Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  18

  The Christian conception of God – God as God of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth: perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, the will to life! God the formula for every calumny of ‘this world’, for every lie about ‘the next world’! In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified!…

  19

  That the strong races of northern Europe have not repudiated the Christian God certainly reflects no credit on their talent for religion – not to speak of their taste. They ought to have felt compelled to have done with such a sickly and decrepit product of décadence. But there lies a curse on them for not having had done with it: they have taken up sickness, old age, contradiction into all their instincts – since then they have failed to create a God! Almost two millennia and not a single new God! But still, and as if existing by right, like an ultimate and maximum of the God-creating force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid of the void, conceptualism and contradiction, this picture of decay, in which all décadence instincts, all cowardliness and weariness of soul have their sanction! –

  20

  With my condemnation of Christianity, I should not like to have wronged a kindred religion which even preponderates in the number of its believers: Buddhism. They belong together as nihilistic religions – they are décadence religions – but they are distinguished from one another in the most remarkable way. The critic of Christianity is profoundly grateful to Indian scholars that one is now able to compare these two religions. – Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity – it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion history has to show us, even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism –), it no longer speaks of ‘the struggle against sin’ but, quite in accordance with actuality, ‘the struggle against suffering’. It already has – and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity – the self-deception of moral concepts behind it – it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil. – The two physiological facts upon which it rests and on which it fixes its eyes are: firstly an excessive excitability of sensibility which expresses itself as a refined capacity for pain, then an over-intellectuality, a too great preoccupation with concepts and logical procedures under which the personal instinct has sustained harm to the advantage of the ‘impersonal’ (– both of them conditions which at any rate some of my readers, the objective ones, will know from experience, as I do). On the basis of these physiological conditions a state of depression has arisen: against this depression Buddha takes hygienic measures. He opposes it with life in the open air, the wandering life; with moderation and fastidiousness as regards food; with caution towards all emotions which produce gall, which heat the blood; no anxiety, either for oneself or for others. He demands ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness – he devises means for disaccustoming oneself to others. He understands benevolence, being kind, as health-promoting. Prayer is excluded, as is asceticism; no categorical imperative, no compulsion at all, not even with in the monastic community (– one can leave it –). All these would have the effect of increasing that excessive excitability. For this reason too he demands no struggle against those who think differently; his teaching resists nothing more than it resists the feeling of revengefulness, of antipathy, of ressentiment (– ‘enmity is not ended by enmity’: the moving refrain of the whole of Buddhism…). And quite rightly: it is precisely these emotions which would be thoroughly unhealthy with regard to the main dietetic objective. The spiritual weariness he discovered and which expressed itself as an excessive ‘objectivity’ (that is to say weakening of individual interest, loss of centre of gravity, of ‘egoism’), he combated by directing even the spiritual interests back to the individual person. In the teaching of Buddha egoism becomes a duty: the ‘one thing needful’, the ‘how can you get rid of suffering’ regulates and circumscribes the entire spiritual diet (– one may perhaps call to mind that Athenian who likewise made war on pure ‘scienctificality’, Socrates, who elevated personal egoism to morality even in the domain of problems).

  21

  The precondition for Buddhism is a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved. Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires after perfection: perfection is the normal case. –

  In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come into the foreground: it is the lowest classes which seek their salvation in it. Here the casuistic business of sin, self-criticism, conscience-inquisition is practised as a specific against boredom; here an emotional attitude towards a power, called ‘God’, is kept constantly alive (through prayer); here the highest things are considered unachievable, gifts, ‘grace’. Here public openness is also lacking; the hole-and-corner, the dark chamber is Christian. Here the body is despised, hygiene repudiated as sensuality; the Church even resists cleanliness (– the first measure taken by the Christians after the expulsion of the Moors was the closure of the public baths, of which Cordova alone possessed 270). A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Gloomy and exciting ideas stand in the foreground; the states most highly desired and designated by the highest names are epileptoid states; diet is selected so as to encourage morbid phenomena and to over-excite the nerves. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the ‘noble’ – and at the same time a covert secret competition (– one allows them the ‘body’, one wants only the ‘soul’): that is also Christian. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind is Christian; hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian…

  22

  When it left its original home, the lowest orders, the underworld of the ancient world, when it went in search of power among barbarian peoples, Christianity had no longer to presuppose weary human beings but inwardly savage and self-lacerating ones – strong but ill-constituted human beings. Here discontentedness with oneself, suffering from oneself is not, as it is with the Buddhists, an immoderate excitability and capacity for pain, but on the contrary an overwhelming desire to do harm, to discharge an inner tension in hostile actions and ideas. To dominate barbarians Christianity had need of barbarous concepts and values: sacrifice of the first-born, blood-drinking at communion, contempt for intellect and culture; torture in all its forms, physical and non-physical; great pomp brought to public worship. Buddhism is a religion for late human beings, for races grown kindly, gentle, over-intellectual who feel pain too easily (– Europe is not nearly ripe for it –): it leads them back to peace and cheerfulness, to an ordered diet in intellectual things, to a certain physical hardening. Christianity desires to dominate beasts of prey; its means for doing so is to make them sick – weakening is the Christian recipe for taming, for ‘civilization’. Buddhism is a religion for the end and fatigue of a civilization, Christianity does not even find civilization in existence – it establishes civilization if need be.

  23

  Buddhism, to say it again, is a hundred times colder, more veracious, more objective. It no longer needs to make its suffering and capacity for pain decent to itself by interpreting it as sin – it merely says what it feels: ‘I suffer’. To the barbarian, on the contrary, suffering in itself is not decent: he first requires it to be interpreted before he will admit to himself that he suffers (his instinct directs him rather
to deny he is suffering, to a silent endurance). Here the word ‘Devil’ was a blessing: one had an overwhelming and fearful enemy – one did not need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an.enemy. –

  Christianity has a number of subtleties in its foundations which belong to the Orient. Above all, it knows that it is in itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent it is believed to be true. Truth and the belief that something is true: two completely diverse worlds of interest, almost antithetical worlds – one gets to them by fundamentally different roads. To be knowledgeable in this – in the Orient that is almost enough to constitute a sage: thus the Brahmins* understood it, thus Plato understands it, thus does every student of esoteric wisdom understand it. If, for example, there is happiness to be found in believing oneself redeemed from sin, it is not necessary for a man first to be sinful, but for him to feel himself sinful. If, however, it is belief as such which is necessary above all else, then one has to bring reason, knowledge, inquiry into disrepute: the road to truth becomes the forbidden road. – Intense hope is a much stronger stimulant to life than any single instance of happiness which actually occurs. Sufferers have to be sustained by a hope which cannot be refuted by any actuality – which is not done away with by any fulfilment: a hope in the Beyond. (It was precisely on account of this capacity for keeping the unhappy in suspense that the Greeks considered hope the evil of evils, the actual malignant evil: it remained behind in the box of evil.) – So that love shall be possible, God has to be a person; so that the lowest instincts shall have a voice, God has to be young. To satisfy the ardour of the women a handsome saint is moved into the foreground, to satisfy that of the men a Mary. This on the presupposition that Christianity desires to become master on a soil where the worship of Adonis or Aphrodite has already determined the concept of what religious worship is. The requirement of chastity increases the vehemence and inward intensity of the religious instinct – it renders the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful. – Love is the state in which man sees things most of all as they are not. The illusion-creating force is there at its height, likewise the sweetening and transforming force. One endures more when in love than one otherwise would, one tolerates everything. The point was to devise a religion in which love is possible: with that one is beyond the worst that life can offer – one no longer even sees it. – So much for the three Christian virtues faith, hope and charity:† I call them the three Christian shrewdnesses. – Buddhism is too late, too positivistic still to be shrewd in this fashion. –

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  I only touch on the problem of the origin of Christianity here. The first proposition towards its solution is: Christianity can be understood only by referring to the soil out of which it grew – it is not a counter-movement against the Jewish instinct, it is actually its logical consequence, one further conclusion of its fear-inspiring logic. In the Redeemer’s formula: ‘Salvation is of the Jews’. – The second proposition is: the psychological type of the Galilean is still recognizable – but only in a completely degenerate form (which is at once a mutilation and an overloading with foreign traits) could it serve the end to which it was put, that of being the type of a redeemer of mankind. –

  The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves counter to all those conditions under which a nation was previously able to live, was permitted to live; they made of themselves an antithesis to natural conditions – they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history, psychology one after the other in an irreparable way into the contradiction of their natural values. We encounter the same phenomenon again and in unutterably vaster proportions, although only as a copy – the Christian Church, in contrast to the ‘nation of saints’, renounces all claim to originality. For precisely this reason the Jews are the most fateful nation in world history; their after-effect has falsified mankind to such an extent that today the Christian is able to feel anti-Jewish without realizing he is the ultimate consequence of the Jews.

  In my Genealogy of Morals I introduced for the first time the psychology of the antithetical concepts of a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the latter deriving from a denial of the former: but this latter corresponds totally to Judeo-Christian morality. To be able to reject all that represents the ascending movement of life, well-constitutedness, power, beauty, self-affirmation on earth, the instinct of ressentiment here become genius had to invent another world from which that life-affirmation would appear evil, reprehensible as such. Considered psychologically, the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy which, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily, from the profoundest shrewdness in self-preservation, took the side of all décadence instincts – not as being dominated by them but because it divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against ‘the world’. The Jews are the counterparts of décadents: they have been compelled to act as décadents to the point of illusion, they have known, with a non plus ultra of histrionic genius, how to place themselves at the head of all décadence movements (– as the Christianity of Paul –) so as to make of them something stronger than any party affirmative of life. For the kind of man who desires to attain power through Judaism and Christianity, the priestly kind, décadence is only a means: this kind of man has a life-interest in making mankind sick and in inverting the concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a mortally dangerous and world-calumniating sense. –

  25

  The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of the denaturalizing of natural values: I shall indicate five stages in the process. Originally, above all in the period of the Kingdom, Israel too stood in a correct, that is to say natural relationship to all things. Their Yaweh was the expression of their consciousness of power, of their delight in themselves, their hopes of themselves: in him they anticipated victory and salvation, with him they trusted that nature would provide what the people needed – above all rain. Yaweh is the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice: the logic of every nation that is in power and has a good conscience about it. These two aspects of a nation’s self-affirmation find expression in festival worship: it is grateful for the great destiny which has raised it on high, it is grateful towards the year’s seasons and all its good fortune with livestock and husbandry. – This state of things long remained the ideal, even after it had been tragically done away with: anarchy with in, the Assyrian from without. But the people retained as its supreme desideratum that vision of a king who is a good soldier and an upright judge: as did above all the typical prophet (that is to say critic and satirist of the hour) Isaiah. – But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old God could no longer do what he formerly could. One should have let him go. What happened? One altered the conception of him: at this price one retained him. Yaweh the God of ‘justice’ – no longer at one with Israel, an expression of national self-confidence: now only a God bound by conditions. The new conception of him becomes an instrument in the hands of priestly agitators who henceforth interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for ‘sin’: that most mendacious mode of interpretation of a supposed ‘moral world-order’ through which the natural concept ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ is once and for all stood on its head. When one has banished natural causality from the world by means of reward and punishment, one then requires an anti-natural causality: all the remaining unnaturalness follows forthwith. A God who demands – in place of a God who helps, who devises means, who is fundamentally a word for every happy inspiration of courage and self-reliance.… Morality no longer the expression of the conditions under which a nation lives and grows, no longer a nation’s deepe
st instinct of life, but become abstract, become the antithesis of life – morality as a fundamental degradation of the imagination, as an ‘evil eye’ for all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; misfortune dirtied by the concept ‘sin’; well-being as a danger, as ‘temptation’; physiological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience…