SECOND BOOK.

CRITICISM OF THE HIGHEST VALUES THAT HAVE PREVAILED HITHERTO.

I.

CRITICISM OF RELIGION.

All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things, I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things in order to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! Hitherto, this has been his greatest disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired.

1. Concerning the Origin of Religions.

135.

The origin of religion.—Just as the illiterate man of to-day believes that his wrath is the cause of his being angry, that his mind is the cause of his thinking, that his soul is the cause of his feeling, in short, just as a mass of psychological entities are still unthinkingly postulated as causes; so, in a still more primitive age, the same phenomena were interpreted by man by means of personal entities. Those conditions of his soul which seemed strange, overwhelming, and rapturous, he regarded as obsessions and bewitching influences emanating from the power of some personality. (Thus the Christian, the most puerile and backward man of this age, traces hope, peace, and the feeling of deliverance to a psychological inspiration on the part of God: being by nature a sufferer and a creature in need of repose, states of happiness, peace, and resignation, perforce seem strange to him, and seem to need some explanation.) Among intelligent, strong, and vigorous races, the epileptic is mostly the cause of a belief in the existence of some foreign power; but all such examples of apparent subjection—as, for instance, the bearing of the exalted man, of the poet, of the great criminal, or the passions, love and revenge—lead to the invention of supernatural powers. A condition is made concrete by being identified with a personality, and when this condition overtakes anybody, it is ascribed to that personality. In other words: in the psychological concept of God, a certain state of the soul is personified as a cause in order to appear as an effect.

The psychological logic is as follows: when the feeling of power suddenly seizes and overwhelms a man,—and this takes place in the case of all the great passions,—a doubt arises in him concerning his own person: he dare not think himself the cause of this astonishing sensation—and thus he posits a stronger person, a Godhead as its cause. In short, the origin of religion lies in the extreme feelings of power, which, being strange, take men by surprise: and just as the sick man, who feels one of his limbs unaccountably heavy, concludes that another man must be sitting on it, so the ingenuous homo religiosus, divides himself up into several people. Religion is an example of the "altération de la personalité." A sort of fear and sensation of terror in one's own presence.... But also a feeling of inordinate rapture and exaltation. Among sick people, the sensation of health suffices to awaken a belief in the proximity of God.

136.

Rudimentary psychology of the religious man:—All changes are effects; all effects are effects of will (the notion of "Nature" and of "natural law," is lacking); all effects presuppose an agent. Rudimentary psychology: one is only a cause oneself, when one knows that one has willed something.

Result: States of power impute to man the feeling that he is not the cause of them, that he is not responsible for them: they come without being willed to do so—consequently we cannot be their originators: will that is not free (that is to say, the knowledge of a change in our condition which we have not helped to bring about) requires a strong will.

Consequence of this rudimentary psychology: Man has never dared to credit himself with his strong and startling moods, he has always conceived them as "passive," as "imposed upon him from outside": Religion is the offshoot of a doubt concerning the entity of the person, an altération of the personality: in so far as everything great and strong in man was considered superhuman and foreign, man belittled himself,—he laid the two sides, the very pitiable and weak side, and the very strong and startling side apart, in two spheres, and called the one "Man" and the other "God."

And he has continued to act on these lines; during the period of the moral idiosyncrasy he did not interpret his lofty and sublime moral states as "proceeding from his own will" or as the "work" of the person. Even the Christian himself divides his personality into two parts, the one a mean and weak fiction which he calls man, and the other which he calls God (Deliverer and Saviour).

Religion has lowered the concept "man"; its ultimate conclusion is that all goodness, greatness, and truth are superhuman, and are only obtainable by the grace of God.

137.

One way of raising man out of his self-abasement, which brought about the decline of the point of view that classed all lofty and strong states of the soul, as strange, was the theory of relationship. These lofty and strong states of the soul could at least be interpreted as the influence of our forebears; we belonged to each other, we were irrevocably joined; we grew in our own esteem, by acting according to the example of a model known to us all.

There is an attempt on the part of noble families to associate religion with their own feelings of self-respect. Poets and seers do the same thing; they feel proud that they have been worthy,—that they have been selected for such association,—they esteem it an honour, not to be considered at all as individuals, but as mere mouthpieces (Homer).

Man gradually takes possession of the highest and proudest states of his soul, as also of his acts and his works. Formerly it was believed that one paid oneself the greatest honour by denying one's own responsibility for the highest deeds one accomplished, and by ascribing them to—God. The will which was not free, appeared to be that which imparted a higher value to a deed: in those days a god was postulated as the author of the deed.

138.

Priests are the actors of something which is supernatural, either in the way of ideals, gods, or saviours, and they have to make people believe in them; in this they find their calling, this is the purpose of their instincts; in order to make it as credible as possible, they have to exert themselves to the utmost extent in the art of posing; their actor's sagacity must, above all, aim at giving them a clean conscience, by means of which, alone, it is possible to persuade effectively.

139.

The priest wishes to make it an understood thing, that he is the highest type of man, that he rules,—even over those who wield the power,—that he is indispensable and unassailable,—that he is the strongest power in the community, not by any means to be replaced or undervalued.

Means thereto: he alone is cultured; he alone is the man of virtue; he alone has sovereign power over himself: he alone is, in a certain sense, God, and ultimately goes back to the Godhead; he alone is the middleman between God and others; the Godhead administers punishment to every one who puts the priest at a disadvantage, or who thinks in opposition to him.

Means thereto: Truth exists. There is only one way of attaining to it, and that is to become a priest. Everything good, which relates either to order, nature, or tradition, is to be traced to the wisdom of the priests. The Holy Book is their work. The whole of nature is only a fulfilment of the maxims which it contains. No other source of goodness exists than the priests. Every other kind of perfection, even the warrior's, is different in rank from that of the priests.

Consequence: If the priest is to be the highest type, then the degrees which lead to his virtues must be the degrees of value among men. Study, emancipation from material things, inactivity, impassibility, absence of passion, solemnity;—the opposite of all this is found in the lowest type of man.

The priest has taught a kind of morality which conduced to his being considered the highest type of man. He conceives a type which is the reverse of his own: the Chandala. By making these as contemptible as possible, some strength is lent to the order of castes. The priest's excessive fear of sensuality also implies that the latter is the most serious threat to the order of castes (that is to say, order in general).... Every "free tendency" in puncto puncti overthrows the laws of marriage.

140.

The philosopher considered as the development of the priestly type:—He has the heritage of the priest in his blood; even as a rival he is compelled to fight with the same weapons as the priest of his time;—he aspires to the highest authority.

What is it that bestows authority upon men who have no physical power to wield (no army, no arms at all ...)? How do such men gain authority over those who are in possession of material power, and who represent authority? (Philosophers enter the lists against princes, victorious conquerors, and wise statesmen.)

They can do it only by establishing the belief that they are in possession of a power which is higher and stronger—God. Nothing is strong enough: every one is in need of the mediation and the services of priests. They establish themselves as indispensable intercessors. The conditions of their existence are: (1) That people believe in the absolute superiority of their god, in fact believe in their god; (2) that there is no other access, no direct access to god, save through them. The second condition alone gives rise to the concept "heterodoxy"; the first to the concept "disbelievers" (that is to say, he who believes in another god).

141.

A Criticism of the Holy Lie.—That a lie is allowed in pursuit of holy ends 'is a principle which belongs to the theory of all priestcraft, and the object of this inquiry is to discover to what extent it belongs to its practice.

But philosophers, too, whenever they intend taking over the leadership of mankind, with the ulterior motives of priests in their minds, have never failed to arrogate to themselves the right to lie: Plato above all. But the most elaborate of lies is the double lie, developed by the typically Arian philosophers of the Vedanta: two systems, contradicting each other in all their main points, but interchangeable, complementary, and mutually expletory, when educational ends were in question. The lie of the one has to create a condition in which the truth of the other can alone become intelligible....

How far does the holy lie of priests and philosophers go?—The question here is, what hypotheses do they advance in regard to education, and what are the dogmas they are compelled to invent in order to do justice to these hypotheses?

First: they must have power, authority, and absolute credibility on their side.

Secondly: they must have the direction of the whole of Nature, so that everything affecting the individual seems to be determined by their law.

Thirdly: their domain of power must be very extensive, in order that its control may escape the notice of those they subject: they must know the penal code of the life beyond—of the life "after death,"—and, of course, the means whereby the road to blessedness may be discovered. They have to put the notion of a natural course of things out of sight, but as they are intelligent and thoughtful people, they are able to promise a host of effects, which they naturally say are conditioned by prayer or by the strict observance of their law. They can, moreover, prescribe a large number of things which are exceedingly reasonable —only they must not point to experience or empiricism as the source of this wisdom, but to revelation or to the fruits of the "most severe exercises of penance."

The holy lie, therefore, applies principally to the purpose of an action (the natural purpose, reason, is made to vanish: a moral purpose, the observance of some law, a service to God, seems to be the purpose): to the consequence of an action (the natural consequence is interpreted as something supernatural, and, in order to be on surer ground, other incontrollable and supernatural consequences are foretold).

In this way the concepts good and evil are created, and seem quite divorced from the natural concepts: "useful," "harmful," "life-promoting," "life-retarding,"—indeed, inasmuch as another life is imagined, the former concepts may even be antagonistic to Nature's concepts of good and evil. In this way, the proverbial concept "conscience" is created: an inner voice, which, though it makes itself heard in regard to every action, does not measure the worth of that action according to its results, but according to its conformity or non-conformity to the "law."

The holy lie therefore invented: (1) a god who punishes and rewards, who recognises and carefully observes the law-book of the priests, and who is particular about sending them into the world as his mouthpieces and plenipotentiaries; (2) an After Life, in which, alone, the great penal machine is supposed to be active—to this end the immortality of the soul was invented; (3) a conscience in man, understood as the knowledge that good and evil are permanent values—that God himself speaks through it, whenever its counsels are in conformity with priestly precepts; (4) Morality as the denial of all natural processes, as the subjection of all phenomena to a moral order, as the interpretation of all phenomena as the effects of a moral order of things (that is to say, the concept of punishment and reward), as the only power and only creator of all transformations; (5) Truths given, revealed, and identical with the teaching of the priests: as the condition to all salvation and happiness in this and the next world.

In short: what is the price paid for the improvement supposed to be due to morality?—The unhinging of reason, the reduction of all motives to fear and hope (punishment and reward); dependence upon the tutelage of priests, and upon a formulary exactitude which is supposed to express a divine will; the implantation of a "conscience" which establishes a false science in the place of experience and experiment: as though all one had to do or had not to do were predetermined—a kind of contraction of the seeking and striving spirit;—in short: the worst mutilation of man that can be imagined, and it is pretended that "the good man" is the result.

Practically speaking, all reason, the whole heritage of intelligence, subtlety, and caution, the first condition of the priestly canon, is arbitrarily reduced, when it is too late, to a simple mechanical process: conformity with the law becomes a purpose in itself, it is the highest purpose; Life no longer contains any problems;—the whole conception of the world is polluted by the notion of punishment; —Life itself, owing to the fact that the priests life is upheld as the non plus ultra of perfection, is transformed into a denial and pollution of life;—the concept "God" represents an aversion to Life, and even a criticism and a contemning of it. Truth is transformed in the mind, into priestly prevarication; the striving after truth, into the study of the Scriptures, into the way to become a theologian.

142.

A criticism of the Law-Book of Manu.—The whole book is founded upon the holy lie. Was it the well-being of humanity that inspired the whole of this system? Was this kind of man, who believes in the interested nature of every action, interested or not interested in the success of this system? The desire to improve mankind—whence comes the inspiration to this feeling? Whence is the concept improvement taken?

We find a class of men, the sacerdotal class, who consider themselves the standard pattern, the highest example and most perfect expression of the type man. The notion of "improving" mankind, to this class of men, means to make mankind like themselves. They believe in their own superiority, they will be superior in practice: the cause of the holy lie is The Will to Power....

Establishment of the dominion: to this end, ideas which place a non plus ultra of power with the priesthood are made to prevail. Power acquired by lying was the result of the recognition of the fact that it was not already possessed physically, in a military form.... Lying as a supplement to power—this is a new concept of "truth."

It is a mistake to presuppose unconscious and innocent development in this quarter—a sort of self-deception. Fanatics are not the discoverers of such exhaustive systems of oppression.... Cold-blooded reflection must have been at work here; the same sort of reflection which Plato showed when he worked out his "State"—"One must desire the means when one desires the end." Concerning this political maxim, all legislators have always been quite clear.

We possess the classical model, and it is specifically Arian: we can therefore hold the mostgifted and most reflective type of man responsible for the most systematic lie that has ever been told.... Everywhere almost the lie was copied, and thus Avian influence corrupted the world....

143.

Much is said to-day about the Semitic spirit of the New Testament: but the thing referred to is merely priestcraft,—and in the purest example of an Arian law-book, in Manu, this kind of "Semitic spirit"—that is to say, Sacerdotalism, is worse than anywhere else.

The development of the Jewish hierarchy is not original: they learnt the scheme in Babylon—it is Arian. When, later on, the same thing became dominant in Europe, under the preponderance of Germanic blood, this was in conformity to the spirit of the ruling race: a striking case of atavism. The Germanic middle ages aimed at a revival of the Arian order of castes.

Mohammedanism in its turn learned from Christianity the use of a "Beyond" as an instrument of punishment.

The scheme of a permanent community, with priests at its head—this oldest product of Asia's great culture in the domain of organisation—naturally provoked reflection and imitation in every way.—Plato is an example of this, but above all, the Egyptians.

144.

Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can modify men into whatever one ; provided one is possessed of an overflow of creative power, and can cause one's will to prevail over long periods of time.

145.

If one wish to see an affirmative Arian religion which is the product of a ruling class, one should read the law-book of Manu. (The deification of the feeling of power in the Brahmin: it is interesting to note that it originated in the warrior-caste, and was later transferred to the priests.)

If one wish to see an affirmative religion of the Semitic order, which is the product of the ruling class, one should read the Koran or the earlier portions of the Old Testament. (Mohammedanism, as a religion for men, has profound contempt for the sentimentality and prevarication of Christianity, ... which, according to Mohammedans, is a woman's religion.)

If one wish to see a negative religion of the Semitic order, which is the product of the oppressed class, one should read the New Testament (which, according to Indian and Arian points of view, is a religion for the Chandala).

If one wish to see a negative Arian religion, which is the product of the ruling classes, one should study Buddhism.

It is quite in the nature of things that we have no Arian religion which is the product of the oppressed classes; for that would have been a contradiction: a race of masters is either paramount or else it goes to the dogs.

146.

Religion, per se, has nothing to do with morality; yet both offshoots of the Jewish religion are essentially moral religions—which prescribe the rules of living, and procure obedience to their principles by means of rewards and punishment.

147.

Paganism—Christianity.—Paganism is that which says yea to all that is natural, it is innocence in being natural, "naturalness." Christianity is that which says no to all that is natural, it is a certain lack of dignity in being natural; hostility to Nature.

"Innocent":—Petronius is innocent, for instance. Beside this happy man a Christian is absolutely devoid of innocence. But since even the Christian status is ultimately only a natural condition, the term "Christian" soon begins to mean the counterfeiting of the psychological interpretation.

148.

The Christian priest is from the root a mortal enemy of sensuality: one cannot imagine a greater contrast to his attitude than the guileless, slightly awed, and solemn attitude, which the religious rites of the most honourable women in Athens maintained in the presence of the symbol of sex. In all non-ascetic religions the procreative act is the secret per se: a sort of symbol of perfection and of the designs of the future: re-birth, immortality.

149.

Our belief in ourselves is the greatest fetter, the most telling spur, and the strongest pinion. Christianity ought to have elevated the innocence of man to the position of an article of belief—men would then have become gods: in those days believing was still possible.

150.

The egregious lie of history: as if it were the corruption of Paganism that opened the road to Christianity. As a matter of fact, it was the enfeeblement and moralisation of the man of antiquity. The new interpretation of natural functions, which made them appear like vices, had already gone before!

151.

Religions are ultimately wrecked by the belief in morality. The idea of the Christian moral God becomes untenable,—hence "Atheism,"—as though there could be no other god.

Culture is likewise wrecked by the belief in morality. For when the necessary and only possible conditions of its growth are revealed, nobody will any longer countenance it (Buddhism).

152.

The physiology of Nihilistic religions.—All in all, the Nihilistic religions are systematised histories of sickness described in religious and moral terminology.

In pagan cultures it is around the interpretation of the great annual cycles that the religious cult turns; in Christianity it is around a cycle of paralytic phenomena.

153.

This Nihilistic religion gathers together all the decadent elements and things of like order which it can find in antiquity, viz.:—

(a) The weak and the botched (the refuse of the ancient world, and that of which it rid itself with most violence).

(b) Those who are morally obsessed and anti-pagan.

(c) Those who are weary of politics and indifferent (the blasé Romans), the denationalised, who know not what they are.

(d) Those who are tired of themselves—who are happy to be party to a subterranean conspiracy.

154.

Buddha versus Christ.—Among the Nihilistic religions, Christianity and Buddhism may always be sharply distinguished. Buddhism is the expression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and mild—it is a sort of gratitude towards all that lies hidden, including that which it entirely lacks, viz., bitterness, disillusionment, and resentment. Finally it possesses lofty intellectual love; it has got over all the subtlety of philosophical contradictions, and is even resting after it, though it is precisely from that source that it derives its intellectual glory and its glow as of a sunset (it originated in the higher classes).

Christianity is a degenerative movement, consisting of all kinds of decaying and excremental elements: it is not the expression of the downfall of a race, it is, from the root, an agglomeration of all the morbid elements which are mutually attractive and which gravitate to one another.... It is therefore not a national religion, not determined by race: it appeals to the disinherited everywhere; it consists of a foundation of resentment against all that is successful and dominant: it is in need of a symbol which represents the damnation of everything successful and dominant. It is opposed to every form of intellectual movement, to all philosophy: it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, learned, intellectually independent: in all these it suspects the element of success and domination.

155.

In Buddhism this thought prevails: "All passions, everything which creates emotions and leads to blood, is a call to action"—to this extent alone are its believers warned against evil. For action has no sense, it merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irrationalism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror. For instance: "On no account seek after revenge! Be the enemy of no one!"—The Hedonism of the weary finds its highest expression here. Nothing is more utterly foreign to Buddhism than the Jewish fanaticism of St. Paul: nothing could be more contrary to its instinct than the tension, fire, and unrest of the religious man, and, above all, that form of sensuality which sanctifies Christianity with the name "Love." Moreover, it is the cultured and very intellectual classes who find blessedness in Buddhism: a race wearied and besotted by centuries of philosophical quarrels, but not beneath all culture as those classes were from which Christianity sprang.... In the Buddhistic ideal, there is essentially an emancipation from good and evil: a very subtle suggestion of a Beyond to all morality is thought out in its teaching, and this Beyond is supposed to be compatible with perfection,—the condition being, that even good actions are only needed pro tem., merely as a means,—that is to say, in order to be free from all action.

156.

How very curious it is to see a Nihilistic religion such as Christianity, sprung from, and in keeping with, a decrepit and worn-out people, who have outlived all strong instincts, being transferred step by step to another environment—that is to say, to a land of young people, who have not yet lived at all. The joy of the final chapter, of the fold and of the evening, preached to barbarians and Germans! How thoroughly all of it must first have been barbarised, Germanised! To those who had dreamed of a Walhalla: who found happiness only in war!—A supernational religion preached in the midst of chaos, where no nations yet existed even.

157.

The only way to refute priests and religions is this: to show that their errors are no longer beneficent—that they are rather harmful; in short, that their own "proof of power" no longer holds good....

2. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.

158.

Christianity as an historical reality should not be confounded with that one root which its name recalls. The other roots, from which it has sprung, are by far the more important. It is an unprecedented abuse of names to identify such manifestations of decay and such abortions as the "Christian Church," "Christian belief," and "Christian life," with that Holy Name. What did Christ deny?—Everything which to-day is called Christian.

159.

The whole of the Christian creed—all Christian "truth," is idle falsehood and deception, and is precisely the reverse of that which was at the bottom of the first Christian movement.

All that which in the ecclesiastical sense is Christian, is just exactly what is most radically anti-Christian: crowds of things and people appear instead of symbols, history takes the place of eternal facts, it is all forms, rites, and dogmas instead of a "practice" of life. To be really Christian would mean to be absolutely indifferent to dogmas, cults, priests, church, and theology.

The practice of Christianity is no more an impossible phantasy than the practice of Buddhism is: it is merely a means to happiness.

160.

Jesus goes straight to the point, the "Kingdom of Heaven" in the heart, and He does not find the means in duty to the Jewish Church; He even regards the reality of Judaism (its need to maintain itself) as nothing; He is concerned purely with the inner man.

Neither does He make anything of all the coarse forms relating to man's intercourse with God: He is opposed to the whole of the teaching of repentance and atonement; He points out how man ought to live in order to feel himself "deified," and how futile it is on his part to hope to live properly by showing repentance and contrition for his sins. "Sin is of no account" is practically his chief standpoint.

Sin, repentance, forgiveness,—all this does not belong to Christianity ... it is Judaism or Paganism which has become mixed up with Christ's teaching.

161.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of the heart (of children it is written, "for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven"): it has nothing to do with superterrestrial things. The Kingdom of God "cometh," not chronologically or historically, not on a certain day in the calendar; it is not something which one day appears and was not previously there; it is a "change of feeling in the individual," it is something which may come at any time and which may be absent at any time....

162.

The thief on the cross;—When the criminal himself, who endures a painful death, declares: "the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without a murmur of revolt or enmity, graciously and resignedly, is the only right way," he assents to the gospel; and by this very fact he is in Paradise....

163.

Jesus bids us:—not to resist, either by deeds or in our heart, him who ill-treats us;

He bids us admit of no grounds for separating ourselves from our wives;

He bids us make no distinction between foreigners and fellow-countrymen, strangers and familiars;

He bids us show anger to no one, and treat no one with contempt;—give alms secretly; not to desire to become rich;—not to swear;—not to stand in judgment;—become reconciled with our enemies and forgive offences;—not to worship in public.

"Blessedness" is nothing promised: it is here, with us, if we only wish to live and act in a particular way.

164.

Subsequent Additions;—The whole of the prophet- and thaumaturgist-attitudes and the bad temper; while the conjuring-up of a supreme tribunal of justice is an abominable corruption (see Mark vi. 11: "And whosoever shall not receive you.... Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha," etc.). The "fig tree" (Matt. xxi. 18, 19): "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away."

165.

The teaching of rewards and punishments has become mixed up with Christianity in a way which is quite absurd; everything is thereby spoilt. In the same way, the practice of the first ecclesia militans, of the Apostle Paul and his attitude, is put forward as if it had been commanded or predetermined.

The subsequent glorification of the actual life and teaching of the first Christians: as if everything had been prescribed beforehand and had been only a matter of following directions——And as for the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies: how much of all that is more than forgery and cooking?

166.

Jesus opposed a real life, a life in truth, to ordinary life: nothing could have been more foreign to His mind than the somewhat heavy nonsense of an "eternal Peter,"—of the eternal duration of a single person. Precisely what He combats is the exaggerated importance of the "person": how can He wish to immortalise it?

He likewise combats the hierarchy within the community; He never promises a certain proportion of reward for a certain proportion of deserts: how can He have meant to teach the doctrine of punishment and reward in a Beyond?

167.

Christianity is an ingenuous attempt at bringing about a Buddhistic movement in favour of peace, sprung from the very heart of the resenting masses ... but transformed by Paul into a mysterious pagan cult, which was ultimately able to accord with the whole of State organisation ... and which carries on war, condemns, tortures, conjures, and hates.

Paul bases his teaching upon the need of mystery felt by the great masses capable of religious emotions: he seeks a victim, a bloody phantasmagoria, which may be equal to a contest with the images of a secret cult: God on the cross, the drinking of blood, the unio mystica with the "victim."

He seeks the prolongation of life after death (the blessed and atoned after-life of the individual soul) which he puts in causal relation with the victim already referred to (according to the type of Dionysos, Mithras, Osiris).

He feels the necessity of bringing notions of guilt and sin into the foreground, not a new practice of life (as Jesus Himself demonstrated and taught), but a new cult, a new belief, a belief in a miraculous metamorphosis ("Salvation" through belief).

He understood the great needs of the pagan worlds and he gave quite an absolutely arbitrary picture of those two plain facts, Christ's life and death. He gave the whole a new accent, altering the equilibrium everywhere ... he was one of the most active destroyers of primitive Christianity.

The attempt made on the life of priests and theologians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priesthood and theology—a ruling caste and a Church.

The attempt made to suppress the fussy importance of the "person," culminated in the belief in the eternal "personality" (and in the anxiety concerning "eternal salvation" ...), and in the most paradoxical exaggeration of individual egoism.

This is the humorous side of the question—tragic humour: Paul again set up on a large scale precisely what Jesus had overthrown by His life. At last, when the Church edifice was complete, it even sanctioned the existence of the State.

168.

The Church is precisely that against which Jesus inveighed—and against which He taught His disciples to fight.

169.

A God who died for our sins, salvation through faith, resurrection after death—all these things are the counterfeit coins of real Christianity, for which that pernicious blockhead Paul must be held responsible.

The life which must serve as an example consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and contempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandonment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual;—in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life.

Once the Church had allowed itself to take over all the Christian practice, and had formally sanctioned the State,—that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns,—it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals—that is to say, in the faith in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions "sin," "forgiveness," "punishment," "reward"—everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite absent from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground.

An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc.

170.

Christianity has, from the first, always transformed the symbolical into crude realities:

(1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into "life here" and "life beyond."

(2) The notion "eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into "personal immortality";

(3) The process of fraternising by means of sharing the same food and drink, after the Hebrew-Arabian manner, is interpreted as the "miracle of transubstantiation."

(4) "Resurrection" which was intended to mean the entrance to the "true life," in the sense of being intellectually "born again," becomes an historical contingency, supposed to take place at some moment after death;

(5) The teaching of the Son of man as the "Son of God,"—that is to say, the life-relationship between man and God,—becomes the "second person of the Trinity," and thus the filial relationship of every man—even the lowest—to God, is done away with;

(6) Salvation through faith (that is to say, that there is no other way to this filial relationship to God, save through the practice of life taught by Christ) becomes transformed into the belief that there is a miraculous way of atoning for all sin; though not through our own endeavours, but by means of Christ:

For all these purposes, "Christ on the Cross" had to be interpreted afresh. The death itself would certainly not be the principal feature of the event ... it was only another sign pointing to the way in which one should behave towards the authorities and the laws of the world—that one was not to defend oneself—this was the exemplary life.

171.

Concerning the psychology of Paul.—The important fact is Christ's death. This remains to be explained .... That there may be truth or error in an explanation never entered these people's heads: one day a sublime possibility strikes them, "His death might mean so and so" —and it forthwith becomes so and so. An hypothesis is proved by the sublime ardour it lends to its discoverer....

"The proof of strength": i.e., a thought is demonstrated by its effects ("by their fruits," as the Bible ingenuously says); that which fires enthusiasm must be true,—what one loses one's blood for must be true—

In every department of this world of thought, the sudden feeling of power which an idea imparts to him who is responsible for it, is placed to the credit of that idea:—and as there seems no other way of honouring an idea than by calling it true, the first epithet it is honoured with is the word true. ... How could it have any effect otherwise? It was imagined by some power: if that power were not real, it could not be the cause of anything.... The thought is then understood as inspired: the effect it causes has something of the violent nature of a demoniacal influence—

A thought which a decadent like Paul could not resist and to which he completely yields, is thus "proved" true!!!

All these holy epileptics and visionaries did not possess a thousandth part of the honesty in self-criticism with which a philologist, nowadays, reads a text, or tests the truth of an historical event.... Beside us, such people were moral cretins.

172.

It matters little whether a thing be true, provided it be effective: total absence of intellectual uprightness. Everything is good, whether it be lying, slander, or shameless "cooking," provided it serve to heighten the degree of heat to the point at which people "believe."

We are face to face with an actual school for the teaching of the means wherewith men are seduced to a belief: we see systematic contempt for those spheres whence contradiction might come (that is to say, for reason, philosophy, wisdom, doubt, and caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the teaching, with continual references to the fact that it was God who presented us with it—that the apostle signifies nothing—that no criticism is brooked, but only faith, acceptance; that it is the greatest blessing and favour to receive such a doctrine of salvation; that the state in which one should receive it, ought to be one of the profoundest thankfulness and humility....

The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though they were the meaning and salt of the earth.

Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the teaching; it is sufficient to take note of the means it uses in order to be aware of the nature of the phenomenon one is examining. It identified itself with virtue, it appropriated the whole of the fascinating power of virtue, shamelessly, for its own purposes ... it availed itself of the power of paradox, and of the need, manifested by old civilisation, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed and revolted at the same time; it provoked persecutions and ill-treatment.

It is the same kind of well-thought-out meanness with which the Jewish priesthood established their power and built up their Church....

One must be able to discern: (1) that warmth of passion "love" (resting on a base of ardent sensuality); (2) the thoroughly ignoble character of Christianity:—the continual exaggeration and verbosity;—the lack of cool intellectuality and irony;—the unmilitary character of all its instincts;—the priestly prejudices against manly pride, sensuality, the sciences, the arts.

173.

Paul: seeks power against ruling Judaism,—his attempt is too weak.... Transvaluation of the notion "Jew": the "race" is put aside: but that means denying the very basis of the whole structure. The "martyr," the "fanatic," the value of all strong belief. Christianity is the form of decay of the old world, after the latter's collapse, and it is characterised by the fact that it brings all the most sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top.

Consequently other instincts had to step into the foreground, in order to constitute an entity, a power able to stand alone—in short, a condition of tense sorrow was necessary, like that out of which the Jews had derived their instinct of self-preservation....

The persecution of Christians was invaluable for this purpose.

Unity in the face of danger; the conversion of the masses becomes the only means of putting an end to the persecution of the individual. (The notion "conversion" is therefore made as elastic as possible.)

174.

The Christian Judaic life: here resentment did not prevail. The great persecutions alone could have driven out the passions to that extent—as also the ardour of love and hate.

When the creatures a man most loves are sacrificed before his eyes for the sake of his faith, that man becomes aggressive; the triumph of Christianity is due to its persecutors.

Asceticism is not specifically Christian: this is what Schopenhauer misunderstood. It only shoots up in Christianity, wherever it would have existed without that religion.

Melancholy Christianity, the torture and torment of the conscience, also only a peculiarity of a particular soil, where Christian values have taken root: it is not Christianity properly speaking. Christianity has absorbed all the different kinds of diseases which grow from morbid soil: one could refute it at one blow by showing that it did not know how to resist any contagion. But that precisely is the essential feature of it. Christianity is a type of decadence.

175.

The reality on which Christianity was able to build up its power consisted of the small dispersed Jewish families, with their warmth, tenderness, and peculiar readiness to help, which, to the whole of the Roman Empire, was perhaps the most incomprehensible and least familiar of their characteristics; they were also united by their pride at being a "chosen people," concealed beneath a cloak of humility, and by their secret denial of all that was uppermost and that possessed power and splendour, although there was no shade of envy in their denial. To have recognised this as a power, to have regarded this blessed state as communicable, seductive, and infectious even where pagans were concerned—this constituted Paul's genius: to use up the treasure of latent energy and cautious happiness for the purposes of "a Jewish Church of free confession," and to avail himself of all the Jewish experience, their propaganda, and their expertness in the preservation of a community under a foreign power—this is what he conceived to be his duty. He it was who discovered that absolutely unpolitical and isolated body of paltry people, and their art of asserting themselves and pushing themselves to the front, by means of a host of acquired virtues which are made to represent the only forms of virtue ("the self-preservative measure and weapon of success of a certain class of man").

The principle of love comes from the small community of Jewish people: a very passionate soul glows here, beneath the ashes of humility and wretchedness: it is neither Greek, Indian, nor German. The song in praise of love which Paul wrote is not Christian; it is the Jewish flare of that eternal flame which is Semitic. If Christianity has done anything essentially new in a psychological sense, it is this, that it has increased the temperature of the soul among those cooler and more noble races who were at one time at the head of affairs; it discovered that the most wretched life could be made rich and invaluable, by means of an elevation of the temperature of the soul....

It is easily understood that a transfer of this sort could not take place among the ruling classes: the Jews and Christians were at a disadvantage owing to their bad manners—spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing (I become aware of these bad manners while reading the New Testament). It was necessary to be related both in baseness and sorrow with this type of lower manhood in order to feel anything attractive in him.... The attitude a man maintains towards the New Testament is a test of the amount of taste he may have for the classics (see Tacitus); he who is not revolted by it, he who does not feel honestly and deeply that he is in the presence of a sort of fœda superstitio when reading it, and who does not draw his hand back so as not to soil his fingers—such a man does not know what is classical. A man must feel about "the cross" as Goethe did.[1]

176.

The reaction of paltry people:—Love provides the feeling of highest power. It should be understood to what extent, not man in general, but only a certain kind of man is speaking here.

"We are godly in love, we shall be 'the children of God'; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love"; that is to say: all morality, obedience, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does;—a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone.

Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living sentiment of unity felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, caring for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success, the expression of pleasure, emphasise the feeling of power; pride is not lacking either, it is felt in the form of the community, the House of God, and the "chosen people."

As a matter of fact, man has once more experienced an "altération" of his personality: this time he called his feeling of love—God. The awakening of such a feeling must be pictured; it is a sort of ecstasy, a strange language, a "Gospel"—it was this newness which did not allow man to attribute love to himself—he thought it was God leading him on and taking shape in his heart. "God descends among men," one's neighbour is transfigured and becomes a God (in so far as he provokes the sentiment of love), Jesus is the neighbour, the moment He is transfigured in thought into a God, and into a cause provoking the feeling of power.

177.

Believers are aware that they owe an infinite amount to Christianity, and therefore conclude that its Founder must have been a man of the first rank.... This conclusion is false, but it is typical of the reverents. Regarded objectively, it is, in the first place, just possible that they are mistaken concerning the extent of their debt to Christianity: a man's convictions prove nothing concerning the thing he is convinced about, and in religions they are more likely to give rise to suspicions.... Secondly, it is possible that the debt owing to Christianity is not due to its Founder at all, but to the whole structure, the whole thing—to the Church, etc. The notion "Founder" is so very equivocal, that it may stand even for the accidental cause of a movement: the person of the Founder has been inflated in proportion as the Church has grown: but even this process of veneration allows of the conclusion that, at one time or other, this Founder was something exceedingly insecure and doubtful—in the beginning.... Let any one think of the free and easy way in which Paul treats the problem of the personality of Jesus, how he almost juggles with it: some one who died, who was seen after His death,—some one whom the Jews delivered up to death—all this was only the theme—Paul wrote the music to it.

178.

The founder of a religion may be quite insignificant—a wax vesta and no more!

179.

Concerning the psychological problem of Christianity.—The driving forces are: resentment, popular insurrection, the revolt of the bungled and the botched. (In Buddhism it is different: it is not born of resentment. It rather combats resentment because the latter leads to action!)

This party, which stands for freedom, understands that the abandonment of antagonism in thought and deed is a condition of distinction and preservation. Here lies the psychological difficulty which has stood in the way of Christianity being understood: the force which created it, urges to a struggle against itself.

Only as a party standing for peace and innocence can this insurrectionary movement hope to be successful: it must conquer by means of excessive mildness, sweetness, softness, and its instincts are aware of this. The feat was to deny and condemn the force, of which man is the expression, and to press the reverse of that force continually to the fore, by word and deed.

180.

The pretence of youthfulness.—It is a mistake to imagine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful people rose against an old culture; the story goes that it was out of the lowest levels of society, where Christianity flourished and shot its roots, that the more profound source of life gushed forth afresh: but nothing can be understood of the psychology of Christianity, if it be supposed that it was the expression of revived youth among a people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is rather a typical form of decadence, of moral-softening and of hysteria, amid a general hotch-potch of races and people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and sick. The wonderful company which gathered round this master-seducer of the populace, would not be at all out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this crowd—the absence of a known duty, the feeling that everything is nearing its end, that nothing is any longer worth while, and that contentment lies in dolce far niente.

The power and certainty of the future in the Jew's instinct, its monstrous will for life and for power, lies in its ruling classes; the people who upheld primitive Christianity are best distinguished by this exhausted condition of their instincts. On the one hand, they are sick of everything; on the other, they are content with each other, with themselves and for themselves.

181.

Christianity regarded as emancipated Judaism (just as a nobility which is both racial and indigenous ultimately emancipates itself from these conditions, and goes in search of kindred elements....).

(1) As a Church (community) on the territory of the State, as an unpolitical institution.

(2) As life, breeding, practice, art of living.

(3) As a religion of sin (sin committed against God, being the only recognised kind, and the only cause of all suffering), with a universal cure for it. There is no sin save against God; what is done against men, man shall not sit in judgment upon, nor call to account, except in the name of God. At the same time, all commandments (love): everything is associated with God, and all acts are performed according to God's will. Beneath this arrangement there lies exceptional intelligence (a very narrow life, such as that led by the Esquimaux, can only be endured by most peaceful and indulgent people: the Judæo-Christian dogma turns against sin in favour of the "sinner").

182.

The Jewish priesthood understood how to present everything it claimed to be right as a divine precept, as an act of obedience to God, and also to introduce all those things which conduced to preserve Israel and were the conditions of its existence (for instance: the large number of "works": circumcision and the cult of sacrifices, as the very pivot of the national conscience), not as Nature, but as God.

This process continued; within the very heart of Judaism, where the need of these "works" was not felt (that is to say, as a means of keeping a race distinct), a priestly sort of man was pictured, whose bearing towards the aristocracy was like that of "noble nature"; a sacerdotalism of the soul, which now, in order to throw its opposite into strong relief, attaches value, not to the "dutiful acts" themselves, but to the sentiment....

At bottom, the problem was once again, how to make a certain kind of soul prevail: it was also a popular insurrection in the midst of a priestly people—a pietistic movement coming from below (sinners, publicans, women, and children). Jesus of Nazareth was the symbol of their sect. And again, in order to believe in themselves, they were in need of a theological transfiguration: they require nothing less than "the Son of God" in order to create a belief for themselves. And just as the priesthood had falsified the whole history of Israel, another attempt was made, here, to alter and falsify the whole history of mankind in such a way as to make Christianity seem like the most important event it contained. This movement could have originated only upon the soil of Judaism, the main feature of which was the confounding of guilt with sorrow and the reduction of all sin to sin against God. Of all this, Christianity is the second degree of power.

183.

The symbolism of Christianity is based upon that of Judaism, which had already transfigured all reality (history, Nature) into a holy and artificial unreality—which refused to recognise real history, and which showed no more interest in a natural course of things.

184.

The Jews made the attempt to prevail, after two of their castes—the warrior and the agricultural castes, had disappeared from their midst.

In this sense they are the "castrated people": they have their priests and then—their Chandala....

How easily a disturbance occurs among them—an insurrection of their Chandala. This was the origin of Christianity.

Owing to the fact that they had no knowledge of warriors except as their masters, they introduced enmity towards the nobles, the men of honour, pride, and power, and the ruling classes, into their religion: they are pessimists from indignation....

Thus they created a very important and novel position: the priests in the van of the Chandala—against the noble classes....

Christianity was the logical conclusion of this movement: even in the Jewish priesthood, it still scented the existence of the caste, of the privileged and noble minority—it therefore did away with priests.

Christ is the unit of the Chandala who removes the priest ... the Chandala who redeems himself....

That is why the French Revolution is the lineal descendant and the continuator of Christianity— it is characterised by an instinct of hate towards castes, nobles, and the last privileges.

185.

The "Christian Ideal" put on the stage with Jewish astuteness—these are the fundamental psychological forces of its "nature":—

Revolt against the ruling spiritual powers;

The attempt to make those virtues which facilitate the happiness of the lowly, a standard of all values—in fact, to call God that which is no more than the self-preservative instinct of that class of man possessed of least vitality;

Obedience and absolute abstention from war and resistance, justified by this ideal;

The love of one another as a result of the love of God.

The trick: The denial of all natural mobilia, and their transference to the spiritual world beyond ... the exploitation of virtue and its veneration for wholly interested motives, gradual denial of virtue in everything that is not Christian.

186.

The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated by the noble people of antiquity, is of the same order as the present instinctive aversion to Jews: it is the hatred which free and self-respecting classes feel towards those who wish to creep in secretly, and who combine an awkward bearing with foolish self-sufficiency.

The New Testament is the gospel of a completely ignoble species of man; its pretensions to highest values—yea, to all values, is, as a matter of fact, revolting—even nowadays.

187.

How little the subject matters! It is the spirit which gives the thing life! What a quantity of stuffy and sick-room air there is in all that chatter about "redemption," "love," "blessedness," "faith," "truth," "eternal life"! Let any one look into a really pagan book and compare the two; for instance, in Petronius, nothing at all is done, said, desired, and valued, which, according to a bigoted Christian estimate, is not sin, or even deadly sin. And yet how happy one feels with the purer air, the superior intellectuality, the quicker pace, and the free overflowing strength which is certain of the future! In the whole of the New Testament there is not one bouffonnerie: but that fact alone would suffice to refute any book....

188.

The profound lack of dignity with which all life, which is not Christian, is condemned: it does not suffice them to think meanly of their actual opponents, they cannot do with less than a general slander of everything that is not themselves.... An abject and crafty soul is in the most perfect harmony with the arrogance of piety, as witness the early Christians.

The future: they see that they are heavily paid for it.... Theirs is the muddiest kind of spirit that exists. The whole of Christ's life is so arranged as to confirm the prophecies of the Scriptures: He behaves in such wise in order that they may be right....

189.

The deceptive interpretation of the words, the doings, and the condition of dying people; the natural fear of death, for instance, is systematically confounded with the supposed fear of what is to happen "after death." ...

190.

The Christians have done exactly what the Jews did before them. They introduced what they conceived to be an innovation and a thing necessary to self-preservation into their Master's teaching, and wove His life into it They likewise credited Him with all the wisdom of a maker of proverbs—in short, they represented their everyday life and activity as an act of obedience, and thus sanctified their propaganda.

What it all depends upon, may be gathered from Paul: it is not much. What remains is the development of a type of saint, out of the values which these people regarded as saintly.

The whole of the "doctrine of miracles," including the resurrection, is the result of self-glorification on the part of the community, which ascribed to its Master those qualities it ascribed to itself, but in a higher degree (or, better still, it derived its strength from Him....)

191.

The Christians have never led the life which Jesus commanded them to lead, and the impudent fable of the "justification by faith," and its unique and transcendental significance, is only the result of the Church's lack of courage and will in acknowledging those "works" which Jesus commanded.

The Buddhist behaves differently from the non-Buddhist; but the Christian behaves as all the rest of the world does, and possesses a Christianity of ceremonies and states of the soul.

The profound and contemptible falsehood of Christianity in Europe makes us deserve the contempt of the Arabs, Hindoos, and Chinese....

Let any one listen to the words of the first German statesman, concerning that which has preoccupied Europe for the last forty years.

192.

"Faith" or "works"?—But that the "works," the habit of particular works may engender a certain set of values or thoughts, is just as natural as it would be unnatural for "works" to proceed from mere valuations. Man must practise, not how to strengthen feelings of value, but how to strengthen action: first of all, one must be able to do something.... Luther's Christian Dilettantism. Faith is an asses' bridge. The background consists of a profound conviction on the part of Luther and his peers, that they are enabled to accomplish Christian "works," a personal fact, disguised under an extreme doubt as to whether all action is not sin and devil's work, so that the worth of life depends upon isolated and highly-strained conditions of inactivity (prayer, effusion, etc.).—Ultimately, Luther would be right: the instincts which are expressed by the whole bearing of the reformers are the most brutal that exist. Only in turning absolutely away from themselves, and in becoming absorbed in the opposite of themselves, only by means of an illusion ("faith") was existence endurable to them.

193.

"What was to be done in order to believe?"—an absurd question. That which is wrong with Christianity is, that it does none of the things that Christ commanded.

It is a mean life, but seen through the eye of contempt.

194.

The entrance into the real life—a man saves his own life by living the life of the multitude.

195.

Christianity has become something fundamentally different from what its Founder wished it to be. It is the great anti-pagan movement of antiquity, formulated with the use of the life, teaching, and "words" of the Founder of Christianity, but interpreted quite arbitrarily, according to a scheme embodying profoundly different needs: translated into the language of all the subterranean religions then existing.

It is the rise of Pessimism (whereas Jesus wished to bring the peace and the happiness of the lambs): and moreover the Pessimism of the weak, of the inferior, of the suffering, and of the oppressed.

Its mortal enemies are (1) Power, whether in the form of character, intellect, or taste, and "worldliness"; (2) the "good cheer" of classical times, the noble levity and scepticism, hard pride, eccentric dissipation, and cold frugality of the sage, Greek refinement in manners, words, and form. Its mortal enemy is as much the Roman as the Greek.

The attempt on the part of anti-paganism to establish itself on a philosophical basis, and to make its tenets possible: it shows a taste for the ambiguous figures of antique culture, and above all for Plato, who was, more than any other, an anti-Hellene and Semite in instinct.... It also shows a taste for Stoicism, which is essentially the work of Semites ("dignity" is regarded as severity, law; virtue is held to be greatness, self-responsibility, authority, greatest sovereignty over oneself—this is Semitic.) The Stoic is an Arabian sheik wrapped in Greek togas and notions.

196.

Christianity only resumes the fight which had already been begun against the classical ideal and noble religion.

As a matter of fact, the whole process of transformation is only an adaptation to the needs and to the level of intelligence of religious masses then existing:—those masses which believed in Isis, Mithras, Dionysos, and the "great mother," and which demanded the following things of a religion: (1) hopes of a beyond, (2) the bloody phantasmagoria of animal sacrifice (the mystery), (3) holy legend and the redeeming deed, (4) asceticism, denial of the world, superstitious "purification," (5) a hierarchy as a part of the community. In short, Christianity everywhere fitted the already prevailing and increasing anti-pagan tendency—those cults which Epicurus combated,—or more exactly, those religions proper to the lower herd, women, slaves, and ignoble classes.

The misunderstandings are therefore the following:—

(1) The immortality of the individual;

(2) The assumed existence of another world;

(3) The absurd notion of punishment and expiation in the heart of the interpretation of existence;

(4) The profanation of the divine nature of man, instead of its accentuation, and the construction of a very profound chasm, which can only be crossed by the help of a miracle or by means of the most thorough self-contempt;

(5) The whole world of corrupted imagination and morbid passion, instead of a simple and loving life of action, instead of Buddhistic happiness attainable on earth;

(6) An ecclesiastical order with a priesthood, theology, cults, and sacraments; in short, everything that Jesus of Nazareth combated;

(7) The miraculous in everything and everybody, superstition too: while precisely the trait which distinguished Judaism and primitive Christianity was their repugnance to miracles and their relative rationalism.

197.

The psychological pre-requisites:—Ignorance and lack of culture,—the sort of ignorance which has unlearned every kind of shame: let any one imagine those impudent saints in the heart of Athens;

The Jewish instinct of a chosen people: they appropriate all the virtues, without further ado, as their own, and regard the rest of the world as their opposite; this is a profound sign of spiritual depravity;

The total lack of real aims and real duties, for which other virtues are required than those of the bigot—the State undertook this work for them: and the impudent people still behaved as though they had no need of the State. "Except ye become as little children" —oh, how far we are from this psychological ingenuousness!

198.

The Founder of Christianity had to pay dearly for having directed His teaching at the lowest classes of Jewish society and intelligence. They understood Him only according to the limitations of their own spirit. ... It was a disgrace to concoct a history of salvation, a personal God, a personal Saviour, a personal immortality, and to have retained all the meanness of the "person," and of the "history" of a doctrine which denies the reality of all that is personal and historical.

The legend of salvation takes the place of the symbolic "now" and "all time," of the symbolic "here" and "everywhere"; and miracles appear instead of the psychological symbol.

199.

Nothing is less innocent than the New Testament. The soil from which it sprang is known.

These people, possessed of an inflexible will to assert themselves, and who, once they had lost all natural hold on life, and had long existed without any right to existence, still knew how to prevail by means of hypotheses which were as unnatural as they were imaginary (calling themselves the chosen people, the community of saints, the people of the promised land, and the "Church"): these people made use of their pia fraus with such skill, and with such "clean consciences," that one cannot be too cautious when they preach morality. When Jews step forward as the personification of innocence, the danger must be great. While reading the New Testament a man should have his small fund of intelligence, mistrust, and wickedness constantly at hand.

People of the lowest origin, partly mob, outcasts not only from good society, but also from respectable society; grown away from the atmosphere of culture, and free from discipline; ignorant, without even a suspicion of the fact that conscience can also rule in spiritual matters; in a word—the Jews: an instinctively crafty people, able to create an advantage, a means of seduction out of every conceivable hypothesis of superstition, even out of ignorance itself.

200.

I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed—as the greatest and most impious lie: I can discern the last sprouts and branches of its ideal beneath every form of disguise, I decline to enter into any compromise or false position in reference to it—I urge people to declare open war with it.

The morality of paltry people as the measure of all things: this is the most repugnant kind of degeneracy that civilisation has ever yet brought into existence. And this kind of ideal is hanging still, under the name of "God," over men's heads!!

201.

However modest one's demands may be concerning intellectual cleanliness, when one touches the New Testament one cannot help experiencing a sort of inexpressible feeling of discomfort; for the unbounded cheek with which the least qualified people will have their say in its pages, in regard to the greatest problems of existence, and claim to sit in judgment on such matters, exceeds all limits. The impudent levity with which the most unwieldy problems are spoken of here (life, the world, God, the purpose of life), as if they were not problems at all, but the most simple things which these little bigots know all about!!!

202.

This was the most fatal form of insanity that has ever yet existed on earth:—when these little lying abortions of bigotry begin laying claim to the words "God," "last judgment," "truth," "love," "wisdom," "Holy Spirit," and thereby distinguishing themselves from the rest of the world; when such men begin to transvalue values to suit themselves, as though they were the sense, the salt, the standard, and the measure of all things; then all that one should do is this: build lunatic asylums for their incarceration. To persecute them was an egregious act of antique folly: this was taking them too seriously; it was making them serious.

The whole fatality was made possible by the fact that a similar form of megalomania was already in existence, the Jewish form (once the gulf separating the Jews from the Christian-Jews was bridged, the Christian-Jews were compelled to employ those self-preservative measures afresh which were discovered by the Jewish instinct, for their own self-preservation, after having accentuated them); and again through the fact that Greek moral philosophy had done everything that could be done to prepare the way for moral-fanaticism, even among Greeks and Romans, and to render it palatable.... Plato, the great importer of corruption, who was the first who refused to see Nature in morality, and who had already deprived the Greek gods of all their worth by his notion "good" was already tainted with Jewish bigotry (in Egypt?).

203.

These small virtues of gregarious animals do not by any means lead to "eternal life": to put them on the stage in such a way, and to use them for one's own purpose is perhaps very smart; but to him who keeps his eyes open, even here, it remains, in spite of all, the most ludicrous performance. A man by no means deserves privileges, either on earth or in heaven, because he happens to have attained to perfection in the art of behaving like a good-natured little sheep; at best, he only remains a dear, absurd little ram with horns—provided, of course, he does not burst with vanity or excite indignation by assuming the airs of a supreme judge.

What a terrible glow of false colouring here floods the meanest virtues—as though they were the reflection of divine qualities!

The natural purpose and utility of every virtue is systematically hushed up; it can only be valuable in the light of a divine command or model, or in the light of the good which belongs to a beyond or a spiritual world. (This is magnificent!—As if it were a question of the salvation of the soul: but it was a means of making things bearable here with as many beautiful sentiments as possible.)

204.

The law, which is the fundamentally realistic formula of certain self-preservative measures of a community, forbids certain actions that have a definite tendency to jeopardise the welfare of that community: it does not forbid the attitude of mind which gives rise to these actions—for in the pursuit of other ends the community requires these forbidden actions, namely, when it is a matter of opposing its enemies. The moral idealist now steps forward and says: "God sees into men's hearts: the action itself counts for nothing; the reprehensible attitude of mind from which it proceeds must be extirpated ..." In normal conditions men laugh at such things; it is only in exceptional cases, when a community lives quite beyond the need of waging war in order to maintain itself, that an ear is lent to such things. Any attitude of mind is abandoned, the utility of which cannot be conceived.

This was the case, for example, when Buddha appeared among a people that was both peaceable and afflicted with great intellectual weariness.

This was also the case in regard to the first Christian community (as also the Jewish), the primary condition of which was the absolutely unpolitical Jewish society. Christianity could grow only upon the soil of Judaism—that is to say, among a people that had already renounced the political life, and which led a sort of parasitic existence within the Roman sphere of government, Christianity goes a step farther: it allows men to "emasculate" themselves even more; the circumstances actually favour their doing so.—Nature is expelled from morality when it is said, "Love ye your enemies": for Nature's injunction, "Ye shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy," has now become senseless in the law (in instinct); now, even the love a man feels for his neighbour must first be based upon something (a sort of love of God). God is introduced everywhere, and utility is withdrawn; the natural origin of morality is denied everywhere: the veneration of Nature, which lies in acknowledging a natural morality, is destroyed to the roots....

Whence comes the seductive charm of this emasculate ideal of man? Why are we not disgusted by it, just as we are disgusted at the thought of a eunuch?... The answer is obvious: it is not the voice of the eunuch that revolts us, despite the cruel mutilation of which it is the result; for, as a matter of fact, it has grown sweeter.... And owing to the very fact that the "male organ" has been amputated from virtue, its voice now has a feminine ring, which, formerly, was not to be discerned.

On the other hand, we have only to think of the terrible hardness, dangers, and accidents to which a life of manly virtues leads—the life of a Corsican, even at the present day, or that of a heathen Arab (which resembles the Corsican's life even to the smallest detail: the Arab's songs might have been written by Corsicans)—in order to perceive how the most robust type of man was fascinated and moved by the voluptuous ring of this "goodness" and "purity." ... A pastoral melody ... an idyll ... the "good man": such things have most effect in ages when tragedy is abroad.

***

With this, we have realised to what extent the "idealist" (the ideal eunuch) also proceeds from a definite reality and is not merely a visionary.... He has perceived precisely that, for his kind of reality, a brutal injunction of the sort which prohibits certain actions has no sense (because the instinct which would urge him to these actions is weakened, thanks to a long need of practice, and of compulsion to practise). The castrator formulates a host of new self-preservative measures for a perfectly definite species of men: in this sense he is a realist. The means to which he has recourse for establishing his legislation, are the same as those of ancient legislators: he appeals to all authorities, to "God," and he exploits the notions "guilt and punishment"—that is to say, he avails himself of the whole of the older ideal, but interprets it differently; for instance: punishment is given a place in the inner self (it is called the pang of conscience).

In practice this kind of man meets with his end the moment the exceptional conditions favouring his existence cease to prevail—a sort of insular happiness, like that of Tahiti, and of the little Jews in the Roman provinces. Their only natural foe is the soil from which they spring: they must wage war against that, and once more give their offensive and defensive passions rope in order to be equal to it: their opponents are the adherents of the old ideal (this kind of hostility is shown on a grand scale by Paul in relation to Judaism, and by Luther in relation to the priestly ascetic ideal). The mildest form of this antagonism is certainly that of the first Buddhists; perhaps nothing has given rise to so much work, as the enfeeblement and discouragement of the feeling of antagonism. The struggle against resentment almost seems the Buddhist's first duty; thus only is his peace of soul secured. To isolate oneself without bitterness, this presupposes the existence of a surprisingly mild and sweet order of men,—saints....

***

The Astuteness of moral castration.—How is war waged against the virile passions and valuations? No violent physical means are available; the war must therefore be one of ruses, spells, and lies—in short, a "spiritual war."

First recipe: One appropriates virtue in general, and makes it the main feature of one's ideal; the older ideal is denied and declared to be the reverse of all ideals. Slander has to be carried to a fine art for this purpose.

Second recipe: A type of man is set up as a general standard; and this is projected into all things, behind all things, and behind the destiny of all things—as God.

Third recipe: The opponents of one's ideal are declared to be the opponents of God; one arrogates to oneself a right to great pathos, to power, and a right to curse and to bless.

Fourth recipe: All suffering, all gruesome, terrible, and fatal things are declared to be the results of opposition to ones ideal—all suffering is punishment even in the case of one's adherents (except it be a trial, etc.).

Fifth recipe: One goes so far as to regard Nature as the reverse of one's ideal, and the lengthy sojourn amid natural conditions is considered a great trial of patience—a sort of martyrdom; one studies contempt, both in one's attitudes and one's looks towards all "natural things."

Sixth recipe: The triumph of anti-naturalism and ideal castration, the triumph of the world of the pure, good, sinless, and blessed, is projected into the future as the consummation, the finale, the great hope, and the "Coming of the Kingdom of God."

I hope that one may still be allowed to laugh at this artificial hoisting up of a small species of man to the position of an absolute standard of all things?

205.

What I do not at all like in Jesus of Nazareth and His Apostle Paul, is that they stuffed so much into the heads of paltry people, as if their modest virtues were worth so much ado. We have had to pay dearly for it all; for they brought the most valuable qualities of both virtue and man into ill repute; they set the guilty conscience and the self-respect of noble souls at loggerheads, and they led the braver, more magnanimous, more daring, and more excessive tendencies of strong souls astray—even to self-destruction.

206.

In the New Testament, and especially in the Gospels, I discern absolutely no sign of a "Divine" voice: but rather an indirect form of the most subterranean fury, both in slander and destructiveness—one of the most dishonest forms of hatred. It lacks all knowledge of the qualities of a higher nature. It makes an impudent abuse of all kinds of plausibilities, and the whole stock of proverbs is used up and foisted upon one in its pages. Was it necessary to make a God come in order to appeal to those publicans and to say to them, etc. etc.?

Nothing could be more vulgar than this struggle with the Pharisees, carried on with a host of absurd and unpractical moral pretences; the mob, of course, has always been entertained by such feats. Fancy the reproach of "hypocrisy!" coming from those lips! Nothing could be more vulgar than this treatment of one's opponents—a most insidious sign of nobility or its reverse....

207.

Primitive Christianity is the abolition of the State: it prohibits oaths, military service, courts of justice, self-defence or the defence of a community, and denies the difference between fellow-countrymen and strangers, as also the order of castes.

Christs example; He does not withstand those who ill-treat Him; He does not defend Himself; He does more, He "offers the left cheek" (to the demand: "Tell us whether thou be the Christ?" He replies: "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven"). He forbids His disciples to defend Him; He calls attention to the fact that He could get help if He wished to, but will not.

Christianity also means the abolition of society, it prizes everything that society despises, its very growth takes place among the outcasts, the condemned, and the leprous of all kinds, as also among "publicans," "sinners," prostitutes, and the most foolish of men (the "fisher folk "); it despises the rich, the scholarly, the noble, the virtuous, and the "punctilious." ...

208.

The war against the noble and the powerful, as it is waged in the New Testament, is reminiscent of Reynard the Fox and his methods: but plus the Christian unction and the more absolute refusal to recognise one's own craftiness.

209.

The Gospel is the announcement that the road to happiness lies open for the lowly and the poor—that all one has to do is to emancipate one's self from all institutions, traditions, and the tutelage of the higher classes. Thus Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of Socialists.

Property, acquisitions, mother-country, status and rank, tribunals, the police, the State, the Church, Education, Art, militarism: all these are so many obstacles in the way of happiness, so many mistakes, snares, and devil's artifices, on which the Gospel passes sentence—all this is typical of socialistic doctrines.

Behind all this there is the outburst, the explosion, of a concentrated loathing of the "masters,"—the instinct which discerns the happiness of freedom after such long oppression.... (Mostly a symptom of the fact that the inferior classes have been treated too humanely, that their tongues already taste a joy which is forbidden them.... It is not hunger that provokes revolutions, but the fact that the mob have contracted an appetite en mangeant....)

210.

Let the New Testament only be read as a book of seduction: in it virtue is appropriated, with the idea that public opinion is best won with it,—and as a matter of fact it is a very modest kind of virtue, which recognises only the ideal gregarious animal and nothing more (including, of course, the herdsmen): a puny, soft, benevolent, helpful, and gushingly-satisfied kind of virtue which to the outside world is quite devoid of pretensions,—and which separates the "world" entirely from itself. The crassest arrogance which fancies that the destiny of man turns around it, and it alone, and that on the one side the community of believers represents what is right, and on the other the world represents what is false and eternally to be reproved and rejected. The most imbecile hatred of all things in power, which, however, never goes so far as to touch these things. A kind of inner detachment which, outwardly, leaves everything as it was (servitude and slavery; and knowing how to convert everything into a means of serving God and virtue).

211.

Christianity is possible as the most private form of life; it presupposes the existence of a narrow, isolated, and absolutely unpolitical society—it belongs to the conventicle. On the other hand, a "Christian State," "Christian politics," are pieces of downright impudence; they are lies, like, for instance, a Christian leadership of an army, which in the end regards "the God of hosts" as chief of the staff. Even the Papacy has never been able to carry on politics in a Christian way...; and when Reformers indulge in politics, as Luther did, it is well known that they are just as ardent followers of Machiavelli as any other immoralists or tyrants.

212.

Christianity is still possible at any moment. It is not bound to any one of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name: it needs neither the teaching of the personal God, nor of sin, nor of immortality, nor of redemption, nor of faith; it has absolutely no need whatever of metaphysics, and it needs asceticism and Christian "natural science" still less. Christianity is a method of life, not a system of belief. It tells us how we should behave, not what we should believe.

He who says to-day: "I refuse to be a soldier," "I care not for tribunals," "I lay no claim to the services of the police," "I will not do anything that disturbs the peace within me: and if I must suffer on that account, nothing can so well maintain my inward peace as suffering"—such a man would be a Christian.

213.

Concerning the history of Christianity.—Continual change of environment: Christian teaching is thus continually changing its centre of gravity. The favouring of low and paltry people.... The development of Caritas.... The type "Christian" gradually adopts everything that it originally rejected (and in the rejection of which it asserted its right to exist). The Christian becomes a citizen, a soldier, a judge, a workman, a merchant, a scholar, a theologian, a priest, a philosopher, a farmer, an artist, a patriot, a politician, a prince ... he re-enters all those departments of active life which he had forsworn (he defends himself, he establishes tribunals, he punishes, he swears, he differentiates between people and people, he contemns, and he shows anger). The whole life of the Christian is ultimately exactly that life from which Christ preached deliverance.... The Church is just as much a factor in the triumph of the Antichrist, as the modern State and modern Nationalism.... The Church is the barbarisation of Christianity.

214.

Among the powers that have mastered Christianity are: Judaism (Paul); Platonism (Augustine); The cult of mystery (the teaching of salvation, the emblem of the "cross"); Asceticism (hostility towards "Nature," "Reason," the "senses,"—the Orient ...).

215.

Christianity is a denaturalisation of gregarious morality: under the power of the most complete misapprehensions and self-deceptions. Democracy is a more natural form of it, and less sown with falsehood. It is a fact that the oppressed, the low, and whole mob of slaves and half-castes, will prevail.

First step: they make themselves free—they detach themselves, at first in fancy only; they recognise each other; they make themselves paramount.

Second step: they enter the lists, they demand acknowledgment, equal rights, "Justice."

Third step: they demand privileges (they draw the representatives of power over to their side).

Fourth step: they alone want all power, and they have it.

There are three elements in Christianity which must be distinguished: (a) the oppressed of all kinds, (b) the mediocre of all kinds, (c) the dissatisfied and diseased of all kinds. The first struggle against the politically noble and their ideal; the second contend with the exceptions and those who are in any way privileged (mentally or physically); the third oppose the natural instinct of the happy and the sound.

Whenever a triumph is achieved, the second element steps to the fore; for then Christianity has won over the sound and happy to its side (as warriors in its cause), likewise the powerful (interested to this extent in the conquest of the crowd)—and now it is the gregarious instinct, that mediocre nature which is valuable in every respect, that now gets its highest sanction through Christianity. This mediocre nature ultimately becomes so conscious of itself (gains such courage in regard to its own opinions), that it arrogates to itself even political power....

Democracy is Christianity made natural: a sort of "return to Nature," once Christianity, owing to extreme anti-naturalness, might have been overcome by the opposite valuation. Result: the aristocratic ideal begins to lose its natural character ("the higher man," "noble," "artist," "passion," "knowledge"; Romanticism as the cult of the exceptional, genius, etc. etc.).

216.

When the "masters" may also become Christians.—It is of the nature of a community (race, family, herd, tribe) to regard all those conditions and aspirations which favour its survival, as in themselves valuable; for instance: obedience, mutual assistance, respect, moderation, pity—as also, to suppress everything that happens to stand in the way of the above.

It is likewise of the nature of the rulers (whether they are individuals or classes) to patronise and applaud those virtues which make their subjects amenable and submissive—conditions and passions which may be utterly different from their own.

The gregarious instinct and the instinct of the rulers sometimes agree in approving of a certain number of qualities and conditions,—but for different reasons: the first do so out of direct egoism, the second out of indirect egoism.

The submission to Christianity on the part of master races is essentially the result of the conviction that Christianity is a religion for the herd, that it teaches obedience: in short, that Christians are more easily ruled than non-Christians. With a hint of this nature, the Pope, even nowadays, recommends Christian propaganda to the ruling Sovereign of China.

It should also be added that the seductive power of the Christian ideal works most strongly upon natures that love danger, adventure, and contrasts; that love everything that entails a risk, and wherewith a non plus ultra of powerful feeling may be attained. In this respect, one has only to think of Saint Theresa, surrounded by the heroic instincts of her brothers:—Christianity appears in those circumstances as a dissipation of the will, as strength of will, as a will that is Quixotic.

3. Christian Ideals.

217.

War against the Christian ideal, against the doctrine of "blessedness" and "salvation" as the aims of life, against the supremacy of the fools, of the pure in heart, of the suffering and of the botched!

When and where has any man, of any note at all, resembled the Christian ideal?—at least in the eyes of those who are psychologists and triers of the heart and reins. Look at all Plutarch's heroes!

218.

Our claim to superiority: we live in an age of Comparisons; we are able to calculate as men have never yet calculated; in every way we are history become self-conscious. We enjoy things in a different way; we suffer in a different way: our instinctive activity is the comparison of an enormous variety of things. We understand everything; we experience everything, we no longer have a hostile feeling left within us. However disastrous the results may be to ourselves, our plunging and almost lustful inquisitiveness, attacks, unabashed, the most dangerous of subjects....

"Everything is good"—it gives us pain to say "nay" to anything. We suffer when we feel that we are sufficiently foolish to make a definite stand against anything.... At bottom, it is we scholars who to-day are fulfilling Christ's teaching most thoroughly.

219.

We cannot suppress a certain irony when we contemplate those who think they have overcome Christianity by means of modern natural science. Christian values are by no means overcome by such people. "Christ on the cross" is still the most sublime symbol—even now....

220.

The two great Nihilistic movements are: (a) Buddhism, (b) Christianity. The latter has only just about reached a state of culture in which it can fulfil its original object,—it has found its level,—and now it can manifest itself without disguise.....

221.

We have re-established the Christian ideal, it now only remains to determine its value.

(1) Which values does it deny? What does the ideal that opposes it stand for?—Pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberant spirits, splendid animalism, the instincts of war and of conquest; the deification of passion, revenge, cunning, anger, voluptuousness, adventure, knowledge—the noble ideal is denied: the beauty, wisdom, power, pomp, and awfulness of the type man: the man who postulates aims, the "future" man (here Christianity presents itself as the logical result of Judaism).

(2) Can it be realised?—Yes, of course, when the climatic conditions are favourable—as in the case of the Indian ideal. Both neglect the factor work.—It separates a creature from a people, a state, a civilised community, and jurisdiction; it rejects education, wisdom, the cultivation of good manners, acquisition and commerce; it cuts adrift everything which is of use and value to men—by means of an idiosyncrasy of sentiment it isolates a man. It is non-political, anti-national, neither aggressive nor defensive,—and only possible within a strictly-ordered State or state of society, which allows these holy parasites to flourish at the cost of their neighbours.....

(3) It has now become the will to be happy—and nothing else! "Blessedness" stands for something self-evident, that no longer requires any justification—everything else (the way to live and let live) is only a means to an end....

But what follows is the result of a low order of thought, the fear of pain, of defilement, of corruption, is great enough to provide ample grounds for allowing everything to go to the dogs.... This is a poor way of thinking, and is the sign of an exhausted race; we must not allow ourselves to be deceived. ("Become as little children." Natures of the same order: Francis of Assisi, neurotic, epileptic, visionary, like Jesus.)

222.

The higher man distinguishes himself from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune: it is a sign of degeneration when eudemonistic values begin to prevail (physiological fatigue and enfeeblement of will-power). Christianity, with its prospect of "blessedness," is the typical attitude of mind of a suffering and impoverished species of man. Abundant strength will be active, will suffer, and will go under: to it the bigotry of Christian salvation is bad music and hieratic posing and vexation.

223.

Poverty, humility, and chastity are dangerous and slanderous ideals; but like poisons, which are useful cures in the case of certain diseases, they were also necessary in the time of the Roman Empire.

All ideals are dangerous: because they lower and brand realities; they are all poisons, but occasionally indispensable as cures.

224.

God created man, happy, idle, innocent, and immortal: our actual life is a false, decadent, and sinful existence, a punishment.... Suffering, struggle, work, and death are raised as objections against life, they make life questionable, unnatural—something that must cease, and for which one not only requires but also has—remedies!

Since the time of Adam, man has been in an abnormal state: God Himself delivered up His Son for Adam's sin, in order to put an end to the abnormal condition of things: the natural character of life is a curse; to those who believe in Him, Christ restores normal life: He makes them happy, idle, and innocent. But the world did not become fruitful without labour; women do not bear children without pain; illness has not ceased: believers are served just as badly as unbelievers in this respect. All that has happened is, that man is delivered from death and sin—two assertions which allow of no verification, and which are therefore emphasised by the Church with more than usual heartiness. "He is free from sin,"—not owing to his own efforts, not owing to a vigorous struggle on his part, but redeemed by the death of the Saviour,—consequently, perfectly innocent and paradisaical.

Actual life is nothing more than an illusion (that is to say, a deception, an insanity). The whole of struggling, fighting, and real existence—so full of light and shade, is only bad and false: everybody's duty is to be delivered from it.

"Man, innocent, idle, immortal, and happy"—this concept, which is the object of the "most supreme desires," must be criticised before anything else. Why should guilt, work, death, and pain (and, from the Christian point of view, also knowledge ...) be contrary to all supreme desires?—The lazy Christian notions: "blessedness," "innocence," "immortality."

225.

The eccentric concept "holiness" does not exist—"God" and "man" have not been divorced from each other. "Miracles" do not exist—such spheres do not exist: the only one to be considered is the "intellectual" (that is to say, the symbolically-psychological). As decadence: a counterpart to "Epicureanism." ... Paradise according to Greek notions was only "Epicurus' Garden."

A life of this sort lacks a purpose: it strives after nothing;—a form of the "Epicurean gods"—there is no longer any reason to aim at anything,—not even at having children:—everything has been done.

226.

They despised the body: they did not reckon with it: nay, more—they treated it as an enemy. It was their delirium to think that a man could carry a "beautiful soul" about in a body that was a cadaverous abortion.... In order to inoculate others with this insanity they had to present the concept "beautiful soul" in a different way, and to transvalue the natural value, until, at last, a pale, sickly, idiotically exalted creature, something angelic, some extreme perfection and transfiguration was declared to be the higher man.

227.

Ignorance in matters psychological.—The Christian has no nervous system;—contempt for, and deliberate and wilful turning away from, the demands of the body, and the naked body; it is assumed that all this is in keeping with man's nature, and must perforce work the ultimate good of the soul;—all functions of the body are systematically reduced to moral values; illness itself is regarded as determined by morality, it is held to be the result of sin, or it is a trial or a state of salvation, through which man becomes more perfect than he could become in a state of health (Pascal's idea); under certain circumstances, there are wilful attempts at inducing illness.

228.

What in sooth is this struggle "against Nature" on the part of the Christian? We shall not, of course, let ourselves be deceived by his words and explanations. It is Nature against something which is also Nature. With many, it is fear; with others, it is loathing; with yet others, it is the sign of a certain intellectuality, the love of a bloodless and passionless ideal; and in the case of the most superior men, it is love of an abstract Nature—these try to live up to their ideal. It is easily understood that humiliation in the place of self-esteem, anxious cautiousness towards the passions, emancipation from the usual duties (whereby, a higher notion of rank is created), the incitement to constant war on behalf of enormous issues, habituation to effusiveness of feelings—all this goes to constitute a type: in such a type the hypersensitiveness of a perishing body preponderates; but the nervousness and the inspirations it engenders are interpreted differently. The taste of this kind of creature tends either (1) to subtilise, (2) to indulge in bombastic eloquence, or (3) to go in for extreme feelings. The natural inclinations do get satisfied, but they are interpreted in a new way; for instance, as "justification before God," "the feeling of redemption through grace," every undeniable feeling of pleasure becomes (interpreted in this way!) pride, voluptuousness, etc. General problem: what will become of the man who slanders and practically denies and belittles what is natural? As a matter of fact, the Christian is an example of exaggerated self-control: in order to tame his passions, he seems to find it necessary to extirpate or crucify them.

229.

Man did not know himself physiologically throughout the ages his history covers; he does not even know himself now. The knowledge, for instance, that man has a nervous system (but no "soul") is still the privilege of the most educated people. But man is not satisfied, in this respect, to say he does not know. A man must be very superior to be able to say: "I do not know this,"—that is to say, to be able to admit his ignorance.

Suppose he is in pain or in a good mood, he never questions that he can find the reason of either condition if only he seeks.... In truth, he cannot find the reason; for he does not even suspect where it lies.... What happens?... He takes the result of his condition for its cause; for instance, if he should undertake some work (really undertaken because his good mood gave him the courage to do so) and carry it through successfully: behold, the work itself is the reason of his good mood.... As a matter of fact, his success was determined by the same cause as that which brought about his good mood—that is to say, the happy co-ordination of physiological powers and functions.

He feels bad: consequently he cannot overcome a care, a scruple, or an attitude of self-criticism.... He really fancies that his disagreeable condition is the result of his scruple, of his "sin," or of his "self-criticism."

But after profound exhaustion and prostration, a state of recovery sets in. "How is it possible that I can feel so free, so happy? It is a miracle; only a God could have effected this change."—Conclusion: "He has forgiven my sin." ...

From this follow certain practices: in order to provoke feelings of sinfulness and to prepare the way for crushed spirits it is necessary to induce a condition of morbidity and nervousness in the body. The methods of doing this are well known. Of course, nobody suspects the causal logic of the fact: the maceration of the flesh is interpreted religiously, it seems like an end in itself, whereas it is no more than a means of bringing about that morbid state of indigestion which is known as repentance (the "fixed idea" of sin, the hypnotising of the hen by-means of the chalk-line "sin").

The mishandling of the body prepares the ground for the required range of "guilty feelings"—that is to say, for that general state of pain which demands an explanation....

On the other hand, the method of "salvation" may also develop from the above: every dissipation of the feelings, whether prayers, movements, attitudes, or oaths, has been provoked, and exhaustion follows; very often it is acute, or it appears in the form of epilepsy. And behind this condition of deep somnolence there come signs of recovery—or, in religious parlance, "Salvation."

230.

Formerly, the conditions and results of physiological exhaustion were considered more important than healthy conditions and their results, and this was owing to the suddenness, fearfulness, and mysteriousness of the former. Men were terrified by themselves, and postulated the existence of a higher world. People have ascribed the origin of the idea of two worlds—one this side of the grave and the other beyond it—to sleep and dreams, to shadows, to night, and to the fear of Nature: but the symptoms of physiological exhaustion should, above all, have been considered.

Ancient religions have quite special methods of disciplining the pious into states of exhaustion, in which they must experience such things.... The idea was, that one entered into a new order of things, where everything ceases to be known.—The semblance of a higher power....

231.

Sleep is the result of every kind of exhaustion; exhaustion follows upon all excessive excitement....

In all pessimistic religions and philosophies there is a yearning for sleep; the very notion "sleep" is deified and worshipped.

In this case the exhaustion is racial; sleep regarded psychologically is only a symbol of a much deeper and longer compulsion to rest.... In praxi it is death which rules here in the seductive image of its brother sleep....

232.

The whole of the Christian training in repentance and redemption may be regarded as a folie circulaire arbitrarily produced; though, of course, it can be produced only in people who are predisposed to it—that is to say, who have morbid tendencies in their constitutions.

233.

Against remorse and its purely psychical treatment.—To be unable to have done with an experience is already a sign of decadence. This reopening of old wounds, this wallowing in self-contempt and depression, is an additional form of disease; no "salvation of the soul" ever results from it, but only a new kind of spiritual illness....

These "conditions of salvation" of which the Christian is conscious are merely variations of the same diseased state—the interpretation of an attack of epilepsy by means of a particular formula which is provided, not by science, but by religious mania.

When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.... By far the greatest portion of the psychical apparatus which Christianity has used, is now classed among the various forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

The whole process of spiritual healing must be remodelled on a physiological basis: the "sting of conscience" as such is an obstacle in the way of recovery—as soon as possible the attempt must be made to counterbalance everything by means of new actions, so that there may be an escape from the morbidness of self-torture.... The purely psychical practices of the Church and of the various sects should be decried as dangerous to the health. No invalid is ever cured by prayers or by the exorcising of evil spirits: the states of "repose" which follow upon such methods of treatment, by no means inspire confidence, in the psychological sense....

A man is healthy when he can laugh at the seriousness and ardour with which he has allowed himself to be hypnotised to any extent by any detail in his life—when his remorse seems to him like the action of a dog biting a stone—when he is ashamed of his repentance.

The purely psychological and religious practices, which have existed hitherto, only led to an alteration in the symptoms: according to them a man had recovered when he bowed before the cross, and swore that in future he would be a good man.... But a criminal, who, with a certain gloomy seriousness cleaves to his fate and refuses to malign his deed once it is done, has more spiritual health.... The criminals with whom Dostoiewsky associated in prison, were all, without exception, unbroken natures,—are they not a hundred times more valuable than a "broken-spirited" Christian?

(For the treatment of pangs of conscience I recommend Mitchell's Treatment.[2])

234.

A pang of conscience in a man is a sign that his character is not yet equal to his deed. There is such a thing as a pang of conscience after good deeds: in this case it is their unfamiliarity, their incompatibility with an old environment.

235.

Against remorse.—I do not like this form of cowardice in regard to one's own actions, one must not leave one's self in the lurch under the pressure of sudden shame or distress. Extreme pride is much more fitting here. What is the good of it all in the end! No deed gets undone because it is regretted, no more than because it is "forgiven" or "expiated." A man must be a theologian in order to believe in a power that erases faults: we immoralists prefer to disbelieve in "faults." We believe that all deeds, of what kind soever, are identically the same at root; just as deeds which turn against us may be useful from an economical point of view, and even generally desirable. In certain individual cases, we admit that we might well have been spared a given action; the circumstances alone predisposed us in its favour. Which of us, if favoured by circumstances, would not already have committed every possible crime?... That is why one should never say: "Thou shouldst never have done such and such a thing," but only: "How strange it is that I have not done such and such a thing hundreds of times already!"—As a matter of fact, only a very small number of acts are typical acts and real epitomes of a personality, and seeing what a small number of people really are personalities, a single act very rarely characterises a man. Acts are mostly dictated by circumstances; they are superficial or merely reflex movements performed in response to a stimulus, long before the depths of our beings are affected or consulted in the matter. A fit of temper, a gesture, a blow with a knife: how little of the individual resides in these acts!—A deed very often brings a sort of stupor or feeling of constraint in its wake: so that the agent feels almost spellbound at its recollection, or as though he belonged to it, and were not an independent creature. This mental disorder, which is a form of hypnotism, must be resisted at all costs: surely a single deed, whatever it be, when it is compared with all one has done, is nothing, and may be deducted from the sum without making the account wrong. The unfair interest which society manifests in controlling the whole of our lives in one direction, as though the very purpose of its existence were to cultivate a certain individual act, should not infect the man of action: but unfortunately this happens almost continually. The reason of this is, that every deed, if followed by unexpected consequences, leads to a certain mental disturbance, no matter whether the consequences be good or bad. Behold a lover who has been given a promise, or a poet while he is receiving applause from an audience: as far as intellectual torpor is concerned, these men are in no way different from the anarchist who is suddenly confronted by a detective bearing a search warrant.

There are some acts which are unworthy of us: acts which, if they were regarded as typical, would set us down as belonging to a lower class of man. The one fault that has to be avoided here, is to regard them as typical. There is another kind of act of which we are unworthy: exceptional acts, born of a particular abundance of happiness and health; they are the highest waves of our spring tides, driven to an unusual height by a storm—an accident: such acts and "deeds" are also not typical. An artist should never be judged according to the measure of his works.

236.

A. In proportion as Christianity seems necessary to-day, man is still wild and fatal....

B. In another sense, it is not necessary, but extremely dangerous, though it is captivating and seductive, because it corresponds with the morbid character of whole classes and types of modern humanity, ... they simply follow their inclinations when they aspire to Christianity—they are decadents of all kinds.

A and B must be kept very sharply apart. In the case of A, Christianity is a cure, or at least a taming process (under certain circumstances it serves the purpose of making people ill: and this is sometimes useful as a means of subduing savage and brutal natures). In the case of B, it is a symptom of illness itself, it renders the state of decadence more acute; in this case it stands opposed to a corroborating system of treatment, it is the invalid's instinct standing against that which would be most salutary to him.

237.

On one side there are the serious, the dignified, and reflective people: and on the other the barbarous, the unclean, and the irresponsible beasts: it is merely a question of taming animals—and in this case the tamer must be hard, terrible, and awe-inspiring, at least to his beasts.

All essential requirements must be imposed upon the unruly creatures with almost brutal distinctness—that is to say, magnified a thousand times.

Even the fulfilment of the requirement must be presented in the coarsest way possible, so that it may command respect, as in the case of the spiritualisation of the Brahmins.

The struggle with the rabble and the herd. If any degree of tameness and order has been reached, the chasm separating these purified and regenerated people from the terrible remainder must have been bridged....

This chasm is a means of increasing self-respect in higher castes, and of confirming their belief in that which they represent—hence the Chandala. Contempt and its excess are perfectly correct psychologically—that is to say, magnified a hundred times, so that it may at least be felt.

238.

The struggle against brutal instincts is quite different from the struggle against morbid instincts; it may even be a means of overcoming brutality by making the brutes ill. The psychical treatment practised by Christianity is often nothing more than the process of converting a brute into a sick and therefore tame animal.

The struggle against raw and savage natures must be a struggle with weapons which are able to affect such natures: superstitions and such means are therefore indispensable and essential.

239.

Our age, in a certain sense, is mature (that is to say, decadent), just as Buddha's was.... That is why a sort of Christianity is possible without all the absurd dogmas (the most repulsive offshoots of ancient hybridism).

240.

Supposing it were impossible to disprove Christianity, Pascal thinks, in view of the terrible possibility that it may be true, that it is in the highest degree prudent to be a Christian. As a proof of how much Christianity has lost of its terrible nature, to-day we find that other attempt to justify it, which consists in asserting, that even if it were a mistake, it nevertheless provides the greatest advantages and pleasures for its adherents throughout their lives:—it therefore seems that this belief should be upheld owing to the peace and quiet it ensures—not owing to the terror of a threatening possibility, but rather out of fear of a life that has lost its charm. This hedonistic turn of thought, which uses happiness as a proof, is a symptom of decline: it takes the place of the proof resulting from power or from that which to the Christian mind is most terrible—namely, fear. With this new interpretation, Christianity is, as a matter of fact, nearing its stage of exhaustion. People are satisfied with a Christianity which is an opiate, because they no longer have the strength to seek, to struggle, to dare, to stand alone, nor to take up Pascal's position and to share that gloomily brooding self-contempt, that belief in human unworthiness, and that anxiety which believes that it "may be damned." But a Christianity the chief object of which is to soothe diseased nerves, does not require the terrible solution consisting of a "God on the cross"; that is why Buddhism is secretly gaining ground all over Europe.

241.

The humour of European culture: people regard one thing as true, but do the other. For instance, what is the use of all the art of reading and criticising, if the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible, whether according to Catholics or Protestants, is still upheld!

242.

No one is sufficiently aware of the barbarity of the notions among which we Europeans still live. To think that men have been able to believe that the "Salvation of the soul" depended upon a book!... And I am told that this is still believed.

What is the good of all scientific education, all criticism and all hermeneutics, if such nonsense as the Church's interpretation of the Bible has not yet turned the colours of our bodies permanently into the red of shame?

243.

Subject for reflection: To what extent does the fatal belief in "Divine Providence"—the most paralysing belief for both the hand and the understanding that has ever existed—continue to prevail; to what extent have the Christian hypothesis and interpretation of Life continued their lives under the cover of terms like "Nature," "Progress," "perfectionment," "Darwinism," or beneath the superstition that there is a certain relation between happiness and virtue, unhappiness and sin? That absurd belief in the course of things, in "Life" and in the "instinct of Life"; that foolish resignation which arises from the notion that if only every one did his duty all would go well—all this sort of thing can only have a meaning if one assumes that there is a direction of things sub specie boni. Even fatalism, our present form of philosophical sensibility, is the result of a long belief in Divine Providence, an unconscious result: as though it were nothing to do with us how everything goes! (As though we might let things take their own course; the individual being only a modus of the absolute reality.)

244.

It is the height of psychological falsity on the part of man to imagine a being according to his own petty standard, who is a beginning, a "thing-in-itself," and who appears to him good, wise, mighty, and precious; for thus he suppresses in thoughts all the causality by means of which every kind of goodness, wisdom, and power comes into existence and has value. In short, elements of the most recent and most conditional origin were regarded not as evolved, but as spontaneously generated and "things-in-themselves," and perhaps as the cause of all things.... Experience teaches us that, in every case in which a man has elevated himself to any great extent above the average of his fellows, every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from Good and Evil as also from "true" and "false," and cannot take into account what goodness dictates: the same holds good of a high degree of wisdom—in this case goodness is just as much suppressed as truthfulness, justice, virtue, and other popular whims in valuations. In fact, is it not obvious that every high degree of goodness itself presupposes a certain intellectual myopia and obtuseness? as also an inability to distinguish at a great distance between true and false, useful and harmful?—not to mention the fact that a high degree of power in the hands of the highest goodness might lead to the most baleful consequences ("the suppression of evil"). In sooth it is enough to perceive with what aspirations the "God of Love" inspires His believers: they ruin mankind for the benefit of "good men." In practice, this same God has shown Himself to be a God of the most acute myopia, devilry, and impotence, in the face of the actual arrangement of the universe, and from this the value of His conception may be estimated. Knowledge and wisdom can have no value in themselves, any more than goodness can: the goal they are striving after must be known first, for then only can their value or worthlessness be judged—a goal might be imagined which would make excessive wisdom a great disadvantage (if, for instance, complete deception were a prerequisite to the enhancement of life; likewise, if goodness were able to paralyse and depress the main springs of the great passions)....

Taking our human life as it is, it cannot be denied that all "truth," "goodness," "holiness," and "Godliness" in the Christian sense, have hitherto shown themselves to be great dangers—even now mankind is in danger of perishing owing to an ideal which is hostile to life.

245.

Let any one think of the loss which all human institutions suffer, when a divine and transcendental, higher sphere is postulated which must first sanction these institutions! By recognising their worth in this sanction alone (as in the case of marriage, for instance) their natural dignity is reduced, and under certain circumstances denied.... Nature is spitefully misjudged in the same ratio as the anti-natural notion of a God is held in honour. "Nature" then comes to mean no more than "contemptible," "bad." ...

The fatal nature of a belief in God as the reality of the highest moral qualities: through it, all real values were denied and systematically regarded as valueless. Thus Anti-Nature ascended the throne. With relentless logic the last step was reached, and this was the absolute demand to deny Nature.

246.

By pressing the doctrine of disinterestedness and love into the foreground, Christianity by no means elevated the interests of the species above those of the individual. Its real historical effect, its fatal effect, remains precisely the increase of egotism, of individual egotism, to excess (to the extreme which consists in the belief in individual immortality). The individual was made so important and so absolute, by means of Christian values, that he could no longer be sacrificed, despite the fact that the species can only be maintained by human sacrifices. All "souls" became equal before God: but this is the most pernicious of all valuations! If one regards individuals as equals, the demands of the species are ignored, and a process is initiated which ultimately leads to its ruin. Christianity is the reverse of the principle of selection. If the degenerate and sick man ("the Christian") is to be of the same value as the healthy man ("the pagan"), or if he is even to be valued higher than the latter, as Pascal's view of health and sickness would have us value him, the natural course of evolution is thwarted and the unnatural becomes law.... In practice this general love of mankind is nothing more than deliberately favouring all the suffering, the botched, and the degenerate: it is this love that has reduced and weakened the power, responsibility, and lofty duty of sacrificing men. According to the scheme of Christian values, all that remained was the alternative of self-sacrifice, but this vestige of human sacrifice, which Christianity conceded and even recommended, has no meaning when regarded in the light of rearing a whole species. The prosperity of the species is by no means affected by the sacrifice of one individual (whether in the monastic and ascetic manner, or by means of crosses, stakes, and scaffolds, as the "martyrs" of error). What the species requires is the suppression of the physiologically botched, the weak and the degenerate: but it was precisely to these people that Christianity appealed as a preservative force, it simply strengthened that natural and very strong instinct of all the weak which bids them protect, maintain, and mutually support each other. What is Christian "virtue" and "love of men," if not precisely this mutual assistance with a view to survival, this solidarity of the weak, this thwarting of selection? What is Christian altruism, if it is not the mob-egotism of the weak which divines that, if everybody looks after everybody else, every individual will be preserved for a longer period of time?... He who does not consider this attitude of mind as immoral, as a crime against life, himself belongs to the sickly crowd, and also shares their instincts.... Genuine love of mankind exacts sacrifice for the good of the species—it is hard, full of self-control, because it needs human sacrifices. And this pseudo-humanity which is called Christianity, would fain establish the rule that nobody should be sacrificed.

247.

Nothing could be more useful and deserves more promotion than systematic Nihilism in action.—As I understand the phenomena of Christianity and pessimism, this is what they say: "We are ripe for nonentity, for us it is reasonable not to be." This hint from "reason" in this case, is simply the voice of selective Nature.

On the other hand, what deserves the most rigorous condemnation, is the ambiguous and cowardly infirmity of purpose of a religion like Christianity,—or rather like the Church,—which, instead of recommending death and self-destruction, actually protects all the botched and bungled, and encourages them to propagate their kind.

Problem: with what kind of means could one lead up to a severe form of really contagious Nihilism—a Nihilism which would teach and practise voluntary death with scientific conscientiousness (and not the feeble continuation of a vegetative sort of life with false hopes of a life after death)?

Christianity cannot be sufficiently condemned for having depreciated the value of a great cleansing Nihilistic movement (like the one which was probably in the process of formation), by its teaching of the immortality of the private individual, as also by the hopes of resurrection which it held out: that is to say, by dissuading people from performing the deed of Nihilism which is suicide.... In the latter's place it puts lingering suicide, and gradually a puny, meagre, but durable life; gradually a perfectly ordinary, bourgeois, mediocre life, etc.

248.

Christian moral quackery.—Pity and contempt succeed each other at short intervals, and at the sight of them I feel as indignant as if I were in the presence of the most despicable crime. Here error is made a duty—a virtue, misapprehension has become a knack, the destructive instinct is systematised under the name of "redemption"; here every operation becomes a wound, an amputation of those very organs whose energy would be the prerequisite to a return of health. And in the best of cases no cure is effected; all that is done is to exchange one set of evil symptoms for another set.... And this pernicious nonsense, this systematised profanation and castration of life, passes for holy and sacred; to be in its service, to be an instrument of this art of healing—that is to say, to be a priest, is to be rendered distinguished, reverent, holy, and sacred. God alone could have been the Author of this supreme art of healing; redemption is only possible as a revelation, as an act of grace, as an unearned gift, made by the Creator Himself.

Proposition I.: Spiritual healthiness is regarded as morbid, and creates suspicion....

Proposition II.: The prerequisites of a strong, exuberant life—strong desires and passions—are reckoned as objections against strong and exuberant life.

Proposition III.: Everything which threatens danger to man, and which can overcome and ruin him, is evil—and should be torn root and branch from his soul.

Proposition IV.: Man converted into a weak creature, inoffensive to himself and others, crushed by humility and modesty, and conscious of his weakness,—in fact, the "sinner,"—this is the desirable type, and one which one can produce by means of a little spiritual surgery....

249.

What is it I protest against? That people should regard this paltry and peaceful mediocrity, this spiritual equilibrium which knows nothing of the fine impulses of great accumulations of strength, as something high, or possibly as the standard of all things.

Bacon of Verulam says: Infimarum virtutum apud vulgus laus est, mediarum admiratio, supremarum sensus nullus. Christianity as a religion, however, belongs to the vulgus: it has no feeling for the highest kind of virtus.

250.

Let us see what the "genuine Christian" does of all the things which his instincts forbid him to do:—he covers beauty, pride, riches, self-reliance, brilliancy, knowledge, and power with suspicion and mud—in short, all culture: his object is to deprive the latter of its clean conscience.

251.

The attacks made upon Christianity, hitherto, have been not only timid but false. So long as Christian morality was not felt to be a capital crime against Life, its apologists had a good time. The question concerning the mere "truth" of Christianity—whether in regard to the existence of its God, or to the legendary history of its origin, not to speak of its astronomy and natural science—is quite beside the point so long as no inquiry is made into the value of Christian morality. Are Christian morals worth anything, or are they a profanation and an outrage, despite all the arts of holiness and seduction with which they are enforced? The question concerning the truth of the religion may be met by all sorts of subterfuges; and the most fervent believers can, in the end, avail themselves of the logic used by their opponents, in order to create a right for their side to assert that certain things are irrefutable—that is to say, they transcend the means employed to refute them (nowadays this trick of dialectics is called "Kantian Criticism").

252.

Christianity should never be forgiven for having ruined such men as Pascal. This is precisely what should be combated in Christianity, namely, that it has the will to break the spirit of the strongest and noblest natures. One should take no rest until this thing is utterly destroyed:—the ideal of mankind which Christianity advances, the demands it makes upon men, and its "Nay" and "Yea" relative to humanity. The whole of the remaining absurdities, that is to say, Christian fable, Christian cobweb-spinning in ideas and principles, and Christian theology, do not concern us; they might be a thousand times more absurd and we should not raise a finger to destroy them. But what we do stand up against, is that ideal which, thanks to its morbid beauty and feminine seductiveness, thanks to its insidious and slanderous eloquence, appeals to all the cowardices and vanities of wearied souls,—and the strongest have their moments of fatigue,—as though all that which seems most useful and desirable at such moments—that is to say, confidence, artlessness, modesty, patience, love of one's like, resignation, submission to God, and a sort of self-surrender—were useful and desirable per se; as though the puny, modest abortion which in these creatures takes the place of a soul, this virtuous, mediocre animal and sheep of the flock—which deigns to call itself man, were not only to take precedence of the stronger, more evil, more passionate, more defiant, and more prodigal type of man, who by virtue of these very qualities is exposed to a hundred times more dangers than the former, but were actually to stand as an ideal for man in general, as a goal, a measure—the highest desideratum. The creation of this ideal was the most appalling temptation that had ever been put in the way of mankind; for, with it, the stronger and more successful exceptions, the lucky cases among men, in which the will to power and to growth leads the whole species "man" one step farther forward, this type was threatened with disaster. By means of the values of this ideal, the growth of such higher men would be checked at the root. For these men, owing to their superior demands and duties, readily accept a more dangerous life (speaking economically, it is a case of an increase in the costs of the undertaking coinciding with a greater chance of failure). What is it we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness and debility, at converting their proud assurance into anxiety and conscience-trouble; that it knows how to poison the noblest instincts and to infect them with disease, until their strength, their will to power, turns inwards, against themselves—until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt and self-immolation: that gruesome way of perishing, of which Pascal is the most famous example.