only creator of all transformations; (5) Truth as given, revealed, and identical with the teaching of the priests: as the condition to all salvation and happiness in this and the next world. In short: what is the price paid for the improve- ment supposed to be due to morality? The unhinging of reason, the reduction of all motives to fear and hope (punishment and reward); dependence upon the tutelage of priests, and upon a formulary exactitude which is supposed to express a divine will; the implantation of a " conscience " which establishes a false science in the place of experience and experiment: as though all one had to do or had not to do were predetermined a kind of contraction of the seeking and striving spirit; in short: the worst mutilation of man that can be imagined, and it is pretended that " the good man " is the result. Practically speaking, all reason, the whole heri tage of intelligence, subtlety, and caution, the first condition of the priestly canon, is arbitrarily re duced, when it is too late, to a simple mechanical process: conformity with the law becomes a pur pose in itself, it is the highest purpose; Life no longer contains any problems; the whole conception of the world is polluted by the notion of punish ment; Life itself, owing to the fact that the priesfs life is upheld as the non plus ultra of perfection, is transformed into a denial and pol lution of life; the concept " God " represents an aversion to Life, and even a criticism and a con temning of it. Truth is transformed in the mind, into priestly prevarication; the striving after truth, into the study of the Scriptures into the way to become a theologian..
142. A criticism of the Law-Book of Manu. The whole book is founded upon the holy lie. Was it the well-being of humanity that inspired the whole of this system? Was this kind of man, who believes in the interested nature of every action, interested or not interested in the success of this system? The desire to improve mankind whence comes the inspiration to this feeling? Whence is the concept improvement taken? We find a class of men, the sacerdotal class, who consider themselves the standard pattern, the highest example and most perfect expression of the type man. The notion of " improving " mankind, to this class of men, means to make man kind like themselves. They believe in their own superiority, they will be superior in practice: the cause of the holy lie is The Will to Power...Establishment of the dominion: to this end, ideas which place a non plus ultra of power with the priesthood are made to prevail. Power ac quired by lying was the result of the recognition of the fact that it was not already possessed physically, in a military form...Lying as a supplement to power this is a new concept of " truth." It is a mistake to presuppose unconscious and innocent development in this quarter a sort of self-deception. Fanatics are not the discoverers of such exhaustive systems of oppression...Cold-blooded reflection must have been at work here; the same sort of reflection which Plato showed when he worked out his " State " " One must desire the means when one desires the end." Concerning this political maxim, all legislators have always been quite clear. We possess the classical model, and it is speci fically Arian: we can therefore hold the most gifted and most reflective type of man responsible for the most systematic lie that has ever been told...Everywhere almost the lie was copied, and thus Arian influence corrupted the world...
143. Much is said today about the Semitic spirit of the New Testament-, but the thing referred to is merely priestcraft, and in the purest example of an Arian law-book, in Manu, this kind of " Semitic spirit " that is to say, Sacerdotalism, is worse than anywhere else. The development of the Jewish hierarchy is not original: they learnt the scheme in Babylon it is Arian. When, later on, the same thing became dominant in Europe, under the preponderance of Germanic blood, this was in conformity to the spirit of the ruling race: a striking case of atavism. The Germanic middle ages aimed at a revival of the A rian order of castes. Mohammedanism in its turn learned from Christianity the use of a " Beyond " as an instru ment of punishment. The scheme of a permanent community, with priests at its head this oldest product of Asia s great culture in the domain of organization naturally provoked reflection and imitation in every way. Plato is an example of this, but above all, the Egyptians.
144. Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can modify men into whatever one 126 likes; provided one is possessed of an overflow of creative power, and can cause one s will to pre vail over long periods of time.
145. If one wish to see an affirmative Arian religion which is the product of a ruling class, one should read the law-book of Manu. (The deification of the feeling of power in the Brahmin: it is in teresting to note that it originated in the warrior- caste, and was later transferred to the priests.) If one wish to see an affirmative religion of the Semitic order, which is the product of the ruling class, one should read the Koran or the earlier portions of the Old Testament. (Mohammedan ism as a religion for men, has profound contempt for the sentimentality and prevarication of Christi anity,...which, according to Mohammedans, is a woman s religion.) If one wish to see a negative religion of the Semitic order, which is the product of the op pressed class, one should read the New Testament (which, according to Indian and Arian points of view, is a religion for the Chandala). If one wish to see a negative Arian religion, which is the product of the ruling classes, one should study Buddhism. It is quite in the nature of things that we have no Arian religion which is the product of the oppressed classes; for that would have been a contradiction: a race of masters is either para mount or else it goes to the dogs.
146. Religion, per se, has nothing to do with morality; yet both offshoots of the Jewish religion are essentially moral religions which prescribe the rules of living, and procure obedience to their principles by means of rewards and punishment.
147. Paganism Christianity. Paganism is that which says yea to all that is natural, it is innocence in being natural, " naturalness." Christianity is that which says no to all that is natural, it is a certain lack of dignity in being natural; hostility to Nature. " Innocent ": Petronius is innocent, for in stance. Beside this happy man a Christian is absolutely devoid of innocence. But since even the Christian status is ultimately only a natural condition, the term " Christian " soon begins to mean the counterfeiting of the psychological inter pretation.
148. The Christian priest is from the root a mortal enemy of sensuality: one cannot imagine a greater contrast to his attitude than the guileless, slightly awed, and solemn attitude, which the religious rites of the most honorable women in Athens maintained in the presence of the symbol of sex. In all non-ascetic religions the procreative act is the secret per se: a sort of symbol of perfection and of the designs of the future: re-birth, im mortality.
149. Our belief in ourselves is the greatest fetter, the most telling spur, and the strongest pinion. Christianity ought to have elevated the innocence of man to the position of an article of belief men would then have become gods: in those days believing was still possible.
150. The egregious lie of history: as if it were the corruption of Paganism that opened the road to Christianity. As a matter of fact, it was the enfeeblement and moralisation of the man of antiquity. The new interpretation of natural functions, which made them appear like vices, had already gone before!
151. Religions are ultimately wrecked by the belief in morality. The idea of the Christian moral God becomes untenable, hence " Atheism," as though there could be no other god. Culture is likewise wrecked by the belief in morality. For when the necessary and only possible conditions of its growth are revealed, nobody will any longer countenance it (Buddh ism).
152. The physiology of Nihilistic religions. All in all, the Nihilistic religions are systematized histories of sickness described in religious and moral ter- m in o logy. In pagan cultures it is around the interpretation of the great annual cycles that the religious cult turns; in Christianity it is around a cycle of paralytic phenomena.
153. This Nihilistic religion gathers together all the decadent elements and things of like order which it can find in antiquity, viz.: (a) The weak and the botched (the refuse of the ancient world, and that of which it rid itself with most violence). (b} Those who are morally obsessed and anti- pagan. (c) Those who are weary of politics and in different (the bias Romans), the denationalised, who know not what they are. (d) Those who are tired of themselves who are happy to be party to a subterranean conspiracy.
154. Buddha versus Christ. Among the Nihilistic religions, Christianity and Buddhism may always be sharply distinguished. Buddhism is the ex pression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and mild it is a sort of gratitude towards all that. I lies hidden, including that which it entirely lacks, viz., bitterness, disillusionment, and resent ment. Finally it possesses lofty intellectual love; it has got over all the subtlety of philosophical contradictions, and is even resting after it, though it is precisely from that source that it derives its intellectual glory and its glow as of a sunset (it originated in the higher classes). Christianity is a degenerative movement, con sisting of all kinds of decaying and excremental elements: it is not the expression of the downfall of a race, it is, from the root, an agglomeration of all the morbid elements which are mutually attractive and which gravitate to one another...It is therefore not a national religion, not determined by race: it appeals to the disinherited everywhere; it consists of a foundation of resent ment against all that is successful and dominant: it is in need of a symbol which represents the damnation of everything successful and dominant. It is opposed to every form of intellectual move ment, to all philosophy: it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, learned, intellectually independent: in all these it suspects the element of success and domination.
155. In Buddhism this thought prevails: " All passions, everything which creates emotions and leads to blood, is a call to action " to this extent alone are its believers warned against evil. For action has no sense, it merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irration- alism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror. For instance: " On no account seek after revenge! Be the enemy of no one! " The Hedonism of the weary finds its highest expression here. Nothing is more utterly foreign to Buddhism than the Jewish fanaticism of St. Paul: nothing could be more contrary to its instinct than the tension, fire, and unrest of the religious man, and, above all, that form of sensuality which sanctifies Christianity with the name " Love." Moreover, it is the cultured and very intellectual classes who find blessedness in Buddhism: a race wearied and besotted by centuries of philosophical quarrels, but not beneath all culture as those classes were from which Christianity sprang...In the Buddhistic ideal, there is essentially an emancipa tion from good and evil: a very subtle suggestion of a Beyond to all morality is thought out in its teaching, and this Beyond is supposed to be compatible with perfection, the condition being, that even good actions are only needed pro tern., merely as a means, that is to say, in order to be free from all action.
156. How very curious it is to see a Nihilistic religion such as Christianity, sprung from, and in keeping with, a decrepit and worn-out people, who have outlived all strong instincts, being transferred step by step to another environment that is to say, to a land of young people, who have not yet lived at all The joy of the final chapter, of the fold and of the evening, preached to barbarians and Germans! How thoroughly all of it must first have been barbarised, Germanised! To those who had dreamed of a Walhalla: who found happiness only in war! A -national religion preached in the midst of chaos, where no nations yet existed even.
157. The only way to refute priests and religions is this: to show that their errors are no longer beneficent -that they are rather harmful; in short, that their own " proof of power " no longer holds good...2. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
158. Christianity as an historical reality should not be confounded with that one root which its name recalls. The other roots, from which it has sprung, are by far the more important. It is an unprecedented abuse of names to identify such manifestations of decay and such abortions as the "Christian Church," "Christian belief," and "Christian life," with that Holy Name. What did Christ deny? Everything which today is called Christian.
159. The whole of the Christian creed all Christian " truth," is idle falsehood and deception, and is precisely the reverse of that which was at the bottom of the first Christian movement. All that which in the ecclesiastical sense is Christian, is just exactly what is most radically anti- Christian: crowds of things and people appear instead of symbols, history takes the place of eternal facts, it is all forms, rites, and dogmas instead of a " practice " of life. To be really Christian would mean to be absolutely indifferent to dogmas, cults, priests, church, and theology. The practice of Christianity is no more an im possible phantasy than the practice of Buddhism is: it is merely a means to happiness.
160. Jesus goes straight to the point, the " Kingdom of Heaven " in the heart, and He does not find the means in duty to the Jewish Church; He even regards the reality of Judaism (its need to maintain itself) as nothing; He is concerned purely with the inner man. Neither does He make anything of all the coarse forms relating to man s intercourse with God: He is opposed to the whole of the teaching of repentance and atonement; He points out how man ought to live in order to feel himself" deified," and how futile it is on his part to hope to live properly by showing repentance and contrition for his sins. " Sin is of no account " is practically his chief standpoint. Sin, repentance, forgiveness, all this does not belong to Christianity...it is Judaism or Paganism which has become mixed up with Christ s teaching.
161. The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of the heart (of children it is written, " for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven "): it has nothing to do with superterrestrial things. The Kingdom of God " cometh," not chronologically or historically, not on a certain day in the calendar; it is not something which one day appears and was not previously there; it is a " change of feeling in the individual," it is something which may come at any time and which may be absent at any time...
162. The thief on the cross; When the criminal him self, who endures a painful death, declares: " the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without a murmur of revolt or enmity, graciously and resignedly, is the only right way," he assents to the gospel; and by this very fact he is in Paradise...163. Jesus bids us: not to resist, either by deeds or in our heart, him who ill-treats us; He bids us admit of no grounds for separating ourselves from our wives; 135 He bids us make no distinction between foreigners and fellow-countrymen, strangers and familiars; He bids us show anger to no one, and treat no one with contempt; give alms secretly; not to desire to become rich; not to swear; not to stand in judgment; become reconciled with our enemies and forgive offences; not to worship in public. " Blessedness " is nothing promised: it is here, with us, if we only wish to live and act in a par ticular way.
164. Subsequent Additions; The whole of the prophet- and thaumaturgist-attitudes and the bad temper; while the conjuring-up of a supreme tribunal of justice is an abominable corruption (see Mark vi. 1 1: " And whosoever shall not receive you...Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha," etc.). The "fig tree" (Matt. xxi. 18, 19): "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee hence forward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away."
165. The teaching of rewards and punishments has become mixed up with Christianity in a way which is quite absurd; everything is thereby spoilt. I3 6 In the same way, the practice of the first ecclesia militant, of the Apostle Paul and his attitude, is put forward as if it had been commanded or pre- determined. The subsequent glorification of the actual life and teaching of the first Christians: as if every thing had been prescribed beforehand and had been only a matter of following directions And as for the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies: how much of all that is more than forgery and cooking?
166. Jesus opposed a real life, a life in truth, to ordinary life: nothing could have been more foreign to His mind than the somewhat heavy nonsense of an eternal Peter," of the eternal duration of a single person. Precisely what He combats is the exaggerated importance of the " person ": how can He wish to immortalise it? He likewise combats the hierarchy within the community; He never promises a certain propor tion of reward for a certain proportion of deserts: how can He have meant to teach the doctrine of punishment and reward in a Beyond?
167. Christianity is an ingenuous attempt at bringing about a Buddhistic movement in favour of peace, sprung from the very heart of the resenting masses...but transformed by Paul into a mysterious pagan cult, which was ultimately able to accord 137 with the whole of State organization...and which carries on war, condemns, tortures, conjures, and hates. Paul bases his teaching upon the need of mystery felt by the great masses capable of religious emotions: he seeks a victim a bloody phantasmagoria, which may be equal to a contest with the images of a secret cult: God on the cross, the drinking of blood, the unto mystica with the " victim." He seeks the prolongation of life after death (the blessed and atoned after-life of the individual soul) which he puts in causal relation with the victim already referred to (according to the type of Dionysos, Mithras, Osiris). He feels the necessity of bringing notions of guilt and sin into the foreground, not a new practice of life (as Jesus Himself demonstrated and taught), but a new cult,a newbelief,a beliefin a mira culous metamorphosis (" Salvation " through belief). He understood the great needs of the pagan world, and he gave quite an absolutely arbitrary picture of those two plain facts, Christ s life and death. He gave the whole a new accent, altering the equilibrium everywhere...he was one of the most active destroyers of primitive Christianity. The attempt made on the life of priests and theo logians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priest hood and theology a ruling caste and a Church. The attempt made to suppress the fussy im portance of the " person," culminated in the belief in the eternal " personality " (and in the anxiety concerning " eternal salvation "...), and in the 138 most paradoxical exaggeration of individual egoism. This is the humorous side of the question tragic humour: Paul again set up on a large scale precisely what Jesus had overthrown by His life. At last, when the Church edifice was complete, it even sanctioned the existence of the State.
168. The Church is precisely that against which Jesus inveighed and against which He taught His disciples to fight.
169. A God who died for our sins, salvation through faith, resurrection after death all these things are the counterfeit coins of real Christianity, for which that pernicious blockhead Paul must be held responsible. The life ivJiich must serve as an example consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and con tempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandon ment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual; 139 in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life. Once the Church had allowed itself to take over all the Christian practice, and had formally sanctioned the State, that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns, it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals that is to say, in the faith in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions " sin," " for giveness," " punishment," " reward " everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite absent from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground. An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc.
170. Christianity has, from the first, always trans formed the symbolical into crude realities: (1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into " life here " and " life beyond." (2) The notion " eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into " personal immortality "; (3) The process of fraternising by means of sharing the same food and drink, after the Hebrew- Arabian manner, is interpreted as the " miracle of transubstantiation." (4) " Resurrection " which was intended to 140 mean the entrance to the " true life," in the sense of being intellectually " born again," becomes an historical contingency, supposed to take place at some moment after death; (5) The teaching of the Son of man as the " Son of God," that is to say, the life-relationship between man and God, becomes the " second person of the Trinity," and thus the filial relation ship of every man even the lowest to God, is done away with; (6) Salvation through faith (that is to say, that there is no other way to this filial relationship to God, save through the practice of life taught by Christ) becomes transformed into the belief that there is a miraculous way of atoning for all sin; though not through our own endeavours, but by means of Christ: For all these purposes, " Christ on the Cross " had to be interpreted afresh. The death itself would certainly not be the principal feature of the event...it was only another sign pointing to the way in which one should behave towards the authorities and the laws of the world that one was not to defend oneself this was the exemplary life.
171. Concerning the psychology of Paul. The im portant fact is Christ s death. This remains to be explained...That there may be truth or error in an explanation never entered these people s heads: one day a sublime possibility strikes them, " His death might mean so and so " 14! and it forthwith becomes so and so. An hypo thesis is proved by the sublime ardour it lends to its discoverer..." The proof of strength ": i.e., a thought is demonstrated by its effects (" by their fruits," as the Bible ingenuously says); that which fires en thusiasm must be true, what one loses one s blood for must be true In every department of this world of thought, the sudden feeling of power which an idea imparts to him who is responsible for it, is placed to the credit of that idea: and as there seems no other way of honoring an idea than by calling it true, the first epithet it is honored with is the word true,.,. How could it have any effect other wise? It was imagined by some power: if that power were not real, it could not be the cause of anything...The thought is then understood as inspired: the effect it causes has something of the violent nature of a demoniacal influence A thought which a decadent like Paul could not resist and to which he completely yields, is thus " proved " true All these holy epileptics and visionaries did not possess a thousandth part of the honesty in self-criticism with which a philologist, nowadays, reads a text, or tests the truth of an historical event...Beside us, such people were moral cretins.
172. whet) provided it be effective: total absence of intellectual It matters little whether a thing be true, 142 uprightness. Everything is good, whether it be lying, slander, or shameless " cooking," provided it serve to heighten the degree of heat to the point at which people " believe." We are face to face with an actual school for the teaching of the means wherewith men are seduced to a belief: we see systematic contempt for those spheres whence contradiction might come (that is to say, for reason, philosophy, wisdom, doubt, and caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the teaching, with continual refer ences to the fact that it was God who presented us with it that the apostle signifies nothing. that no criticism is brooked, but only faith, ac ceptance; that it is the greatest blessing and favour to receive such a doctrine of salvation; that the state in which one should receive it, ought to be one of the profoundest thankfulness and humility...The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though they were the mean ing and salt of the earth. Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the 143 teaching; it is sufficient to take note of the means it uses in order to be aware of the nature of the phenomenon one is examining. It identified itself with virtue, it appropriated the whole of the fasci nating power of virtue, shamelessly, for its own purposes...it availed itself of the power of paradox, and of the need, manifested by old civilisation, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed and revolted at the same time; it provoked per secutions and ill-treatment. It is the same kind of vdl-thought-out meanness with which the Jewish priesthood established their power and built up their Church...One must be able to discern: (i)that warmth of passion " love " (resting on a base of ardent sensuality); (2) the thoroughly ignoble character of Christianity: the continual exaggeration and verbosity; the lack of cool intellectuality and irony; the unmilitary character of all its instincts; the priestly prejudices against manly pride, sensuality, the sciences, the arts.