of the superior minority by intel- 
 lectual disease from below. His plain aim in 
 “The Antichrist” was to combat that menace by 
 completing the work begun, on the one hand, by 
 Darwin and the other evolutionist philosophers, 
 and, on the other hand, by German historians and 
 philologians. The net effect of this earlier at- 
 tack, in the eighties, had been the collapse of 
 Christian theology as a serious concern of edu- 
 cated men. The mob, it must be obvious, was 
 very little shaken; even to this day it has not put 
 — 18 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 off its belief in the essential Christian doctrines. 
 But the intelligentsia, by 1885, had been pretty 
 well convinced. No man of sound information, 
 at the time Nietzsehe planned “The Antichrist,” 
 actually believed that the world was created in 
 seven days, or that its fauna was once over- 
 whelmed by a flood as a penalty for the sins of 
 man, or that Noah saved the boa constrictor, the 
 prairie dog and the pediculus capitis by taking 
 a pair of each into the ark, or that Lot’s wife was 
 turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of 
 the True Cross could cure hydrophobia. Such 
 notions, still almost universally prevalent in 
 Christendom a century before, were now confined 
 to the great body of ignorant and credulous men 
 — that is, to ninety-five or ninety-six percent, of 
 the race. For a man of the superior minority 
 to subscribe to one of them publicly was already 
 suflBcient to set him off as one in imminent need 
 of psychiatrical attention. Belief in them had 
 become a mark of inferiority, like the allied be- 
 lief in madstones, magic and apparitions. 
 
 But though the theology of Christianity had 
 thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion 
 of the rabble, propagated on that level by the 
 ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics 
 — 19 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost ac- 
 ceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than 
 ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in 
 fact, that they simply must be saved from the 
 wreck — that the world would vanish into chaos 
 if they went the way of the revelations support- 
 ing them. In this fear a great many judicious 
 men joined, and so there arose what was, in es- 
 sence, an absolutely new Christian cult — a cult, 
 to wit, purged of all the supematuralism super- 
 imposed upon the older cult by generations of 
 theologians, and harking back to what was con- 
 ceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus. 
 This cult still flourishes; Protestantism tends to 
 become identical with it; it invades Catholicism 
 as Modernism; it is supported by great numbers 
 of men whose intelligence is manifest and 
 whose sincerity is not open to question. Even 
 Nietzsche himself yielded to it in weak moments, 
 as you will discover on examining his somewhat 
 laborious effort to make Paul the villain of Chris- 
 tian theology, and Jesus no more than an inno- 
 cent bystander. But this sentimental yielding 
 never went far enough to distract his attention 
 for long from his main idea, which was this: that 
 Christian ethics were quite as dubious, at bot- 
 — 20 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 tom, as Christian theology — that they were 
 founded, just as surely as such childish fables as 
 the story of Jonah and the whale, upon the pe- 
 culiar prejudices and credulities, the special de- 
 sires and appetites, of inferior men — that they 
 warred upon the best interests of men of a better 
 sort quite as unmistakably as the most extrava- 
 gant of objective superstitions. In brief, what 
 he saw in Christian ethics, under all the poetry 
 and all the line show of altruism and all the 
 theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic 
 effort to curb the egoism of the strong — a con- 
 spiracy of the chandala against the free func- 
 tioning of their superiors, nay, against the free 
 progress of mankind. This theory is the thing 
 he exposes in “The Antichrist,” bringing to the 
 business his amazingly chromatic and exigent 
 eloquence at its finest flower. This is the “con- 
 spiracy” he sets forth in all the panoply of his 
 characteristic italics, dashes, sforzando interjec- 
 tions and exclamation points. 
 
 Well, an idea is an idea. The present one 
 may be right and it may be wrong. One thing 
 is quite certain: that no progress will be made 
 against it by denouncing it as merely immoral. 
 If it is ever laid at all, it must be laid evidenti- 
 — 21 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ally, logically. The notion to the contrary is 
 thoroughly democratic; the mob is the most ruth- 
 less of tyrants; it is always in a democratic so- 
 ciety that heresy and felony tend to be most con- 
 stantly confused. One hears without surprise of 
 a Bismarck philosophizing placidly (at least in 
 his old age) upon the delusion of Socialism and 
 of a Frederick the Great playing the hose of 
 his eynieism upon the absolutism that was almost 
 identical with his own person, but men in the 
 mass never brook the destructive diseussion of 
 their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is 
 naturally most evident in those soeieties in which 
 men in the mass are most influential. Democ- 
 raey and free speech are not facets of one gem; 
 democracy and free speech are eternal enemies. 
 But in any battle between an institution and an 
 idea, the idea, in the long run, has the better of it. 
 Here I do not venture into the absurdity of argu- 
 ing that, as the world wags on, the truth always 
 survives. I believe nothing of the sort. As a 
 matter of fact, it seems to me that an idea that 
 happens to be true — or, more exactly, as near to 
 truth as any human idea can be, and yet remain 
 generally intelligible — it seems to me that such 
 an idea carries a special and often fatal handi- 
 — 22 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 cap. The majority of men prefer delusion to 
 truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above 
 all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a uni- 
 verse of false appearances — of complex and ir- 
 rational phenomena, defectively grasped. But 
 though an idea that is true is thus not likely to 
 prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great 
 advantage. The evidence behind it is now sup- 
 ported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, senti- 
 mentality — and sentimentality is as powerful as 
 an army with banners. One never hears of a 
 martyr in history whose notions are seriously dis- 
 puted today. The forgotten ideas are those of 
 the men who put them forward soberly and 
 quietly, hoping fatuously that they would con- 
 quer by tho force of their truth; these are the 
 ideas that we now struggle to rediscover. Had 
 Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by out- 
 raged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been 
 a glorious day for his doctrines. As it is, they' 
 are helped on their way every time they are de- 
 nounced as immoral and against God. The war 
 brought down upon them the maledictions of vast 
 herds of right-thinking men. And now “The 
 Antichrist,” after long neglect, is being reprinted 
 and read again. . . . 
 
 23 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 One imagines the. author, a sardonic wraith, 
 snickering somewhat sadly over the fact. His 
 shade, wherever it suffers, is favoured in these 
 days by many such consolations, some of them 
 of much greater horsepower. Think of the 
 facts and arguments, even the underlying 
 theories and attitudes, that have been borrowed 
 from him, consciously and unconsciously, by 
 the foes of Bolshevism during these last thrill- 
 ing years! The face of democracy, suddenly 
 seen hideously close, has scared the guardians 
 of the reigning plutocracy half to death, and 
 they have gone to the devil himself for aid. 
 Southern Senators, almost illiterate men, have 
 mixed his acids with well water and spouted 
 them like affrighted geysers, not knowing what 
 they did. Nor are they the first to borrow from 
 him. Years ago I called attention to the debt 
 incurred with characteristic forgetfulness of ob- 
 ligation by the late Theodore Roosevelt, in “The 
 Strenuous Life” and elsewhere. Roosevelt, a 
 typical apologist for the existing order, adeptly 
 dragging a herring across the trail whenever it 
 was menaced, yet managed to delude the native 
 boobery, at least until toward the end, into ac- 
 cepting him as a fiery exponent of pure democ- 
 — 24 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 racy. Perhaps he even fooled himself; charla- 
 tans usually do so soon or late. A study of 
 Nietzsche reveals the sources of much that was 
 honest in him, and exposes the hollowness 
 of much that was sham. Nietzsche, an infi- 
 nitely harder and more courageous intellect, 
 was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; 
 he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him 
 from the glaring fact. What is called Bol- 
 shevism today he saw clearly a generation ago 
 and described for what it was and is — democ- 
 racy in another aspect, the old resssentiment of 
 the lower orders in free function once more. 
 Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity 
 — ^he saw them all as allotropic forms of democ- 
 racy, as variations upon the endless struggle of 
 quantity against quality, of the weak and timor- 
 ous against the strong and enterprising, of the 
 botched against the fit. The world needed a 
 staggering exaggeration to make it see even half 
 of the truth. It trembles today as it trembled 
 during the French Revolution. Perhaps it 
 would tremble less if it could combat the mon- 
 ster with a clearer conscience and less burden of 
 compromising theory — if it could launch its 
 forces frankly at the fundamental doctrine, and 
 — 25 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 not merely employ them to police the transient 
 orgy. 
 
 Nietzsche, in the long run, may help it toward 
 that greater honesty. His notions, propagated 
 by cuttings from cuttings from cuttings, may con- 
 ceivably prepare the way for a sounder, more 
 healthful theory of society and of the state, and 
 so free human progress from the stupidities 
 which now hamper it, and men of true vision 
 from the despairs which now sicken them. I say 
 it is conceivable, but I doubt that it is probable. 
 The soul and the belly of mankind are too evenly 
 balanced ; it is not likely that the belly will ever 
 put away its hunger or forget its power. Here, 
 perhaps, there is an example of the eternal re- 
 currence that Nietzsche was fond of mulling over 
 in his blacker moods. We are in the midst of 
 one of the perennial risings of the lower orders. 
 It got under way long before any of the current 
 Bolshevist demons was born; it was given its 
 long, secure start by the intolerable tyranny of 
 the plutocracy — the end product of the Eight- 
 eenth Century revolt against the old aristocracy. 
 It found resistance suddenly slackened by civil 
 war within the plutocracy itself — one gang of 
 traders falling upon another gang, to the tune of 
 — 26 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 vast hymn-singing and yells to God. Perhaps it 
 has already passed its apogee; the plutocraey, 
 chastened, shows signs of a new solidarity; the 
 wheel continues to swing ’round. But this com- 
 bat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after 
 all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities strug- 
 gle for the privilege of polluting the world. 
 What actual difference does it make to a civilized 
 
 man, when there is a steel strike, whether the 
 workmen win or the mill-owners win? The con- 
 flict can interest him only as spectacle, as the 
 conflict between Bonaparte and the old order in 
 Europe interested Goethe and Beethoven. The 
 victory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring 
 chaos nearer, and so set the stage for a genuine 
 revolution later on, with (let us hope) a new 
 feudalism or something better coming out of it, 
 and a new Thirteenth Century at dawn. This 
 seems to be the slow, costly way of the worst of 
 habitable worlds. 
 
 In the present case my money is laid upon the 
 plutocracy. It will win because it will be 
 
 able, in the long run, to enlist the finer intelli- 
 gences. The mob and its maudlin causes at- 
 tract only sentimentalists and scoundrels, chiefly 
 the latter. Politics, under a democracy, reduces 
 
 — 27 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of 
 the proletariat; even when a superior man pre- 
 vails at that disgusting game he must prevail at 
 the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior 
 men make the attempt. The average great cap- 
 tain of the rabble, when he is not simply a 
 weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite 
 so far gone that he is unconscious of his own 
 hypocrisy — a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. 
 The plutocracy can recruit measurably more re- 
 spectable janissaries, if only because it can make 
 self-interest less obviously costly to amour 
 propre. Its defect and its weakness lie in the 
 fact that it is still too young to have acquired 
 dignity. But lately sprung from the mob it 
 now preys upon, it yet shows some of the habits 
 of mind of that mob: it is blatant, stupid, igno- 
 rant, lacking in all delicate instinct and govern- 
 mental finesse. Above all, it remains somewhat 
 heavily moral. One seldom finds it undertak- 
 ing one of its characteristic imbecilities without 
 offering a sonorous moral reason; it spends al- 
 most as much to support the Y. M. C. A., vice- 
 crusading, Prohibition and other such puerilities 
 as it spends upon Congressmen, strike-breakers, 
 gun-men, kept patriots and newspapers. In Eng- 
 — 28 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 land the case is even worse. It is almost impos- 
 sible to find a wealthy industrial over there who 
 is not also an eminent non-conformist layman, 
 and even among financiers there are praying 
 brothers. On the Continent, the day is saved by 
 the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more 
 and more Jewish, Here the intellectual cyni- 
 cism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social 
 ungracefulness. If he is destined to lead the 
 plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel he 
 will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy 
 — i. e., a caste of gentlemen — , but he will at 
 least make it intelligent, and hence worthy of 
 respect. The case against the Jews is long and 
 damning; it would justify ten times as much prej- 
 udice as they now encounter in the world. But 
 whenever you find a Davidsbiindlerschaft mak- 
 ing practise against the Philistines, there you 
 will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this 
 fact that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the 
 children of Israel quite as often as he spoke 
 against them. He was not blind to their faults, 
 but when he set them beside Christians he could 
 not deny their general superiority. Perhaps in 
 America and England, as on the Continent, the 
 increasing Jewishness of the plutocracy, while 
 — 29 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 cutting it off from all chance of ever developing 
 into an aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a 
 dignity that it will at least deserve a certain 
 grudging respect. 
 
 But even so, it will remain in a sort of half- 
 world, midway between the gutter and the stars. 
 Above it will still stand the small group of men 
 that constitutes the permanent aristocracy of the 
 race — the men of imagination and high purpose, 
 the makers of genuine progress, the brave and 
 ardent spirits, above all petty fears and discon- 
 tents and above all petty hopes and ideals no less. 
 There were heroes before Agamemnon; there 
 will be Bachs after Johann Sebastian. And be- 
 neath the Judaized plutocracy, the sublimated 
 bourgeoisie, there the immemorial proletariat, I 
 venture to guess, will roar on, endlessly tortured 
 by its vain hatreds and envies, stampeded and 
 made to tremble by its ancient superstitions, 
 prodded and made miserable by its sordid and 
 degrading hopes. It seems to me very likely 
 that, in this proletariat, Christianity will con- 
 tinue to survive. It is nonsense, true enough, 
 but it is sweet. Nietzsche, denouncing its dan- 
 gers as a poison, almost falls into the error of 
 denying it its undoubtedly sugary smack. Of 
 — 30 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 all the religions ever devised by the great practi- 
 cal jokers of the race, this is the one that offers 
 most for the least money, so to speak, to the infe- 
 rior man. It starts out by denying his inferi- 
 ority in plain terms: all men are equal in the 
 sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferior- 
 ity into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit 
 to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon 
 — of such are the celestial elect. Not all the elo- 
 quence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the pain- 
 ful marshalling of evidence of a million Dar- 
 wins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great 
 consolation of its allure. The most they can ever 
 accomplish is to make the superior orders of men 
 acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and 
 so give them armament against the contagion. 
 This is going on ; this is being done. I think that 
 “The Antichrist” has a useful place in that enter- 
 prise. It is strident, it is often extravagant, it is, 
 to many sensitive men, in the worst of possible 
 taste, but at bottom it is enormously apt and 
 effective — and on the surface it is undoubtedly 
 a good show. One somehow enjoys, with the 
 malice that is native to man, the spectacle of an- 
 athemas batted back; it is refreshing to see the 
 pitchfork employed against gentlemen who have 
 — 31 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. In 
 Nietzsche they found, after many long years, a 
 foeman worthy of them — not a mere fancy 
 swordsman like Voltaire, or a mob orator like 
 Tom Paine, or a pedant like the heretics of ex- 
 egesis, but a gladiator armed with steel and ar- 
 moured with steel, and showing all the ferocious 
 gusto of a mediaeval bishop. It is a pity that 
 Holy Church has no process for the elevation of 
 demons, like its process for the canonization of 
 saints. There must be a long roll of black mir- 
 acles to the discredit of the Accursed Friedrich — 
 sinners purged of conscience and made happy in 
 their sinning, clerics shaken in their theology by 
 visions of a new and better holy city, the strong 
 made to exult, the weak robbed of their old sad 
 romance. It would be a pleasure to see the Ad- 
 vocatus Diaboli turn from the table of the prose- 
 cution to the table of the defence, and move in 
 solemn form for the damnation of the Naumburg 
 hobgoblin. . . . 
 
 Of all Nietzsche’s books, “The Antichrist” 
 comes nearest to conventionality in form. It 
 presents a connected argument with very few in- 
 terludes, and has a beginning, a middle and an 
 end. Most of his works are in the form of col- 
 — 32 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 lections of apothegms, and sometimes the sub- 
 ject changes on every second page. This fact 
 constitutes one of the counts in the orthodox in- 
 dictment of him: it is cited as proof that his ca- 
 pacity for consecutive thought was limited, and 
 that he was thus deficient mentally, and perhaps 
 a downright moron. The argument, it must be 
 obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What 
 deceives the professors is the traditional prolix- 
 ity of philosophers. Because the average philo- 
 sophical writer, when he essays to expose his 
 ideas, makes such inordinate drafts upon the 
 parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emp- 
 tied these defective observers jump to the conclu- 
 sion that his intrinsic notions are of correspond- 
 ing weight. This is not unseldom quite untrue. 
 What makes philosophy so garrulous is not the 
 profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; 
 they are like physicians who sought to cure a 
 slight hyperacidity by giving the patient a car- 
 load of burned oyster-shells to eat. There is, 
 too, the endless poll-parrotting that goes on : each 
 new philosopher must prove his learning by la- 
 boriously rehearsing the ideas of all previ- 
 ous philosophers. . . . Nietzsche avoided both 
 faults. He always assumed that his readers 
 — 33 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 knew the books, and that it was thus unnecessary 
 to rewrite them. And, having an idea that 
 seemed to him to be novel and original, he stated 
 it in as few words as possible, and then shut 
 down. Sometimes he got it into a hundred 
 words ; sometimes it took a . thousand ; now and 
 then, as in the present case, he developed a series 
 of related ideas into a connected book. But he 
 never wrote a word too many. He never 
 pumped up an idea to make it appear bigger 
 than it actually was. The pedagogues, alas, are 
 not accustomed to that sort of writing in serious 
 fields. They resent it, and sometimes they even 
 try to improve it. There exists, in fact, a huge 
 and solemn tome on Nietzsche by a learned man 
 of America in which all of his brilliancy is pain- 
 fully translated into the windy phrases of the 
 seminaries. The tome is satisfactorily ponder- 
 ous, but the meat of the cocoanut is left out: there 
 is actually no discussion of the Nietzschean view 
 of Christianity! . . . Always Nietzsche daunts 
 the pedants. He employed too few words for 
 them — and he had too many ideas. 
 
 The present translation of “The Antichrist” is 
 published by agreement with Dr. Oscar Levy, 
 — 34 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 editor of the English edition of Nietzsche. 
 There are two earlier translations, one by 
 Thomas Common and the other by Anthony M. 
 Ludovici. That of Mr. Common follows the 
 text very closely, and thus occasionally shows 
 some essentially German turns of phrase ; that of 
 Mr. Ludovici is more fluent but rather less exact. 
 I do not offer my own version on the plea that 
 either of these is useless; on the contrary, I 
 cheerfully acknowledge that they have much 
 merit, and that they helped me at almost every 
 line. I began this new Englishing of the book, 
 not in any hope of supplanting them, and surely 
 not with any notion of meeting a great public 
 need, but simply as a private amusement in 
 troubled days. But as I got on with it I began 
 to see ways of putting some flavour of Nietzsche’s 
 peculiar style into the English, and so amusement 
 turned into a more or less serious labour. The 
 result, of course, is far from satisfactory, but it 
 at least represents a very diligent attempt. 
 Nietzsche, always under the influence of French 
 models, wrote a German that differs materially 
 from any other German that I know. It is more 
 nervous, more varied, more rapid in tempo; it 
 runs to more effective climaxes; it is never 
 — 35 — 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 stodgy. His marks begin to show upon the writ- 
 ing of the younger Germans of today. They are 
 getting away from the old thunderous manner, 
 with its long sentences and its tedious gram- 
 matical complexities. In the course of time, I 
 daresay, they will develop a German almost as 
 clear as French and almost as colourful and resil- 
 ient as English. 
 
 I owe thanks to Dr. Levy for his imprimatur, 
 to Mr. Theodor Hemberger for criticism, and to 
 Messrs. Common and Ludovici for showing me 
 the way around many a difficulty. 
 
 H. L. Mencken. 
 
 — 36 — 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This book belongs to the most rare of men. 
 Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is pos- 
 sible that they may be among those who under- 
 stand 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 bom posthumously. 
 
 The conditions under which any one under- 
 stands me, and necessarily understands me — I 
 know them only too well. Even to endure my 
 seriousness, my passion, he must carry intel- 
 lectual integrity to the verge of hardness. h 3 
 must be accustomed to living on mountain tops 
 — and to looking upon the wretched gabble of 
 politics and nationalism as beneath him. He 
 must have become indifferent; he must never 
 ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him 
 or a fatality to him. . . . He must have an 
 inclination, bom of strength, for questions that 
 no one has the courage for; the courage for the 
 forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. 
 — 37 — 
 
PREFACE 
 
 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.J And the will to 
 economize in the grand manner — to hold to- 
 gether his strength, his enthusiasm. . . . Rev- 
 erence for self; love of self; absolute freedom 
 of self. . . . 
 
 Very well, then! of that sort only are my 
 readers, my true readers, my readers foreor- 
 dained: of what account are the rest ? — The rest 
 are merely humanity. — One must make one’s 
 self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness 
 of soul, — in contempt. 
 
 Friedrich W. Nietzsche. 
 
 — 38 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 1 . 
 
 — Let us look each other in the face. We 
 are Hyperboreans — ^we know well enough how 
 remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by 
 water will you find the road to the Hyper- 
 boreans”: even Pindar,^ in his day, knew that 
 much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the 
 ice, beyond death — our life, our happiness. 
 . . . We have discovered that happiness; we 
 know the way; we got our knowledge of it from 
 thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else 
 has found it? — 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 compro- 
 
 1 Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth book of 
 Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond 
 the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed un- 
 broken happiness and perpetual youth. 
 
 — 41 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 mise, 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 ^mid the ice than among modern 
 virtues and other such south-winds! ... We 
 were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves 
 nor others; but we were a long time finding 
 out where to direct our courage. We grew dis- 
 mal; they called us fatalists. Our fate — it was 
 the fulness, the tension, the storing up of 
 powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and 
 great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the 
 happiness of the weakling, from “resignation” 
 . . . There was thunder in our air; nature, 
 as we embodied it, became overcast — for we 
 had not yet found the way. The formula of 
 our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a 
 goal. . . . 
 
 2 . 
 
 What is good? — ^Whatever augments the feel- 
 ing of power, the will to power, power itself, 
 in man. 
 
 What is evil? — Whatever springs from weak- 
 ness. 
 
 — 42 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 What is happiness? — The feeling that power 
 increases — that resistance is overcome. 
 
 Not contentment, hut more power; not peace 
 at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency 
 (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue 
 free of moral acid). 
 
 The weak and the botched shall perish: first 
 principle of our charity. And one should help 
 them to it. 
 
 What is more harmful than any vice? — Prac- 
 tical sympathy for the botched and the weak — 
 Christianity. . . . 
 
 3 . 
 
 The problem that I set here is not what shall 
 replace mankind in the order of living creatures 
 ( — man is an end — ) ; but what type of man 
 must be bred, must be willed, as being the most 
 valuable, the most worthy of life, the most 
 secure guarantee of the future. 
 
 This more valuable type has appeared often 
 enough in the past: but always as a happy ac- 
 cident, as an exception, never as deliberately 
 willed. Very often it has been precisely the 
 most feared; hitherto it has been almost t^he 
 terror of terrors; — and out of that terror the 
 — 43 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 contrary type has been willed, cultivated and 
 attained: the domestie animal, the herd animal, 
 the sick brute-man — the Christian. . . . 
 
 Mankind surely does not represent an evolu- 
 tion toward a better or stronger or higher level, 
 as progress is now understood. This “prog- 
 
 a false idea. The European of today, in his 
 essential worth, falls far below the European of 
 the Renaissance; the process of evolution does 
 not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, 
 strengthening. 
 
 True enough, it succeeds in isolated and in- 
 dividual 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 whicl 
 
 been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, 
 for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes 
 and nations may occasionally represent such 
 lucky accidents. 
 
 4 . 
 
 ress” is merely a modem idea, whieh is to say. 
 
 in the mass, appears 
 
 Sueh happy strokes of high suecess have^alwayC 
 
 44 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 5 . 
 
 We should not deck out and embellish 
 Christianity: it has waged a war to the death 
 against this higher type of man, it has put all 
 the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, 
 it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil 
 One himself, out of these instincts — the strong 
 man as the_typical reprobate, the “outcast among 
 men.” Christianity has taken the part of all 
 the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an 
 ideal out of antagonism to all the self -preserva- 
 tive instincts of sound life ; it has corrupted even 
 the faculties of {hose natures that are intellec- 
 tually most vigorous, by representing the high- 
 est intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, 
 as full of temptation. The most lamentable 
 example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed 
 that his intellect had been destroyed by original 
 sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by 
 Christianity! — 
 
 6 . 
 
 It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises 
 before me: I have drawn back the curtain from 
 the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, 
 — 45 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 is at least free from one suspicion: that it in- 
 volves a moral accusation against humanity. 
 It is used — and I wish to emphasize the fact 
 again — without any moral significance: and this 
 is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is 
 most apparent to me precisely in those quarters 
 where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, 
 toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As you prob- 
 ably surmise, I understand rottem^s’s in the 
 sense of decadence: my argument 'xs that all 
 the values on which mankind now fixes its high- 
 est aspirations are decadence-wahxes,. 
 
 I call an animal, a species, an individual 
 corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it 
 chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to 
 it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the 
 “ideals of humanity” — and it is possible that 
 I’ll have to write it — would almost explain why 
 man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me 
 I as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the 
 ^ accumulation of forces, for power: whenever 
 the will to power fails there is disaster. My 
 contention is that all the highest values of 
 humanity have been emptied of this will — that 
 the values of decadence, of nihilism, now pre- 
 vail under the holiest names. 
 
 — 46 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 7 . 
 
 Christianity is called the religion of pity . — 
 Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic pas- 
 sions 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 multi- 
 plied a thousandfold. Suffering is made con- 
 tagious by pity; under certain circumstances it 
 may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living 
 energy — a loss out of all proportion to the 
 magnitude of the cause ( — the case of the death 
 of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; 
 there is, however, a still more important one. 
 If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity 
 of the reactions it sets up, its character as a 
 menace to life appears in a much clearer light. 
 Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which 
 is the law of natural selection. It preserves 
 whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the 
 side of those disinherited and condemned by 
 life; by maintaining life in so many of the 
 botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy 
 and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to 
 call pity a virtue ( — in every superior moral 
 — 47 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 system it appears as a weakness — ) ; going still 
 further, it has been called the virtue, the source 
 and foundation of all other virtues — but let us 
 always bear in mind that this was from the 
 standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, 
 and upon whose shield the denial of life was 
 inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: 
 that by means of pity life is denied, and made 
 worthy of denial — pity is the technic of 
 nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and 
 contagious instinct stands against all those in- 
 stincts which work for the preservation and en- 
 hancement of life: in the role of protector of 
 the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promo- 
 tion of decadence — pity persuades to extinction. 
 . . . Of course, one doesn’t say “extinction”: 
 one says “the other world,” or “God,” or “the 
 true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness. 
 . . . This innocent rhetoric, from the realm 
 of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good 
 deal less innocent when one reflects upon the 
 tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: 
 the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer 
 was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared 
 to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as every 
 one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous 
 — 48 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 state of mind, the remedy for which was an oc- 
 casional 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 dis- 
 charged. . . . Nothing is more unhealthy, 
 amid all our unhealthy modernism, than 
 Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be 
 unmerciful here, to wield the knife here — all 
 this is our business, all this is our sort of hu- 
 manity, by this sign we are philosophers, we 
 Hyperboreans ! — 
 
 8 . 
 
 It is necessary to say just whom we regard as 
 our antagonists: theologians and all who have 
 any theological blood in their veins — this is our 
 whole philosophy. . . . One must have faced 
 that menace at close hand, better still, one must 
 have had experience of it directly and almost 
 succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be 
 taken lightly ( — the alleged free-thinking of our 
 — 49 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be 
 a joke — they have no passion about such things; 
 they have not suffered — ) . This poisoning goes 
 a great deal further than most people think: 
 I find the arrogant habit of the theologian 
 among all who regard themselves as “idealists” 
 — among all who, by virtue of a higher point 
 of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, 
 and to look upon it with suspicion. . . . The 
 idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of 
 lofty concepts in his hand ( — and not only in 
 his hand ! ) ; he launches them with benevolent 
 contempt against “understanding,” “die senses,” 
 “honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such 
 things as beneath him, as pernicious and se- 
 ductive forces, on which “the soul” soars as a 
 pure thing-in-itself — as if humility, chastity, 
 poverty, in a word, holiness, had not already 
 done much more damage to life than all 
 imaginable horrors and vices. . . . The pure 
 soul is a pure lie. ... So long as the priest, 
 that professional denier, calumniator and 
 poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety 
 of man, there can be no answer to the ques- 
 tion, What is truth? Truth has already been 
 stood on its head when the obvious attorney of 
 — 50 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 mere emptiness is mistaken for its representa- 
 tive. . . . 
 
 9 . 
 
 Upon this theological instinct I make war: I 
 find the tracks of it everywhere. Whoever has 
 theological blood in his veins is shifty and dis- 
 honourable 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 in- 
 curable 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 he found on earth. 
 Whatever a theologian regards as true must be 
 false : there you have almost a criterion of truth. 
 His profound instinct of self-preservation stands 
 against truth ever coming into honour in any 
 way, or even getting stated. Wherever the in- 
 — 51 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 fluence of theologians is felt there is a trans- 
 valuation of values, and the concepts “true” 
 and “false” are forced to change places: what- 
 ever is most damaging to life is there called 
 “true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, ap- 
 proves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant 
 is there called “false.” . . . When theo- 
 logians, working through the “consciences” of 
 princes (or of peoples — ), stretch out their 
 hands for power, there is never any doubt as to 
 the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, 
 the nihilistic will exerts that power. . . . 
 
 10 . 
 
 Among Germans I am immediately under- 
 stood when I say that theological blood is the 
 ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is 
 the grandfather of German philosophy; Pro- 
 testantism itself is its peccatum originale. 
 Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paraly- 
 sis of Christianity — and of reason. . . . One 
 need only utter the words “Tübingen School” 
 to get an understanding of what German philoso- 
 phy is at bottom — a very artful form of theol- 
 ogy. . . . The Suabians are the best liars in 
 Germany; they lie innocently. . . . Why all 
 — 52 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 the rejoicing over the appearance of Kant that 
 went through the learned world of Germany, 
 three-fourths of which is made up of the sons 
 of preachers and teachers — why the German 
 conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a 
 change for the better? The theological instinct 
 of German scholars made them see clearly just 
 what had become possible again. ... A 
 backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; 
 the concept of the “true world,” the concept 
 of morality as the essence of the world ( — the 
 two most vicious errors that ever existed!), 
 were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily 
 scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at 
 least no longer refutable. . . . Reason, the 
 prerogative of reason, does not go so far. . . . 
 Out of reality there had been made “appear- 
 ance”; 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 impedi- 
 ment to German integrity, already far from 
 steady. — 
 
 11 . 
 
 A word now against Kant as a moralist. A 
 virtue must be our invention; it must spring out 
 — 53 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 con- 
 cept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is 
 pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its 
 own sake,” goodness grounded upon impersonal- 
 ity or a notion of universal validity — these are 
 all chimeras, and in them one finds only an ex- 
 •vpression of the decay, the last collapse of life, 
 the Chinese spirit of Königsberg. Quite the 
 contrary is demanded by the most profound laws 
 of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that 
 every man find his own virtue, his own 
 [ categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces 
 when it confounds its duty with the general con- 
 cept of duty. Nothing works a more complete 
 and penetrating disaster than every “imper- 
 sonal” 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 in- 
 stinct alone took it under protection! — An action 
 prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a 
 right action by the amount of pleasure that goes 
 with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels 
 — 54 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 de- 
 sire, without pleasure — as a mere automaton of 
 duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no 
 less for idiocy. . . . Kant became an idiot. 
 — And such a man was the contemporary of 
 Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs 
 passed for the German philosopher — still passes 
 today! ... I forbid myself to say 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.” In- 
 
 stinct at fault in everything and anything, in- 
 stinct as a revolt against nature, German 
 decadence as a philosophy — that is Kant ! — 
 
 55 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 12 . 
 
 I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency 
 in the history of philosophy: the rest haven’t 
 the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. 
 They behave like women, all these great en- 
 thusiasts and prodigies — they regard “beauti- 
 ful feelings” as arguments, the “heaving 
 breast” as the bellows of divine inspiration, 
 conviction as the criterion of truth. In the end, 
 with “German” innocence, Kant tried to give a 
 scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this 
 dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it 
 “practical reason.” He deliberately invented 
 a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it 
 was desirable not to trouble with reason — that 
 is, when morality, when the sublime command 
 “thou shalt,” was heard. When one recalls the 
 fact that, among all peoples, the philosopher 
 is no more than a development from the old type 
 of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this 
 fraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable. 
 When a man feels that he has a divine mission, 
 say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind — 
 when a man feels the divine spark in his heart 
 and believes that he is the mouthpiece of super- 
 — 56 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 natural imperatives — when such a mission in- 
 flames him, it is only natural that he should 
 stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of 
 judgment. He feels that he is himself sancti- 
 fied 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 de- 
 termined the meaning of “true” and “not 
 true”! . . . 
 
 13 . 
 
 Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we 
 ourselves, we free spirits, are already a “trans- 
 valuation of all values,” a visualized declara- 
 tion of war and victory against all the old con- 
 cepts of “true” and “not true.” The most 
 valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; 
 the most valuable of all are those which deter- 
 mine methods. All the methods, all the prin- 
 ciples of the scientific spirit of today, were the 
 targets for thousands of years of the most pro- 
 found contempt; if a man inclined to them he 
 was excluded from the society of “decent” 
 people — he passed as “an enemy of God,” as 
 a scoffer at the truth, as one “possessed.” As 
 — 57 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala/ 
 . . . We have had the whole pathetic stupidity 
 of mankind against us — their every notion of 
 what the truth ought to be, of what the service 
 of the truth ought to be — their every “thou 
 shalt” was launched against us. . . . Our ob- 
 jectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, dis- 
 trustful manner — all appeared to them as abso- 
 lutely discreditable and contemptible. — Look- 
 ing 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 de- 
 manded of the truth was picturesque effective- 
 ness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their 
 senses. It was our modesty that stood out long- 
 est against their taste. . . . How well they 
 guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God! 
 
 14 . 
 
 We have unlearned something. We have be- 
 come more modest in every way. We no longer 
 derive man from the “spirit,” from the “god- 
 head”; we have dropped him back among the 
 beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the 
 beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the re- 
 ^ The lowest of the Hindu castes. 
 
 — 58 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 suits thereof is his intellectuality. On the 
 other hand, we guard ourselves against a con- 
 ceit which would assert itself even here: that 
 man is the great second thought in the proce ss 
 of organic evolutio n. He i s, in truth, anything 
 but the crown of cre ation: beside him stan d 
 many other animals, all at similar stages of de- 
 velopment. . . . 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 th e most 
 dangerously from h is instincts — though for all 
 that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting! 
 — As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes 
 who first had the really admirable daring to de- 
 scribe them as machina; the whole of our phy- 
 siology 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 tliis 
 will from him, for the term no longer describes 
 anything that we can understand. The old word 
 — 59 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 , “will” now connotes only a sort of result, an 
 individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon 
 a series of partly discordant and partly har- 
 monious stimuli — the will no longer “acts,” or 
 “moves.” . . . Formerly it was thought that 
 man’s consciousness, his “spirit,” offered 
 evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That 
 he might be perfected, he was advised, tortoise- 
 like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic 
 with earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil 
 — then only tlie important part of him, the “pure 
 spirit,” would remain. Here again we have 
 thought out the thing better: to us conscious- 
 ness, 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 un- 
 necessarily — we deny that anything can be done 
 perfectly so long as it is done consciously. 
 The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: 
 take away the nervous system and the senses, 
 the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest is mis- 
 calculation — that is all! . . . 
 
 — 60 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 15 . 
 
 Under Christianity neither morality nor re- 
 ligion 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,” “forgive- 
 ness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary 
 beings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imagin- 
 ary natural history (anthropocentric; a total 
 denial of the concept of natural causes) ; an 
 imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of 
 self, misinterpretations of agreeable or dis- 
 agreeable general feelings — for example, of the 
 states of the nervus sympathicus with the help 
 of the sign-language of religio-ethical balder- 
 dash — , “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” 
 “temptation by the devil,” “the presence of 
 God”) ; an imaginary teleology (the “kingdom 
 of God,” “the last judgment,” “eternal life”). 
 — This purely fictitious world, greatly to its dis- 
 advantage, is to be differentiated from the world 
 of dreams; the latter at least reflects reality, 
 whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and 
 denies it. Once the concept of “nature” had 
 — 61 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 been opposed to the concept of “God,” the word 
 “natural” necessarily took on the meaning of 
 “abominable” — the whole of that fictitious 
 world has its sources in hatred of the natural 
 ( — the real! — ), and is no more than evidence 
 of a profound uneasiness in the presence of 
 reality. . . . This explains everything. Who 
 alone has any reason for living his way out of 
 reality? The man who suffers under it. But 
 to suffer from reality one must be a botched 
 reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over 
 pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality 
 and religion: but such a preponderance also 
 supplies the formula for decadence. . . . 
 
 16 . 
 
 A criticism of the Christian concept of God 
 leads inevitably to the same conclusion. — A na- 
 tion that still believes in itself holds fast to 
 its own god. In him it does honour to the 
 conditions which enable it to survive, to its 
 virtues — it projects its joy in itself, its feeling 
 of power, into a being to whom one may offer 
 thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; 
 a proud people need a god to whom they can 
 make sacrifices. . . . Religion, within these 
 — 62 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grate- 
 ful for his own existence: to that end he needs 
 a god. — Such a god must be able to work both 
 benefits and injuries; he must be able to play 
 either friend or foe — he is wondered at for the 
 good he does as well as for the evil he does. 
 But the castration, against all nature, of such 
 a god, making him a god of goodness alone, 
 would be contrary to human inclination. Man- 
 kind has just as much need for an evil god as 
 for a good god; it doesn’t have to thank mere 
 tolerance and humanitarianism for its own 
 existence. . . . What would be the value of a 
 god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, 
 scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps 
 never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of 
 victory and of destruction? No one would 
 understand such a god: why should any one 
 want him? — True enough, when a nation is on 
 the downward path, when it feels its belief in 
 its own future, its hope of freedom slipping 
 from it, when it begins to see submission as a 
 first necessity and the virtues of submission 
 as measures of self-preservation, then it must 
 overhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite, 
 timorous and demure; he counsels “peace of 
 — 63 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 soul,” hate-no-more, leniency, “love” of friend 
 and foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps 
 into every private virtue; he becomes the god 
 of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a 
 cosmopolitan. . . . Formerly he represented 
 a people, the strength of a people, everything 
 aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a 
 people; now he is simply the good god. . . . 
 The truth is that there is no other alternative 
 for gods: either they are the will to power — in 
 which case they are national gods — or in- 
 capacity for power — in which case they have 
 to be good. . . 
 
 17 . 
 
 Wherever the will to power begins to decline, 
 in whatever form, there is always an accom- 
 panying 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 de- 
 graded, 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 
 — 64 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 possible. The same instinct which prompts the 
 inferior to reduce their own god to “goodness- 
 in-itself” also prompts them to eliminate all 
 good qualities from the god of their superiors; 
 they make revenge on their masters by making 
 a devil of the latter’s god. — The good god, and 
 the devil like him — both are abortions of 
 decadence . — How can we be so tolerant of the 
 naivete of Christian theologians as to join in 
 their doctrine that the evolution of the concept 
 of god from “the god of Israel,” the god of a 
 people, to the Christian god, the essence of all 
 goodness, is to be described as progress ? — But 
 even Renan does this. As if Renan had a right 
 to be naive! The contrary actually stares one 
 in the face. When everything necessary to 
 ascending life; when all that is strong, courage- 
 ous, masterful and proud has been eliminated 
 from the concept of a god; when he has sunk 
 step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, 
 a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he be- 
 comes the poor man’s god, the sinner’s god, the 
 invalid’s god par excellence, and the attribute 
 of “saviour” or “redeemer” remains as the one 
 essential attribute of divinity — just what is the 
 significance of such a metamorphosis? what 
 — 65 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 them- 
 selves, into foreign parts; he has given up set- 
 tling down quietly anywhere; finally he has 
 come to feel at home everywhere, and is the 
 great cosmopolitan — until now he has the 
 “great majority” on his side, and half the 
 earth. But this god of the “great majority,” 
 this democrat among gods, has not become a 
 proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains 
 a Jew, he remains a god in a comer, a god of 
 all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noise- 
 some quarters of the world! . . . His earthly 
 kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the 
 underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto 
 kingdom. . . . And he himself is so pale, so 
 weak, so decadent. . . . Even the palest of 
 the pale are able to master him — messieurs the 
 metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. 
 They spun their webs around him for so long that 
 finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin 
 himself, and became another metaphysician. 
 Thereafter he resumed once more his old busi- 
 — 66 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ness of spinning the world out of his inmost 
 being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he be- 
 came ever thinner and paler — became the 
 “ideal,” became “pure spirit,” became “the 
 absolute,” became “the thing-in-itself.” . . . 
 The collapse of a god: he became a “thing-in- 
 itself.” 
 
 18 . 
 
 The Christian concept of a god — the god as 
 the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of 
 cobwebs, the god as a spirit — is one of the most 
 corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in 
 the world: it probably touches low- water mark 
 in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God 
 degenerated into the contradiction of life. In- 
 stead of being its transfiguration and eternal 
 Yea! In him war is declared on life, on 
 nature, on the will to live! God becomes the 
 formula for every slander upon the “here and 
 now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! 
 In him nothingness is deified, and the will to 
 nothingness is made holy! . . . 
 
 19 . 
 
 The fact that the strong races of northern 
 Europe did not repudiate this Christian god does 
 — 67 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 little credit to their gift for religion — and not 
 much more to their taste. They ought to have 
 been able to make an end of such a moribund 
 and worn-out product of the decadence. A 
 curse lies upon them because they were not equal 
 to it; they made illness, decrepitude and contra- 
 diction a part of their instincts — and since then 
 they have not managed to create any more gods. 
 Two thousand years have come and gone — and 
 not a single new god ! Instead, there still exists, 
 and as if by some intrinsic right, — as if he were 
 the ultimatum and maximum of the power to 
 create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind 
 — this pitiful god of Christian monotono -theism! 
 This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of 
 emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in 
 which all the instincts of decadence, - all the 
 cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their 
 sanction 1 — 
 
 20 . 
 
 In my condemnation of Christianity I surely 
 hope I do no injustice to a related religion with 
 an even larger number of believers: I allude 
 to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among 
 the nihilistic religions — they are both decadence 
 — 68 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 religions — ^but they are separated from each 
 other in a very remarkable way. For the fact 
 that he is able to compare them at all the critic 
 of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of 
 India. — Buddhism is a hundred times as real- 
 istic as Christianity — it is part of its living 
 heritage that it is able to face problems ob- 
 jectively and coolly; it is the product of long 
 centuries of philosohical 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 dif- 
 ferentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the 
 self-deception that lies in moral concepts be- 
 hind it; it is, in my phrase, beyond good and 
 evil. — The two physiological facts upon which 
 it grounds itself and upon which it bestows its 
 chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitive- 
 ness to sensation, which manifests itself as a 
 refined susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an 
 extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted con- 
 cern with concepts and logical procedures, under 
 — 69 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 the influence of which the instinct of personality 
 has yielded to a notion of the “impersonal.” 
 ( — Both of these states will be familiar to a few 
 of my readers, the objectivists, by experience, 
 as they are to me). These physiological states 
 produced a depression, and Buddha tried to 
 combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he 
 prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; 
 moderation in eating and a careful selection of 
 foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the 
 same caution in arousing any of the passions 
 that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; 
 finally, no worry, either on one’s own account 
 or on account of others. He encourages ideas 
 that make for either quiet contentment or good 
 cheer — he finds means to combat ideas of other 
 sorts. He understands good, the state of good- 
 ness, as something which promotes health. 
 Prayer is not included, and neither is asceticism. 
 There is no categorical imperative nor any dis- 
 ciplines, even within the walls of a monastery 
 ( — it is always possible to leave — ). These 
 things would have been simply means of in- 
 creasing the excessive sensitiveness above men- 
 tioned. For the same reason he does not advo- 
 cate any conflict with unbelievers; his teaehing 
 — 70 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 de- 
 livered from suffering,” regulates and deter- 
 mines the whole spiritual diet. ( — Perhaps 
 one will here recall that Athenian who also 
 declared war upon pure “scientiflcality,” to 
 wit, Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the 
 estate of a morality). 
 
 21 . 
 
 The things necessary to Buddhism are a very 
 mild climate, customs of great gentleness and 
 liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must 
 get its start among the higher and better edu- 
 — 71 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 cated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet and the ab- 
 sence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they 
 are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in 
 which perfection is merely an object of aspira- 
 tion: perfection is actually normal. — 
 
 Under Christianity the instincts of the sub- 
 jugated 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 pas- 
 time, the favourite remedy for boredom is the 
 discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition 
 of conscience; here the emotion produced by 
 power (called “God”) is pumped up (by 
 prayer) ; here the highest good is regarded as 
 unattainable, as a gift, as “grace.” Here, too, 
 open dealing is lacking; concealment and the 
 darkened room are Christian. Here body is 
 despised and hygiene is denounced as sensual; 
 the church even ranges itself against cleanliness 
 ( — the first Christian order after the banishment 
 of the Moors elosed 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 
 — 72 — 
 
THE A N T ICH RI ST 
 
 mind, bearing the most respectable names, are 
 epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to en- 
 gender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the 
 nerves. Qiristian, again, is all deadly enmity 
 to the rulers of the earth, to the “aristocratic” 
 — along with a sort of secret rivalry with them 
 ( — one resigns one’s “body” to them; one wants 
 only one’s “soul” . . . ) . And Christian is all 
 hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of 
 freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian 
 is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, 
 of joy in general. . . . 
 
 22 . 
 
 When Christianity departed from its native 
 soil, that of the lowest orders, the underworld 
 of the ancient world, and began seeking power 
 among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to 
 deal with exhausted men, but with men still in- 
 wardly savage and capable of self-torture — in 
 brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, un- 
 like in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of 
 discontent with self, suffering through self, is 
 not merely a general sensitiveness and suscepti- 
 bility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate 
 thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency 
 — 73 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds 
 and ideas. Christianity had to embrace bar- 
 baric concepts and valuations in order to obtain 
 mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for ex- 
 ample, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the 
 drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain 
 of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its 
 forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of 
 the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples 
 in a further state of development, for races that 
 have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized 
 ( — Europe is not yet ripe for it — ) : it is a 
 summons that takes them back to peace and 
 cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, 
 to a certain hardening of the body. Christi- 
 anity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus 
 operandi is to make them ill — to make feeble 
 is the Christian recipe for taming, for “civiliz- 
 ing” Buddhism is a religion for the closing, 
 over-wearied stages of civilization. Christi- 
 anity appears before civilization has so much as 
 begun — under certain circumstances it lays the 
 very foundations thereof. 
 
 74 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 23 . 
 
 Buddhism, I repeat, is a himdred times more 
 austere, more honest, more objective. It no 
 longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility 
 to suffering, by interpreting these things in 
 terms of sin — it simply says, as it simply thinks, 
 “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffer- 
 ing 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 bless- 
 ing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible 
 enemy — there was no need to be ashamed of suf- 
 fering 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 conse- 
 quence whether a thing be true or not, so long 
 as it is believed to be true. Truth and faith: 
 here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, 
 almost two diametrically opposite worlds — the 
 road to the one and the road to the other lie miles 
 apart. To understand that fact thoroughly — 
 this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one 
 — 75 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 fol- 
 lows 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 suffer- 
 ing by a hope so high that no conflict with actu- 
 ality can dash it — so high, indeed, that no ful- 
 filment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out be- 
 yond 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.)^ — In order 
 that love may be possible, God must become a 
 person; in order that the lower instincts may 
 take a hand in the matter God must be young. 
 To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful 
 
 1 That is, in Pandora’s box. 
 
 — 76 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy 
 that of the men there must be a virgin. These 
 things are necessary if Christianity is to assume 
 lordship over a soil on which some aphrodisiacal 
 or Adonis cult has already established a notion 
 as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon 
 chastity greatly strengthens the vehemence and 
 subjectivity of the religious instinct — it makes 
 the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soul- 
 ful. — Love is the state in which man sees things 
 most decidedly as they are not. The force of 
 illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the 
 capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. 
 When a man is in love he endures more than at 
 any other time; he submits to anything. The 
 problem was to devise a religion which would 
 allow one to love: by this means the worst that 
 life has to offer is overcome — it is scarcely even 
 noticed. — So much for the three Christian vir- 
 tues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the 
 three Christian ingenuities . — Buddhism is in too 
 late a stage of development, too full of posi- 
 tivism, to be shrewd in any such way. — 
 
 — 77 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 24 . 
 
 Here I barely touch upon the problem of the 
 origin of Christianity. The first thing neces- 
 sary to its solution is this: that Christianity is 
 to be understood only by examining the soil 
 from which it sprung — it is not a reaction against 
 Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; 
 it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring 
 logic of the Jews. In the words of the 
 Saviour, “salvation is of the Jews.” ^ — The 
 second thing to remember is this: that the psy- 
 chological type of the Galilean is still to be 
 recognized, but it was only in its most degen- 
 erate form (which is at once maimed and over- 
 laden with foreign features) that it could serve 
 in the manner in which it has been used: as a 
 type of the Saviour of mankind. — 
 
 The Jews are the most remarkable people in 
 the history of the world, for when they were con- 
 fronted with the question, to be or not to be, 
 they chose, with perfectly unearthly delibera- 
 tion, to be at any price: this price involved a 
 radical falsification of all nature, of all natural- 
 ness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, 
 1 John iv, 22. 
 
 78 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 as well as of the outer. They put themselves 
 against all those conditions under which, hither- 
 to, 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 opposi- 
 tion to natural conditions — one by one they 
 distorted religion, civilization, morality, history 
 and psychology until each became a contradic- 
 tion of its natural significance. We meet with 
 the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably 
 exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Chris- 
 tian church, put beside the “people of God,” 
 shows a complete lack of any claim to origin- 
 ality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are 
 the most fateful people in the history of the 
 world: their influence has so falsified the reason- 
 ing of mankind in this matter that today the 
 Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without 
 realizing that it is no more than the final conse- 
 quence of Judaism. 
 
 In my “Genealogy of Morals” I give the first 
 psychological explanation of the concepts under- 
 lying those two antithetical things, a noble 
 morality and a ressentiment morality, the 
 second of which is a mere product of the denial 
 of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral 
 — 79 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 system belongs to the second division, and in 
 every detail. In order to be able to say Nay 
 to everything representing an ascending evolu- 
 tion of life — that is, to well-being, to power, to 
 beauty, to self-approval — the instincts of res- 
 sentiment, here become downright genius, had 
 to invent an other world in which the ac- 
 ceptance of life appeared as the most evil 
 and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologi- 
 cally, the Jews are a people gifted with the 
 very strongest vitality, so much so that 
 when they found themselves facing impos- 
 sible conditions of life they chose volun- 
 tarily, and with a profound talent for self-preser- 
 vation, the side of all those instincts which make 
 for decadence — not as if mastered by them, but 
 as if detecting in them a power by which “the 
 world” could be defied. The Jews are the very 
 opposite of decadents: they have simply been 
 forced into appearing in that guise, and with a 
 degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra 
 of histrionic genius they have managed to put 
 themselves at the head of all decadent move- 
 ments ( — for example, the Christianity of 
 Paul — ), and so make of them something 
 stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to 
 — 80 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 life. To the sort of men who reach out for 
 power under Judaism and Christianity, — that is 
 to say, to the priestly class — decadence is no 
 more than a means to an end. Men of this sort 
 have a vital interest in making mankind sick, 
 and in confusing the values of “good” and 
 “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is 
 not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it. 
 
 25 . 
 
 The history of Israel is invaluable as a 
 typical history of an attempt to denaturize all 
 natural values: I point to five facts which bear 
 
 this out. Originally, and above all in the time 
 of the monarchy, Israel maintained the right 
 attitude of things, which is to say, the natural 
 attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its 
 consciousness of power, its joy in itself, its 
 hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for vic- 
 tory and salvation and through him they ex- 
 pected nature to give them whatever was neces- 
 sary to their existence — above all, rain. Jahveh 
 is the god of Israel, and consequently the god of 
 justice: this is the logic of every race that has 
 power in its hands and a good conscience in the 
 use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the 
 — 81 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 Jews both aspects of this self -approval stand 
 revealed. The nation is grateful for the high 
 destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; 
 it is grateful for the benign procession of the 
 seasons, and for the good fortune attending its 
 herds and its crops. — This view of things re- 
 mained an ideal for a long while, even after it 
 had been robbed of validity by tragic blows: 
 anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But 
 the people still retained, as a projection of their 
 highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was 
 at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge 
 — a vision best visualized in the typical prophet 
 (i. e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah. 
 — But every hope remained unfulfilled. The 
 old god no longer could do what he used to do. 
 He ought to have been abandoned. But what 
 actually happened? Simply this: the concep- 
 tion of him was changed — the conception of him 
 was denaturized; this was the price that had to 
 be paid for keeping him. — Jahveh, the god of 
 “justice” — he is in accord with Israel no more, 
 he no longer vizualizes the national egoism; he 
 is now a god only conditionally. . . . The pub- 
 lic notion of this god now becomes merely a 
 — 82 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who 
 interpret all happiness as a reward and all un- 
 happiness as a punishment for obedience or dis- 
 obedience 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 causa- 
 tion has been swept out of the world by doctrines 
 of reward and punishment some sort of un- 
 natural causation becomes necessary: and all 
 other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. 
 A god who demands — in place of a god who 
 helps, who gives counsel, who is at bottom 
 merely a name for every happy inspiration of 
 courage and self-reliance. . . . Morality is no 
 longer a reflection of the conditions which make 
 for the sound life and development of the peo- 
 ple; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; 
 instead it has become abstract and in opposi- 
 tion to life — a fundamental perversion of the 
 fancy, an “evil eye” on all things. What is 
 Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance 
 robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted 
 with the idea of “sin”; well-being represented 
 — 83 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 as a danger, as a “temptation”; a physiological 
 disorder produced by the canker worm of con- 
 science. . . . 
 
 26 . 
 
 The concept of god falsified; the concept of 
 morality falsified; — but even here Jewish priest- 
 craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel 
 ceased to be of any value: out with it! — These 
 priests accomplished that miracle of falsification 
 of which a great part of the Bible is the docu- 
 mentary evidence ; with a degree of contempt un- 
 paralleled, 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 re- 
 warded. We would regard this act of histor- 
 ical falsification as something far more shame- 
 ful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical inter- 
 pretation 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, 
 — 84 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 be 
 measured by the extent to which they or he 
 obey this will of God; that the destinies of a 
 people or of an individual are controlled by this 
 will of God, which rewards or punishes accord- 
 ing to the degree of obedience manifested. — In 
 place of all that pitiable lie reality has this to 
 say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who 
 can exist only at the cost of every sound view 
 of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls 
 that state of human society in which he himself 
 determines the value of all things “the kingdom 
 of God”; he calls the means whereby that state 
 of affairs is attained “the will of God”; with 
 cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, 
 all ages and all individuals by the extent of their 
 subservience or opposition to the power of the 
 priestly order. One observes him at work: un- 
 der 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 
 — 85 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 transformed into a punishment for that great 
 age — during which priests had not yet come into 
 existence. Out of the powerful and wholly free 
 heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned, accord- 
 ing 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 pre- 
 serving the power of the priests) had to be 
 determined — and to this end they had to have 
 a “revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic 
 literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and “holy 
 scriptures” had to be concocted — and so, with 
 the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of pen- 
 ance 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 
 — 86 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 every- 
 where; at all the great natural events of life, at 
 birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to 
 say at the “sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), 
 the holy parasite put in his appearance, and 
 proceeded to denaturize it — in his own phrase, 
 to “sanctify” it. ... For this should be noted: 
 that every natural habit, every natural institu- 
 tion (the state, the administration of justice, 
 marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), 
 everything demanded by the life-instinct, in 
 short, everything that has any value in itself, 
 is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even 
 made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism 
 of priests (or, if you chose, by the “moral order 
 of the world”). The fact requires a sanction 
 — a power to grant values becomes necessary, 
 and the only way it can create such values is by 
 denying nature. . . . The priest depreciates and 
 desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he 
 can exist at all. — Disobedience to God, which 
 — 87 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 effec- 
 tively under the thumb of the priest; he alone 
 can “save”. . . . Psychologically considered, 
 “sins” are indispensable to every society organ- 
 ized 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 “sin- 
 ning”. . . . Prime axiom: “God forgiveth 
 
 him that repenteth” — in plain English, him that 
 submitteth to the priest. 
 
 27 . 
 
 Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt 
 that on it everything natural, every natural 
 value, every reality was opposed by the deepest 
 instincts of the ruling class — it grew up as a sort 
 of war to the death upon reality, and as such 
 it has never been surpassed. The “holy peo- 
 ple,” who had adopted priestly values and 
 priestly names for all things, and who, with a 
 terrible logical consistency, had rejected every- 
 thing of the earth as “unholy,” “worldly,” “sin- 
 ful” — this people put its instinct into a final for- 
 — 88 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 mula that was logical to the point of self-annihi- 
 lation : as Christianity it actually denied even the 
 last form of reality, the “holy people,” the 
 “chosen people,” Jewish reality itself. The 
 phenomenon is of the first order of importance: 
 the small insurrectionary movement which took 
 the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the 
 Jewish instinct redivivus — in other words, it is 
 the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it 
 can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is 
 the discovery of a state of existence even more 
 fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life 
 even more unreal than that necessary to an 
 ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actu- 
 ally denies the church. . . . 
 
 I am unable to determine what was the target 
 of the insurrection said to have been led 
 (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was 
 not the Jewish church — “church” being here 
 used in exactly the same sense that the word has 
 today. It was an insurrection against the 
 “good and just,” against the “prophets of 
 Israel,” against the whole hierarchy of society — 
 not against corruption, but against caste, privi- 
 lege, order, formalism. It was unbelief in 
 “superior men,” a Nay flung at everything 
 — 89 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 that priests and theologians stood for. But 
 the hierarchy that was called into ques- 
 tion, if only for an instant, by this move- 
 ment was the structure of piles which, 
 above everything, was necessary to the safety 
 of the Jewish people in the midst of the 
 “waters” — it represented their last possibility of 
 survival; it was the final residuum of their inde- 
 pendent political existence; an attack upon it 
 was an attack upon the most profound national 
 instinct, the most powerful national will to live, 
 that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly 
 anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, 
 the outcasts and “sinners,” the Chandala of 
 Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established 
 order of things — and in language which, if the 
 Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent 
 to Siberia today — this man was certainly a 
 political criminal, at least in so far as it was 
 possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a 
 community. This is what brought him to the 
 cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the in- 
 scription that was put upon the cross. He died 
 for his own sins — ^there is not the slightest 
 ground for believing, no matter how often it is 
 asserted, that he died for the sins of others. — 
 — 90 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 28 . 
 
 As to whether he himself was conscious of this 
 contradiction — whether, in fact, this was the 
 only contradiction he was eognizant of — that 
 is quite another question. Here, for the first 
 time, I touch upon the problem of the psychol- 
 ogy of the Saviour . — I confess, to begin with, 
 that there are very few books which offer me 
 harder reading than the Gospels. My difficul- 
 ties are quite different from those which en- 
 abled the learned curiosity of the German mind 
 to achieve one of its most unforgettable tri- 
 umphs. 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.^ At 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 ab- 
 
 ^ David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of “Das Leben 
 Jesu” (1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche 
 here refers to it. 
 
 — 91 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 sence of corroborative documents, seems to me 
 to condemn the whole inquiry from the start — 
 it is simply learned idling. . . . 
 
 29 . 
 
 What concerns me is the psychological type 
 of the Saviour. This type might he depicted 
 in the Gospels, in however mutilated* a form 
 and however much overladen with extraneous 
 characters — that is, in spite of the Gospels; just 
 as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in 
 his legends in spite of his legends. It is not a 
 question of mere truthful evidence as to what 
 he did, what he said and how he actually died; 
 the question is, whether his type is still con- 
 ceivable, 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 psycho- 
 logicus, 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 essen- 
 tially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of 
 the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive 
 — 92 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, 
 of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for 
 resistance is here converted into something 
 moral: (“resist not evil!” — the most profound 
 sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key 
 to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of 
 gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What 
 is the meaning of “glad tidings”? — The true 
 life, the life eternal has been found — it is not 
 merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is 
 the life that lies in love free from all retreats 
 and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. 
 Every one is the child of God — Jesus claims 
 nothing for himself alone — as the child of God 
 each man is the equal of every other man. . . . 
 Imagine making Jesus a hero ! — And what a tre- 
 mendous misunderstanding appears in the word 
 “genius”! Our whole conception of the 
 “spiritual,” the whole conception of our civili- 
 zation, 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 
 — 93 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, 
 such a physiological habitus becomes an instinc- 
 tive hatred of all reality, a flight into the “in- 
 tangible,” into the “incomprehensible”; a dis- 
 taste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time 
 and space, for everything established — customs, 
 institutions, the church — ; a feeling of being at 
 home in a world in which no sort of reality sur- 
 vives, a merely “inner” world, a “true” world, 
 an “eternal” world. . . . “The Kingdom of 
 God is within you”. . . . 
 
 30 . 
 
 The instinctive hatred of reality: the conse- 
 quence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and 
 irritation — so great that merely to be “touched” 
 becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too 
 profound. 
 
 The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all 
 hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling: 
 the consequence of an extreme susceptibility 
 to pain and irritation — so great that it senses 
 all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as 
 unbearable anguish ( — that is to say, as harm- 
 ful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion), and regards blessedness (joy) as possible 
 — 94 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 only when it is no longer necessary to offer re- 
 sistance to anybody or anything, however evil or 
 dangerous — love, as the only, as the ultimate 
 possibility of life. . . . 
 
 These are the two physiological realities upon 
 and out of which the doctrine of salvation has 
 sprung. I call them a sublime super-develop- 
 ment of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalu- 
 brious soil. What stands most closely related to 
 them, though with a large admixture of Greek 
 vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the 
 theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was 
 a typical decadent: I was the first to recognize 
 
 him. — The fear of pain, even of infinitely 
 slight pain — the end of this can be nothing save 
 a religion of love. . . . 
 
 31 . 
 
 I have already given my answer to the prob- 
 lem. 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 
 — 95 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 retros- 
 pectively with characters which can be imder- 
 stood only as serving the purposes of war and 
 of propaganda. That strange and sickly world 
 into which the Gospels lead us — a world ap- 
 parently out of a Russian novel, in which the 
 scum of society, nervous maladies and “childish” 
 idiocy keep a tryst — must, in any case, have 
 coarsened the type: the first disciples, in par- 
 ticular, must have been forced to translate an 
 existence visible only in symbols and incompre- 
 hensibilities into their own crudity, in order to 
 understand it at all — in their sight the type could 
 take on reality only after it had been recast in 
 a familiar mould. . . . The prophet, the messiah, 
 the future judge, the teacher of morals, the 
 worker of wonders, John the Baptist — all these 
 merely presented chances to misunderstand it. 
 . . . Finally, let us not underrate the proprium 
 of all great, and especially all sectarian venera- 
 tion: it tends to erase from the venerated ob- 
 jects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, 
 often so painfully strange — it does not even see 
 — 96 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 them. It is greatly to be regretted that no 
 Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this 
 most interesting decadent — I mean some one who 
 would have felt the poignant charm of such a 
 compound of the sublime, the morbid and the 
 childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a 
 type of the decadence, may actually have been 
 peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a 
 possibility is not to be lost sight of. Neverthe- 
 less, the probabilities seem to be against it, for 
 in that case tradition would have been particu- 
 larly accurate and objective, whereas we have 
 reasons for assuming the contrary. Meanwhile, 
 there is a contradiction between the peaceful 
 preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the 
 fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a 
 soil very unlike India’s, and the aggressive fan- 
 atic, the mortal enemy of theologians and ec- 
 clesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan’s 
 malice as “le grand maitre en ironie.” I my- 
 self haven’t any doubt that the greater part of 
 this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into 
 the concept of the Master only as a result of the 
 excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all 
 know the unserupulousness of sectarians when 
 they set out to turn their leader into an apologia 
 — 97 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 judg- 
 ment,” all sorts of expectations and promises, 
 current at the time. — 
 
 32 . 
 
 I can only repeat that I set myself against all 
 efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of 
 the Saviour: the very word imperieux, used by 
 Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What 
 the “glad tidings” tell us is simply that there 
 are no more contradictions; the kingdom of 
 heaven belongs to children; the faith that is 
 voiced here is no more an embattled faith — it 
 is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is 
 a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. 
 The physiologists, at all events, are familiar with 
 such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the 
 living organism, the result of degeneration. A 
 faith of this sort is not furious, it does not de- 
 — 98 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 nounce, 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 re- 
 wards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it is 
 itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own re- 
 ward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of 
 God.” This faith does not formulate itself — 
 it simply lives, and so guards itself against 
 formulae. To be sure, the accident of environ- 
 ment, of educational background gives promi- 
 nence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive 
 Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo- 
 Semitic character ( — that of eating and drink- 
 ing at the last supper belongs to this category 
 — an idea which, like everything else Jewish, 
 has been badly mauled by the church). But 
 let us be careful not to see in all this anything 
 more than symbolical language, semantics ^ an 
 opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on 
 the theory that no work is to be taken literally 
 that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set 
 down among Hindus he would have made use of 
 the concepts of Sankhya,^ and among Chinese 
 
 1 The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable that 
 Semantik is what Nietzsche had in mind. 
 
 2 One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy. 
 
 — 99 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 he would have employed those of Lao-tse ^ — and 
 in neither case would it have made any dif- 
 ference to him. — With a little freedom in the 
 use of words, one might actually call Jesus a 
 “free spirit” ^ — he cares nothing for what is 
 established: the word killeth^ whatever is 
 established killeth. The idea of “life” as an 
 experience, as he alone conceives it, stands op- 
 posed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, 
 law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of 
 inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his 
 word for the innermost — in his sight everything 
 else, the whole of reality, all nature, even lan- 
 guage, has significance only as sign, as allegory. 
 — Here it is of paramount importance to be led 
 into no error by the temptations lying in Chris- 
 tian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a 
 symbolism par excellence stands outside all re- 
 ligion, all notions of worship, all history, all 
 natural science, all worldly experience, all 
 knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all 
 books, all art — ^his “wisdom” is precisely a pure 
 
 1 The reputed founder of Taoism. 
 
 2 Nietzsche’s name for one accepting his own philosophy. 
 
 3 That is, the strict letter of the law — the chief target of 
 Jesus’s early preaching. 
 
 100 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ignorance ^ of all such things. He has never 
 heard of culture; he doesn’t have to make war 
 on it — he doesn’t even deny it. . . . The same 
 thing may be said of the state, of the whole 
 bourgeoise social order, of labour, of war — ^he 
 has no ground for denying “ the world,” for he 
 knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept of 
 “the world”. . . . Denial is precisely the thing 
 that is impossible to him. — In the same way he 
 lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief 
 that an article of faith, a “truth,” may be estab- 
 lished by proofs ( — his proofs are inner 
 “lights,” subjective sensations of happiness and 
 self-approval, simple “proofs of power” — ). 
 Such a doctrine cannot contradict: it doesn’t 
 know that other doctrines exist, or can exist, and 
 is wholly incapable of imagining anything op- 
 posed to it. . . . If anything of the sort is ever 
 encountered, it laments the “blindness” with sin- 
 cere sympathy — for it alone has “light” — but it 
 does not offer objections. . . . 
 
 33 . 
 
 In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the 
 concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, 
 
 1 A reference to the “pure ignorance” (reine Thorheit) of 
 Parsifal. 
 
 — 101 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 and so is that of reward, “Sin,” which means 
 anything that puts a distance between God and 
 man, is abolished — this is precisely the “glad 
 tidings” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, 
 nor is it bound up with conditions: it is con- 
 ceived as the only reality — what remains con- 
 sists 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 coun- 
 trymen, Jews and Gentiles (“neighbour,” of 
 course, means fellow-believer, Jew), He is an- 
 gry with no one, and he despises no one. He 
 neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds 
 their mandates (“Swear not at all”) He never 
 under any circumstances divorces his wife, even 
 when he has proofs of her infidelity, — And un- 
 der all of this is one principle; all of it arises 
 from one instinct, — 
 
 The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying 
 ^ Matthew v, 34. 
 
 102 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 out of this way of life — and so was his death. 
 . . . He no longer needed any formula or rit- 
 ual in his relations with God — not even prayer. 
 He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine 
 of repentance and atonement ; he knew that it was 
 only by a way of life that one could feel one’s 
 self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child 
 of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer 
 and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the 
 Gospel way leads to God — it is itself “God!” — 
 What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in 
 the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” 
 “faith,” “salvation through faith” — the whole 
 ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by 
 the “glad tidings.” 
 
 The deep instinct which prompts the Christian 
 how to live so that he will feel that he is “in 
 heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many rea- 
 sons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this 
 is the only psychological reality in “salvation.” 
 — A new way of life, not a new faith, . . . 
 
 34 . 
 
 If I understand anything at all about this 
 great symbolist, it is this : that he regarded only 
 subjective realities as realities, as “truths” — 
 — 103 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 that he saw everything else, everything natural, 
 temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, 
 as materials for parables. The concept of “the 
 Son of God” does not connote a concrete person 
 in history, an isolated and definite individual, 
 but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set 
 free from the concept of time. The same thing 
 is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of 
 this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” 
 and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could 
 be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiasti- 
 cal notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom 
 of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of 
 heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the 
 second person of the Trinity. All this — if I 
 may be forgiven the phrase — is like thrusting 
 one’s fist into the eye ( and what an eye ! ) of the 
 Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to 
 world-historical cynicism. . . . But it is never- 
 theless obvious enough what is meant by the sym- 
 bols “Father” and “Son” — not, of course, to 
 every one — : the word “Son” expresses en- 
 trance into the feeling that there is a general 
 transformation of all things (beatitude), and 
 “Father” expresses that feeling itself — the sen- 
 sation of eternity and of perfection. — I am 
 — 104 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ashamed to remind you of what the church has 
 made of this symbolism ; has it not set an Amphi- 
 tryon story ^ at the threshold of the Christian 
 “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate con- 
 ception” for good measure? ... And thereby 
 it has robbed conception of its immaculate- 
 ness — 
 
 The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the 
 heart — not something to come “beyond the 
 world” or “after death.” The whole idea of 
 natural death is absent from the Gospels: death 
 is not a bridge, not a passing ; it is absent because 
 it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent 
 world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour 
 of death” is not a Christian idea — “hours,” 
 time, the physical life and its crises have no ex- 
 istence for the bearer of “glad tidings.” . . . 
 The “kingdom of God” is not something that men 
 wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after 
 tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “mil- 
 lennium” — it is an experience of the heart, it is 
 everywhere and it is nowhere. . . . 
 
 1 Amphytrion was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His 
 wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by 
 Zeus, and bore Heracles. 
 
 105 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 35 . 
 
 This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he 
 lived and taught — not to “save mankind,” but 
 to show mankind how to live. It was a way of 
 life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour 
 before the judges, before the officers, before his 
 accusers — his demeanour on the cross. He 
 does not resist; he does not defend his rights; 
 he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme 
 penalty — more, he invites it. . . . And he 
 prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who 
 do him evil. . . . Not to defend one’s self, not 
 to show anger, not to lay blames. . . . On the 
 contrary, to submit even to the Evil One — to love 
 him. . . . 
 
 36 . 
 
 — ^We free spirits — we are the first to have the 
 necessary prerequisite to understanding what 
 nineteen centuries have misunderstood — that in- 
 stinct 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 
 — 106 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 makes possible the solution of sueh strange and 
 subtle things: what men always sought, with 
 shameless egoism, was their own advantage 
 therein; they created the church out of denial of 
 the Gospels. . . . 
 
 Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divin- 
 ity’s hand in the great drama of existence would 
 find no small indication thereof in the stupen- 
 dous question-mark that is called Christianity. 
 That mankind should be on its knees before the 
 very antithesis of what was the origin, the mean- 
 ing and the law of the Gospels — that in the con- 
 cept of the “church” the very things should be 
 pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tid- 
 ings” regards as beneath him and behind him — 
 it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand 
 example of world-historical irony — 
 
 37 . 
 
 — Our age is proud of its historical sense: 
 how, then, could it delude itself into believing 
 that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and 
 Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christian- 
 ity — and that everything spiritual and symboli- 
 cal in it only came later? Quite to the contrary, 
 the whole history of Christianity — from the 
 — 107 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 death on the cross onward — is the history of a 
 progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an 
 original symbolism. With every extension of 
 Christianity among larger and ruder masses, 
 even less capable of grasping the principles that 
 gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more 
 and more vulgar and barbarous — it absorbed the 
 teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults 
 of the imperium Romanum, and the absurdities 
 engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It 
 was the fate of Christianity that its faith had 
 to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the 
 needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had 
 to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts 
 itself to power as the church — the church, that 
 incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, 
 to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the 
 spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity. 
 — Christian values — noble values: it is only we, 
 we free spirits, who have re-established this 
 greatest of all antitheses in values! . . . 
 
 38 . 
 
 — I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There 
 are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker 
 than the blackest melancholy — contempt of man. 
 
 — 108 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom 
 I despise: it is the man of today, the man with 
 whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The 
 man of today — I am suffocated by his foul 
 breath! . . . Toward the past, like all who 
 understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to 
 say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution 
 I pass through whole millenniums of this mad- 
 house of a world, call it “Christianity,” 
 “Christian faith” or the “Christian church,” as 
 you will — I take care not to hold mankind re- 
 sponsible for its lunacies. But my feeling 
 changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I 
 enter modem times, our times. Our age knows 
 better. . . . What was formerly merely sickly 
 now becomes indecent — it is indecent to be a 
 Christian today. And here my disgust begins. 
 — I look about me: not a word survives of 
 what was once called “tmth”; we can no 
 longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the 
 word. Even a man who makes the most 
 modest pretensions to integrity must know that a 
 theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only 
 errs when he speaks, but actually lies — and that 
 he no longer escapes blame for his lie through 
 “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest knows, 
 — 109 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 as every one knows, that there is no longer any 
 “God,” or any “sinner,” or any “Saviour” — that 
 “free will” and the “moral order of the world” 
 are lies — : serious reflection, the profound self- 
 conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend 
 that he does not know it. . . .All the ideas of 
 the church are now recognized for what they are 
 — as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented 
 to debase nature and all natural values; the 
 priest himself is seen as he actually is — as the 
 most dangerous form of parasite, as the veno- 
 mous spider of ereation. . . . We know, our 
 conscience now knows — ^just what the real value 
 of all those sinister inventions of priest and 
 church has been and what ends they have served, 
 with their debasement of humanity to a state of 
 self-pollution, the very sight of which excites 
 loathing, — the concepts “the other world,” “the 
 last judgment,” “the immortality of the soul,” 
 the “soul” itself : they are all merely so many in- 
 struments 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 beeome of 
 the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, 
 when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional 
 — 110 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in 
 their acts, now call themselves Christians and go 
 to the communion-table? ... A prince at the 
 head of his armies, magnificent as the expres- 
 sion of the egoism and arrogance of his people 
 — and yet acknowledging, without any shame, 
 that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does 
 Christianity deny? what does it call “the 
 world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be 
 a patriot; to defend one’s self; to be careful of 
 one’s honour; to desire one’s own advantage; 
 to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every 
 instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a 
 deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of 
 falsehood the modem man must be to call him- 
 self nevertheless, and without shame, a Chris- 
 tian! — 
 
 39 . 
 
 — I shall go back a bit, and tell you the 
 authentic history of Christianity. — The very 
 word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — at 
 bottom there was only one Christian, and he died 
 on the cross. The “Gospels” died on the cross. 
 What, from that moment onward, was called 
 the “Gospels” was the very reverse of 
 — 111 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 what he had lived: “bad tidings,” a Dysange- 
 lium.^ It is an error amounting to nonsensi- 
 eality to see in “faith,” and particularly in 
 faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguish- 
 ing mark of the Christian: only the Christian 
 way of life, the life lived by him who died on 
 the cross, is Christian. ... To this day such a 
 life is still possible, and for certain men even 
 necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will 
 remain possible in all ages. . . . Not faith, but 
 acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different 
 state of being. . . . States of consciousness, 
 faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of 
 anything as true — as every psychologist knows, 
 the value of these things is perfectly indifferent 
 and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: 
 strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellec- 
 tual causality is false. To reduce being a 
 Christian, the state of Christianity, to an accept- 
 ance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of con- 
 sciousness, is to formulate the negation of 
 Christianity. In fact, there are no Christians. 
 The “Christian” — he who for two thousand years 
 has passed as a Christian — is simply a psycho- 
 
 1 So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numerous coinages, ob- 
 viously suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel. 
 
 — 112 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 logical self-delusion. Closely examined, it ap- 
 pears that, despite all his “faith,” he has been 
 ruled only by his instincts — and what instincts! 
 — In all ages — for example, in the case of 
 Luther — “faith” has been no more than a cloak, 
 a pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts 
 have played their game — a shrewd blindness to 
 the domination of certain of the instincts. . . . 
 I have already called “faith” the specially 
 Christian form of shrewdness — people always 
 talk of their “faith” and act according to their 
 instincts. ... In the world of ideas of the 
 Christian there is nothing that so much as 
 touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes 
 an instinctive hatred of reality as the motive 
 power, the only motive power at the bottom 
 of Christianity. What follows therefrom? 
 That even here, in psychologicis, there is 
 a radical error, which is to say one con- 
 ditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one 
 in substance. Take away one idea and put 
 a genuine reality in its place — and the whole of 
 Christianity crumbles to nothingness! — Viewed 
 calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a re- 
 ligion not only depending on errors, but inven- 
 tive and ingenious only in devising injurious 
 — 113 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 errors, poisonous to life and to the heart — this re- 
 mains a spectacle for the gods — for those gods 
 who are also philosophers, and whom I have 
 encountered, for example, in the celebrated 
 dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their 
 disgust leaves them ( — and us!) they will be 
 thankful for the spectacle afforded by the Chris- 
 tians: perhaps because of this curious exhibi- 
 tion alone the wretched little planet called the 
 earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a 
 show of divine interest. . . . Therefore, let us 
 not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, 
 false to the point of innocence, is far above the 
 ape — in its application to the Christians a well- 
 known theory of descent becomes a mere piece 
 of politeness. . . . 
 
 40 . 
 
 — The fate of the Gospels was decided by 
 death — it hung on the “cross.” ... It was only 
 death, that unexpected and shameful death; it 
 was only the cross, which was usually re- 
 served for the canaille only — it was only this ap- 
 palling paradox which brought the disciples 
 face to face with the real riddle: “Who 
 was it? what was it?” — The feeling of dis- 
 — 114 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 may, of profound affront and injury; the 
 suspicion that such a death might involve 
 a refutation of their cause ; the terrible 
 question, “Why just in this way?” — this state 
 of mind is only too easy to understand. Here 
 everything must be accounted for as necessary; 
 everything must have a meaning, a reason, the 
 highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple 
 excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm 
 of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who 
 
 was his natural enemy?” — this question flashed 
 like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Juda- 
 ism, its ruling class. From that moment, one 
 found one’s self in revolt against the established 
 order, and began to understand Jesus as in re- 
 volt against the established order. Until then 
 this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element 
 in his character had been lacking; what is more, 
 he had appeared to present its opposite. Ob- 
 viously, the little community had not understood 
 what was precisely the most important thing of 
 all: the example offered by this way of dying, the 
 freedom from and superiority to every feeling 
 of ressentiment — a plain indication of how little 
 he was understood at all! All that Jesus could 
 hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was 
 — 115 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 to offer tile strongest possible proof, or example, 
 of his teachings in the most public manner. . . . 
 But his disciples were very far from forgiving 
 his death — though to have done so would have 
 accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; 
 and neither were they prepared to offer them- 
 selves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, 
 for a similar death. . . . On the contrary, it was 
 precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, re- 
 venge, that now possessed them. It seemed im- 
 possible 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 fore- 
 ground ; attention was rivetted upon an historical 
 moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with 
 judgment upon his enemies. . . . But in all this 
 there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine 
 the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere 
 promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the in- 
 carnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this 
 “kingdom of God.” It v/as only now that all 
 the familiar contempt for and bitterness against 
 Pharisees and theologians began to appear in 
 ^116 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 the character of the Master — he was thereby 
 turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! 
 On the other hand, the savage veneration of 
 these completely unbalanced souls could no 
 longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by 
 Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children 
 of God: their revenge took the form of elevating 
 Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus sepa- 
 rating 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 ressentiment. . . . 
 
 41 . 
 
 — And from that time onward an absurd prob- 
 lem offered itself: “how could God allow it!” 
 To which the deranged reason of the little com- 
 munity formulated an answer that was terrify- 
 ing 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 him- 
 — 117 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 self Had done away with the very concept of 
 “guilt,” he denied that there was any gulf fixed 
 between God and man; he lived this unity be- 
 tween God and man, and that was precisely his 
 “glad tidings”. . . . And not as a mere privi- 
 lege! — From this time forward the type of the 
 Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doc- 
 trine of judgment and of the second coming, the 
 doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of 
 the resurrection, by means of which the entire 
 concept of “blessedness,” the whole and only 
 reality of the gospels, is juggled away — in 
 favour of a state of existence after death! . . . 
 St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which 
 shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical 
 quality to that conception, that indecent con- 
 ception, 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 imfulfillable promises, 
 the shameless doctrine of personal immortality. 
 . . . Paul even preached it as a reward. . . . 
 
 42 . 
 
 One now begins to see just what it was that 
 came to an end with the death on the cross: a 
 — 118 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 new and thoroughly original effort to found a 
 Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish 
 happiness on earth — real, not merely promised. 
 For this remains — as I have already pointed 
 out — the essential difference between the two re- 
 ligions of decadence: Buddhism promises noth- 
 ing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises 
 everything, hut fulfils nothing. — Hard upon the 
 heels of the “glad tidings” came the worst 
 imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incar- 
 nated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad 
 tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the 
 vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. 
 What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed 
 to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed 
 him to his own cross. The life, the example, 
 the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning 
 and the law of the whole gospels — nothing was 
 left of all this after that counterfeiter in 
 hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not 
 reality; surely not historical truth! . . . Once 
 more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated 
 the same old master crime against history — he 
 simply struck out the yesterday and the day be- 
 fore yesterday of Christianity, and invented his 
 own history of Christian beginnings. Going 
 — 119 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 further, he treated the history of Israel to an- 
 other falsification, so that it became a mere pro- 
 logue 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 Christi- 
 anity. . . . The figure of the Saviour, his teach- 
 ing, his way of life, his death, the meaning of 
 his death, even the consequences of his death — 
 nothing remained untouched, nothing remained 
 in even remote contact with reality. Paul 
 simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole 
 life to a place behind this existence — in the lie 
 of the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use 
 for the life of the Saviour — what he needed was 
 the death on the cross, and something more. To 
 see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose 
 home was at the centre of the Stoical enlighten- 
 ment, 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 hal- 
 lucination himself — this would be a genuine 
 niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the 
 end; therefore he also willed the means. . . . 
 What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed 
 readily enough by the idiots among whom he 
 — 120 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 spread his teaching. — ^What he wanted was 
 power; in Paul the priest once more reached out 
 for power — ^he had use only for such concepts, 
 teachings and symbols as served the purpose of 
 tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mohs. 
 What was the only part of Christianity that Mo- 
 hammed borrowed later on? Paul’s invention, 
 his device for establishing priestly tyranny and 
 organizing the mob: the belief in the immor- 
 tality of the soul — that is to say, the doctrine of 
 “judgment” . . . . 
 
 43 . 
 
 When the centre of gravity of life is placed, 
 not in life itself, but in “the beyond” — in noth- 
 ingness — then one has taken away its centre of 
 gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal im- 
 mortality destroys all reason, all natural 
 instinct — henceforth, everything in the in- 
 stincts that is beneficial, that fosters life 
 and that safeguards the future is a cause 
 of suspicion. So to live that life no longer 
 has any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of 
 life. . . . Why be public-spirited? Why take 
 any pride in descent and forefathers? Why 
 labour together, trust one another, or concern 
 — 121 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 in- 
 dividual may lay claim to eternal importance; 
 that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths in- 
 sane may assume that the laws of nature are 
 constantly suspended in their behalf — it is im- 
 possible 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 per- 
 sonal vanity for its triumph — it was thus that it 
 lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen 
 upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scour- 
 ing of humanity to its side. The “salvation of 
 the soul” — in plain English: “the world re- 
 volves around me.” . . . The poisonous doc- 
 trine, ‘‘equal rights for all,” has been propa- 
 gated 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, 
 — 122 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to 
 every step upward, to every development of 
 civilization — out of the ressentiment of the 
 masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, 
 against everything noble, joyous and high- 
 spirited on earth, against our happiness on 
 earth. ... To allow “immortality” to every 
 Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious 
 outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated. 
 — And let us not underestimate the fatal influ- 
 ence that Qhristianity has had, even upon poli- 
 tics! Nowadays no one has courage any more 
 for special rights, for the right of dominion, 
 for feelings of honourable pride in himself and 
 his equals— for the pathos of distance. . . . 
 Our politics is sick with this lack of courage! — 
 The aristocratic attitude of mind has been under- 
 mined by the lie of the equality of souls ; and if 
 belief in the “privileges of the majority” makes 
 and will continue to make revolutions — it is 
 Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian 
 valuations, which convert every revolution into 
 a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity 
 is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the 
 ground against everything that is lofty: the 
 gospel of the “lowly” lowers. . . . 
 
 — 123 — 
 
t:he antichrist 
 
 44 . 
 
 — The gospels are invaluable as evidence of 
 the corruption that was already persistent within 
 the primitive community. That which Paul, 
 with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed 
 to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of 
 decay that had begun with the death of the 
 Saviour. — These gospels cannot be read too care- 
 fully ; difficulties lurk behind every word. I con- 
 fess — I hope it will not be held against me — that 
 it is precisely for this reason that they offer 
 first-rate joy to a psychologist — as the opposite 
 of all merely na'ive corruption, as refinement 
 par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psycho- 
 logical corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand 
 alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be com- 
 pared to them. Here we are among Jews: 
 this is the first thing to be home in mind if we 
 are not to lose the thread of the matter. This 
 positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of 
 personal “holiness” unmatched anywhere else, 
 either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud 
 in word and attitude to the level of an art — all 
 this is not an accident due to the chance talents 
 of an individual, or to any violation of nature. 
 — 124 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 The thing responsible is race. The whole of 
 Judaism appears in Christianity as the art of 
 concocting holy lies, and there, after many cen- 
 turies of earnest Jewish training and hard prac- 
 tice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the 
 stage of mastery. The Christian, that ultima 
 ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again — he is 
 threefold the Jew. . . . The underlying will to 
 make use only of such concepts, symbols and 
 attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the in- 
 stinctive repudiation of every other mode of 
 thought, and every other method of estimating 
 values and utilities — this is not only tradition, 
 it is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it 
 able to operate with the force of nature. The 
 whole of mankind, even the best minds of the 
 best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly 
 human — ), have permitted themselves to be de- 
 ceived. 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 
 — 125 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 that / have made an end of them. ... I simply 
 cannot endure the way tliey 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 con- 
 demn to hell whoever stands in their way. In 
 letting God sit in judgment they judge them- 
 selves; in glorifying God they glorify them- 
 selves; in demanding that every one show the 
 virtues which they themselves happen to be 
 capable of — still more, which they must have in 
 order to remain on top — they assume the grand 
 air of men struggling for virtue, of men en- 
 gaging 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 hypo- 
 crites, to be sneaky, to hide in comers, to slink 
 along in the shadows, they convert their neces- 
 sity into a duty: 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 wit- 
 ness for us.”. . . . One may read the gospels 
 — 126 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 as books of moral seduction: these petty folks 
 fasten themselves to morality — they know the 
 uses of morality! Morality is the best of all 
 devices for leading mankind by the nose ! — The 
 fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen 
 here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this 
 way that they, the “community,” the “good and 
 just,” range themselves, once and for always, 
 on one side, the side of “the truth” — and the 
 rest of mankind, “the world,” on the other. . . . 
 In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalo- 
 mania that the earth has ever seen: little abor- 
 tions of bigots and liars began to claim exclu- 
 sive rights in the concepts of “God,” “the truth,” 
 “the light,” “the spirit,” “love,” “wisdom” and 
 “life,” as if these things were synonyms of them- 
 selves and thereby they sought to fence them- 
 selves off from the “world”; little super-Jews, 
 ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values 
 upside down in order to meet their notions, just 
 as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, 
 the standard and even the last judgment of all 
 the rest. . . . The whole disaster was only made 
 possible by the fact that there already existed 
 in the world a similar megalomania, allied to 
 this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm 
 — 127 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 began to yawn between Jews and Judaeo-Chris- 
 tians, the latter had no choice but to employ the 
 self-preservative measures that the Jewish in- 
 stinct had devised, even against the Jews them- 
 selves, whereas the Jews had employed them 
 only against non- Jews. The Christian is simply 
 a Jew of the “reformed” confession. — 
 
 45. 
 
 — I offer a few examples of the sort of thing 
 these petty people have got into their heads — 
 what they have put into the mouth of the Master: 
 the unalloyed creed of “beautiful souls.” — 
 
 “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor 
 hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the 
 dust under your feet for a testimony against 
 them. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more 
 tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of 
 judgment, than for that city” (Mark vi, 11) — 
 How evangelical! . . . 
 
 “And whosoever shall offend one of these little 
 ones that believe in me, it is better for him that 
 a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he 
 were cast into the sea” (Mark ix, 42). — How 
 evangelical! . . . 
 
 “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: 
 — 128 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 is is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of 
 God with one eye, than having two eyes to be 
 cast into hell fire ; Where the worm dieth not, and 
 the fire is not quenched.” (Mark ix, 47.^) — 
 It is not exactly the eye that is meant. . . . 
 
 “Verily I say unto you. That there be some 
 of them that stand here, which shall not taste of 
 death, till they have seen the kingdom of God 
 come with power.” (Mark ix, 1.) — Well lied, 
 lion! ^ . . . 
 
 “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny 
 himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 
 For . . .” {Note of a psychologist. Christian 
 morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are 
 against it, — this makes it Christian.) Mark 
 viii, 34. — 
 
 “Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what 
 measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you 
 again.” (Matthew vii, 1.®) — What a notion of 
 justice, of a “just” judge! . . . 
 
 “For if ye love them which love you, what 
 reward have ye? do not even the publicans the 
 
 ^ To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48. 
 
 2 A paraphrase of Demetrius’ “Well roar’d, Lion!” in act v, 
 scene 1 of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The lion, oi 
 course, is the familiar Christian symbol for Mark. 
 
 3 Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2. 
 
 — 129 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 same? And if ye salute your brethren only, 
 what do ye more than others? do not even the 'jm 
 publicans so?” (Matthew v, 46/) — Principle 9 
 
 of “Christian love”: it insists upon being well 9 
 paid in the end. ... 
 
 “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, 9 
 neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” fl 
 (Matthew vi, 15.) — Very compromising for the 9 
 said “father.” ... 9 
 
 “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his 9 
 
 righteousness ; and all these things shall be added 9 
 
 unto you.” (Matthew vi, 33.) — All these jS 
 
 things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessi- 9 
 
 ties of life. An error, to put it mildly. ... A 9 
 
 bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least -9 
 
 in certain cases. ... 9 
 
 “Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, # 
 behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in 
 the like manner did their fathers unto the ■ 
 
 prophets.” (Luke vi, 23.) — Impudent rabble! ■ 
 
 It compares itself to the prophets. ... ' 
 
 “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, j 
 and that the spirit of God dwell eth in you? If 
 any man defile the temple of God, him shall God ■ 
 destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which ^ 
 ^The quotation also includes verse 47. ^ 
 
 — 130 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 temple ye are.” (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16/) 
 — For that sort of thing one cannot have enough 
 contempt. . . . 
 
 “Do ye not know that the saints shall judge 
 the world? and if the world shall be judged by 
 you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest mat- 
 ters?” (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.) — Unfortu- 
 nately, not merely the speech of a lunatic. . . . 
 This frightful impostor then proceeds: “Know 
 
 ye not that we shall judge angels? how much 
 more things that pertain to this life?” . . . 
 
 “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of 
 this world? For after that in the wisdom of 
 God the world by wisdom knew not God, it 
 pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to 
 save them that believe. . . . Not many wise men 
 after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble 
 are called: But God hath chosen the foolish 
 
 things of the world to confound the wise; and 
 God hath chosen the weak things of the world 
 to confound the things which are mighty; And 
 base things of the world, and things which are 
 despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which 
 are not, to bring to nought things that are : That 
 
 no flesh should glory in his presence.” (Paul, 
 
 1 And 17. 
 
 — 131 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 1 Corinthians i, 20ff/) — In order to understand 
 this passage, a first-rate example of the psy- 
 chology underlying every Chandala-morality, 
 one should read the first part of my “Genealogy 
 of Morals”: there, for the first time, the antag- 
 onism between a noble morality and a morality 
 bom of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness 
 is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apos- 
 tles of revenge. . . . 
 
 46 . 
 
 — What follows, then? That one had better 
 put on gloves before reading the New Testament. 
 The presence of so much filth makes it very 
 advisable. One would as little choose “early 
 Christians” for companions as Polish Jews: not 
 that one need seek out an objection to them. 
 . . . Neither has a pleasant smell. — I have 
 searched the New Testament in vain for a single 
 sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, 
 kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it human- 
 ity does not even make the first step upward — 
 the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . . Only 
 evil instincts are there, and there is not even the 
 courage of these evil instincts. It is all coward- 
 1 Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29. 
 
 — 132 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-decep- 
 tion. Every other book becomes clean, once one 
 has read the New Testament: for example, im- 
 mediately after reading Paul I took up with 
 delight that most charming and wanton of scoff- 
 ers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Do- 
 menico Boccaccio wrote of Caesar Borgia to the 
 Duke of Parma: “e tutto festo” — immortally 
 healthy, immortally cheerful and sound. . . . 
 These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. 
 They attack, but everything they attack is thereby 
 distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an 
 “early Christian” is surely not befouled. . . . 
 On the contrary, it is an honour to have an “early 
 Christian” as an opponent. One cannot read 
 the New Testament without acquired admiration 
 for whatever it abuses — not to speak of the “wis- 
 dom 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 cer- 
 tainly have been worth something to have been 
 hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy 
 — as if this were a charge that the “early Chris- 
 tians” dared to make! — After all, they were 
 the privileged, and that was enough: the hatred 
 — 133 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The 
 “early Christian” — and also, I fear, the “last 
 Christian,” whom I may perhaps live to see — 
 is a rebel against all privilege by profound in- 
 stinct — he lives and makes war for ever for 
 “equal rights.” . . . Strictly speaking, he has 
 no alternative. When a man proposes to rep- 
 resent, in his own person, the “chosen of God” — 
 or to be a “temple of God,” or a “judge of the 
 angels” — ^then every other eriterion, whether 
 based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manli- 
 ness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of 
 the heart, becomes simply “worldly” — evil in 
 itself. . . . Moral: every word that comes from 
 the lips of an “early Christian” is a lie, and his 
 every act is instinctively dishonest — all his val- 
 ues, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he 
 hates, whatever he hates, has real value. . . . 
 The Christian, and particularly the Christian 
 priest, is thus a criterion of values. 
 
 — Must I add that, in the whole New Testa- 
 ment, there appears but a solitary figure worthy 
 of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To re- 
 gard a Jewish imbroglio seriously — that was 
 quite beyond him. One Jew more or less — 
 what did it matter? . . . The noble scorn of a 
 — 134 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 Roman, before whom the word “truth” was 
 shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Tes- 
 tament with the only saying that has any value — 
 and that is at once its criticism and its destruc- 
 tion: “What is truth? . . . 
 
 47 . 
 
 — The thing that sets us apart is not that we 
 are unable to find God, either in history, or in 
 nature, or behind nature — but that we regard 
 what has been honoured as God, not as “divine,” 
 but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as 
 a mere error, but as a crime against life. . . . 
 We deny that God is God. ... If any one were 
 to show us this Christian God, we’d be still less 
 inclined to believe in him. — In a formula: deus, 
 qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio. — Such a re- 
 ligion as Christianity, which does not touch re al- 
 ity at a single point and w hich goes to pieces^the 
 mome nt reality ass erts its righ ts at any point, 
 must b e inevi tably the deadly eneniy of the “wis- 
 dom of this world, ” which is to say, of science ^ — 
 and it will give the name of good to whatever 
 means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down 
 all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strict- 
 ness in matters of intellectual conscience, and 
 — 135 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. 
 “Faith,” as an imperative, vetoes science — in 
 praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew 
 that lying — that “faith” — was necessary; later 
 on the church borrowed the fact from Paul. — 
 The God that Paul invented for himself, a God 
 who “reduced to absurdity” “the wisdom of this 
 world” (especially the two great enemies of su- 
 perstition, philology and medicine), is in truth 
 only an indication of Paul’s resolute determina- 
 tion to accomplish that very thing himself: to 
 give one’s own will the name of God, thora — 
 that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dis- 
 pose of the “wisdom of this world” : his enemies 
 are the good philologians and physicians of the 
 Alexandrine school — on them he makes his war. 
 As a matter of fact no man can he a philologian 
 or a physician without being also Antichrist. 
 That is to say, as a philologian a man sees be- 
 hind the “holy books,” and as a physician he 
 sees behind the physiological degeneration of the 
 typical Christian. The physician says “incur- 
 able”; the philologian says “fraud.” . . . 
 
 136 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 48 . 
 
 — Has any one ever clearly understood the 
 celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible — 
 of God’s mortal terror of science? ... No one, 
 in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par 
 excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great 
 inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one 
 great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great 
 danger. — 
 
 The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the 
 high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his 
 garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. 
 Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.^ 
 What does he do? He creates man — man is en- 
 tertaining. . . . But then he notices that man is 
 also bored. God’s pity for the only form of 
 distress that invades all paradises knows no 
 bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. 
 God’s first mistake: to man these other animals 
 were not entertaining — he sought dominion over 
 them; he did not want to be an “animal” him- 
 self. — So God created woman. In the act he 
 brought boredom to an end — and also many 
 
 paraphrase of Schiller’s “Against stupidity even gods 
 struggle in vain.” 
 
 — 137 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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; sci- 
 ence makes men godlike — it is all up with priests 
 and gods when man becomes scientific! — Moral: 
 science is the forbidden per se; it alone is for- 
 bidden. 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, how- 
 ever, 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! Happi- 
 
 ness, leisure, foster thought — and all thoughts 
 are bad thoughts! — Man must not think. — And 
 so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal 
 dangers of childbirth, all sorts' of misery, old 
 age, decrepitude, above all, sickness — nothing 
 — 138 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 but devices for making war on science! The 
 troubles of man don’t allow him to think. . . . 
 Nevertheless — how terrible! — , the edifice of 
 knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading 
 heaven, shadowing the gods — what is to be done? 
 — The old God invents war; he separates the 
 peoples; he makes men destroy one another 
 ( — the priests have always had need of war. . . .) . 
 War — among other things, a great disturber of 
 science! — Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance 
 from the priests, prospers in spite of war. — So 
 the old God comes to his final resolution: 
 “Man has become scientific — there is no help 
 for it: he must be drowned!” . . . 
 
 49 . 
 
 — I have been understood. At the opening 
 of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the 
 priest. — The priest knows of only one great dan- 
 ger: that is science — the sound comprehension 
 of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on 
 the whole, only under favourable conditions — 
 a man must have time, he must have an overflow- 
 ing intellect, in order to “know.” . . . “There- 
 fore, man must be made unhappy,” — this has 
 been, in all ages, the logic of the priest. — It is 
 — 139 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first 
 thing to come into the world : — “sin.” . . . The 
 concept of guilt and punishment, the whole 
 “moral order of the world,” was set up against 
 science — against the deliverance of man from 
 priests. . . . Man must not look outward; he 
 must look inward. He must not look at things 
 shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; 
 he must not look at all; he must suffer. . . . 
 And he must suffer so much that he is always in 
 need of the priest. — Away with physicians! 
 What is needed is a Saviour. — The concept of 
 guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of 
 “grace,” of “salvation,” of “forgiveness” — lies 
 through and through, and absolutely without 
 psychological reality — were devised to destroy 
 man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon 
 the concept of cause and effect! — And not an at- 
 tack 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 
 — 140 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 creations of superstition — by “God,” by “spir- 
 its,” by “souls” — and reckoned as merely 
 “moral” consequences, as rewards, as punish- 
 ments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole 
 ground-work of knowledge is destroyed — then 
 the greatest of crimes against humanity has been 
 perpetrated. — I repeat that sin, man’s self-dese- 
 cration par excellence, was invented in order to 
 make science, culture, and every elevation and 
 ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules 
 through the invention of sin. — 
 
 50 . 
 
 — In this place I can’t permit myself to omit 
 a psychology of “belief,” of the “believer,” for 
 the special benefit of “believers.” If there re- 
 main any today who do not yet know how in- 
 decent it is to be “believing” — or how much a 
 sign of decadence, of a broken will to live — 
 then they will know it well enough tomorrow. 
 My voice reaches even the deaf. — It appears, un- 
 less 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 dem- 
 — 141 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 onstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon 
 “faith” as a condition — one shall be blessed be- 
 cause one believes. . . . But what of the thing 
 that the priest promises to the believer, the 
 wholly transcendental “beyond” — how is that to 
 be demonstrated? — The “proof by power,” thus 
 assumed, is actually no more at bottom than 
 a belief that the effects which faith promises will 
 not fail to appear. In a formula: “I believe 
 
 that faith makes for blessedness — therefore, it is 
 true.” . . . But this is as far as we may go. 
 This “therefore” would be absurdum itself as a 
 criterion of truth. — But let us admit, for the sake 
 of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be 
 demonstrated ( — not merely hoped for, and not 
 merely promised by the suspicious lips of a 
 priest) : even so, could blessedness — in a techni- 
 cal term, pleasure — ever be a proof of truth? 
 So little is this true that it is almost a proof 
 against truth when sensations of pleasure influ- 
 ence the answer to the question “What is true?” 
 or, at all events, it is enough to make that “truth” 
 highly suspicious. The proof by “pleasure” is 
 a proof of “pleasure” — nothing more; why in 
 the world should it be assumed that true judg- 
 ments give more pleasure than false ones, and 
 — 142 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 that, in conformity to some pre-established har- 
 mony, 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 busi- 
 ness: the service of truth is the hardest of all 
 services. — ^What, then, is the meaning of integ- 
 rity in things intellectual? It means that a man 
 must be severe with his own heart, that he must 
 scorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makes 
 every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience! — 
 Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies. . . . 
 
 51 . 
 
 The fact that faith, under certain circum- 
 stances, 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 
 — 143 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic 
 asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, 
 just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabun- 
 dance of health — the actual ulterior purpose of 
 the whole system of salvation of the ehurch is to 
 make people ill. And the church itself — doesn’t 
 it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ulti- 
 mate 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 ex- 
 hausted 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 aetually epileptoid in form — the 
 church has granted the name of holy only to 
 lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei 
 honorem. . . . Once I ventured to designate the 
 whole Christian system of training ^ in 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 
 
 1 The word training is in English in the text, 
 
 — 144 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 be a Christian: one is not “converted” to Chris- 
 tianity — one must first be sick enough for it. 
 . . . We others, who have the courage for health 
 and likewise for contempt, — we may well de- 
 spise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of 
 the body! that refuses to rid itself of the super- 
 stition 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 “per- 
 fect 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 ecs- 
 tatic state of existence, so-called “holiness” — a 
 holiness that is itself merely a series of symp- 
 toms of an impoverished, enervated and in- 
 curably 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 conglom- 
 eration of decadence products from all direc- 
 tions, crowding together and seeking one another 
 out. It was not, as has been thought, the corrup- 
 tion of antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made 
 — 145 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 impe- 
 rium were Christianized, the contrary type, the 
 nobility, reached its finest and ripest develop- 
 ment. The majority became master; democ- 
 racy, with its Christian instincts, triumphed. 
 . . . Christianity was not “national,” it was not 
 based on race — it appealed to all the varieties 
 of men disinherited by life, it had its allies 
 everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the 
 sick at its very core — the instinct against the 
 healthy, against health. Everything that is well- 
 constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beau- 
 tiful 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” : ^ 
 this was the formula ; in hoc signo the decadence 
 triumphed. — God on the cross — is man always 
 to miss the frightful inner significance of this 
 symbol? — Everything that suffers, everything 
 that hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We all 
 '■I Corinthians i, 27, 28. 
 
 — 146 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 hang on the cross, consequently we are divine. 
 ... We alone are divine. . . . Christianity was 
 thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was 
 destroyed by it — Christianity remains to this day 
 the greatest misfortune of humanity. — 
 
 52 . 
 
 Christianity also stands in opposition to all 
 intellectual well-being, — sick reasoning is the 
 only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; 
 it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it 
 pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the 
 superbia of the healthy intellect. Since sick- 
 ness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that 
 the typically Christian state of “faith” must be 
 a form of sickness too, and that all straight, 
 straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge 
 must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. 
 Doubt is thus a sin from the start. . . . The 
 complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the 
 priest — revealed by a glance at him — is a phe- 
 nomenon resulting from decadence , — one may 
 observe in hysterical women and in rachitic chil- 
 dren how regularly the falsification of instincts, 
 delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and 
 incapacity for looking straight and walking 
 — 147 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 straight are symptoms of decadence. “Faith” 
 means the will to avoid knowing what is true. 
 The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud 
 because he is sick: his instinct demands that the 
 truth shall never be allowed its rights on any 
 point. “Whatever makes for illness is good; 
 whatever issues from abundance, from super- 
 abundance, from power, is evil” : so argues the 
 believer. The impulse to lie — it is by this that 
 I recognize every foreordained theologian. — 
 Another characteristic of the theologian is his 
 unfitness for philology. What I here mean by 
 philology is, in a general sense, the art of read- 
 ing with profit — the capacity for absorbing facts 
 without interpreting them falsely, and without 
 losing caution, patience and subtlety in the ef- 
 fort to understand them. Philology as ephexis ^ 
 in interpretation: whether one be dealing with 
 books, with newspaper reports, with the most 
 fateful events or with weather statistics — not to 
 mention the “salvation of the soul.” . . . The 
 way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or 
 in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a “passage 
 of Scripture,” or an experience, or a victory by 
 
 1 That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism 
 was also occasionally called ephecticism. 
 
 — 148 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 Suabia ^ use 
 the “finger of God” to convert their miserably 
 commonplace and huggermugger existence into 
 a miracle of “grace,” a “providence” and an 
 “experience of salvation”? The most modest 
 exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, 
 should certainly be enough to convince these 
 interpreters of the perfect childishness and un- 
 worthiness 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 
 ahnanac-man — at bottom, he is a mere name for 
 the stupidest sort of chance. ... “Divine Prov- 
 
 1 A reference to the University of Tiibingen and its famous 
 school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was 
 F. C. Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was 
 Nietzsche’s pet abomination, David F. Strauss, himself a 
 Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28. 
 
 — 14P — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 idence,” which every third man in “educated 
 Germany” still believes in, is so strong an argu- 
 ment against God that it would be impossible 
 to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an 
 argument against Germans! . . . 
 
 53 . 
 
 — It is so little true that martyrs offer any 
 support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined 
 to deny that any martyr has ever had anything 
 to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in 
 which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true 
 at the head of the world there appears so low a 
 grade of intellectual honesty and such insensi- 
 bility 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 Lu- 
 ther, 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 deli- 
 cacy, to know anything further. . . . “Truth,” 
 as the word is understood by every prophet, every 
 sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and 
 every churchman, is simply a complete proof 
 — 150 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 that not even a beginning has been made in the 
 intellectual discipline and self-control that are 
 necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest 
 truth. — The deaths of the martyrs, it may be 
 said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: 
 they have misled. . . . The conclusion that all 
 idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there 
 must be something in a cause for which any one 
 goes to his death (or which, as under primitive 
 Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seek- 
 ing) — this conclusion has been an unspeakable 
 drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole 
 spirit of inquiry and investigation. The mar- 
 tyrs have damaged the truth. . . . Even to this 
 day the crude fact of persecution is enough to 
 give an honourable name to the most empty sort ' 
 of sectarianism. — But why? Is the worth of a 
 cause altered by the fact that some one had laid 
 down his life for it? — An error that becomes 
 honourable is simply an error that has acquired 
 one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, 
 Messrs.. Theologians, that we shall give you the 
 chance to be martyred for your lies? — One best 
 disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on 
 ice — that is also the best way to dispose of 
 theologians. . . . This was precisely the world- 
 — 151 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that 
 they gave the appearance of honour to the cause 
 they opposed — that they made it a present of the 
 fascination of martyrdom. . . . Women are still 
 on their knees before an error because they have 
 been told that some one died on the cross for it. 
 Is the cross, then, an argument ? — But about all 
 these things there is one, and one only, who has 
 said what has been needed for thousands of 
 years — Zarathustra. 
 
 They made signs in blood along the way that they 
 went, and their folly taught them that the truth is 
 proved by blood. 
 
 But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the 
 truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and 
 turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart. 
 
 And when one goeth through fire for his teaching — 
 what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one’s 
 teaching oometh out of one’s own burning! ^ 
 
 54 . 
 
 Do not let yourself be deceived: great intel- 
 lects are sceptieal. Zarathustra is a sceptic. 
 The strength, the freedom which proceed from 
 intelleetual power, from a superabundanee of 
 intellectual power, manifest themselves as scep- 
 
 1 The quotations are from “Also sprach Zarathustra” ii, 24: 
 “Of Priests.” 
 
 — 152 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count 
 when it comes to determining what is fundamen- 
 tal in values and lack of values. Men of con- 
 victions are prisoners. They do not see far 
 enough, they do not see what is below them: 
 whereas a man who would talk to any purpose 
 about value and non-value must be able to see 
 five hundred convictions beneath him — and be- 
 hind him. ... A mind that aspires to great 
 things, and that wills the means thereto, is neces- 
 sarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of con- 
 viction belongs to strength, and to an independ- 
 ent point of view. . . . That grand passion 
 which is at once the foundation and the power of 
 a sceptic’s existence, and is both more enlight- 
 ened 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 em- 
 ploy unholy means ; under certain circumstances 
 it does not begrudge him even convictions. Con- 
 viction as a means : one may achieve a good deal 
 by means of a conviction. A grand passion 
 makes use of and uses up convictions; it does 
 not yield to them — it knows itself to be sovereign. 
 — On the contrary, the need of faith, of some- 
 thing unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, 
 — 153 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weak- 
 ness. The man of faith, the “believer” of any 
 sort, is necessarily a dependent man — such a 
 man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he 
 find goals within himself. The “believer” does 
 not belong to himself; he can only be a means 
 to an end; he must be used up; he needs some 
 one to use him up. His instinct gives the high- 
 est honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he 
 is prompted to embrace it by everything: his 
 prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every 
 sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self- 
 effacement, of self -estrangement. . . . When 
 one reflects how necessary it is to the great ma- 
 jority that there be regulations to restrain them 
 from without and hold them fast, and to what 
 extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, 
 is the one and only condition which makes for 
 the well-being of the weak-willed man, and espe- 
 cially woman, then one at once understands con- 
 viction and “faith.” To the man with convic- 
 tions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing 
 many things, to be impartial about nothing, to 
 be a party man through and through, to estimate 
 all values strictly and infallibly — these are con- 
 ditions necessary to the existence of such a man. 
 — 154 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 But by the same token they are antagonists of the 
 truthful man — of the truth. . . . The believer 
 is not free to answer the question, “true” or “not 
 true,” according to the dictates of his own con- 
 science: integrity on this point would work his 
 instant downfall. The pathological limitations 
 of his vision turn the man of convictions into a 
 fanatic — Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robes- 
 pierre, Saint-Simon — these types stand in oppo- 
 sition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the 
 grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these 
 intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the 
 great masses — fanatics are picturesque, and man- 
 kind prefers observing poses to listening to rea- 
 sons. . . . 
 
 55. 
 
 — One step further in the psychology of con- 
 viction, of “faith.” It is now a good while 
 since I first proposed for consideration the ques- 
 tion whether convictions are not even more dan- 
 gerous enemies to truth than lies. (“Human, 
 All-Too-Human,” I, aphorism 483.)^ This time 
 I desire to put the question definitely: is there 
 
 1 The aphorism, which is headed “The Enemies of Truth,” 
 makes the direct statement; “Convictions are more dangerous 
 enemies of truth than lies.” 
 
 — 155 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 any actual difference between a lie and a con- 
 viction? — All the world believes that there is; 
 but what is not believed by all the world! — 
 Every conviction has its history, its 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 per- 
 sons: what was a lie in the father becomes a con- 
 viction 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 de- 
 ceives himself: the deception of others is a rela- 
 tively 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 his- 
 torians 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 
 — 156 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, 
 including the German historians, instinctively 
 roll the fine phrases of morality upon their 
 tongues — that morality almost owes its very sur- 
 vival to the fact that the party man of every sort 
 has need of it every moment? — “This is our con- 
 viction: we publish it to the whole world; we 
 live and die for it — let us respect all who have 
 convictions!” — I have actually heard such senti- 
 ments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the 
 contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely 
 does not become more respectable because he 
 lies on principle. . . . The priests, who have 
 more finesse in such matters, and who well un- 
 derstand 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 cate- 
 gorical imperative, was on tlie same road: this 
 was his practical reason.^ There are questions 
 regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not 
 
 ^ A reference, of course, to Kant’s “Kritik der praktischen 
 Vernunft” (Critique of Practical Reason). 
 
 — 157 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 for man to decide; all die capital questions, all 
 the capital problems of valuation, are beyond 
 human reason. ... To know the limits of rea- 
 son — that alone is genuine philosophy. . . . 
 |Why did God make a revelation to man? Would 
 God have done anything superfluous? Man 
 could not find out for himself what was good and 
 what was evil, so God taught him His will. . . . 
 Moral: the priest does not lie — the question, 
 “true” or “untrue,” has nothing to do with such 
 things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to 
 lie about these things. In order to lie here it 
 would be necessary to know what is true. But 
 this is more than man can know; therefore, the 
 priest is simply the mouth-piece of God. — Such 
 a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jew- 
 ish and Christian ; the right to lie and the shrewd 
 dodge of “revelation” belong to the general 
 priestly type — to the priest of the decadence as 
 well as to the priest of pagan times ( — Pagans 
 are all those who say yes to life, and to whom 
 “God” is a word signifying acquiescence in all 
 things).— The “law,” the “will of God,” the 
 “holy book,” and “inspiration” — all these things 
 are merely words for the conditions under which 
 the priest comes to power and with which he 
 — 158 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 maintains his power, — these concepts are to be 
 found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, 
 and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical 
 schemes of governments. The “holy lie” — com- 
 mon alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to 
 Mohammed and to the Christian church — is not 
 even wanting in Plato. “Truth is here”: this 
 means, no matter where it is heard, the priest 
 lies. . . . 
 
 56 . 
 
 — In the last analysis it comes to this: what is 
 the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, 
 “holy” ends are not visible is my objection to 
 the means it employs. Only had ends appear: 
 the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of 
 life, the despising of the body, the degradation 
 and self-contamination of man by the concept of 
 sin — therefore, its means are also bad. — I have 
 a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, 
 an incomparably more intellectual and superior 
 work, which it would be a sin against the in- 
 telligence to so much as name in the same breath 
 with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a 
 genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely 
 an evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and 
 — 159 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 superstition, — it gives even the most fastidious 
 psychologist something to sink his teeth into. 
 And, not to forget what is most important, it 
 differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: 
 by means of it the nobles, the philosophers and 
 the warriors keep the whip-hand over the ma- 
 jority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a 
 feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and 
 triumphant feeling toward self and life — the sun 
 shines upon the whole book. — All the things on 
 which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgar- 
 ity — for example, procreation, women and mar- 
 riage — are here handled earnestly, with rever- 
 ence 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 
 bum”? ^ 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 
 
 1 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9. 
 
 — 160 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 grey-beards and saints have a way of being gal- 
 lant to women that it would be impossible, per- 
 haps, 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 noth- 
 ing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow 
 cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a 
 maiden.” Finally, in still another place — per- 
 haps this is also a holy lie — : “all the orifices of 
 the body above the navel are pure, and all below 
 are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole 
 body pure.” 
 
 57 . 
 
 One catches the unholiness of Christian means 
 in flagranti by the simple process of putting the 
 ends sought by Christianity beside the ends 
 sought by the Code of Manu — by putting these 
 enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. 
 The critic of Christianity cannot evade the neces- 
 sity of making Christianity contemptible . — A 
 book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the 
 same origin as every other good law-book : it epit- 
 omizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethi- 
 cal experimentation of long centuries; it brings 
 — 161 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The 
 prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recog- 
 nition of the fact that the means which establish 
 the authority of a slowly and painfully attained 
 truth are fundamentally different from those 
 which one would make use of to prove it. A 
 law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, 
 the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did 
 so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou 
 shalt,” on which obedience is based. The prob- 
 lem 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 hind- 
 sight and foresight, declares that the series of 
 experiences determining how all shall live — or 
 can live — has come to an end. The object now 
 is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as 
 possible from the days of experiment and hard 
 experience. In consequence, the thing that is to 
 be avoided above everything is further experi- 
 mentation — the continuation o^ the state in which 
 values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criti- 
 cized ad infinitum. Against this a double wall is 
 set up : on the one hand, revelation, which is the 
 assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws 
 are not of human origin, that they were not sought 
 — 162 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 his- 
 tory, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and on the 
 other hand, tradition, which is the assumption 
 that the law has stood unchanged from time im- 
 memorial, and that it is impious and a crime 
 against one’s forefathers to bring it into question. 
 The authority of the law is thus grounded on the 
 thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it. — 
 
 The higher motive of such procedure lies in the 
 design to distract consciousness, step by step, 
 from its concern with notions of right living (that 
 is to say, those that have been proved to be right 
 by wide and carefully considered experience), 
 so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism — 
 a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to 
 every sort of perfection in the art of life. To 
 draw up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay 
 before a people the possibility of future mastery, 
 of attainable perfection — it permits them to 
 aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. 
 To that end the thing must be made unconscious: 
 that is the aim of every holy lie. — The order of 
 castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely 
 the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural 
 — 163 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, 
 no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In 
 every healthy society there are three physiologi- 
 cal 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 master}^ and feeling of perfection. 
 It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class 
 hose who are chiefly intellectual, in another those 
 who are marked by muscular strength and tem- 
 perament, and in a third those who are distin- 
 guished in neither one way or the other, but show 
 only mediocrity — the last-named represents the 
 great majority, and the first two the select. The 
 superior caste — I call it the fewest — has, as the 
 most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands 
 for happiness, for beauty, for everything good 
 upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men 
 have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in 
 them can goodness escape being weakness. Pul- 
 chrum est paucorum hominum: ^ goodness is a 
 privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming 
 to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic 
 look, or an eye that sees ugliness — or indignation 
 against the general aspect of things. Indigna- 
 
 1 Few men are noble. 
 
 164 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 tion is the privilege of the Chandala ; so is pessi- 
 mism. “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 dis- 
 tance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of 
 this perfection.” The most intelligent men, like 
 the strongest, find their happiness where others 
 would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in 
 being hard with themselves and with others, in 
 effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them 
 asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an 
 instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privi- 
 lege; it is to them a recreation to play with bur- 
 dens that would crush all others. . . . Knowl- 
 edge — a form of asceticism. — They are the most 
 honourable kind of men: but that does not pre- 
 vent them being the most cheerful and most ami- 
 able. 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 con- 
 stitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the 
 — 165 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 next to them in rank, taking from them all that is 
 rough in the business of ruling — their followers, 
 their right hand, their most apt disciples. — In 
 all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, noth- 
 ing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is 
 made up — by it nature is brought to shame. . . . 
 The order of castes, the order of rank, simply 
 formulates the supreme law of life itself; the 
 separation of the three types is necessary to the 
 maintenance of society, and to the evolution of 
 higher types, and the highest types — the inequal- 
 ity 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 privi- 
 leges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as 
 one mounts the heights — the cold increases, re- 
 sponsibility 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, com- 
 merce, 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 
 — 166 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 func- 
 tion, 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 in- 
 telligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity 
 is a form of happiness; they have a natural in- 
 stinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. 
 It would be altogether unworthy of a profound 
 intellect to see anything objectionable in medioc- 
 rity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite 
 to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a nec- 
 essary 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 kind- 
 ness of heart — it is simply his duty. . . . Whom 
 do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of to- 
 day? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to 
 the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s 
 instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment 
 with his petty existence — who make him envious 
 and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies 
 in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of 
 “equal” rights. . . . What is bad? But I have 
 — 167 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 already answered: all that proceeds from weak- 
 ness, from envy, from revenge. — The anarchist 
 and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . . 
 
 58 . 
 
 In point of fact, the end for which one lies 
 makes a great difference: whether one preserves 
 thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness 
 between Christian and anarchist: their object, 
 their instinct, points only toward destruction. 
 One need only turn to history for a proof of this: 
 there it appears with appalling distinctness. We 
 have just studied a code of religious legislation 
 whose object it was to convert the conditions 
 which cause life to flourish into an “eternal” so- 
 cial organization, — Christianity found its mis- 
 sion 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 impe- 
 rium Romanum, the most magnificent form of 
 — 168 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 organization under difficult conditions that has 
 ever heen achieved, and compared to which 
 everything before it and after it appears as 
 patchwork, bungling, dilletantism — those holy 
 anarchists made it a matter of “piety” to destroy 
 “the world,” which is to say, the imperium Ro- 
 manum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon 
 another — and even Germans and other such louts 
 were able to become its masters. . . . The Chris- 
 tian 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 cul- 
 ture that could await its time. Can it be that this 
 fact is not yet understood? The imperium Ro- 
 manum 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, noth- 
 — 169 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ing 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 noth- 
 ing to do with such things — the first principle of 
 all genuinely great architecture. But it was not 
 strong enough to stand up against the corruptest 
 of all forms of corruption — against Christians. 
 . . . These stealthy worms, which under the 
 cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon 
 every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest 
 interest in real things, of all instinct for reality — 
 this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang 
 gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, 
 from that colossal edifice, turning lagainst 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 rekin- 
 dled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge — all 
 that sort of thing became master of Rome: the 
 same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent 
 form, Epicurus had combatted. One has but to 
 — 170 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war 
 upon — not paganism, but “Christianity,” which 
 is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the 
 concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality. — 
 He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole 
 of latent Christianity — to deny immortality was 
 already a form of genuine salvation. — Epicurus 
 had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in 
 Rome was Epicurean — when Paul appeared . . . 
 Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of “the 
 world,” in the flesh and inspired by genius — the 
 Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence. . . . What 
 he saw was how, with the aid of the small sec- 
 tarian Christian movement that stood apart from 
 Judaism, a “world conflagration” might be kin- 
 dled; how, with the symbol of “God on the 
 cross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of anar- 
 chistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalga- 
 mated 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 
 — 171 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of 
 Chandala religion into the mouth of the “Sav- 
 iour” as his own inventions, and not only into 
 the mouth — he made out of him something that 
 even a priest of Mithras could understand. . . . 
 This was his revelation at Damascus : he grasped 
 the fact that he needed the belief in immortality 
 in order to rob “the world” of its value, that the 
 concept of “hell” would master Rome — that the 
 notion of a “beyond” is the death of life. . . . 
 Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, 
 and they do more than rhyme. . . . 
 
 59 . 
 
 The whole labour of the ancient world gone 
 for naught: I have no word to describe the feel- 
 ings that such an enormity arouses in me. — And, 
 considering the fact that its labour was merely 
 preparatory, that with adamantine self-conscious- 
 ness 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 pre- 
 requisites to a learned culture, all the methods of 
 science, were already there; man had already 
 perfected the great and incomparable art of read- 
 — 172 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 ing profitably — that first necessity to the tradi- 
 tion 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 un- 
 derstood? 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 op- 
 posed by habit and laziness. What we have to- 
 day reconquered, with unspeakable self-disci- 
 pline, for ourselves — for certain bad instincts, 
 certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies 
 — that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the 
 cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the 
 smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge 
 — all these things were already there, and had 
 been there for two thousand years! More, there 
 was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! 
 Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as “German” 
 culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, 
 as bearing, as instinct — in short, as reality. . . . 
 All gone for naught! Overnight it became 
 merely a memory ! — The Greeks ! The Romans ! 
 — 173 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 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 Impe- 
 rium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a 
 grand style that was beyond mere art, but had 
 become reality, truth, life. . . . — All over- 
 whelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of 
 nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and 
 others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by 
 crafty, sneaking, invisible, anaemic vampires! 
 Not conquered, — only sucked dry I . . . Hidden 
 vengefulness, petty envy, became master! 
 Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and 
 invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world 
 of the soul, was at once on top ! — One needs but 
 read any of the Christian agitators, for example, 
 St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to 
 smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It 
 would be an error, however, to assume that there 
 was any lack of understanding in the leaders of 
 the Christian movement: — ah, but they were 
 clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fa- 
 thers of the church! What they lacked was 
 something quite different. Nature neglected — 
 perhaps forgot — to give them even the most 
 — 174 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of 
 cleanly instincts. . . . Between ourselves, they 
 are not even men. ... If Islam despises Qiris- 
 tianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: 
 Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with 
 men. . . . 
 
 60 . 
 
 Christianity destroyed for us the whole har- 
 vest of ancient civilization, and later it also de- 
 stroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan 
 civilization. The wonderful culture of the 
 Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer 
 to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes 
 than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled 
 down ( — I do not say by what sort of feet — ) 
 Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly 
 instincts for its origin — because it said yes to 
 life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of 
 Moorish life! . . . The crusaders later made 
 war on something before which it would have 
 been more fitting for them to have grovelled in 
 the dust — a civilization beside which even that 
 of our nineteenth century seems very poor and 
 very “senile.” — ^What they wanted, of course, 
 was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put 
 — 175 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 aside our prejudices! The crusades were a 
 higher form of piracy, nothing more! The Ger- 
 man 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 serv- 
 ice of every bad instinct of the church — but well 
 paid. . . . Consider the fact that it is precisely 
 the aid of German swords and German blood 
 and valour that has enabled the church to carry 
 through its war to the death upon everything 
 noble on earth! At this point a host of painful 
 questions suggest themselves. The German no- 
 bility stands outside the history of the higher 
 civilization: the reason is obvious. . . . Chris- 
 tianity, alcohol — the two great means of corrup- 
 tion. . . . 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 
 — 176 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 II. What! must a German first be a genius, a 
 free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’t 
 make out how a German could ever feel Chris- 
 
 tlQiTht • • • 
 
 61 . 
 
 Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory 
 that must be a hundred times more painful to 
 Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Eu- 
 rope the last great harvest of civilization that 
 Europe was ever to reap — the Renaissance. Is 
 it understood at last, will it ever be understood, 
 what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation 
 of Christian values, — an attempt with all avail- 
 able means, all instincts and all the resources of 
 genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite 
 values, the more noble values. . . . This has 
 been the one great war of the past; there has 
 never been a more critical question than that of 
 the Renaissance — it is my question too — ; there 
 has never been a form of attack more fundamen- 
 tal, more direct, or more violently delivered by a 
 whole front upon the center of the enemy! To 
 attack at the critical place, at the very seat of 
 Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble 
 values — ^that is to say, to insinuate them into the 
 — 177 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 instincts, into the most fundamental needs and 
 appetites of those sitting there ... I see before 
 me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly en- 
 chantment and spectacle : — it seems to me to scin- 
 tillate with all the vibrations of a fine and deli- 
 cate 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 pos- 
 sibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance 
 and at the same time so wonderfully full of 
 paradox that it should arouse all the gods on 
 Olympus to immortal laughter — Ccesar 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 Chrstianity 
 would have been swept away! — ^What happened? 
 A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This 
 monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuc- 
 cessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against 
 the Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of grasp- 
 ing, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that 
 had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at 
 its capital — instead of this, his hatred was stimu- 
 lated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks 
 only of himself. — Luther saw only the depravity 
 of the papacy at the very moment when the oppo- 
 — 178 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 site was becoming apparent: the old corruption, 
 the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no 
 longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there 
 was life 1 Instead there was the triumph of life 1 
 Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beau- 
 tiful and daring things! . . . And Luther re- 
 stored the church: he attacked it. . . . The Re- 
 naissance — an event without meaning, a great 
 futility ! — Ah, these Germans, what they have not 
 cost us! Futility — that has always been the 
 work of the Germans. — The Reformation; Lieh- 
 nitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the 
 war of “liheration”; the empire — every time a 
 futile substitute for something that once existed, 
 for something irrecoverable. . . . These Ger- 
 mans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all 
 their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, 
 their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. 
 For nearly a thousand years they have tangled 
 and confused everything their fingers have 
 touched; they have on their conscience all the 
 half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way 
 measures, that Europe is sick of, — they also have 
 on their conscience the uncleanest variety of 
 Christianity that exists, and the most incurable 
 and indestructible — Protestantism. ... If man- 
 — 179 — 
 

 THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 kind never manages to get rid of Christianity the 
 Germans will be to blame. . . . 
 
 62 . 
 
 — With this I come to a conclusion and pro- 
 nounce 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 possi- 
 ble 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, f Let any one dare to speak to me of its 
 “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessi- 
 ties range it against any effort to abolish distress ; 
 it lives by distress; it creates distress to make 
 itself immortal. ... For example, the worm of 
 sin : it was the church that first enriched mankind 
 with this misery! — The “equality of souls before 
 God” — this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes 
 of all the base-minded — this explosive concept, 
 ending in revolution, the modem idea, and the 
 notion of overthrowing the whole social order — 
 — 180 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 this is Christian dynamite. . . . The “humani- 
 tarian” blessings of Christianity forsooth! To 
 breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an 
 art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, 
 an aversion and contempt for all good and honest 
 instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarian- 
 ism” of Christianity! — Parasitism as the only 
 practice of the church; with its anaemic and 
 “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, 
 all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will 
 to deny all reality ; the cross as the distinguishing 
 mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever 
 heard of, — against health, beauty, well-being, 
 intellect, kindness of soul — against life it- 
 self. . . . 
 
 This eternal accusation against Christianity I 
 shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to 
 be found — I have letters that even the blind will 
 be able to see. ... I call Christianity the one 
 great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the 
 one great instinct of revenge, for which no means 
 are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean 
 and small enough, — I call it the one immortal 
 blemish upon the human race. . . . 
 
 And mankind reckons time from the dies ne- 
 fastus when this fatality befell — from the first 
 — 181 — 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 day of Christianity ! — Why not rather from its 
 last? — From today ? — The transvaluation of all 
 values! . . . 
 
 THE END 
 
 — 182 — 
 
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