33.

[6]The wordSemiotikis in the text, but it is probable thatSemantikis what Nietzsche had in mind.

[7]One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy.

[8]The reputed founder of Taoism.

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

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

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

In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking,and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished—this is precisely the “glad tidings.”Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as theonlyreality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.

Theresultsof such a point of view project themselves into a newway 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 actsdifferently. He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles (“neighbour,” of course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their mandates (“Swear not at all”).[12]He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity.—And under all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.—

[12]Matthew v, 34.

The life of the Saviour was simply a carryingout of this way of life—and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; heknewthat it was only by awayof life that one could feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.”Notby “repentance,”notby “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God:only the Gospel wayleads to God—it isitself“God!”—What the Gospelsabolishedwas the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the wholeecclesiasticaldogma of the Jews was denied by the “glad tidings.”

The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how toliveso that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he isnot“in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life,nota new faith....

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded onlysubjectiverealities as realities, as “truths”—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 theGodof this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than thecrude ecclesiasticalnotions of God as aperson, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as thesecond personof 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 toworld-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”—not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expressesentranceinto the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expressesthat feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I amashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story[13]at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?...And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness—

[13]Amphitryonwas the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles.

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 isabsentfrom 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” isnota Christian idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....

This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived andtaught—notto “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was away of lifethat he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on thecross. 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 loveswiththose,inthose, who do him evil....Notto defend one’s self,notto show anger,notto lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—tolovehim....

—We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alonemakes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was theirownadvantage therein; they created thechurchout of denial of the Gospels....

Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity’s hand in the great drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in thestupendous question-markthat is called Christianity. That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and thelawof the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards asbeneathhim andbehindhim—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example ofworld-historical irony—

—Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into believing that thecrude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviourconstituted the beginnings of Christianity—and that everything spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary, the whole history of Christianity—from thedeath on the cross onward—is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of anoriginalsymbolism. 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 morevulgarandbarbarous—it absorbed the teachings and rites of all thesubterraneancults of theimperium 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. Asickly barbarismfinally 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.—Christianvalues—noblevalues: it is only we, wefreespirits, who have re-established this greatest of all antitheses in values!...

—I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man.Let me leave no doubt as towhatI despise,whomI 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,generousself-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it “Christianity,” “Christian faith” or the “Christian church,” as you will—I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times,ourtimes. Our ageknows better.... What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today.And here my disgust begins.—I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integritymustknow that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actuallylies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest knows,as every one knows, that there is no longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any “Saviour”—that “free will” and the “moral order of the world” are lies—: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit,allowno man to pretend that he doesnotknow it....Allthe ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are—as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is—as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation.... We know, ourconsciencenow knows—justwhatthe real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been andwhat 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 instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master.... Every one knows this,but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventionalclass of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion-table?... A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people—and yet acknowledging,withoutany shame, that he is a Christian!... Whom, then, does Christianity deny?whatdoes it call “the world”? To be asoldier, 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 beproud... every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in adeed, is now anti-Christian: what amonster of falsehoodthe modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, andwithoutshame, a Christian!—

—I shall go back a bit, and tell you theauthentichistory of Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “Gospels”diedon the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the “Gospels” was the very reverse ofwhathehad lived: “bad tidings,” aDysangelium.[14]It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in “faith,” and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christianway of life, the lifelivedby him who died on the cross, is Christian.... To this daysucha life is still possible, and forcertainmen even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages....Notfaith, but acts; above all, anavoidanceof acts, a differentstate of being.... States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true—as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity.In fact, there are no Christians.The “Christian”—he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian—is simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears that,despiteall his “faith,” he has been ruledonlyby his instincts—andwhat instincts!—In all ages—for example, in the case of Luther—“faith” has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, acurtainbehind which the instincts have played their game—a shrewdblindnessto the domination ofcertainof the instincts.... I have already called “faith” the specially Christian form ofshrewdness—people alwaystalkof their “faith” andactaccording 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 instinctivehatredof reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even here, inpsychologicis, there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one insubstance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingeniousonlyin devising injuriouserrors, poisonous to life and to the heart—this remains aspectacle 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 theirdisgustleaves them (—and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps because ofthiscurious exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, falseto 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....

[14]So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numerous coinages, obviously suggested byEvangelium, the German forgospel.

—The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve arefutationof their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everythingmustbe 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: “Whoput him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revoltagainstthe established order, and began to understand Jesus asin revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community hadnotunderstood 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 ofressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, wasto offer the strongest possible proof, orexample, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far fromforgivinghis death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared toofferthemselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings,revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was 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 incarnation, the fulfilment, therealizationof this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear inthe character of the Master—he was therebyturnedinto 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 ofelevatingJesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products ofressentiment....

—And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: “howcouldGod allow it!” To which the deranged reason of the little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son as asacrificefor 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 theinnocentfor the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!—Jesus himself had done away with the very concept of “guilt,” he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God and man; helivedthis unity between God and man, and that was preciselyhis“glad tidings”.... Andnotas a mere privilege!—From this time forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of theresurrection, 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 existenceafterdeath!... St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, thatindecentconception, in this way: “IfChrist did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!”—And at once there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, theshamelessdoctrine of personal immortality.... Paul even preached it as areward....

One now begins to see justwhatit was that came to an end with the death on the cross: anew and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establishhappiness on earth—real,notmerely promised. For this remains—as I have already pointed out—the essential difference between the two religions ofdécadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, butfulfils nothing.—Hard upon the heels of the “glad tidings” came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred.What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him tohis owncross. 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. Surelynotreality; surelynothistorical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, andinvented his own history of Christian beginnings. Goingfurther, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue tohisachievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred tohis“Saviour.”... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a placebehindthis existence—in thelieof the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour—what he needed was the death on the cross,andsomething more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into aproofof the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself—this would be a genuineniaiseriein a psychologist. Paul willed the end;thereforehe also willed the means.... What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom hespreadhisteaching.—Whathewanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs.Whatwas the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment”....

When the centre of gravity of life is placed,notin life itself, but in “the beyond”—innothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning:thisis now the “meaning” of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concernone’s self about the common welfare, and try to serve it?... Merely so many “temptations,” so many strayings from the “straight path.”—“Onething 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” ofeveryindividual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantlysuspendedin their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, toinsolence. And yet Christianity has to thank preciselythismiserable flattery of personal vanity for itstriumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves aroundme.”... The poisonous doctrine, “equalrights for all,” has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man,which is to say, upon the firstprerequisiteto every step upward, to every development of civilization—out of theressentimentof the masses it has forged its chief weapons againstus, 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 uponnoblehumanity ever perpetrated.—Andlet us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals—for thepathos of distance.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!—The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the “privileges of the majority” makes andwill continue to makerevolutions—it is Christianity, let us not doubt, andChristianvaluations, 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 islofty: the gospel of the “lowly”lowers....

—The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already persistentwithinthe primitive community. That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the Saviour.—These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confess—I hope it will not be held against me—that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist—as theoppositeof all merely naïve corruption, as refinementpar excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is thefirstthing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal “holiness” unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of anart—all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature.The thing responsible israce. The whole of Judaism appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The Christian, thatultima ratioof lying, is the Jew all over again—he isthreefoldthe Jew.... The underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of everyothermode of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities—this is not only tradition, it isinheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human—), have permitted themselves to be deceived. The gospels have been read as abook of innocence... surely no small indication of the high skill with which the trick has been done.—Of course, if we could actuallyseethese astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an end,—and it is precisely becauseIcannot read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizingthatI have made an end of them.... I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.—For the majority, happily enough, books are mereliterature.—Let us not be led astray: they say “judge not,” and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; indemandingthat every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be capable of—still more, which theymusthave in order to remain on top—they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. “We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselvesfor the good” (—“the truth,” “the light,” “the kingdom of God”): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity into aduty: it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility, and that humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety.... Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! “Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.”... One may read the gospelsas books ofmoralseduction: these petty folks fasten themselves to morality—they know the uses of morality! Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankindby the nose!—The fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way thatthey, 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.... Inthatwe observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of “God,” “the truth,” “the light,” “the spirit,” “love,” “wisdom” and “life,” as if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the “world”; little super-Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to meettheirnotions, just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even thelast judgmentof 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, theJewish: once a chasmbegan to yawn between Jews and Judaeo-Christians, the latter had no choice but to employ the self-preservative measures that the Jewish instinct had devised, evenagainstthe Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them only against non-Jews. The Christian is simply a Jew of the “reformed” confession.—

—I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into their heads—what they haveput into the mouthof 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)—Howevangelical!...

“And whosoever shall offend one oftheselittle 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).—Howevangelical!...

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

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

“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.)—Welllied, lion![16]....

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

“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 itsfors: 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.[17])—What a notion of justice, of a “just” judge!...

[17]Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.

“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans thesame? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye morethan others? do not even the publicans so?” (Matthew v, 46.[18])—Principle of “Christian love”: it insists upon being wellpaidin the end....

[18]The quotation also includes verse 47.

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

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matthew vi, 33.)—All these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. Anerror, to put it mildly.... A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in certain cases....

“Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your rewardisgreat in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.” (Luke vi, 23.)—Impudentrabble! It compares itself to the prophets....

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

[19]And 17.

“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 matters?” (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)—Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a lunatic.... Thisfrightful impostorthen 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 nobleare 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 Corinthians i, 20ff.[20])—In order tounderstandthis passage, a first-rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my “Genealogy of Morals”: there, for the first time, the antagonism between anoblemorality and a morality born ofressentimentand impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge....

[20]Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.

—What follows, then?That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose “early Christians” for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them.... Neither has a pleasant smell.—I have searched the New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward—the instinct forcleanlinessis lacking.... Onlyevilinstincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: “è tutto festo”—immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is therebydistinguished. Whoever is attacked by an “early Christian” is surelynotbefouled.... On the contrary, it is an honour to have an “early Christian” as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses—not to speak of the “wisdom of this world,” which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of “by the foolishness of preaching.”... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy—as if this were a charge that the “early Christians”daredto make!—After all, they were theprivileged, and that was enough: the hatredof the Chandala needed no other excuse. The “early Christian”—and also, I fear, the “last Christian,”whom I may perhaps live to see—is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct—he lives and makes war for ever for “equal rights.”... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the “chosen of God”—or to be a “temple of God,” or a “judge of the angels”—then everyothercriterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply “worldly”—evil in itself.... Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an “early Christian” is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest—all his values, all his aims are noxious, butwhoeverhe hates,whateverhe hates, has realvalue.... The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus acriterion of values.

—Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but asolitaryfigure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglioseriously—that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less—what did it matter?... The noble scorn of aRoman, before whom the word “truth” was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only sayingthat has any value—and that is at once its criticism and itsdestruction: “What is truth?...”

—The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature—but that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as “divine,” but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life.... We deny that God is God.... If any one were toshowus this Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.—In a formula:deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.—Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the “wisdom of this world,” which is to say, ofscience—and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate andcry downall intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, andall noble coolness and freedom of the mind. “Faith,” as an imperative, vetoes science—in praxi, lying at any price.... Paulwell knewthat lying—that “faith”—was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.—The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who “reduced to absurdity” “the wisdom of this world” (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul’s resolutedeterminationto accomplish that very thing himself: to give one’s own will the name of God,thora—that is essentially Jewish. Paulwantsto dispose of the “wisdom of this world”: his enemies are thegoodphilologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school—on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be aphilologianor a physician without being alsoAntichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man seesbehindthe “holy books,” and as a physician he seesbehindthe physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says “incurable”; the philologian says “fraud.”...

—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror ofscience?... No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-bookpar excellenceopens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest:hefaces 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.[21]What does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.—So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end—and also manyother things! Woman was thesecondmistake 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 forscience.... 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 hisgreatestblunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes mengodlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbiddenper se; it alone is forbidden. Science is thefirstof sins, the germ of all sins, theoriginalsin.This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shallnotknow”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one toprotectone’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Manmustnot think.—And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all,sickness—nothingbut devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’tallowhim 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 inventswar; 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!”...

Back to Index Next