No More Learning

He understood the great needs of the pagan
world, 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 theo-
logians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priest-
hood and theology—a ruling caste and a Church.
The attempt made to suppress the fussy im-
portance of the "person," culminated in the belief
in the eternal " personality” (and in the anxiety
concerning "eternal salvation" . . . ), and in the
a


## p. 138 (#162) ############################################

138
THE WILL TO POWER.
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.
C
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, of all defence; of conquest, in the
sense of personal triumph; in the belief in salva-
tion 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; abandon-
ment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual;
a


## p. 139 (#163) ############################################

CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
139
-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," " for-
giveness,” “punishment,"
“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 trans-
formed 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


## p. 140 (#164) ############################################

140
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 relation-
ship 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.
99
171.
Concerning the psychology of Paul. —The im-
portant 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
>


## p. 141 (#165) ############################################

CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
141
and it forthwith becomes so and so.
An hypo-
thesis 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 en-
thusiasm 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 other-
wise? 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.
.
a
172.
It matters little whether a thing be true,
provided it be effective : total absence of intellectual


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142
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 refer-
ences 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, ac-
ceptance; 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 mean-
ing and salt of the earth.
Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently
contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
143
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 fasci-
nating power of virtue, shamelessly, for its own
purposes
it availed itself of the power of
paradox, and of the need, manifested by old
civilisations, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed
and revolted at the same time; it provoked per-
secutions 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 struc-
ture. 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 is
characterised by the fact that it brings all the most
sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top.


## p. 144 (#168) ############################################

144
THE WILL TO POWER.
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-preserva-
tion.
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 tor-
ment of the conscience, is 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


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
145
reproach it simply with the fact that it did not
know how to resist any contagion. But that
precisely is the essential feature of it. Christi-
anity 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 incom-
prehensible and least familiar of their character-
istics; 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 com-
municable, seductive, and infectious even where
pagans were concernedthis 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 propa-
ganda, 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
K
VOL. I.


## p. 146 (#170) ############################################

146
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 that time at the head of affairs;
it discovered that the most wretched life could be
made rich and invaluable, by means of an eleva-
tion 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 atti-
tude a man maintains towards the New Testament
is a test of the amount of classical taste he may
have in him (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 fæda
superstitio when reading it, and who does not draw


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
147
his hand back so as not to soil his fingers such a
man does not know what is classical.
must feel about “ the cross as Goethe did. *
A man
))
176.
The reaction of paltry people :-Love provides
the feeling of highest power.
It should be under-
stood 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, obedi-
ence, 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 senti-
ment 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
* Vieles kann ich ertragen. Die meisten beschwerlichen
Dinge
Duld' ich mit ruhigem Mut, wie es ein Gott mir gebeut.
Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider ;
Viere : Rauch des Tabaks, Wanzen, und Knoblauch und to
Goethe's Venetian Epigrams, No. 67.
Much can I bear. Things the most irksome
I endure with such patience as comes from a god.
Four things, however, repulse me like venom :-
Tobacco smoke, garlic, bugs, and the cross.
-(TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. )


## p. 148 (#172) ############################################

148
THE WILL TO POWER.
>
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 experi.
enced an "altération" of his personality: this time
he called his feeling of love-God. The awaken-
ing 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 trans-
figured and becomes a God (in so far as he provokes
the sentiment of love). Jesus
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


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
149
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 some-
thing 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.
C
178.
The founder of a religion may be quite insignifi-
cant-a wax vesta and no more!
179.
Concerning the psychological problem of Christi-
anity. — 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 resent-
ment because the latter leads to action. )
This party, which stands for freedom, under-
stands 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


## p. 150 (#174) ############################################

150
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 con-
demn 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 under-
stood 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 rendezvous in
in this crowd the
absence of a known duty, the feeling that every-
a


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
151
thing 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 dis-
tinguished by this exhausted condition of their
instincts. On the one hand, they are sick of every-
thing; 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 in-
digenous 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


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152
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 spontaneous and non-caste
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. i . .
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


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
153
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 upo
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 agri-
cultural 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


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154
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 facili-
tate 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 ;


## p. 155 (#179) ############################################

CRITICISM OF RELIGION,
155
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 com-
pletely 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 o
stuffy and sick-room air there is in all that chattet
about“ redemption,”“ love," “ blessedness," “ faith,"
"truth" ”
, ,” “eternal life”! Let any one look into a
really pagan book and compare the two; for in-
stance, 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
>


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156
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 oppon-
ents, 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 suchwise 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


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
157
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 every-
day 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,” in-
cluding 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 acknow-
ledging 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 con-
tempt of the Arabs, Hindoos, and Chinese,
.


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158
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 some-
thing. . . . 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 unable 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


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
159
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 fundament-
ally different from what its Founder wished it to
be. It is the great anti-pagan movement of anti-
quity, 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,
«


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160
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 follow-
ing 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, super-
stitious "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


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
161
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 con-
struction 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, every-
thing that Jesus of Nazareth combated;
(7) The miraculous in everything and every-
body, 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 un-
learned every kind of shame: let any one imagine
those impudent saints in the heart of Athens;
L
VOL I.


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162
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 Testa-
ment. The soil from which it sprang is known.


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
163
:
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 them-
selves 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, out-
casts 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


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164
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 dis-
comfort; 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,"
”


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
165
“ 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 accent-
uated 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


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166
THE WILL TO POWER.
them on the stage in such a way, and oneself
with them 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 pur-


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CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
167
suit 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 pro-
ceeds 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 main-
tain 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.