what the word Dionysus signifies: I know of no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian phenomenon. In it the profoundest instinct of life, the instinct that guarantees the future of life and life eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life itself, procreation, is pronounced _holy,_...It was only Christianity which, with its fundamental resentment against life, made something impure out of sexuality: it flung _filth_ at the very basis, the very first condition of our life.
5 The psychology of orgiasm conceived as the feeling of a superabundance of vitality and strength, within the scope of which even pain _acts as a stimulus,_ gave me the key to the concept _tragic_ feeling, which has been misunderstood not only by Aristotle, but also even more by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything in regard to the pessimism of the Greeks, as Schopenhauer maintains, that it ought rather to be considered as the categorical repudiation and _condemnation_ thereof. The saying of Yea to life, including even its most strange and most terrible problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibleness in the _sacrifice_ of its highest types—this is what I called Dionysian, this is what I divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of the _tragic_ poet.
Not in order to escape from terror and pity, not to purify one’s self of a dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence—this is how Aristotle understood it—but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself—that lust which also involves the _lust of destruction._ And with this I once more come into touch with the spot from which I once set out—-the “Birth of Tragedy” was my first transvaluation of all values: with this I again take my stand upon the soil from out of which my will and my capacity spring—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,—I, the prophet of eternal recurrence.
THE END.
THE HAMMER SPEAKETH “Why so hard!”—said the diamond once unto the charcoal; “are we then not next of kin?”
“Why so soft? O my brethren; this is my question to you. For are ye not—my brothers?
“Why so soft, so servile and yielding? Why are your hearts so fond of denial and self-denial? How is it that so little fate looketh out from your eyes?
“And if ye will not be men of fate and inexorable, how can ye hope one day to conquer with me?
“And if your hardness will not sparkle, cut and divide, how can ye hope one day to create with me?
“For all creators are hard. And it must seem to you blessed to stamp your hand upon millenniums as upon wax,— —Blessed to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass,—harder than brass, nobler than brass.—Hard through and through is only the noblest.
This new table of values, O my brethren, I set over your heads: Become hard.”
III., 29.
THE ANTICHRIST An Attempted Criticism of Christianity PREFACE This book belongs to the very few. Maybe not one of them is yet alive; unless he be of those who understand my Zarathustra. How _can_ I confound myself with those who to-day already find a hearing?—Only the day after to-morrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.
I am only too well aware of the conditions under which a man understands me, and then _necessarily_ understands. He must be intellectually upright to the point of hardness, in order even to endure my seriousness and my passion. He must be used to living on mountain-tops,—and to feeling the wretched gabble of politics and national egotism _beneath_ him. He must have become indifferent; he must never inquire whether truth is profitable or whether it may prove fatal...Possessing from strength a predilection for questions for which no one has enough courage nowadays; the courage for the _forbidden;_ his predestination must be the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most remote things. A new conscience for truths which hitherto have remained dumb. And the will to economy on a large scale: to husband his strength and his enthusiasm...He must honour himself, he must love himself; he must be absolutely free with regard to himself...Very well then! Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers: of what account are the rest?—the rest are simply—humanity.—One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
1 Let us look each other in the face. We are hyperboreans,—we know well enough how far outside the crowd we stand. “Thou wilt find the way to the Hyperboreans neither by land nor by water”: Pindar already knew this much about us. Beyond the north, the ice, and death—_our life, our happiness..._ We discovered happiness; we know the way; we found the way out of thousands of years of labyrinth. Who _else_ would have found it?—Not the modern man, surely?—“I do not know where I am or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,”—sighs the modern man. We were made quite ill by _this_ modernity,—with its indolent peace, its cowardly compromise, and the whole of the virtuous filth of its Yea and Nay. This tolerance and _largeur de cœur_ which “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything, is a Sirocco for us. We prefer to live amid ice than to be breathed upon by modern virtues and other southerly winds!...We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others: but we were very far from knowing whither to direct our bravery. We were becoming gloomy; people called us fatalists. _Our_ fate—it was the abundance, the tension and the storing up of power. We thirsted for thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most respectful distance from the joy of the weakling, from “resignation.”...Thunder was in our air, that part of nature which we are, became overcast—_for we had no direction._ The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.
2 What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power is _increasing,_—that resistance has been overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency[1] (virtue in the Renaissance sense, _virtu,_ free from all moralic acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity. And they ought even to be helped to perish.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy with all the botched and the weak—Christianity.
3 The problem I set in this work is not what will replace mankind in the order of living being! (—Man is an _end_—); but, what type of man must be _reared,_ must be _willed,_ as having the higher value, as being the most worthy of life and the surest guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough already: but as a happy accident, as an exception, never as _willed._ He has rather been precisely the most feared; hitherto he has been almost the terrible in itself;—and from out the very fear he provoked there arose the will to rear the type which has how been reared, _attained:_ the domestic animal, the gregarious animal, the sick animal man,—the Christian.
4 Mankind does _not_ represent a development towards a better, stronger or higher type, in the sense in which this is supposed to occur to-day.
“Progress” is merely a modern idea—that is to say, a false idea.[2] The modern European is still far below the European of the Renaissance in value. The process of evolution does not by any means imply elevation, enhancement and increasing strength.
On the other hand isolated and individual cases are continually succeeding in different places on earth, as the outcome of the most different cultures, and in these a _higher type_ certainly manifests itself: something which by the side of mankind in general, represents a kind of superman. Such lucky strokes of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. And even whole races, tribes and nations may in certain circumstances represent such _lucky strokes._ 5 We must not deck out and adorn Christianity: it has waged a deadly war upon this _higher_ type of man, it has set a ban upon all the fundamental instincts of this type, and has distilled evil and the devil himself out of these instincts:—the strong man as the typical pariah, the villain. Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of _antagonism_ towards all the self-preservative instincts of strong life: it has corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects, by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality are sinful, misleading and full of temptations.
The most lamentable example of this was the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the perversion of his reason through original sin, whereas it had only been perverted by his Christianity.
6 A painful and ghastly spectacle has just risen before my eyes. I tore down the curtain which concealed mankind’s _corruption._ This word in my mouth is at least secure from the suspicion that it contains a moral charge against mankind. It is—I would fain emphasise this again—free from moralic acid: to such an extent is this so, that I am most thoroughly conscious of the corruption in question precisely in those quarters in which hitherto people have aspired with most determination to “virtue” and to “godliness.” As you have already surmised, I understand corruption in the sense of _decadence._ What I maintain is this, that all the values upon which mankind builds its highest hopes and desires are _decadent_ values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it selects and _prefers_ that which is detrimental to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” of “human ideals”—and it is not impossible that I shall have to write it—would almost explain why man is so corrupt. Life itself, to my mind, is nothing more nor less than the instinct of growth, of permanence, of accumulating forces, of power: where the will to power is lacking, degeneration sets in.
My contention is that all the highest values of mankind _lack_ this will,—that the values of decline and of _nihilism_ are exercising the sovereign power under the cover of the holiest names.
7 Christianity is called the religion of _pity._—Pity is opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: its action is depressing. A man loses power when he pities. By means of pity the drain on strength which suffering itself already introduces into the world is multiplied a thousandfold. Through pity, suffering itself becomes infectious; in certain circumstances it may lead to a total loss of life and vital energy, which is absurdly put of proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first standpoint; but there is a still more important one. Supposing one measures pity according to the value of the reactions it usually stimulates, its danger to life appears in a much more telling light On the whole, pity thwarts the law of development which is the law of selection. It preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in favour of the disinherited and the condemned of life; thanks to the multitude of abortions of all kinds which it maintains in life, it lends life itself a sombre and questionable aspect. People have dared to call pity a virtue (—in every _noble_ culture it is considered as a weakness—); people went still further, they exalted it to _the_ virtue, the root and origin of all virtues,—but, of course, what must never be forgotten is the fact that this was done from the standpoint of a philosophy which was nihilistic, and on whose shield the device _The Denial of Life_ was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this respect: by means of pity, life is denied and made _more worthy of denial,_—pity is the _praxis_ of Nihilism. I repeat, this depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value life: by _multiplying_ misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,—pity exhorts people to nothing, to _nonentity!_ But they do not say “_nonentity_” they say “Beyond,” or “God,” or “the true life”; or Nirvana, or Salvation, or Blessedness, instead. This innocent rhetoric, which belongs to the realm of the religio-moral idiosyncrasy, immediately appears to be _very much less innocent_ if one realises what the tendency is which here tries to drape itself in the mantle of sublime expressions—the tendency of hostility to life.
Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why he elevated pity to a virtue...Aristotle, as you know, recognised in pity a morbid and dangerous state, of which it was wise to rid one’s self from time to time by a purgative: he regarded tragedy as a purgative. For the sake of the instinct of life, it would certainly seem necessary to find some means of lancing any such morbid and dangerous accumulation of pity, as that which possessed Schopenhauer (and unfortunately the whole of our literary and artistic decadence as well, from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), if only to make it _burst..._ Nothing is more unhealthy in the midst of our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be doctors _here,_ to be inexorable _here,_ to wield the knife effectively _here,—_ all this is our business, all this is _our_ kind of love to our fellows, this is what makes _us_ philosophers, us hyperboreans!— 8 It is necessary to state whom we regard as our antithesis:—the theologians, and all those who have the blood of theologians in their veins—the whole of our philosophy...A man must have had his very nose upon this fatality, or better still he must have experienced it in his own soul; he must almost have perished through it, in order to be unable to treat this matter lightly (—the free-spiritedness of our friends the naturalists and physiologists is, in my opinion, a _joke,_—what they lack in these questions is passion, what they lack is having suffered from these questions—). This poisoning extends much further than people think: I unearthed the “arrogant” instinct of the theologian, wherever nowadays people feel themselves idealists,—wherever, thanks to superior antecedents, they claim the right to rise above reality and to regard it with suspicion...Like the priest the idealist has every grandiloquent concept in his hand (—and not only in his hand!), he wields them all with kindly contempt “science”; he regards such things as _beneath_ him, as detrimental and seductive forces, upon the face of which, “the Spirit” moves in pure absoluteness:—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word _holiness,_ had not done incalculably more harm to life hitherto, than any sort of horror and vice...Pure spirit is pure falsehood...As long as the priest, the _professional_ denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is considered as the _highest_ kind of man, there can be no answer to the question, what _is_ truth? Truth has already been turned topsy-turvy, when the conscious advocate of nonentity and of denial passes as the representative of “truth.”
9 It is upon this theological instinct that I wage war. I find traces of it everywhere. Whoever has the blood of theologians in his veins, stands from the start in a false and dishonest position to all things.
The pathos which grows out of this state, is called _Faith:_ that is to say, to shut one’s eyes once and for all, in order not to suffer at the sight of incurable falsity. People convert this faulty view of all things into a moral, a virtue, a thing of holiness. They endow their distorted vision with a good conscience,—they claim that no _other_ point of view is any longer of value, once theirs has been made sacrosanct with the names “God,” “Salvation,” “Eternity.” I unearthed the instinct of the theologian everywhere: it is the most universal, and actually the most subterranean form of falsity on earth.
That which a theologian considers true, _must_ of necessity be false: this furnishes almost the criterion of truth. It is his most profound self-preservative instinct which forbids reality ever to attain to honour in any way, or even to raise its voice. Whithersoever the influence of the theologian extends, _valuations_ are topsy-turvy, and the concepts “true” and “false” have necessarily changed places: that which is most deleterious to life, is here called “true,” that which enhances it, elevates it, says Yea to it, justifies it and renders it triumphant, is called “false.”...If it should happen that theologians, _via_ the “conscience” either of princes or of the people, stretch out their hand for power, let us not be in any doubt as to what results therefrom each time, namely:—the will to the end, the _nihilistic_ will to power...10 Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say, that philosophy is ruined by the blood of theologians. The Protestant minister is the grand-father of German philosophy, Protestantism itself is the latter’s _peccatum originale._ Definition of Protestantism: the partial paralysis of Christianity—and of reason...One needs only to pronounce the words “Tübingen Seminary,” in order to understand what German philosophy really is at bottom, theology _in disguise_...The Swabians are the best liars in Germany, they lie innocently...Whence came all the rejoicing with which the appearance of Kant was greeted by the scholastic world of Germany, three-quarters of which consist of clergymen’s and schoolmasters’ sons? Whence came the German conviction, which finds an echo even now, that Kant inaugurated a change for the _better?_ The theologian’s instinct in the German scholar divined what had once again been made possible...A back-staircase leading into the old ideal was discovered, the concept “true world,” the concept morality as the _essence_ of the world (—those two most vicious errors that have ever existed!), were, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, once again, if not demonstrable, at least no longer _refutable..._ Reason, the _prerogative_ of reason, does not extend so far...Out of reality they had made “appearance”; and an absolutely false world—that of being—had been declared to be reality. Kant’s success is merely a theologian’s success. Like Luther, and like Leibniz, Kant was one brake the more upon the already squeaky wheel of German uprightness.
11 One word more against Kant as a _moralist._ A virtue _must_ be _our_ invention, our most personal defence and need: in every other sense it is merely a danger. That which does not constitute a condition of our life, is merely harmful to it: to possess a virtue merely because one happens to respect the concept “virtue,” as Kant would have us do, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “Duty,” “Goodness in itself,” goodness stamped with the character of impersonality and universal validity—these things are mere mental hallucinations, in which decline the final devitalisation of life and Königsbergian Chinadom find expression. The most fundamental laws of preservation and growth, demand precisely the reverse, namely:—that each should discover _his_ own virtue, his own Categorical Imperative. A nation goes to the dogs when it confounds its concept of duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing is more profoundly, more thoroughly pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.—Fancy no one’s having thought Kant’s Categorical Imperative _dangerous to life!_...The instinct of the theologist alone took it under its wing!—An action stimulated by the instinct of life, is proved to be a proper action by the happiness that accompanies it: and that nihilist with the bowels of a Christian dogmatist regarded happiness as an _objection..._. What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, think, feel, as an automaton of “duty,” without internal promptings, without a profound personal predilection, without joy? This is the recipe _par excellence_ of decadence and even of idiocy...Kant became an idiot—And he was the contemporary of Goethe! This fatal spider was regarded as _the_ German philosopher,—is still regarded as such!...I refrain from saying what I think of the Germans...Did Kant not see in the French Revolution the transition of the State from the inorganic to the _organic_ form? Did he not ask himself whether there was a single event on record which could be explained otherwise than as a moral faculty of mankind; so that by means of it, “mankind’s tendency towards good,” might be _proved_ once and for all? Kant’s reply: “that is the Revolution.” Instinct at fault in anything and everything, hostility to nature as an instinct, German decadence made into philosophy_—that is Kant!_ 12 Except for a few sceptics, the respectable type in the history of philosophy, the rest do not know the very first pre-requisite of intellectual uprightness. They all behave like females, do these great enthusiasts and animal prodigies,—they regard “beautiful feelings” themselves as arguments, the “heaving breast” as the bellows of divinity, and conviction as the _criterion_ of truth. In the end, even Kant, with “Teutonic” innocence, tried to dress this lack of intellectual conscience up in a scientific garb by means of the concept “practical reason.” He deliberately invented a kind of reason which at times would allow one to dispense with reason, that is to say when “morality,” when the sublime command “thou shalt,” makes itself heard.
When one remembers that in almost all nations the philosopher is only a further development of the priestly type, this heirloom of priesthood, this _fraud towards one’s self,_ no longer surprises one. When a man has a holy life-task, as for instance to improve, save, or deliver mankind, when a man bears God in his breast, and is the mouthpiece of imperatives from another world,—with such a mission he stands beyond the pale of all merely reasonable valuations. He is even sanctified by such a taste, and is already the type of a higher order! What does a priest care about science! He stands too high for that!—And until now the priest has _ruled!_—He it was who determined the concept “true and false.”
13 Do not let us undervalue the fact that we _ourselves,_ we free spirits, are already a “transvaluation of all values,” an incarnate declaration of war against all the old concepts “true” and “untrue” and of a triumph over them. The most valuable standpoints are always the last to be found: but the most valuable standpoints are the methods. AH the methods and the first principles of our modern scientific procedure, had for years to encounter the profoundest contempt: association with them meant exclusion from the society of decent people—one was regarded as an “enemy of God,” as a scoffer at truth and as “one possessed.” With one’s scientific nature, one belonged to the Chandala.
We have had the whole feeling of mankind against us; hitherto their notion of that which ought to be truth, of that which ought to serve the purpose of truth: every “thou shalt,” has been directed against us...Our objects, our practices, our calm, cautious distrustful manner—everything about us seemed to them absolutely despicable and beneath contempt After all, it might be asked with some justice, whether the thing which kept mankind blindfold so long, were not an æsthetic taste: what they demanded of truth was a _picturesque_ effect, and from the man of science what they expected was that he should make a forcible appeal to their senses. It was our _modesty_ which ran counter to their taste so long...And oh! how well they guessed this, did these divine turkey-cocks!— 14 We have altered our standpoint. In every respect we have become more modest We no longer derive man from the “spirit,” and from the “godhead”; we have thrust him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest animal, because he is the craftiest: one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand we guard against the vain pretension, which even here would fain assert itself: that man is the great _arrière pensée_ of organic evolution! He is by no means the crown of creation, beside him, every other creature stands at the same stage of perfection...And even in asserting this we go a little too far; for, relatively speaking, man is the most botched and diseased of animals, and he has wandered furthest from his instincts. Be all this as it may, he is certainly the most _interesting!_ As regards animals, Descartes was the first, with really admirable daring, to venture the thought that the beast was _machina,_ and the whole of our physiology is endeavouring to prove this proposition. Moreover, logically we do not set man apart, as Descartes did: the extent to which man is understood to-day goes only so far as he has been understood mechanistically. Formerly man was given “free will,” as his dowry from a higher sphere; nowadays we have robbed him even of will, in view of the fact that no such faculty is any longer known. The only purpose served by the old word “will,” is to designate a result, a sort of individual reaction which necessarily follows upon a host of partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli:—the will no longer “effects” or “moves” anything...Formerly people thought that man’s consciousness, his “spirit,” was a proof of his lofty origin, of his divinity. With the idea of perfecting man, he was conjured to draw his senses inside himself, after the manner of the tortoise, to cut off all relations with terrestrial things, and to divest himself of his mortal shell. Then the most important thing about him, the “pure spirit,” would remain over. Even concerning these things we have improved our standpoint Consciousness, “spirit,” now seems to us rather a symptom of relative imperfection in the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misapprehension, an affliction which absorbs an unnecessary quantity of nervous energy. We deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. “Pure spirit” is a piece of “pure stupidity”: if we discount the nervous system, the senses and the “mortal shell,” we have miscalculated—that it is all!...15 In Christianity neither morality nor religion comes in touch at all with reality. Nothing but imaginary _causes_ (God, the soul, the ego, spirit, free will—or even non-free will); nothing but imaginary _effects_ (sin, salvation, grace, punishment, forgiveness of sins).
Imaginary beings are supposed to have intercourse (God, spirits, souls); imaginary Natural History (anthropocentric: total lack of the notion “natural causes”); an imaginary _psychology_ (nothing but misunderstandings of self, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings; for instance of the states of the _nervus sympathicus,_ with the help of the sign language of a religio-moral idiosyncrasy,—repentance, pangs of conscience, the temptation of the devil, the presence of God); an imaginary teleology (the Kingdom of God, the Last Judgment, Everlasting Life).—This purely fictitious world distinguishes itself very unfavourably from the world of dreams: the latter _reflects_ reality, whereas the former falsifies, depreciates and denies it Once the concept “nature” was taken to mean the opposite of the concept God, the word “natural” had to acquire the meaning of abominable,—the whole of that fictitious world takes its root in the hatred of nature (—reality!—), it is the expression of profound discomfiture in the presence of reality..._But this explains everything._ What is the only kind of man who has reasons for wriggling out of reality by lies? The man who suffers from reality. But in order to suffer from reality one must be a bungled portion of it. The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the _cause_ of that fictitious morality and religion: but any such preponderance furnishes the formula for decadence.
16 A criticism of the Christian concept of God inevitably leads to the same conclusion.—A nation that still believes in itself, also has its own God. In him it honours the conditions which enable it to remain uppermost,—that is to say, its virtues. It projects its joy over itself, its feeling of power, into a being, to whom it can be thankful for such things. He who is rich, will give of his riches: a proud people requires a God, unto whom it can _sacrifice_ things...Religion, when restricted to these principles, is a form of gratitude.
A man is grateful for his own existence; for this he must have a God.—Such a God must be able to benefit and to injure him, he must be able to act the friend and the foe. He must be esteemed for his good as well as for his evil qualities. The monstrous castration of a God by making him a God only of goodness, would lie beyond the pale of the desires of such a community. The evil God is just as urgently needed as the good God: for a people in such a form of society certainly does not owe its existence to toleration and humaneness...What would be the good of a God who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, craft, and violence?—who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous _ardeurs_ of victory and of annihilation? No one would understand such a God: why should one possess him?—Of course, when a people is on the road to ruin; when it feels its belief in a future, its hope of freedom vanishing for ever; when it becomes conscious of submission as the most useful quality, and of the virtues of the submissive as self-preservative measures, then its God must also modify himself.
He then becomes a tremulous and unassuming sneak; he counsels “peace of the soul,” the cessation of all hatred, leniency and “love” even towards friend and foe. He is for ever moralising, he crawls into the heart of every private virtue, becomes a God for everybody, he retires from active service and becomes a Cosmopolitan...Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and desirous of power lying concealed in the heart of a nation: now he is merely the good God...In very truth Gods have no other alternative, they are _either_ the Will to Power—in which case they are always the Gods of whole nations,—or, on the other hand, the incapacity for power—in which case they necessarily become good.
17 Wherever the Will to Power, no matter in what form, begins to decline, a physiological retrogression, decadence, always supervenes. The godhead of _decadence,_ shorn of its masculine virtues and passions is perforce converted into the God of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course they do not call themselves the weak, they call themselves “the good.”...No hint will be necessary to help you to understand at what moment in history the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil God first became possible. With the same instinct by which the subjugated reduce their God to “Goodness in itself,” they also cancel the good qualities from their conqueror’s God; they avenge themselves on their masters by diabolising the latter’s God.—The _good God_ and the devil as well:—both the abortions of decadence.—How is it possible that we are still so indulgent towards the simplicity of Christian theologians to-day, as to declare with them that the evolution of the concept God, from the “God of Israel,” the God of a people, to the Christian God, the quintessence of all goodness, marks a _step forward?_—But even Renan does this. As if Renan had a right to simplicity! Why the very contrary stares one in the face.
When the pre-requisites of _ascending_ life, when everything strong, plucky, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of God, and step by step he has sunk down to the symbol of a staff for the weary, of a last straw for all those who are drowning; when he becomes the pauper’s God, the sinner’s God, the sick man’s God _par excellence,_ and the attribute “Saviour,” “Redeemer,” remains _over_ as the one essential attribute of divinity: what does such a metamorphosis, such an abasement of the godhead imply?—Undoubtedly, “the kingdom of God” has thus become larger. Formerly all he had was his people, his “chosen” people. Since then he has gone travelling over foreign lands, just as his people have done; since then he has never rested anywhere: until one day he felt at home everywhere, the Great Cosmopolitan,—until he got the “greatest number,” and half the world on his side. But the God of the “greatest number,” the democrat among gods, did not become a proud heathen god notwithstanding: he remained a Jew, he remained the God of the back streets, the God of all dark corners and hovels, of all the unwholesome quarters of the world!...His universal empire is now as ever a netherworld empire, an infirmary, a subterranean empire, a ghetto-empire...And he himself is so pale, so weak, so decadent...Even the palest of the pale were able to master him—our friends the metaphysicians, those albinos of thought. They spun their webs around him so long that ultimately he was hypnotised by their movements and himself became a spider, a metaphysician. Thenceforward he once more began spinning the world out of his inner being—_sub specie Spinozæ,_—thenceforward he transfigured himself into something ever thinner and ever more anæmic, became “ideal,” became “pure spirit,” became _“absotutum”_ and “thing-in-itself.”..._The decline and fall of a god:_ God became the “thing-in-itself.”
18 The Christian concept of God—God as the deity of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that has ever been attained on earth. Maybe it represents the low-water mark in the evolutionary ebb of the godlike type God degenerated into the _contradiction of life,_ instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! With God war is declared on life, nature, and the will to life! God is the formula for every calumny of this world and for every lie concerning a beyond! In God, nonentity is deified, and the will to nonentity is declared holy!
19 The fact that the strong races of Northern Europe did not repudiate the Christian God, certainly does not do any credit to their religious power, not to speak of their taste They ought to have been able successfully to cope with such a morbid and decrepit offshoot of decadence. And a curse lies on their heads; because they were unable to cope with him: they made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part of all their instincts,—since then they have not _created_ any other God! Two thousand years have passed and not a single new God! But still there exists, and as if by right,—like an _ultimum_ and _maximum_ of god-creating power,—the _creator spiritus_ in man, this miserable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid creature of decay, nonentity, concept and contradiction, in which all the instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and languors of the soul find their sanction!—— 20 With my condemnation of Christianity I should not like to have done