Chapter 7

[15] To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse 48.

"Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." (Mark ix, 1.)--Well _lied_, lion![16]...

[16] A paraphrase of Demetrius' "Well roar'd, Lion!" in act v, scene 1 of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The lion, of course, is the familiar Christian symbol for Mark.

"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. _For_..." (_Note of a psychologist._ Christian morality is refuted by its _fors_: its reasons are against it,--this makes it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.--

"Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." (Matthew vii, 1.[17])--What a notion of justice, of a "just" judge!...

[17] Nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2.

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more _than others_? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew v, 46.[18])--Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well _paid_ in the end....

[18] The quotation also includes verse 47.

"But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." (Matthew vi, 15.)--Very compromising for the said "father."...

"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: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An _error_, to put it mildly.... A bit 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! It compares itself to 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_." (Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.[19])--For that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt....

[19] And 17.

"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?" (Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)--Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a lunatic.... This _frightful impostor_ then proceeds: "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 men 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 presence." (Paul, 1 Corinthians i, 20ff.[20])--In order to _understand_ this passage, a first-rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for the first time, the antagonism between a _noble_ morality and a morality born of _ressentiment_ and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge....

[20] Verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29.

46.

--_What follows, then?_ That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them.... Neither has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward--the instinct for _cleanliness_ is lacking.... Only _evil_ instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: "_è tutto festo_"--immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby _distinguished_. Whoever is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely _not_ befouled.... On the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early Christians" _dared_ to make!--After all, they were the _privileged_, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last Christian," _whom I may perhaps live to see_--is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights."... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every _other_ criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--_evil in itself_.... Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but _whoever_ he hates, _whatever_ he hates, has real _value_.... The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a _criterion of values_.

--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a _solitary_ figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio _seriously_--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less--what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying _that has any value_--and that is at once its criticism and its _destruction_: "What is truth?..."

47.

--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a _crime against life_.... We deny that God is God.... If any one were to _show_ us this Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula: _deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio_.--Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of _science_--and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and _cry down_ all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes science--_in praxi_, lying at any price.... Paul _well knew_ that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute _determination_ to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, _thora_--that is essentially Jewish. Paul _wants_ to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the _good_ philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a _philologian_ or a physician without being also _Antichrist_. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees _behind_ the "holy books," and as a physician he sees _behind_ the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud."...

48.

--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of _science_?... No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book _par excellence_ opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: _he_ faces only one great danger; _ergo_, "God" faces only one great danger.--

The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] What does he do? He creates man--man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored. God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things! Woman was the _second_ mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. _Ergo_, she is also to blame for _science_.... It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his _greatest_ blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men _godlike_--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--_Moral_: science is the forbidden _per se_; it alone is forbidden. Science is the _first_ of sins, the germ of all sins, the _original_ sin. _This is all there is of morality._--"Thou shall _not_ know":--the rest follows from that.--God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to _protect_ one's self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man _must_ not think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, _sickness_--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't _allow_ him to think.... Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents _war_; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war....). War--among other things, a great disturber of science!--Incredible! Knowledge, _deliverance from the priests_, prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific--_there is no help for it: he must be drowned!_"...

[21] A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even gods struggle in vain."

49.

--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the _whole_ psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must have an _overflowing_ intellect, in order to "know."... "_Therefore_, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just _what_, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:--"_sin_."... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up _against_ science--_against_ the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must _not_ look outward; he must look inward. He must _not_ look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must _suffer_.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with physicians! _What is needed is a Saviour._--The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--_lies_ through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's _sense of causality_: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!--And _not_ an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of _priests_! An attack of _parasites_! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--_then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated_.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration _par excellence_, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest _rules_ through the invention of sin.--

50.

--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief," of the "believer," for the special benefit of "believers." If there remain any today who do not yet know how _indecent_ it is to be "believing"--_or_ how much a sign of _décadence_, of a broken will to live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power." "Faith makes blessed: _therefore_ it is true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely _promised_: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one _shall_ be blessed _because_ one believes.... But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is _that_ to be demonstrated?--The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness--_therefore_, it is true."... But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be _absurdum_ itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--_not_ merely hoped for, and _not_ merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, _could_ blessedness--in a technical term, _pleasure_--ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof _of_ "pleasure"--nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that _true_ judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches _the contrary_. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of _integrity_ in things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed: _therefore_, it lies....

51.

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an _idée fixe_ by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead _raises them up_ where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a _lunatic asylum_. _Not_, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_ people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _décadent_; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_.... Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of _training_[22] in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the _courage_ for health _and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _décadence_ products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of _noble_ antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole _imperium_ were Christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, _triumphed_.... Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the _healthy_, against _health_. Everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_ things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the _décadence_ triumphed.--_God on the cross_--is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_.... We all hang on the cross, consequently _we_ are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.--

[22] The word _training_ is in English in the text.

[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.

52.