the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very
advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions
as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them....
Neither has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in vain
for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly,
open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first
step upward--the instinct for _cleanliness_ is lacking.... Only _evil_
instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil
instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a
self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the
New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up
with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of
whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to the
Duke of Parma: "_è tutto festo_"--immortally healthy, immortally
cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation.
They attack, but everything they attack is thereby _distinguished_.
Whoever is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely _not_ befouled....
On the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an
opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration
for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world,"
which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of
preaching."... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such
opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been
hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge
that the "early Christians" _dared_ to make!--After all, they were the
_privileged_, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no
other excuse. The "early Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last
Christian," _whom I may perhaps live to see_--is a rebel against all
privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for
"equal rights."... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man
proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be
a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every _other_
criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness
and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply
"worldly"--_evil in itself_.... Moral: every word that comes from the
lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his every act is
instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but
_whoever_ he hates, _whatever_ he hates, has real _value_.... The
Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a _criterion
of values_.
--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a
_solitary_ figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard
a Jewish imbroglio _seriously_--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more
or less--what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom
the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament
with the only saying _that has any value_--and that is at once its
criticism and its _destruction_: "What is truth?..."
47.
--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as
absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a _crime against
life_.... We deny that God is God.... If any one were to _show_ us this
Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a
formula: _deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio_.--Such a religion as
Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which
goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must
be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is
to say, of _science_--and it will give the name of good to whatever
means serve to poison, calumniate and _cry down_ all intellectual
discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual
conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "Faith," as
an imperative, vetoes science--_in praxi_, lying at any price.... Paul
_well knew_ that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church
borrowed the fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a
God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially
the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in
truth only an indication of Paul's resolute _determination_ to
accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of
God, _thora_--that is essentially Jewish. Paul _wants_ to dispose of the
"wisdom of this world": his enemies are the _good_ philologians and
physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a
matter of fact no man can be a _philologian_ or a physician without
being also _Antichrist_. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees
_behind_ the "holy books," and as a physician he sees _behind_ the
physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says
"incurable"; the philologian says "fraud."...
48.
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of _science_?... No one,
in fact, has understood it. This priest-book _par excellence_ opens, as
is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: _he_ faces
only one great danger; _ergo_, "God" faces only one great danger.--
The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is
promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against
boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] What does he do? He creates
man--man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored.
God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises
knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first
mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought
dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--So God
created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many
other things! Woman was the _second_ mistake of God.--"Woman, at bottom,
is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every
evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. _Ergo_, she is also to
blame for _science_.... It was through woman that man learned to taste
of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God was seized by
mortal terror. Man himself had been his _greatest_ blunder; he had
created a rival to himself; science makes men _godlike_--it is all up
with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--_Moral_: science is
the forbidden _per se_; it alone is forbidden. Science is the _first_ of
sins, the germ of all sins, the _original_ sin. _This is all there is of
morality._--"Thou shall _not_ know":--the rest follows from that.--God's
mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one
to _protect_ one's self against science? For a long while this was the
capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure,
foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man _must_ not
think.--And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of
childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all,
_sickness_--nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles
of man don't _allow_ him to think.... Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the
edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing
the gods--what is to be done?--The old God invents _war_; he separates
the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always
had need of war....). War--among other things, a great disturber of
science!--Incredible! Knowledge, _deliverance from the priests_,
prospers in spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution:
"Man has become scientific--_there is no help for it: he must be
drowned!_"...
[21] A paraphrase of Schiller's "Against stupidity even gods struggle in
vain."
49.
--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the
_whole_ psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great
danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect.
But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable
conditions--a man must have time, he must have an _overflowing_
intellect, in order to "know."... "_Therefore_, man must be made
unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is
easy to see just _what_, by this logic, was the first thing to come into
the world:--"_sin_."... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole
"moral order of the world," was set up _against_ science--_against_ the
deliverance of man from priests.... Man must _not_ look outward; he must
look inward. He must _not_ look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to
learn about them; he must not look at all; he must _suffer_.... And he
must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.--Away with
physicians! _What is needed is a Saviour._--The concept of guilt and
punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of
"forgiveness"--_lies_ through and through, and absolutely without
psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's _sense of
causality_: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and
effect!--And _not_ an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty
in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly,
the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of _priests_!
An attack of _parasites_! The vampirism of pale, subterranean
leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer
"natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of
superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely
"moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons,
then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--_then the greatest
of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated_.--I repeat that sin,
man's self-desecration _par excellence_, was invented in order to make
science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible;
the priest _rules_ through the invention of sin.--
50.
--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief,"
of the "believer," for the special benefit of "believers." If there
remain any today who do not yet know how _indecent_ it is to be
"believing"--_or_ how much a sign of _décadence_, of a broken will to
live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even
the deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that
there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is
called "proof by power." "Faith makes blessed: _therefore_ it is
true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is not
demonstrated, it is merely _promised_: it hangs upon "faith" as a
condition--one _shall_ be blessed _because_ one believes.... But what of
the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly
transcendental "beyond"--how is _that_ to be demonstrated?--The "proof
by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief
that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a
formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness--_therefore_, it is
true."... But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be
_absurdum_ itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the
sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated
(--_not_ merely hoped for, and _not_ merely promised by the suspicious
lips of a priest): even so, _could_ blessedness--in a technical term,
_pleasure_--ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is
almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the
answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough
to make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a
proof _of_ "pleasure"--nothing more; why in the world should it be
assumed that _true_ judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and
that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily
bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all
disciplined and profound minds teaches _the contrary_. Man has had to
fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost
everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to.
Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is
the hardest of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of _integrity_
in things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own
heart, that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every
Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed: _therefore_,
it lies....
51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for
blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an _idée fixe_ by no
means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves
no mountains, but instead _raises them up_ where there were none before:
all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a _lunatic
asylum_. _Not_, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to
the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic
asylums. Christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the Greek
spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior
purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_
people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic
asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort
of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _décadent_; the
moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked
by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man
is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that
it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of
mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are
actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy
only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_.... Once
I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of _training_[22] in
penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of
producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it,
which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a
Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first
be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the _courage_ for health
_and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that
teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the
superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient
nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation!
that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect
soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for
itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically
ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is
itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and
incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European
movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all
sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of
Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ represent the decay of a
race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _décadence_
products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
_noble_ antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too
sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that
theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the
whole _imperium_ were Christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility,
reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master;
democracy, with its Christian instincts, _triumphed_.... Christianity
was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the
varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere.
Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct
against the _healthy_, against _health_. Everything that is
well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence
to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying:
"And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_
things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which
are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the
_décadence_ triumphed.--_God on the cross_--is man always to miss the
frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers,
everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_.... We all hang on the
cross, consequently _we_ are divine.... We alone are divine....
Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed
by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of
humanity.--
[22] The word _training_ is in English in the text.
[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.
52.
Christianity also stands in opposition to all _intellectual_
well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it _can_ use as
Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it
pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the _superbia_ of the healthy
intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that
the typically Christian state of "faith" _must_ be a form of sickness
too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to
knowledge _must_ be banned by the church as _forbidden_ ways. Doubt is
thus a sin from the start.... The complete lack of psychological
cleanliness in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon
_resulting_ from _décadence_,--one may observe in hysterical women and
in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts,
delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking
straight and walking straight are symptoms of _décadence_. "Faith"
means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of
either sex, is a fraud _because_ he is sick: his instinct _demands_ that
the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever
makes for illness is _good_; whatever issues from abundance, from
superabundance, from power, is _evil_": so argues the believer. The
_impulse to lie_--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained
theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his _unfitness
for philology_. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense,
the art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts
_without_ interpreting them falsely, and _without_ losing caution,
patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as
_ephexis_[24] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with
newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather
statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul."... The way in
which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain,
say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the
national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of
David, is always so _daring_ that it is enough to make a philologian run
up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from
Suabia[25] use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably
commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a
"providence" and an "experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise
of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to
convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness
of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our
piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the
head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very
instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that
he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant,
as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man--at bottom, he is a mere name for
the stupidest sort of chance.... "Divine Providence," which every third
man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong an argument
against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in
any case it is an argument against Germans!...
[24] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also
occasionally called ephecticism.
[25] A reference to the University of Tübingen and its famous school of
Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of
the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet abomination, David
F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. _Vide_ § 10 and § 28.
53.
--It is so little true that _martyrs_ offer any support to the truth of
a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything
to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings
what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low
a grade of intellectual honesty and such _insensibility_ to the problem
of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not
something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only
peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any
such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's
intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his
_discretion_, on this point. To _know_ in five cases, and to refuse,
with delicacy, to know anything _further_.... "Truth," as the word is
understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every
Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even
a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline and
self-control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest
truth.--The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been
misfortunes of history: they have _misled_.... The conclusion that all
idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a
cause for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive
Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has
been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole
spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have _damaged_ the
truth.... Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to
give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--But
why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid
down his life for it?--An error that becomes honourable is simply an
error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose,
Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred
for your lies?--One best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it
on ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians.... This was
precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that
they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they
made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom.... Women are still on
their knees before an error because they have been told that some one
died on the cross for it. _Is the cross, then, an argument?_--But about
all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been
needed for thousands of years--_Zarathustra_.
They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their
folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood.
But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood
poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and
hatred in the heart.
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that
prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's
own burning![26]
[26] The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of
Priests."
54.