Chapter 6

--I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--_contempt of man_. Let me leave no doubt as to _what_ I despise, _whom_ I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today--I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, _generous_ self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will--I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, _our_ times. Our age _knows better_.... What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today. _And here my disgust begins._--I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity _must_ know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually _lies_--and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies--: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, _allow_ no man to pretend that he does _not_ know it.... _All_ the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation.... We know, our _conscience_ now knows--just _what_ the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and _what ends they have served_, with their debasement of humanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master.... Every one knows this, _but nevertheless things remain as before_. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion-table?... A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, _without_ any shame, that he is a Christian!... Whom, then, does Christianity deny? _what_ does it call "the world"? To be a _soldier_, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's honour; to desire one's own advantage; to be _proud_ ... every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a _deed_, is now anti-Christian: what a _monster of falsehood_ the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and _without_ shame, a Christian!--

39.

--I shall go back a bit, and tell you the _authentic_ history of Christianity.--The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding--at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The "Gospels" _died_ on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the "Gospels" was the very reverse of what _he_ had lived: "bad tidings," a _Dysangelium_.[14] It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in "faith," and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian _way of life_, the life _lived_ by him who died on the cross, is Christian.... To this day _such_ a life is still possible, and for _certain_ men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages.... _Not_ faith, but acts; above all, an _avoidance_ of acts, a different _state of being_.... States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true--as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. _In fact, there are no Christians._ The "Christian"--he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian--is simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears that, _despite_ all his "faith," he has been ruled _only_ by his instincts--and _what instincts_!--In all ages--for example, in the case of Luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a _curtain_ behind which the instincts have played their game--a shrewd _blindness_ to the domination of _certain_ of the instincts.... I have already called "faith" the specially Christian form of _shrewdness_--people always _talk_ of their "faith" and _act_ according to their instincts.... In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an instinctive _hatred_ of reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even here, in _psychologicis_, there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in _substance_. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place--and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!--Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious _only_ in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart--this remains a _spectacle for the gods_--for those gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their _disgust_ leaves them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps because of _this_ curious exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false _to the point of innocence_, is far above the ape--in its application to the Christians a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness....

[14] So in the text. One of Nietzsche's numerous coinages, obviously suggested by _Evangelium_, the German for _gospel_.

40.

--The fate of the Gospels was decided by death--it hung on the "cross."... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only--it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: "_Who was it? what was it_?"--The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a _refutation_ of their cause; the terrible question, "Why just in this way?"--this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything _must_ be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: "_Who_ put him to death? who was his natural enemy?"--this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one's self in revolt _against_ the established order, and began to understand Jesus as _in revolt against the established order_. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had _not_ understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of _ressentiment_--a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or _example_, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from _forgiving_ his death--though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to _offer_ themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, _revenge_, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: "recompense" and "judgment" became necessary (--yet what could be less evangelical than "recompense," "punishment," and "sitting in judgment"!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the "kingdom of God" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom of God" as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the _realization_ of this "kingdom of God." It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master--he was thereby _turned_ into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of _elevating_ Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products of _ressentiment_....

41.

--And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how _could_ God allow it!" To which the deranged reason of the little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son as a _sacrifice_ for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the _innocent_ for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!--Jesus himself had done away with the very concept of "guilt," he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God and man; he _lived_ this unity between God and man, and that was precisely _his_ "glad tidings".... And _not_ as a mere privilege!--From this time forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the _resurrection_, by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away--in favour of a state of existence _after_ death!... St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that _indecent_ conception, in this way: "_If_ Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!"--And at once there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the _shameless_ doctrine of personal immortality.... Paul even preached it as a _reward_....

42.

One now begins to see just _what_ it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish _happiness on earth_--real, _not_ merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed out--the essential difference between the two religions of _décadence_: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but _fulfils nothing_.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. _What_, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to _his own_ cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely _not_ reality; surely _not_ historical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and _invented his own history of Christian beginnings_. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to _his_ achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to _his_ "Saviour."... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place _behind_ this existence--in the _lie_ of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed was the death on the cross, _and_ something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a _proof_ of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine _niaiserie_ in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; _therefore_ he also willed the means.... What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread _his_ teaching.--What _he_ wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. _What_ was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul--_that is to say, the doctrine of "judgment"_....

43.

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, _not_ in life itself, but in "the beyond"--in _nothingness_--then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: _this_ is now the "meaning" of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it?... Merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from the "straight path."--"_One_ thing only is necessary".... That every man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of _every_ individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly _suspended_ in their behalf--it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to _insolence_. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely _this_ miserable flattery of personal vanity for its _triumph_--it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul"--in plain English: "the world revolves around _me_."... The poisonous doctrine, "_equal_ rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first _prerequisite_ to every step upward, to every development of civilization--out of the _ressentiment_ of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against _us_, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.... To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon _noble_ humanity ever perpetrated.--_And_ let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals--for the _pathos of distance_.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!--The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and _will continue to make_ revolutions--it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and _Christian_ valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is _lofty_: the gospel of the "lowly" _lowers_....

44.

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

45.

--I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into their heads--what they have _put into the mouth_ of the Master: the unalloyed creed of "beautiful souls."--

"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city" (Mark vi, 11)--How _evangelical_!...

"And whosoever shall offend one of _these_ little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42).--How _evangelical_!...

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