The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  Evidently the small community did not understand the main point, the exemplary character of this kind of death, the freedom, the superiority over any feeling of ressentiment: a token of how little they understood him altogether! After all, Jesus could not intend anything with his death except to give publicly the strongest exhibition, the proof of his doctrine. But his disciples were far from forgiving this death—which would have been evangelic in the highest sense—or even from offering themselves for a like death in gentle and lovely repose of the heart. Precisely the most unevangelical feeling, revenge, came to the fore again. The matter could not possibly be finished with this death: “retribution” was needed, “judgment” (and yet, what could possibly be more unevangelical than “retribution,” “punishment,” “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular expectation of a Messiah came to the foreground; a historic moment was envisaged: the “kingdom of God” comes as a judgment over his enemies.

  But in this way everything is misunderstood: the “kingdom of God” as the last act, as a promise! After all, the evangel had been precisely the presence, the fulfillment, the reality of this “kingdom.” Just such a death was this very “kingdom of God.” Now for the first time all the contempt and bitterness against the Pharisees and theologians were carried into the type of the Master—and in this way he himself was made into a Pharisee and theologian! On the other hand, the frenzied veneration of these totally unhinged souls no longer endured the evangelic conception of everybody’s equal right to be a child of God, as Jesus had taught: it was their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly, to sever him from themselves—precisely as the Jews had formerly, out of revenge against their enemies, severed their God from themselves and elevated him. The one God and the one Son of God—both products of ressentiment.

  41

  And from now on an absurd problem emerged: “How could God permit this?” To this the deranged reason of the small community found an altogether horribly absurd answer: God gave his son for the remission of sins, as a sacrifice. In one stroke, it was all over with the evangel! The trespass sacrifice—in its most revolting, most barbarous form at that, the sacrifice of the guiltless for the sins of the guilty! What gruesome paganism!

  Jesus had abolished the very concept of “guilt”—he had denied any cleavage between God and man; he lived this unity of God and man as his “glad tidings.” And not as a prerogative! From now on there enters into the type of the Redeemer, step by step, the doctrine of judgment and return, the doctrine of death as a sacrificial death, the doctrine of the resurrection with which the whole concept of “blessedness,” the whole and only actuality of the evangel, is conjured away—in favor of a state after death.

  Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which distinguishes him in all things, logicalized this conception, this obscenity of a conception, in this way: “If Christ was not resurrected from the dead, then our faith is vain.” And all at once the evangel became the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the impertinent doctrine of personal immortality. Paul himself still taught it as a reward.

  42

  It is plain what was finished with the death on the cross: a new, an entirely original basis for a Buddhistic peace movement, for an actual, not merely promised, happiness on earth. For this, as I have already emphasized, remains the fundamental difference between the two religions of decadence: Buddhism does not promise but fulfills; Christianity promises everything but fulfills nothing. On the heels of the “glad tidings” came the very worst: those of Paul. In Paul was embodied the opposite type to that of the “bringer of glad tidings”: the genius in hatred, in the vision of hatred, in the inexorable logic of hatred. How much this dysangelist49 sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Redeemer: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the doctrine, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire evangel—nothing remained once this hate-inspired counterfeiter realized what alone he could use. Not the reality, not the historical truth! And once more the priestly instinct of the Jew committed the same great crime against history—he simply crossed out the yesterday of Christianity and its day before yesterday; he invented his own history of earliest Christianity. Still further: he falsified the history of Israel once more so that it might appear as the prehistory of his deed: all the prophets spoke of his “Redeemer.” Later the church even falsified the history of mankind into the prehistory of Christianity.

  The Redeemer type, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of the death, even what came after the death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained even similar to the reality. Paul simply transposed the center of gravity of that whole existence after this existence—in the lie of the “resurrected” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use at all for the life of the Redeemer—he needed the death on the cross and a little more.

  To consider a Paul, whose home was in the main seat of Stoic enlightenment, honest when he dresses up a hallucination as proof that the Redeemer still lives, or even to believe his story that he had this hallucination, would be a true niaiserie for a psychologist: Paul wanted the end, consequently he also wanted the means. What he himself did not believe, the idiots among whom he threw his doctrine believed. His need was for power; in Paul the priest wanted power once again—he could use only concepts, doctrines, symbols with which one tyrannizes masses and forms herds. What was the one thing that Mohammed later borrowed from Christianity? Paul’s invention, his means to priestly tyranny, to herd formation: the faith in immortality—that is, the doctrine of the “judgment.”

  43

  When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the “beyond”—in nothingness—one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts—whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future now arouses mistrust. To live so, that there is no longer any sense in living, that now becomes the “sense” of life. Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate, trust, promote, and envisage any common welfare? Just as many “temptations,” just as many distractions from the “right path” —“one thing is needful.”

  That everyone as an “immortal soul” has equal rank with everyone else, that in the totality of living beings the “salvation” of every single individual may claim eternal significance, that little prigs and three-quarter-madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes—such an intensification of every kind of selfishness into the infinite, into the impertinent, cannot be branded with too much contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this miserable flattery of personal vanity: it was precisely all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it. The “salvation of the soul”—in plain language: “the world revolves around me.”

  The poison of the doctrine of “equal rights for all”—it was Christianity that spread it most fundamentally. Out of the most secret nooks of bad instincts, Christianity has waged war unto death against all sense of respect and feeling of distance between man and man, that is to say, against the presupposition of every elevation, of every growth of culture; out of the ressentiment of the masses it forged its chief weapon against us, against all that is noble, gay, high-minded on earth, against our happiness on earth. “Immortality” conceded to every Peter and Paul has so far been the greatest, the most malignant, attempt to assassinate noble humanity.

  And let us not underestimate the calamity which crept out of Christianity into politics. Today nobody has the courage any longer for privileges, for masters’ rights, for a sense of respect for oneself and one’s peers —for a pathos of distance. Our politics is sick from this lack of courage.

  The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls; and if faith in the “prerogative of the majority” makes and will make revolutions—it is Chr
istianity, beyond a doubt, it is Christian value judgments, that every revolution simply translates into blood and crime. Christianity is a rebellion of everything that crawls on the ground against that which has height: the evangel of the “lowly” makes low.

  44

  The Gospels are valuable as testimony to the irresistible corruption within the first community. What Paul later carried to its conclusion, with the logician’s cynicism of a rabbi, was nevertheless nothing other than that process of decay which had begun with the death of the Redeemer.

  One cannot read these Gospels cautiously enough; every word poses difficulties. I confess—one will pardon me—that precisely on this account they are a first-rate delight for a psychologist—as the opposite of all naive corruption, as subtlety par excellence, as artistry in psychological corruption. The Gospels stand apart. The Bible in general suffers no comparison. One is among Jews: first consideration to keep from losing the thread completely. The simulation of “holiness” which has really become genius here, never even approximated elsewhere in books or among men, this counterfeit of words and gestures as an art, is not the accident of some individual talent or other or of some exceptional character. This requires race. In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times more.

  To be determined, as a matter of principle, to apply only concepts, symbols, attitudes which have been proved by the practice of the priest; instinctively to reject every other practice, every other perspective of value and usefulness—that is not merely tradition, that is heritage: only as heritage does it seem like nature itself. The whole of mankind, even the best heads of the best ages (except one, who is perhaps merely inhuman), have permitted themselves to be deceived. The Gospel has been read as a book of innocence—no small indication of the mastery here attained in histrionics. Of course, if we saw them, even if only in passing, all these queer prigs and synthetic saints, that would be the end —and precisely because I do not read words without seeing gestures, I make an end of them. I cannot stand a certain manner they have of turning up their eyes. Fortunately, for the great majority books are mere literature.

  One must not let oneself be led astray: “judge not,” they say, but they consign to hell everything that stands in their way. By letting God judge, they themselves judge; by glorifying God, they glorify themselves; by demanding the virtues of which they happen to be capable—even more, which they require in order to stay on top at all—they give themselves the magnificent appearance of a struggle for virtue, of a fight for the domination of virtue. “We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good” (“truth,” “light,” the “kingdom of God”); in truth, they do what they cannot help doing. Slinking around like typical sneaks, sitting in the corner, leading a shadowy existence in the shadow, they make a duty of all this: their life of humility appears as a duty; as humility it is one more proof of piety. Oh, this humble, chaste, merciful variety of mendaciousness! “Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.” One should read the Gospels as books of seduction by means of morality: these petty people reserve morality for themselves—they know all about morality! With morality it is easiest to lead mankind by the nose!

  What really happens here is that the most conscious conceit of being chosen plays modesty: once and for all one has placed oneself, the “community,” the “good and the just,” on one side, on the side of “truth”—and the rest, “the world,” on the other. This was the most disastrous kind of megalomania that has yet existed on earth: little miscarriages of prigs and liars began to claim for themselves the concepts of God, truth, light, spirit, love, wisdom, life—as synonyms for themselves, as it were, in order to define themselves against “the world”: little superlative Jews, ripe for every kind of madhouse, turned all values around in their own image, just as if “the Christian” alone were the meaning, the salt, the measure, also the Last Judgment, of all the rest. The whole calamity became possible only because a related, racially related, kind of megalomania already existed in this world: the Jewish one. As soon as the cleft between the Jews and the Jewish Christians opened, no choice whatever remained to the latter but to apply against the Jews themselves the same procedures of self-preservation that the Jewish instinct recommended, whereas hitherto the Jews had applied them only against everything non-Jewish. The Christian is merely a Jew of “more liberal” persuasion.

  45

  I give some examples of what these little people put into their heads, what they put into the mouth of their master: without exception, confessions 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 Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city” (Mark 6:11). 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 9:42). 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 their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:47 f.). It is not exactly the eye which is meant.

  “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 9:1). Well lied, lion!

  “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 For’s: its “reasons” refute—thus is it Christian.) Mark 8:34.

  “Judge not, that ye be not judged. . . . With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matt. 7:1 f.). What a conception of justice and of a “just” judge!

  “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?” (Matt. 5:46 f.). The principle of “Christian love”: in the end it wants to be paid well.

  “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:15). Very compromising for said "Father.”

  “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33). All these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error, to put it modestly. 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 6:23). Impertinent rabble! They compare themselves with the prophets, no less.

  “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, I Cor. 3:16 f.). This sort of thing one cannot despise enough.

  “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, I Cor. 6:2). Unfortunately not merely the talk of a lunatic. This frightful swindler continues literally: “Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this lifel”

  “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that the world by its wisdom knew not God in his wisdom, it pleased God by foolish preaching to make blessed them that believe in it. . . . 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 ruin the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to ruin what is strong; And base things of
the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and what is nothing, to bring to nought what is something: That no flesh should glory in his presence” (Paul, I Cor. 1:20 ff.).50 To understand this passage, a first-rate document for the psychology of every chandala morality, one should read the first inquiry in my Genealogy of Morals: there the contrast between a noble morality and a chandala morality, born of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness, was brought to light for the first time. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of vengeance.

  46

  What follows from this? That one does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. We would no more choose the "first Christians” to associate with than Polish Jews—not that one even required any objection to them: they both do not smell good.

  I have looked in vain through the New Testament to descry even a single sympathetic feature: there is nothing in it that is free, gracious, candid, honest. Humaneness did not even make its first beginnings here—the instincts of cleanliness are lacking. There are only bad instincts in the New Testament, and not even the courage to have these bad instincts. Everything in it is cowardice, everything is shutting-one’s-eyes and self-deception. Every book becomes clean just after one has read the New Testament: to give an example, it was with utter delight that, right after Paul, I read that most graceful, most prankish mocker Petronius, of whom one might say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote to the Duke of Parma about Cesare Borgia: è tutto festo—immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and well turned out.