No More Learning

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye
more than others ? do not even the publicans so? "
(Matthew v. 46, 47. ) The principle of “Christian
love”: it insists upon being well paid.
“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. ”
(Matthew vi. 15. )—Very compromising for the
“ Father” in question.
"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
"
righteousness; and all these things shall be added
unto you. ” (Matthew vi. 33. )—“All these things. ”
—that is to say, food, clothing, all the necessities
of life. To use a moderate expression, this is an
error. Shortly before this God appears as a
tailor, at least in certain cases. . .
“Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for,
behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the
like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. ”
(Luke vi. 23. )—Impudent rabble! They dare to
compare themselves with the prophets. . .
“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God
and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If
any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which
temple ye are. ” (St Paul, 1 Corinthians iii. 16, 17. )
"
-One cannot have too much contempt for this
sort of things
-


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
193
“Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the
world? and if the world shall be judged by you,
are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters ?
(St Paul, 1 Corinthians vi. 2. )—Unfortunately this is
not merely the speech of a lunatic. . . . This appal-
ling impostor proceeds thus : “Know ye not that we
shall judge angels? how much more things that
pertain to this life? ”
“Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this
world? For after that in the wisdom of God, the
world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God
by the foolishness of preaching to save them that
believe . . . not many wise men after the flesh, not
many mighty, not many noble are called: But
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to
confound the wise ; and God hath chosen the weak
things of the world to confound the things which
are mighty; And base things of the world, and
things which are despised, hath God chosen ; yea,
and things which are not, to bring to nought things
that are: That no flesh should glory in his pre-
sence. ” (St Paul, 1 Corinthians i. 20 et seq. )-In
order to understand this passage, which is of the
highest importance as an example of the psychology
of every Chandala morality, the reader should refer
to my Genealogy of Morals : in this book, the con-
trast between a noble and a Chandala morality
born of resentment and impotent revengefulness, is
brought to light for the first time. St Paul was the
greatest of all the apostles of revenge.
X
46
What follows from this? That one does well to
13


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194
THE ANTICHRIST
»
put on one's gloves when reading the New Testa-
ment. The proximity of so much pitch almost
defiles one. We should feel just as little inclined to
hobnob with “the first Christians” as with Polish
Jews : not that we need explain our objections.
They 'simply smell bad. —In vain have I sought for
a single sympathetic feature in the New Testament;
there is not a trace of freedom, kindliness, open-
heartedness and honesty to be found in it. Humane-
ness has not even made a start in this book, while
cleanly instincts are entirely absent from it. . . .
Only evil instincts are to be found in the New
Testament, it shows no sign of courage, these people
lack even the courage of their evil instincts. All is
cowardice, all is a closing of one's eyes and self-
deception. Every book becomes clean, after one
has just read the New Testament: for instance, im-
mediately after laying down St Paul, I read with
particular delight that most charming and most
wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom someone
might say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote to the
Duke of Parma about Cæsar Borgia : “è tutto festo”
-immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and well-
constituted. . . . These petty bigots err in their
calculations and in the most important thing of all.
They certainly attack; but everything they assail
is, by that very fact alone, distinguished. He whom
a "primitive Christian” attacks, is not thereby
sullied. . . . Conversely it is an honour to be
opposed by “primitive Christians. ” One cannot
read the New Testament without feeling a prefer-
ence for everything in it which is the subject of
abuse—not to speak of the “wisdom of this world,”
)


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
195
which an impudent windbag tries in vain to con-
found " by the foolishness of preaching. " Even the
Pharisees and the Scribes derive advantage from
such opposition: they must certainly have been
worth something in order to have been hated in such
a disreputable way. Hypocrisy—as if this were a
reproach which the “first Christians” were at liberty
to make ! —After all the Scribes and Pharisees were
the privileged ones: this was quite enough, the hatred
of the Chandala requires no other reasons. I very
much fear that the “first Christian”-as also the
“last Christian" whom I may yet be able to meet,-
is in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything
privileged; he lives and struggles unremittingly for
"equal rights”! . . . Regarded more closely, he
has no alternative. . . . If one's desire be person-
ally to represent “one of the chosen of God”_or
a “temple of God,” or “a judge of angels,”—then
”
every other principle of selection, for instance that
based upon a standard of honesty, intellect, manli-
ness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of heart,
becomes the “world,”—evil in itself. Moral: every
word on the lips of a “first Christian” is a lie, every
action he does is an instinctive falsehood,-all his
values, all his aims are pernicious; but the man he
hates, the thing he hates, has value, . . . The Chris-
tian, more particularly the Christian priest, is a
criterion of values--Do I require to add that in the
whole of the New Testament only one figure appears
which we cannot help respecting? Pilate, the Roman
Governor. To take a Jewish quarrel seriously was
a thing he could not get himself to do. One Jew
more or less—what did it matter? . . . The noble
a


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THE ANTICHRIST
scorn of a Roman, in whose presence the word
"truth” had been shamelessly abused, has enriched
the New Testament with the only saying which is
of value,—and this saying is not only the criticism,
but actually the shattering of that Testament:
“What is truth! ”
.
47
-That which separates us from other people is
not the fact that we can discover no God, either in
history, or in nature, or behind nature,—but that we
regard what has been revered as “God," not as
“divine,” but as wretched, absurd, pernicious; not
as an error, but as a crime against life. . . . We
deny God as God. . . . If the existence of this
Christian God were proved to us, we should feel even
less able to believe in him. -In a formula : deus
qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio. —A religion such
as Christianity which never once comes in touch
with reality, and which collapses the very moment
reality asserts its rights even on one single point,
must naturally be a mortal enemy of the “wisdom
of this world”-that is to say, science. It will call
all those means good with which mental discipline,
lucidity and severity in intellectual matters, nobility
and freedom of the intellect may be poisoned, calum-
niated and decried. “Faith” as an imperative is
a veto against science,-in praxi, it means lies at
any price. St Paul understood that falsehood—that
“ faith” was necessary; subsequently the Church
understood St Paul. - That “God” which St Paul
invented for himself, a God who “confounds” the
“wisdom of this world” (in a narrower sense, the
-


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
197
two great opponents of all superstition, philology
and medicine)
, means, in very truth, simply St Paul's
firm resolve to do so: to call his own will “God”,thora,
that is arch-Jewish. St Paul insists upon confound-
ing the “wisdom of this world”: his enemies are the
good old philologists and doctors of the Alexandrine
schools; it is on them that he wages war.
As a
matter of fact no one is either a philologist or a
doctor, who is not also an Antichrist. As a philolo-
gist, for instance, a man sees behind the “holy
books," as a doctor he sees behind the physiological
rottenness of the typical Christian. The doctor
says “incurable,” the philologist says “forgery. ”
48
-Has anybody ever really understood the cele-
brated story which stands at the beginning of the
Bible, --concerning God's deadly panic over science ?
. . Nobody has understood it. This essentially
sacerdotal book naturally begins with the great
inner difficulty of the priest: he knows only one
great danger, consequently “God” has only one
great danger. -
The old God, entirely “spirit,” a high-priest
through and through, and wholly perfect, is wander-
ing in a leisurely fashion round his garden ; but he
is bored. Against boredom even the gods them-
selves struggle in vain. * What does he do? He
invents man,-man is entertaining. . . . But, behold,
* A parody on a line in Schiller's "Jungfrau von Orleans ”
(Act 3, Sc. vi. ): “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst
vergebens" (With stupidity even the gods themselves.
struggle in vain). -- TR.


## p. 198 (#218) ############################################

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THE ANTICHRIST
even man begins to be bored. God's compassion for
the only form of misery which is peculiar to all
paradises, exceeds all bounds: so forthwith he
creates yet other animals. God's first mistake: man
did not think animals entertaining,—he dominated
them, he did not even wish to be an “animal. "
Consequently God created woman. And boredom
did indeed cease from that moment,—but many
other things ceased as well! Woman was God's
second mistake. —“Woman in her innermost nature
is a serpent, Heva"-every priest knows this : “all
evil came into this world through woman. ”—every
priest knows this too. Consequently science also
comes from woman. Only through woman did
man learn to taste of the tree of knowledge. —What
had happened? Panic had seized the old God.
Man himself had been his greatest mistake, he had
created a rival for himself, science makes vou equal
to God,—it is all up with priests and gods when man
becomes scientific! —Moral: science is the most pro-
hibited thing of all,—it alone, is forbidden. Science
is the first, the germ of all sins, the original sin.
This alone is morality. —“Thou shalt not know":-
the rest follows as a matter of course. God's panic
did not deprive him of his intelligence. How can
one guard against science? For ages this was his
principal problem. Reply: man must be kicked
out of paradise! Happiness, leisure leads to think-
ing,—all thoughts are bad thoughts. . . . Man must
not think. And the “priest-per-se” proceeds to
invent distress, death, the vital danger of pregnancy,
every kind of misery, decrepitude, and affliction,
and above all disease, –all these are but weapons
)


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
199
employed in the struggle with science! Trouble
prevents man from thinking. . And notwith-
standing all these precautions ! Oh, horror! the
work of science towers aloft, it storms heaven itself,
it rings the death-knell of the gods,—what's to be
done ? _The old God invents war; he separates the
nations, and contrives to make men destroy each
other mutually (—the priests have always been in
need of war . . . ). War, among other things, is a
great disturber of science ! -- Incredible! Know-
ledge, the rejection of the sacerdotal yoke, nevertheless
increases. So the old God arrives at this final
decision : "Man has become scientific,—there is no
help for it, he must be drowned ! ”. . .
49
You have understood me. The beginning of the
Bible contains the whole psychology of the priest. -
The priest knows only one great danger, and that
is science,—the healthy concept of cause and effect.
But, on the whole,science flourishes only under happy
conditions,-a man must have time, he must also
have superfluous mental energy in order to "pursue
knowledge. " 'Consequently man must be made
unhappy,"—this has been the argument of the priest
of all ages. —You have already
divined what, in ac-
cordance with such a manner of arguing, must first
have come into the world :"sin. " The notion
of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of
the universe," was invented against science,-against
the deliverance of man from
the priest. . . . Man
must not cast his glance upon the outer world, he
must turn it inwards into himself; he must not as


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200
THE ANTICHRIST
a
a learner look cleverly and cautiously into things;
he must not see at all: he must suffer. . . . And
he must suffer, so that he may be in need of the
priest-every minute. --Away with doctors! What
is needed is a Saviour !
—The notion of guilt and
punishment, including the doctrine of “grace,” of
“salvation" and of “forgiveness ”—all lies through
and through without a shred of psychological reality
-were invented in order to destroy man's sense of
causality, they are an attack on the concept of cause
and effect ! -And not an attack with the fist, with
the knife, with honesty in hate and love! But one
actuated by the most cowardly, most crafty, and
most ignoble instincts! A priests attack! A para-
site's attack! A vampyrism of pale subterranean
leeches ! -. . . When the natural consequences of an
act are no longer “natural,” but are thought to be
conjured up by phantom concepts of superstition, by
“God," by“spirits,” and by “souls,” as merely moral
consequences, in the form of rewards, punishments,
hints, and educational means,—then the whole basis
of knowledge is destroyed, then the greatest crime
against man has been perpetrated. —Sin, I repeat, this
form of self-pollution par excellence on the part of
man, was invented in order to make science, culture
and every elevation and noble trait in man quite
impossible; by means of the invention of sin the
priest is able to rule.
50
-I cannot here dispense with a psychology of
“faith” and of the “faithful,” which will naturally
be to the advantage of the "faithful. ” If to-day there


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
201
)
are still many who do not know how very indecent. .
it is to be a “believer"-or to what extent such a
state is the sign of decadence, and of the broken will
to Life,--they will know it no later than to-morrow.
My voice can make even those hear who are hard
of hearing. If perchance my ears have not deceived
me, it seems that among Christians there is such a
thing as a kind of criterion of truth, which is called
"the proof of power. ” “Faith saveth ; therefore it is
true. ” — It might be objected here that it is precisely
salvation which is not proved but only promised :
salvation is bound up with the condition “faith,
one shall be saved, because one has faith. But
how prove that that which the priest promises
to the faithful really will take place, to wit: the
Beyond” which defies all demonstration ? - The
assumed "proof of power” is at bottom once again
only a belief in the fact that the effect which faith
promises will not fail to take place. In a formula :
"I believe that faith saveth ;---'consequently it is true.
But with this we are at the end of our tether. This
“consequently” would be the absurdum itself as a
criterion of truth. —Let us be indulgent enough to
assume, however, that salvation is proved by faith
(-not only desired, and not merely promised by the
somewhat suspicious lips of a priest): could salvation
-or, in technical terminology, happiness-ever be a
proof of truth? So little is it so that, when pleasur-
able sensations make their influence felt in replying
to the question "what is true,” they furnish almost
the contradiction of truth, or at any rate they
make it in the highest degree suspicious. The proof
.
through “happiness," is a proof of happiness—and


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202
THE ANTICHRIST
nothing else ; why in the world should we take it
for granted that true judgments cause more pleasure
than false ones, and that in accordance with a pre-
established harmony, they necessarily bring pleasant
feelings in their wake ? — The experience of all strict
and profound minds teaches the reverse. Every inch
of truth has been conquered only after a struggle,
almost everything to which our heart, our love and
our trust in life cleaves, has had to be sacrificed
for it. Greatness of soul is necessary for this : the
service of truth is the hardest of all services. What
then is meant by honesty in things intellectual ?
It means that a man is severe towards his own heart,
that he scorns “ beautiful feelings," and that he
makes a matter of conscience out of every Yea and
Nay! ---Faith saveth : consequently it lies. . . .
51
The fact that faith may in certain circumstances
save, the fact that salvation as the result of an idée
fire does not constitute a true idea, the fact that
faith moves no mountains, but may very readily
raise them where previously they did not exist-
all these things are made sufficiently clear by a
mere casual stroll through a lunatic asylum. Of
course no priest would find this sufficient : for he
instinctively denies that illness is illness or that
lunatic asylums are lunatic asylums. Christianity
is in need of illness, just as Ancient Greece was in
need of a superabundance of health. The actual
ulterior motive of the whole of the Church's system
of salvation is to make people ill. And is not the
Church itself the Catholic madhouse as an ultimate
;


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
203
ideal ? —The earth as a whole converted into a
madhouse? —The kind of religious man which the
Church aims at producing is a typical decadent. ,
The moment of time at which a religious crisis
attains the ascendancy over a people, is always
characterised by nerve-epidemics; the “inner
world” of the religious man is ridiculously like
the “inner world” of over-irritable and exhausted
people; the “highest” states which Christianity
holds up to mankind as the value of values, are
epileptic in character,—the Church has pronounced
only madmen or great swindlers in majorem dei
honorem holy. Once I ventured to characterise
the whole of the Christian training of penance and
salvation (which nowadays is best studied in Eng-
land) as a folie circulaire methodically generated
upon a soil which, of course, is already prepared
for it,—that is to say, which is thoroughly morbid.
Not every one who likes can be a Christian: no
man is
converted to Christianity,-he must be
sick enough for it. . We others who possess
enough courage both for health and for contempt,
how rightly we may despise a religion which taught
men to misunderstand the body! which would not
rid itself of the superstitions of the soul! which
made a virtue of taking inadequate nourishment !
which in health combats a sort of enemy, devil,
temptation! which persuaded itself that it was
possible to bear a perfect soul about in a cadaverous
body, and which, to this end, had to make up
for
itself a new concept of “perfection," a pale, sickly,
idiotically gushing ideal,-so-called “holiness,”-
holiness, which in itself is simply a symptom of
.


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204
THE ANTICHRIST
a
an impoverished, enervated and incurably deterio-
rated body! . . . The movement of Christianity,
as a European movement, was from first to last, a
general accumulation of the ruck and scum of all
sorts and kinds (and these, by means of Christi-
anity, aspire to power). It does not express the
downfall of a race, it is rather a conglomerate
assembly of all the decadent elements from every-
where which seek each other and crowd together.
It was not, as some believe, the corruption of
antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christi-
anity possible: the learned idiocy which nowadays
tries to support such a notion cannot be too severely
contradicted. At the time when the morbid and
corrupted Chandala classes became Christianised in
the whole of the imperium, the very contrary type,
nobility, was extant in its finest and maturest
forms. The greatest number became master; the
democracy of Christian instincts triumphed.
Christianity was not “national,” it was not deter-
mined by race,-it appealed to all the disinherited
forms of life, it had its allies everywhere. Christi-
anity is built upon the rancour of the sick : its
instinct is directed against the sound, against
health. Everything well-constituted, proud, high-
spirited, and beautiful is offensive to its ears and
eyes. Again I remind you of St Paul's priceless
words: “And God hath chosen the weak things
of the world, the foolish things of the world; and
base things of the world, and things which are
despised": this was the formula, in hoc signo decad-
ence triumphed. -God on the Cross-does no one
yet understand the terrible ulterior motive of this
.
-
.


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
205
.
.
symbol ? —Everything that suffers, everything that
hangs on the cross, is divine. All of us hang
on the cross, consequently we are divine. . . . We
alone are divine. . . . Christianity was a victory;
a nobler type of character perished through it,-
Christianity has been humanity's greatest misfor-
tune hitherto. --
52
Christianity also stands opposed to everything
happily constituted in the mind,—it can make use
only of morbid reason as Christian reason; it takes
the side of everything idiotic, it utters a curse upon
"intellect,” upon the superbia of the healthy intellect.
Since illness belongs to the essence of Christianity,
the typically Christian state, “faith,” must also be
a form of illness, and all straight, honest and scien-
tific roads to knowledge must be repudiated by the
Church as forbidden. Doubt in itself is already
a sin. . . . The total lack of psychological cleanli-
ness in the priest, which reveals itself in his look, is
a result of decadence. Hysterical women, as also
children with scrofulous constitutions, should be
observed as a proof of how invariably instinctive
falsity, the love of lying for the sake of lying, and
the inability either to look or to walk straight, are the
expression of decadence. “Faith" simply means the
refusal to know what is true. The pious person, the
priest of both sexes, is false because he is ill :
his instinct demands that truth should not assert its
right anywhere. “That which makes ill is good :
that which proceeds from abundance, from super-
abundance and from power, is evil”: that is the
view of the faithful. The constraint to lie—that is


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206
THE ANTICHRIST
»
the sign by which I recognise every predetermined
theologian. —Another characteristic of the theo-
logian is his lack of capacity for philology. What
I mean here by the word philology is, in a general
sense to be understood as the art of reading well, of
being able to take account of facts without falsify-
ing them by interpretation, without losing either
caution, patience or subtlety owing to one's desire
to understand. Philology as ephexis * in interpre-
tation, whether one be dealing with books, news-
paper reports, human destinies or meteorological
records,—not to speak of the “salvation of the
soul. " The manner in which a theologian,
whether in Berlin or in Rome, interprets a verse
from the "Scriptures,” or an experience, or the
triumph of his nation's army for instance, under the
superior guiding light of David's Psalms, is always
so exceedingly daring, that it is enough to make a
philologist's hair stand on end. And what is he to
do, when pietists and other cows from Swabia
explain their miserable every-day lives in their
smoky hovels by means of the “Finger of God,” a
miracle of “grace,” of “Providence,” of experiences
of “salvation”! The most modest effort or the
intellect, not to speak of decent feeling, ought at
least to lead these interpreters to convince them-
selves of the absolute childishness and unworthiness
of any such abuse of the dexterity of God's fingers.
However small an amount of loving piety we might
(6
* édecis = Lat. Retentio, Inhibitio (Stephanus, Thesaurus
Græcæ Linguæ); therefore : reserve, caution. The Greek
Sceptics were also called Ephectics owing to their caution in
judging and in concluding from facts. —TR.


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
207
a
possess, a god who cured us in time of a cold in the
nose, or who arranged for us to enter a carriage
just at the moment when a cloud burst over our
heads, would be such an absurd God, that he would
have to be abolished, even if he existed. * God as a
domestic servant, as a postman, as a general provider,
-in short, merely a word for the most foolish kind of
accidents. “ Divine Providence,” as it is believed
in to-day by almost every third man in “cultured
Germany," would be an argument against God, in
fact it would be the strongest argument against God
that could be imagined. And in any case it is an
argument against the Germans.
53
- The notion that martyrs prove anything at all
in favour of a thing, is so exceedingly doubtful, that
I would fain deny that there has ever yet existed a
martyr who had anything to do with truth. In the
very manner in which a martyr flings his little parcel
of truth at the head of the world, such a low degree
of intellectual honesty and such obtuseness in regard
to the question “truth” makes itself felt, that one
never requires to refute a martyr. Truth is not a
thing which one might have and another be without:
* The following passage from Multatuli will throw light on
this passage :
“Father :- Behold, my son, how wisely Providence has
arranged everything! This bird lays its eggs in its nest and
the young will be hatched just about the time when there
will be worms and flies with which to feed them. Then they
will sing a song of praise in honour of the Creator who over-
whelms his creatures with blessings. '-
“Son :-'Will the worms join in the song, Dad ? '”, -Tæ,


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208
THE ANTICHRIST
only peasants or peasant-apostles, after the style of
Luther, can think like this about truth. You may
be quite sure, that the greater a man's degree of
conscientiousness may be in matters intellectual, ,
the more modest he will show himself on this point.
To know about five things, and with a subtle wave
of the hand to refuse to know others. “Truth'
as it is understood by every prophet, every sectarian,
every free thinker, every socialist and every church-
man, is an absolute proof of the fact that these people
haven't even begun that discipline of the mind and
that process of self-mastery, which is necessary for
the discovery of any small, even exceedingly small
truth. —Incidentally, the deaths of martyrs have been
a great misfortune in the history of the world: they
led people astray. The conclusion which all
idiots, women and common people come to, that
there must be something in a cause for which some-
one lays down his life (or which, as in the case of
primitive Christianity, provokes an epidemic of sacri-
fices),—this conclusion put a tremendous check upon
all investigation, upon the spirit of investigation and
of caution. Martyrs have harmed the cause of truth.
Even to this day it only requires the crude fact
of persecution, in order to create an honourable
name for any obscure sect who does not matter in
the least. What? is a cause actually changed in
any way by the fact that some one has laid down his
life for it? An error which becomes honourable, is
simply an error that possesses one seductive charm
the more: do you suppose, dear theologians, that
we shall give you the chance of acting the martyrs
for your lies ? -A thing is refuted by being laid


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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
209
a
respectfully on ice, and theologians are refuted in
the same way. This was precisely the world-historic
foolishness of all persecutors; they lent the thing
they combated a semblance of honour by conferring
the fascination of martyrdom upon it. . . . Women
still lie prostrate before an error to-day, because
they have been told that some one died on the cross
for it. - Is the cross then an argument ? —But con-
cerning all these things, one person alone has said
what mankind has been in need of for thousands of
years,—Zarathustra.
“Letters of blood did they write on the way they
went, and their folly taught that truth is proved by
blood.
“But blood is the very worst testimony of truth;
blood poisoneth even the purest teaching, and
turneth it into delusion and into blood feuds.
“And when a man goeth through fire for his
teaching—what does that prove? Verily, it is more
when out of one's own burning springeth one's own
teaching. "
54
Do not allow yourselves to be deceivęd:
great
minds are "sceptical. " Zarathustra is a sceptic.
Strength and the freedom which proceeds from the
-power and excessive power of the mind, manifests
itself through scepticism. Men of conviction are
of no account whatever in regard to any principles
of value or of non-value. . Convictions are prisons.
They never see far enough, they do not look down
from a sufficient height: but in order to have any
*
*"Thus Spake Zarathustra. " The Priests. --TR.
»
14


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210
THE ANTICHRIST
say in questions of value and non-value, a man must
see five hundred convictions beneath him,-behind
him. . . A spirit who desires great things, and
who also desires the means thereto, is necessarily
a sceptic. Freedom from every kind of conviction
belongs to strength, to the ability to open one's eyes
freely. . . . The great passion of a sceptic, the basis
and
power of his being, which is more enlightened
and more despotic than he is himself, enlists all his
intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous;
it even gives him the courage to employ unholy
means; in certain circumstances it even allows
him convictions. Conviction as a means : much is
achieved merely by means of a conviction. Great
passion makes use of and consumes convictions, it
does not submit to them it knows that it is a
sovereign power. Conversely; the need of faith, of
anything either absolutely affirmative or negative,
Carlylism (if I may be allowed this expression), is
the need of weakness. The man of beliefs, the “be-
liever" of every sort and condition, is necessarily a
dependent man ;—he is one who cannot regard him-
self as an aim, who cannot postulate aims from the
promptings of his own heart. The “ believer" does
not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he
must be used up, he is in need of someone who uses
him up. His instinct accords the highest honour to
a morality of self-abnegation : everything in him,
his prudence, his experience, his vanity, persuade
him to adopt this morality. Every sort of belief is
in itself an expression of self-denial, of self-estrange-
ment. . . . Ifone considers how necessary a regulat-
ing code of conduct is to the majority of people, a
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A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
211
code of conduct which constrains them and fixes
them from outside ; and how control, or in a higher
sense, slavery, is the only and ultimate condition
under which the weak-willed man, and especially
woman, flourish; one also understands conviction,
faith. ” The man of conviction finds in the latter
his backbone. To be blind to many things, to be
impartial about nothing, to belong always to a par-
ticular side, to hold a strict and necessary point of
view in all matters of values—these are the only <
conditions under which such a man can survive at
all. But all this is the reverse of, the antagonist
of, the truthful man,-of truth. . . . The believer is
not at liberty to have a conscience for the question
“true" and “untrue": to be upright on this point
would mean his immediate downfall. The patho-
logical limitations of his standpoint convert the con-
vinced man into the fanatic—Savonarola, Luther
Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon,—these are the
reverse type of the strong spirit that has become free.
But the grandiose poses of these morbid spirits, of
these epileptics of ideas, exercise an influence over
the masses,-fanatics are picturesque, man
mankind pre-
fers to look at poses than to listen to reason.
55
One step further in the psychology of conviction
of “faith. ” It is already some time since I first
thought of considering whether convictions were not
perhaps more dangerous enemies of truth than lies
(“Human All-too-Human,” Part I, Aphs. 54 and
483). Now I would fain put the decisive question :


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212
THE ANTICHRIST
is there any difference at all between a lie and a
conviction ? -All the world believes that there is,
but what in Heaven's name does not all the world
believe! Every conviction has its history, its pre-
liminary stages, its period of groping and of mis-
takes : it becomes a conviction only after it has not
been one for a long time, only after it has scarcely
been one for a long time. What? might not false-
hood be the embryonic form of conviction ? -At
times all that is required is a change of personality :
very often what was a lie in the father becomes a
conviction in the son. —I call a lie, to refuse to
see something that one sees, to refuse to see it
exactly as one sees it: whether a lie is perpetrated
before witnesses or not is beside the point. —The
most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's
self; to lie to others is relatively exceptional. Now
this refusal to see what one sees, this refusal to see
a thing exactly as one sees it, is almost the first
condition for all those who belong to a party in
any sense whatsoever : the man who belongs to a
party perforce becomes a liar. German historians,
for instance, are convinced that Rome stood for
despotism, whereas the Teutons introduced the
spirit of freedom into the world : what difference
is there between this conviction and a lie? After
a
this is it to be wondered at, that all parties,
including German historians, instinctively adopt
the grandiloquent phraseology of morality,—that
morality almost owes its survival to the fact that
the man who belongs to a party, no matter what it
may be, is in need of morality every moment ?