The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  58

  Indeed, it makes a difference to what end one lies: whether one preserves or destroys. One may posit a perfect equation between Christian and anarchist: their aim, their instinct, are directed only toward destruction. The proof of this proposition can easily be read in history: it is written there in awful clarity. If we have just become acquainted with a religious legislation whose aim it was to “eternalize” the highest condition of life’s prospering, a great organization of society—Christianity found its mission in putting an end to precisely such an organization because life prospered in it. There the gains of reason, after a long period of experiments and uncertainty, were to be invested for the greatest longterm advantage and the harvest to be brought home as great, as ample, as complete as possible; here, conversely, the harvest was poisoned overnight. That which stood there aere perennius, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult circumstances which has yet been achieved, in comparison with which all before and all afterward are mere botch, patchwork, and dilettantism—these holy anarchists made it a matter of “piety” for themselves to destroy “the world,” that is, the imperium Romanum, until not one stone remained on the other, until even Teutons and other louts could become masters over it.

  The Christian and the anarchist: both decadents, both incapable of having any effect other than disintegrating, poisoning, withering, bloodsucking; both the instinct of mortal hatred against everything that stands, that stands in greatness, that has duration, that promises life a future. Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum: overnight it undid the tremendous deed of the Romans—who had won the ground for a great culture that would have time.

  Is it not understood yet? The imperium Romanum which we know, which the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better, this most admirable work of art in the grand style was a beginning; its construction was designed to prove itself through thousands of years: until today nobody has built again like this, nobody has even dreamed of building in such proportions sub specie aeterni. This organization was firm enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of persons may not have anything to do with such matters —first principle of all grand architecture. But it was not firm enough against the most corrupt kind of corruption, against the Christians.

  This stealthy vermin which sneaked up to every single one in the night, in fog and ambiguity, and sucked out of each single one the seriousness for true things and any instinct for realities—this cowardly, effeminate, and saccharine pack alienated “souls” step by step from that tremendous structure—those valuable, those virile, noble natures who found their own cause, their own seriousness, their own pride in the cause of Rome. The sneakiness of prigs, the conventicle secrecy, gloomy concepts like hell, like sacrifice of the guiltless, like unio mystica in drinking blood; above all, the slowly fanned fire of revenge, of chandala revenge—all that is what became master over Rome, the same kind of religion against which, in its pre-existent form, Epicurus already had waged war. One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but “Christianity,” by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation.

  And Epicurus would have won; every respectable spirit in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean. Then Paul appeared—Paul, the chandala hatred against Rome, against “the world,” become flesh, become genius, the Jew, the eternal Wandering Jew par excellence. What he guessed was how one could use the little sectarian Christian movement apart from Judaism to kindle a “world fire”; how with the symbol of “God on the cross” one could unite all who lay at the bottom, all who were secretly rebellious, the whole inheritance of anarchistic agitation in the Empire, into a tremendous power. “Salvation is of the Jews.” Christianity as a formula with which to outbid the subterranean cults of all kinds, those of Osiris, of the Great Mother, of Mithras, for example—and to unite them: in this insight lies the genius of Paul. His instinct was so sure in this that he took the ideas with which these chandala religions fascinated, and, with ruthless violence, he put them into the mouth of the "Savior” whom he had invented, and not only into his mouth—he made something out of him that a priest of Mithras too could understand.

  This was his moment at Damascus: he comprehended that he needed the belief in immortality to deprive “the world” of value, that the concept of “hell” would become master even over Rome—that with the "beyond” one kills life. Nihilism and Christianism: that rhymes, that does not only rhyme.

  59

  The whole labor of the ancient world in vain: I have no word to express my feelings about something so tremendous. And considering that its labor was a preliminary labor, that only the foundation for the labors of thousands of years had just then been laid with granite self-confidence—the whole meaning of the ancient world in vain! Wherefore Greeks? Wherefore Romans?

  All the presuppositions for a scholarly culture, all scientific methods, were already there; the great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been established—that presupposition for the tradition of culture, for the unity of science; natural science, allied with mathematics and mechanics, was well along on the best way—the sense for facts, the last and most valuable of all the senses, had its schools and its tradition of centuries. Is this understood? Everything essential had been found, so that the work could be begun: the methods, one must say it ten times, are what is essential, also what is most difficult, also what is for the longest time opposed by habits and laziness. What we today have again conquered with immeasurable self-mastery —for each of us still has the bad instincts, the Christian ones, in his system—the free eye before reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest matters, the whole integrity in knowledge—that had already been there once before! More than two thousand years ago! And, in addition, the good, the delicate sense of tact and taste. Not as brain drill! Not as “German” education with loutish manners! But as body, as gesture, as instinct—as reality, in short. All in vain! Overnight nothing but a memory!

  Greeks! Romans! The nobility of instinct, the taste, the methodical research, the genius of organization and administration, the faith in, the will to, man’s future, the great Yes to all things, become visible in the imperium Romanum, visible for all the senses, the grand style no longer mere art but become reality, truth, life. And not buried overnight by a natural catastrophe, not trampled down by Teutons and other buffaloes, but ruined by cunning, stealthy, invisible, anemic vampires. Not vanquished—merely drained. Hidden vengefulness, petty envy become master. Everything miserable that suffers from itself, that is afflicted with bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul on top all at once.

  One need only read any Christian agitator, St. Augustine, for example, to comprehend, to smell, what an unclean lot had thus come to the top. One would deceive oneself utterly if one presupposed any lack of intelligence among the leaders of the Christian movement: oh, they are clever, clever to the point of holiness, these good church fathers! What they lack is something quite different. Nature has neglected them—she forgot to give them a modest dowry of respectable, of decent, of clean instincts. Among ourselves, they are not even men. Islam is a thousand times right in despising Christianity: Islam presupposes men.

  60

  Christianity has cheated us out of the harvest of ancient culture; later it cheated us again, out of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful world of the Moorish culture of Spain, really more closely related to us, more congenial to our senses and tastes than Rome and Greece, was trampled down (I do not say by what kind of feet). Why? Because it owed its origin to noble, to male instincts, because it said Yes to life even with the rare and refined luxuries of Moorish life.

  Later the crusaders fought something before which they might more properly have prostrated themsel
ves in the dust—a culture compared to which even our nineteenth century might well feel very poor, very "late.” To be sure, they wanted loot; the Orient was rich. One should not be so prejudiced. Crusades—higher piracy, nothing else! The German nobility, Viking nobility at bottom, was in its proper element here: the church knew only too well what it takes to get the German nobility. The German nobility, always the “Swiss Guards” of the church, always in the service of all the bad instincts of the church—but well paid. That the church should have used German swords, German blood and courage, to wage its war unto death against everything noble on earth! There are many painful questions at this point. The German nobility is almost missing in the history of higher culture: one guesses the reason—Christianity, alcohol, the two great means of corruption.

  Really there should not be any choice between Islam and Christianity, any more than between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is given; nobody is free to make any further choice. Either one is a chandala, or one is not. “War to the knife against Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam”—thus felt, thus acted, that great free spirit, the genius among German emperors, Frederick II. How? Must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, to have decent feelings? I do not understand how a German could ever have Christian feelings.

  61

  Here it becomes necessary to touch on a memory which is even a hundred times more painful for Germans. The Germans have cheated Europe out of the last great cultural harvest which Europe could still have brought home—that of the Renaissance. Does one understand at last, does one want to understand, what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of Christian values, the attempt, undertaken with every means, with every instinct, with all genius, to bring the countervalues, the noble values to victory.

  So far there has been only this one great war, so far there has been no more decisive question than that of the Renaissance—my question is its question—nor has there ever been a more fundamental, a straighter form of attack in which the whole front was led more strictly against the center. Attacking in the decisive place, in the very seat of Christianity, placing the noble values on the throne here, I mean, bringing them right into the instincts, into the lowest needs and desires of those who sat there!

  I envisage a possibility of a perfectly supraterrestrial magic and fascination of color: it seems to me that it glistens in all the tremors of subtle beauty, that an art is at work in it, so divine, so devilishly divine that one searches millennia in vain for a second such possibility; I envisage a spectacle so ingenious, so wonderfully paradoxical at the same time, that all the deities on Olympus would have had occasion for immortal laughter: Cesare Borgia as pope. Am I understood? Well then, that would have been the victory which alone I crave today: with that, Christianity would have been abolished.

  What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of a shipwrecked priest in his system, was outraged in Rome —against the Renaissance. Instead of understanding, with the most profound gratitude, the tremendous event that had happened here, the overcoming of Christianity in its very seat, his hatred understood only how to derive its own nourishment from this spectacle. A religious person thinks only of himself.

  Luther saw the corruption of the papacy when precisely the opposite was more than obvious: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity no longer sat on the papal throne. But life! But the triumph of life! But the great Yes to all high, beautiful, audacious things! And Luther restored the church: he attacked it.

  The Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great in vain. Oh, these Germans, what they have cost us already! In vain—that has always been the doing of the Germans. The Reformation, Leibniz, Kant and so-called German philosophy, the Wars of “Liberation,” the Reich —each time an in vain for something that had already been attained, for something irrevocable.

  They are my enemies, I confess it, these Germans: I despise in them every kind of conceptual and valuational uncleanliness, of cowardice before every honest Yes and No. For almost a thousand years they have messed up and confused everything they touched with their fingers; they have on their conscience everything half-hearted—three-eighths-hearted!—of which Europe is sick; they also have on their conscience the most unclean kind of Christianity that there is, the most incurable, the most irrefutable: Protestantism. If we do not get rid of Christianity, it will be the fault of the Germans.

  62

  With this I am at the end and I pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had the will to the last corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! To abolish any distress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it created distress to eternalize itself.

  The worm of sin, for example: with this distress the church first enriched mankind. The “equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this pretext for the rancor of all the base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society—is Christian dynamite. “Humanitarian” blessings of Christianity! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to lie at any price, a repugnance, a contempt for all good and honest instincts! Those are some of the blessings of Christianity!

  Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anemia, of “holiness,” draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed— against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself.

  This eternal indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls—I have letters to make even the blind see.

  I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

  And time is reckoned from the dies nefastus with which this calamity began—after the first day of Christianity! Why not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!

  ECCE HOME

  FROM Ecce Homo

  HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  No sooner had Nietzsche finished The Antichrist than he wrote the preface to Twilight of the Idols—in fact, on the same day. Then, instead of going to work on the second book of the Revaluation, tentatively entitled “The Free Spirit: A Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement,” he wrote Ecce Homo, an incomparably sarcastic review of his life and works, including sections on all of his books, except The Antichrist, which he now thought of holding back until Ecce Homo had prepared the public for it.

  Ecce Homo consists of four chapters: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am a Destiny.” Of the following selections, the first three are from sections 1, 5, and 7, respectively, of the first chapter; the bit on Heine is from section 4 of the second chapter; and the epigram on immortality is from the discussion of Zarathustra in the third chapter. The final sentence is from the third section of the last chapter.

  The perfect lightness and levity, even exuberance of the spirit, which The Dawn reflects, are quite compatible in my case not only with the deepest physiological weakness, but even with excessive pain. Amid the tortures that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine and agonizing phlegm-wretching, I possessed a dialectician’s clarity par excellence, and very coldbloodedly thought through matters for which, in healthier states, I am not enough of
a climber, not subtle, not cold enough. Perhaps my readers know in what way I consider dialectics a symptom of decadence; for example, in the most famous case of all: in the case of Socrates.

  All sickly disturbances of the intellect, even that half-dazed state which follows a fever, are to this day complete strangers to me, and to instruct myself concerning their nature and frequency I have had to turn to scholars. My blood circulates slowly. Nobody has ever found me feverish. A physician who treated me as a nervous case for a while said in the end, "No! It is not a matter of your nerves; it is I who am nervous.” Any local degeneration is altogether indemonstrable; nor is there any organic disease of the stomach, though, as a consequence of over-all exhaustion, the gastric system is as weak as possible. My eye trouble too, which at times comes dangerously close to blindness, is only a consequence, not a cause; thus my vision has always improved again with every gain in vitality.

  A long, all-too-long series of years signifies my convalescence; unfortunately, it also signifies relapse, ruin, and the periodic rhythm of a kind of decadence. Need I say after all this that I am experienced in questions of decadence? I have spelled them forward and backward. Even that filigree art of clasping and grasping in general, those fingers for nuances, that psychology which knows how to look around corners, and whatever else is characteristic of me, were learned only then, are the real gift of that time in which everything in me became more delicate: observation itself as well as all the organs of observation. To see healthier concepts and values in the perspective of the sick, and conversely, to look down out of the abundance and self-assurance of a rich life to behold the secret doings of the instinct of decadence —in this I have had the longest training, my most characteristic experience: here, if anywhere, I became a master. Now this gift is mine, now I have the gift of reversing perspectives: the first reason why it is perhaps for me alone that a “revaluation of values” is at all possible today.