Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

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  The concept of God falsified; the concept of morality falsified – the Jewish priesthood did not stop there. The entire history of Israel was useless: away with it! – These priests perpetrated that miracle of falsification the documentation of which lies before us in a good part of the Bible: with unparalleled disdain of every tradition, every historical reality, they translated their own national past into religious terms, that is to say they made of it a stupid salvation-mechanism of guilt towards Yaweh and punishment, piety towards Yaweh and reward. We would feel this most shameful act of historical falsification much more painfully if millennia of ecclesiastical interpretation of history had not made us almost oblivious to the demands of integrity in historicis. And the philosophers have seconded the Church: the lie of a ‘moral world-order’ permeates the whole evolution even of the most recent philosophy. What does ‘moral world-order’ mean? That there exists once and for all a will of God as to what man is to do and what he is not to do; that the value of a nation, of an individual is to be measured by how much or how little obedience is accorded the will of God; that the ruling power of the will of God, expressed as punishment and reward according to the degree of obedience, is demonstrated in the destiny of a nation, of an individual. – The reality displaced by this pitiable lie is: a parasitic kind of human being which prospers only at the expense of every healthy form of life, the priest, abuses the name of God: he calls a state of society in which the priest determines the value of things ‘the kingdom of God’; he calls the means by which such a state is achieved or perpetuated ‘the will of God’; with cold-blooded cynicism he assesses nations, epochs, individuals according to whether they were conducive to the rule of priests or whether they resisted it. Observe them at work: in the hands of the Jewish priests the great epoch in the history of Israel became an epoch of decay, the Exile, the long years of misfortune, was transformed into an eternal punishment for the great epoch – an epoch in which the priest was as yet nothing. According to their requirements they made the mighty, very freely constituted figures of Israel’s history into either pathetic cringing bigots or ‘godless men’, they simplified the psychology of every great event into the idiotic formula ‘obedience to or disobedience of God’. – A further step: the ‘will of God’ (that is to say the conditions for preserving the power of the priest) has to be known – to this end a ‘revelation’ is required. In plain words: a great literary forgery becomes necessary, a ‘sacred book’ is discovered – it is made public with all hieratic pomp, with days of repentance and with lamentation over the long years of ‘sinfulness’. The ‘will of God’ had been established years before: the whole evil lay in the nation’s having become estranged from the ‘sacred book’.… The ‘will of God’ had been revealed already to Moses.… What had happened? The priest had, with precision and pedantry, right down to the imposts large and small which had to be paid to him (– not forgetting the tastiest pieces of meat: for the priest is a beef-eater), formulated once and for all what he intends to have, ‘what the will of God is’.… From now on all things of life are so ordered that the priest is everywhere indispensable; at all the natural events of life, at birth, marriage, sickness, death, not to speak of ‘sacrifice’ (meal-times), there appears the holy parasite to denaturalize them – in his language to ‘sanctify’ them.… For one must grasp this: every natural custom, every natural institution (state, administration of justice, marriage, tending of the sick and poor), every requirement presented by the instinct for life, in short everything valuable in itself, becomes utterly valueless, inimical to value through the parasitism of the priest (or the ‘moral world-order’): a sanction is subsequently required – a value-bestowing power is needed which denies the natural quality in these things and only by doing so is able to create a value.… The priest disvalues, dissanctifies nature: it is only at the price of this that he exists at all. – Disobedience of God, that is to say of the priest, of ‘the Law’, now acquires the name ‘sin’; the means of ‘becoming reconciled again with God’ are, as is only to be expected, means by which subjection to the priest is only more thoroughly guaranteed: the priest alone ‘redeems’.… From a psychological point of view, ‘sins’ are indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives on sins, he needs ‘the commission of sins’.… Supreme law: ‘God forgives him who repents’ – in plain language: who subjects himself to the priest. –

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  On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed. The ‘holy people’, which had retained only priestly values, priestly words, for all things, and with a consistency capable of inspiring fear had separated itself from everything else powerful on earth, calling it ‘unholy’, ‘world’, ‘sin’ – this people produced for its instinct a formula which was logical to the point of self-negation: as Christianity it negated the last remaining form of reality, the ‘holy people’, the ‘chosen people’, the Jewish reality itself. The case is of the first rank: the little rebellious movement which is baptized with the name of Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish instinct once more – in other words the priestly instinct which can no longer endure the priest as a reality, the invention of an even more abstract form of existence, an even more unreal vision of the world than one conditioned by an organized Church. Christianity negates the Church…

  I fail to see against what the revolt was directed whose originator Jesus is understood or misunderstood to be if it was not a revolt against the Jewish Church – ‘Church’ taken in precisely the sense in which we take the word today. It was a revolt against ‘the good and the just’, against ‘the saints of Israel’, against the social hierarchy – not against a corruption of these but against caste, privilege, the order, the social form; it was disbelief in ‘higher men’, a No uttered towards everything that was priest and theologian. But the hierarchy which was thus called in question, even if only momentarily, was the pile-work upon which the Jewish nation continued to exist at all in the midst of the ‘waters’ – the laboriously-achieved last possibility of remaining in being, the residuum of its separate political existence: an attack on this was an attack on the profoundest national instinct, on the toughest national will to life which has ever existed on earth. This holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and ‘sinners’, the Chandala within Judaism to oppose the ruling order – in language which, if the Gospels are to be trusted, would even today lead to Siberia – was a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society. This is what brought him to the Cross: the proof is the inscription on the Cross. He died for his guilt – all ground is lacking for the assertion, however often it is made, that he died for the guilt of others. –

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  It is quite another question whether he was conscious of any such antithesis – whether he was not merely felt to be this antithesis. And here for the first time I touch on the problem of the psychology of the redeemer. – I confess there are few books which present me with so many difficulties as the Gospels do. These difficulties are quite other than those which the learned curiosity of the German mind celebrated one of its most unforgettable triumphs in pointing out. The time is far distant when I too, like every young scholar and with the clever dullness of a refined philologist, savoured the work of the incomparable Strauss. I was then twenty years old: now I am too serious for that. What do I care for the contradictions of ‘tradition’? How can legends of saints be called ‘tradition’ at all! The stories of saints are the most ambiguous literature in existence: to apply to them scientific procedures when no other records are extant seems to me wrong in principle – mere learned idling…

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  What I am concerned with is the psychological type of the redeemer. For it could be contained in the Gospels in spite of the Gospels, however mu
ch mutilated and overloaded with foreign traits: as that of Francis of Assisi is contained in the legends about him in spite of the legends. Not the truth about what he did, what he said, how he really died: but the question whether his type is still conceivable at all, whether it has been ‘handed down’ by tradition. – The attempts I know of to extract even the history of a ‘soul’ from the Gospels seem to me proofs of an execrable psychological frivolity. Monsieur Renan, that buffoon in psychologicis, has appropriated for his explication of the type Jesus the two most inapplicable concepts possible in this case: the concept of the genius and the concept of the hero. But if anything is unevangelic it is the concept hero. Precisely the opposite of all contending, of all feeling oneself in struggle has here become instinct: the incapacity for resistance here becomes morality (‘resist not evil!’: the profoundest saying of the Gospel, its key in a certain sense), blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in the inability for enmity. What are the ‘glad tidings’? True life, eternal life is found – it is not promised, it is here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of God – Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone – as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else.… To make a hero of Jesus! – And what a worse misunderstanding is the word ‘genius’! Our whole concept, our cultural concept ‘spirit’ had no meaning whatever in the world Jesus lived in. To speak with the precision of the physiologist a quite different word would rather be in place here: the word idiot. We recognize a condition of morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch which makes it shrink back in horror from every contact, every grasping of a firm object. Translate such a physiological habitus* into its ultimate logic – as instinctive hatred of every reality, as flight into the ‘ungraspable’, into the ‘inconceivable’, as antipathy towards every form, every spacial and temporal concept, towards everything firm, all that is custom, institution, Church, as being at home in a world undisturbed by reality of any kind, a merely ‘inner’ world, a ‘real’ world, an ‘eternal’ world.… ‘The kingdom of God is within you’…

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  Instinctive hatred of reality: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which no longer wants to be ‘touched’ at all because it feels every contact too deeply.

  Instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all enmity, all feeling for limitation and distancing: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which already feels all resisting, all need for resistance, as an unbearable displeasure (that is to say as harmful, as deprecated by the instinct of self-preservation) and knows blessedness (pleasure) only in no longer resisting anyone or anything, neither the evil nor the evil-doer – love as the sole, as the last possibility of life…

  These are the two physiological realities upon which, out of which the doctrine of redemption has grown. I call it a sublime further evolution of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid basis. Closest related to it, even if with a considerable addition of Greek vitality and nervous energy, is Epicureanism, the redemption doctrine of the pagan world. Epicurus a typical décadent: first recognized as such by me. – The fear of pain, even of the infinitely small in pain – cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love…

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  I have anticipated my answer to the problem. Its presupposition is that the type of the redeemer has been preserved to us only in a very distorted form. That this distortion should have occurred is in itself very probable: there are several reasons why such a type could not remain pure, whole, free of accretions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left its mark upon him, as must even more the history, the fate of the first Christian community: from this the type was retrospectively enriched with traits which become comprehensible only with reference to warfare and the aims of propaganda. That strange and sick world to which the Gospels introduce us – a world like that of a Russian novel, in which refuse of society, neurosis and ‘childlike’ idiocy seem to make a rendezvous – must in any case have coarsened the type: the first disciples in particular had to translate a being immersed entirely in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity in order to understand anything of it at all – for them such a type could not exist until it had been reduced to more familiar forms.… The prophet, the Messiah, the judge who is to come, the moral preacher, the miracle-worker, John the Baptist – so many opportunities for misunderstanding the type.… Finally, let us not underestimate the proprium* of all extreme, and in particular sectarian veneration: it extinguishes the original often painfully unfamiliar traits and idiosyncrasies in the revered being – it even fails to see them. One has to regret that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent; I mean someone who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick and the childish. One final viewpoint: the type, as a décadence type, could in fact have been of a peculiar multiplicity and contradictoriness: such a possibility cannot be entirely excluded. But everything speaks against it: for if it were so the tradition would have to have been remarkably faithful and objective: and we have reasons for assuming the opposite. In the meantime, there yawns a contradiction between the mountain, lake and field preacher, whose appearance strikes one as that of a Buddha on a soil very little like that of India, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologian and priest, which Renan has wickedly glorified as ‘le grand maitre en ironie’. I myself have no doubt that this plentiful measure of gall (and even of esprit) has only overflowed on to the type of the Master out of the excited condition of Christian propaganda: for one knows very well how resolutely all sectarians adjust their Master into an apologia of themselves. When the first community had need of a censuring theologian to oppose the theologians they created their ‘God’ according to their requirements: just as they unhesitatingly put into his mouth those totally unevangelic concepts which they could not now do without, ‘Second Coming’, ‘Last Judgement’, every kind of temporal promise and expectation. –

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  I resist, to repeat it, the incorporation of the fanatic into the type of the redeemer: the word impérieux alone which Renan employs already annuls the type. The ‘glad tidings’ are precisely that there are no more opposites; the kingdom of Heaven belongs to children; the faith which here finds utterance is not a faith which has been won by struggle – it is there, from the beginning, it is as it were a return to childishness in the spiritual domain. The occurrence of retarded puberty undeveloped in the organism as a consequence of degeneration is familiar at any rate to physiologists. – Such a faith is not angry, does not censure, does not defend itself: it does not bring ‘the sword’ – it has no idea to what extent it could one day cause dissention. It does not prove itself, either by miracles or by rewards and promises, and certainly not ‘by the Scriptures’: it is every moment its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own ‘kingdom of God’. Neither does this faith formulate itself – it lives, it resists formulas. Chance, to be sure, determines the environment, the language, the preparatory schooling of a particular configuration of concepts: primitive Christianity employs only Judeo-Semitic concepts (– eating and drinking at communion belong here, concepts so sadly abused, like everything Jewish, by the Church). But one must be careful not to see in this anything but a sign-language, a semeiotic, an occasion for metaphors. It is precisely on condition that nothing he says is taken literally that this anti-realist can speak at all. Among Indians he would have made use of Sankhyam concepts, among Chinese those of Lao-tse – and would not have felt the difference. – One could, with some freedom of expression, call Jesus a ‘free spirit’ – he cares nothing for what is fixed: the word killeth, everything fixed killeth. The concept, the experience ‘life’ in the only form he knows it is opposed to any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. He speaks only of the inmost thing: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ is his expression for the inmost thing – everything else, the whole of reality, the whol
e of nature, language itself, possesses for him merely the value of a sign, a metaphor. – On this point one must make absolutely no mistake, however much Christian, that is to say ecclesiastical prejudice, may tempt one to do so: such a symbolist par excellence stands outside of all religion, all conceptions of divine worship, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all acquirements, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art – his ‘knowledge’ is precisely the pure folly of the fact that anything of this kind exists. He has not so much as heard of culture, he does not need to fight against it – he does not deny it.… The same applies to the state, to society and the entire civic order, to work, to war – he never had reason to deny ‘the world’, he had no notion of the ecclesiastical concept ‘world’.… Denial is precisely what is totally impossible for him. – Dialectics are likewise lacking, the idea is lacking that a faith, a ‘truth’ could be proved by reasons (– his proofs are inner ‘lights’, inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, nothing but ‘proofs by potency’ –). Neither can such a doctrine argue: it simply does not understand that other doctrines exist, can exist, it simply does not know how to imagine an opinion contrary to its own.… Where it encounters one it will, with the most heartfelt sympathy, lament the ‘blindness’ – for it sees the ‘light’ – but it will make no objection…

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  In the entire psychology of the ‘Gospel’ the concept guilt and punishment is lacking; likewise the concept reward. ‘Sin’, every kind of distancing relationship between God and man, is abolished – precisely this is the ‘glad tidings’. Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to any conditions: it is the only reality – the rest is signs for speaking of it…