'
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.
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.
Nietzsche - v14 - Will to Power - a
-All in
all, the Nihilistic religions are systematised histories
of sickness described in religious and moral ter-
minology.
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).
(6) Those who are morally obsessed and anti-
pagan.
(c) Those who are weary of politics and in-
different (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 ex-
pression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and
mild-it is a sort of gratitude towards all that
I
VOL. I.
## p. 130 (#154) ############################################
130
THE WILL TO POWER.
>
lies hidden, including that which it entirely
lacks, viz. , bitterness, disillusionment, and resent-
ment. 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, con-
sisting 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 resent-
ment 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 move-
ment, 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
»
## p. 131 (#155) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
131
action has no sense, it merely binds one to
existence. All existence, however, has no sense.
Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irration-
alism: 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 emancipa-
tion 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
## p. 132 (#156) ############################################
132
THE WILL TO POWER.
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.
## p. 133 (#157) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
133
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 im-
possible 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 main-
tain 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
"
## p. 134 (#158) ############################################
134
THE WILL TO POWER.
y for his sins
. “Sin is of no account” is practically
s to
his chief standpoint.
Sin, repentance, forgiveness,- all this does not
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 him-
self, 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;
## p. 135 (#159) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
135
L
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 L.
in public.
“Blessedness" is nothing promised: it is here,
with us, if we only wish to live and act in a par-
ticular 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. II: “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 hence-
forward 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.
## p. 136 (#160) ############################################
136
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 pre-
determined.
The subsequent glorification of the actual life
and teaching of the first Christians: as if every-
thing 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 propor-
tion 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
## p. 137 (#161) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
137
.
}
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 beliefin a mira-
culous metamorphosis (“Salvation " through belief).
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
## p. 142 (#166) ############################################
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
## p. 143 (#167) ############################################
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
## p. 145 (#169) ############################################
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
## p. 147 (#171) ############################################
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
## p. 149 (#173) ############################################
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
## p. 151 (#175) ############################################
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
## p. 152 (#176) ############################################
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
## p. 153 (#177) ############################################
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
## p. 154 (#178) ############################################
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
>
## p. 156 (#180) ############################################
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
## p. 157 (#181) ############################################
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. . . .
all, the Nihilistic religions are systematised histories
of sickness described in religious and moral ter-
minology.
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).
(6) Those who are morally obsessed and anti-
pagan.
(c) Those who are weary of politics and in-
different (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 ex-
pression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and
mild-it is a sort of gratitude towards all that
I
VOL. I.
## p. 130 (#154) ############################################
130
THE WILL TO POWER.
>
lies hidden, including that which it entirely
lacks, viz. , bitterness, disillusionment, and resent-
ment. 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, con-
sisting 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 resent-
ment 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 move-
ment, 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
»
## p. 131 (#155) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
131
action has no sense, it merely binds one to
existence. All existence, however, has no sense.
Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irration-
alism: 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 emancipa-
tion 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
## p. 132 (#156) ############################################
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THE WILL TO POWER.
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.
## p. 133 (#157) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
133
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 im-
possible 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 main-
tain 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
"
## p. 134 (#158) ############################################
134
THE WILL TO POWER.
y for his sins
. “Sin is of no account” is practically
s to
his chief standpoint.
Sin, repentance, forgiveness,- all this does not
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 him-
self, 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;
## p. 135 (#159) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
135
L
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 L.
in public.
“Blessedness" is nothing promised: it is here,
with us, if we only wish to live and act in a par-
ticular 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. II: “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 hence-
forward 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.
## p. 136 (#160) ############################################
136
THE WILL TO POWER.
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 pre-
determined.
The subsequent glorification of the actual life
and teaching of the first Christians: as if every-
thing 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 propor-
tion 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
## p. 137 (#161) ############################################
CRITICISM OF RELIGION.
137
.
}
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 beliefin a mira-
culous metamorphosis (“Salvation " through belief).
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
## p. 142 (#166) ############################################
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
## p. 143 (#167) ############################################
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
## p. 145 (#169) ############################################
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
## p. 147 (#171) ############################################
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
## p. 149 (#173) ############################################
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
## p. 151 (#175) ############################################
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
## p. 152 (#176) ############################################
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
## p. 153 (#177) ############################################
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
## p. 154 (#178) ############################################
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
>
## p. 156 (#180) ############################################
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
## p. 157 (#181) ############################################
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. . . .
