In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history"‑‑yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.

A revaluation of all values, this question mark, so black, so tremendous that it casts shadows upon the man who puts it down-such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sun every moment to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper for this; every "case" a case of luck. Especially, war. War has always been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too inward, too profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal. . . .

Another mode of convalescence-under certain circumstances even more to my liking-is sounding out idols, There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my "evil eye" for this world, that is also my evil earn For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails-what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would remain silent must become out spoken.

This essay too-the title betrays it-is above all a recreation, a spot of sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a psychologist. Perhaps a new war, too? And are new idols sounded out? This little essay is a great declaration of war; and regarding the sounding out of idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols. which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are altogether no older, no more convinced, no more puffed-up idols-and none more hollow. That does not prevent them from being those in which people have the most faith; nor does one ever say "idol," especially not in the most distinguished instance.

THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths-a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live-that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. What does that evidence? What does it evince? Formerly one would have said (oh, it has been said, and loud enough, and especially by our pessimists): At least something of all this must be true! The consensus of the sages evidences the truth." Shall we still talk like that today? May we? "At least something must be sick here," we retort. These wisest men of all ages- they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? late? tottery? decadents? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, inspired by a little whiff of carrion?

2

This irreverent thought that the great sages are declining types first occurred to me precisely in a case where both learned and unlearned prejudice most strongly oppose it: I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of degeneration, tools of the Greek dissolution, pseudo-Greek, anti-Greek (Birth of Tragedy, 1872 ) . The consensus of the sages-I comprehended this ever more clearly-proves least of all that they were right in what they agreed on: it shows rather that they themselves, these wisest men, agreed in some physiological respect, and hence adopted the same negative attitude to life-had to adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one's fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men-they were not only decadents but not wise at all? But I return to the problem of Socrates.

3

In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebs. We know, we can still see for ourselves how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by crossing. Or it appears as declining development. The anthropologists among the criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monster in appearance = monster in motivation. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? At least that would not be contradicted by the famous judgment of the physiognomist which sounded so offensive to the friends of Socrates. A foreigner who knew about faces once passed through Athens and told Socrates to his face that he was a monster-that he harbored in himself all the bad vices and appetites. And Socrates merely answered: "You know me, sir!"

4

Not only does the admitted wantonness and anarchy of his instincts suggest that Socrates was decadent, so too does the hypertrophy of the logical faculty and that barbed malice that distinguishes him. Neither should we forget those auditory hallucinations which, as "Socrates' Demon," have been interpreted religiously. Everything in him is exaggerated, buffo, a caricature; everything is at the same time concealed, ulterior, subterranean. I seek to comprehend what idiosyncrasy begot that Socratic equation of reason, virtue, and happiness that most bizarre of all equations, which, moreover is opposed to all the instincts of the earlier Greeks.

5

With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished, with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad manners, they were compromising. The young were warned against them. Furthermore, all such presentations of one's reasons were distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

6

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. . . .

7

Is the irony of Socrates an expression of revolt? Of plebeian ressentiment? Does he, as one oppressed, enjoy his own ferocity in the knife-thrusts of his syllogisms? Does he avenge himself on the noble people whom he fascinates? As a dialectician, one holds a merciless tool in one's hand; one can become a tyrant by means of it; one compromises those one conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent power less. Indeed? Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates?

. . . .

10

When one finds it necessary to turn reason into a tyrant, as Socrates did, the danger cannot be slight that something else will play the tyrant. Rationality was then hit upon as the savior; neither Socrates nor his "patients" had any choice about being rational: it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or to be absurdly rational. The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is pathologically conditioned; so is their esteem of dialectics. Reason=virture=happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight - the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward.

11

I have given to understand how it was that Socrates fascinated: he seemed to be a physician, a savior. Is it necessary to go on to demonstrate the error in his faith in "rationality at any price"? It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence when they merely wage war against it. . . . Socrates was a misunderstanding; the whole improvement-morality, including the Christian, was a misunderstanding. The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts-all this too was a mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to "virtue," to "health," to happiness. To have to fight the instincts-that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

12

Did he himself still comprehend this, this most brilliant of all self-outwitters? Was this what he said to himself in the end, in the wisdom of his courage to die? Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock; he forced Athens to sentence him. "Socrates is no physician," he said softly to himself; "here death alone is the physician. Socrates himself has merely been sick a long time." (Twilight of the Idols, Preface and Ch. 1)

"REASON" IN PHILOSOPHY

1

You ask me which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni - when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been conceptual-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections, never refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being. Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being: where is the deceiver?" "We have found him," they cry ecstatically; "it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies; history is nothing but faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say No to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of mankind; they are all 'mob.' Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies! Let us represent monotono-theism by adopting the expression of a gravedigger! And above all, away with the body, this wretched idee fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real."

2

With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. "Reason" is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "real" world has only been lyingly added.

. . . .

5

At long last, let us contrast the very different manner in which we conceive the problem of error and appearance. (I say "we" for politeness' sake.) Formerly, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, conversely, precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled into error. So certain are we, on the basis of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies. It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is thought in, foisted on, pushed underneath—as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word. Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical—for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Where then do they originate? And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of in a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, for we have reason!" Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for ex ample. After all, every word we say and every sentence speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom—"Reason" in language—A deceptive old woman! I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar.  (Twilight of the Idols, Ch. 2)

HOW THE "REAL WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A MYTH

The History of an Error

1. The real world–attainable by the wise, the pious, the virtuous man; he dwells in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and convincing. A transformation of the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The real world–unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man ("to the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea: it grows more subtle, more enticing, more incomprehensible–it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian.)

3. The real world–unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but even merely thought of–a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the same old sun, but shining through mist and skepticism. The idea grown elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian. )

4. The real world–unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray dawn. The first yawnings of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.) ^[3]

5. The "real world"–an idea no longer useful, not even an obligation–an idea grown useless, superfluous–consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright daylight; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness, Plato blushes for shame, all free spirits run riot.)

6. We have abolished the real world. What world is left? The apparent world perhaps? But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world! (Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

(Twilight of the Idols Ch. 4)

One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts -the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the ' outcast'. Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations The most deplorable example: the depraving of Pascal, who believed his reason had been depraved by original sin while it had only been depraved by his Christianity! (The Anti-Christ 5) 

Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life's disinherited and condemned; through the abundance of the ill‑constituted of all kinds which it retains in life it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect. One has ventured to call pity a virtue (‑ in every noble morality it counts as weakness ‑); one has gone further, one has made of it the virtue, the ground and origin of all virtue ‑ only, to be sure, from the viewpoint of a nihilistic philosophy which inscribed Denial of Life on its escutcheon‑ a fact always to be kept in view. Schopenhauer was within his rights in this: life is denied, made more worthy of denial by pity ‑ pity is practical nihilism. To say it again, this depressive and contagious instinct thwarts those instincts bent on preserving and enhancing the value of life: both as a multiplier of misery and as a conservator of everything miserable it is one of the chief instruments for the advancement of decadence ‑ pity persuades to nothingness! . . . One does not say 'nothingness': one says 'the Beyond'; or 'God'; or true life'; or Nirvana, redemption, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric from the domain of religio‑moral idiosyncrasy at once appears much less innocent when one grasps which tendency is  here draping the mantle of sublime words about itself: the tendency hostile who life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: therefore pity became for him a virtue.... Aristotle, as is well known, saw in pity a morbid and dangerous condition which one did well to get at from time to time with a purgative: he understood tragedy as a purgative.

The Anti-Christ 7

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes ('God', 'soul', 'ego', 'spirit', 'free will' ‑ or 'unfree will'): nothing but imaginary effects (' sin', 'redemption', 'grace ', ' punishment', 'forgiveness of sins'). A traffic between imaginary beings ('God', 'spirits', 'souls'); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; complete lack of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (nothing but self‑misunderstandings, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings, for example the condition of the nervus sympathicus, with the aid of the sign‑language of religio‑moral idiosyncrasy ‑ 'repentance', 'sting of conscience', 'temptation by the Devils, 'the proximity of God'); an imaginary teleology ('the kingdom of God ', s the Last Judgement ', 'eternal life '). ‑ This purely fictitious world is distinguished from the world of dreams, very much to its disadvantage, by the fact that the latter mirrors actuality, while the former falsifies, disvalues and denies actuality. Once the concept s nature ' had been devised as the concept antithetical to 'God', 'natural' had to be the word for 'reprehensible' ‑ this entire fictional world has its roots in hatred of the natural (‑ actuality I ‑), it is the expression of a profound discontent with the actual.... But that enchains everything. Who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from actuality means to be an abortive actuality.... The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of a fictitious morality and religion: such a preponderance, howerer, provides the formula for decadence . . . 

The Anti-Christ 15

With my condemnation of Christianity, I should not like to have wronged a kindred religion which even preponderates in the number of its believers: Buddhism. They belong together as nihilistic religions ‑ they are decadence religions ‑ but they are distinguished from one another in the most remarkable way. The critic of Christianity is profoundly grateful to Indian scholars that one is now able to compare these two religions. ‑ Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity ‑ it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept 'God' is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion ^[4] history has to show us, even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism ‑), it no longer speaks of 'the struggle against sin' but, quite in accordance with actuality, 'the struggle against suffering'. It already has ‑ and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity ‑ the self‑deception of moral concepts behind it ‑ it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil. ‑ The two physiological facts upon which it rests and on which it fixes its eyes are: firstly an excessive excitability of sensibility which expresses itself as a refined capacity for pain, then an over‑intellectuality, a too great preoccupation with concepts and logical procedures under which the personal instinct has sustained harm to the advantage of the 'impersonal' (‑ both of them conditions which at any rate some of my readers, the objective ones, will know from experience, as I do). on the basis of these physiological conditions a state of depression has arisen: against this depression Buddha takes hygienic measures. He opposes it with life in the open air, the wandering life; with moderation and fastidiousness as regards food; with caution towards all alcoholic spirits; likewise with caution towards all emotions which produce gall, which heat the blood; no anxiety, either for oneself or for others. He demands ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness ‑ he devises means for disaccustoming oneself to others. He understands benevolence, being kind, as health‑promoting. Prayer is excluded, as is asceticism; no categorical imperative, no compulsion at all, not even within the monastic community (‑ one can leave it ‑). All these would have the effect of increasing that excessive excitability. For this reason too he demands no struggle against those who think differently; his teaching resists nothing more than it resists the feeling of revengefulness, of antipathy, of ressintiment (‑‑ 'enmity is not ended by enmity': the moving refrain of the whole of Buddhism . . .). And quite rightly: it is precisely these emotions which would be thoroughly unhealthy with regard to the main dietetic objective. The spiritual weariness he discovered and which expressed itself as an excessive 'objectivity' (that is to say weakening of individual interest, loss of centre of gravity, of ' egoism'), he combated by directing even the spiritual interests back to the individual person. In the teaching of Buddha egoism becomes a duty: the 'one thing needful', the 'how can you get rid of suffering' regulates and circumscribes the entire spiritual diet (‑ one may perhaps call to mind. that Athenian who likewise made war on pure 'scientificality', Socrates, who elevated personal egoism to morality even in the domain of problems). 

The Anti-Christ 20

The precondition for Buddhism is a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness absence of  desire, and this goal is achieved. Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires after perfection: perfection is the normal case. 

In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come into the foreground: it is the lowest classes which seek their salvation in it. Here the casuistic business of sin, self‑criticism, conscience‑inquisition is practiced as a specific against boredom; here an emotional attitude towards a power, called 'God', is kept constantly alive (through prayer); here the highest things are considered unachievable, gifts, ' grace'. Here public openness is also lacking; the hole‑and‑corner, the dark chamber is Christian. Here the body is despised, hygiene repudiated as sensuality; the Church even resists cleanliness (‑ the first measure taken by the Christians after the expulsion of the Moors was the closure of the public baths, of which Cordova alone possessed 270). A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Gloomy and exciting ideas stand in the foreground; the states most highly desired and designated by the highest names are epileptoid states; diet is selected so as to encourage morbid phenomena and to over‑excite the nerves. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble' ‑ and at the same time a covert secret competition (‑ one allows them the 'body', one wants only the 'soul'): that is also Christian. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind is Christian; hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian . . .

The Anti-Christ 21

Buddhism, to say it again, is a hundred times colder, more veracious, more objective. It no longer needs to make its suffering and capacity for pain decent to itself by interpreting it as sin ‑‑ it merely says what it feels: 'I suffer'. To the barbarian on the contrary, suffering in itself is not decent: he first requires it to be interpreted before he will admit to himself that he suffers (his instinct directs him rather to deny he is suffering, to a silent endurance). Here the word 'Devil' was a blessing: one had an overwhelming and fearful enemy‑ one did not need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.‑‑

Christianity has a number of subtleties in its foundations which belong to the Orient. Above all, it knows that it is in itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent it is believed to be true. Truth and the belief that something is true: two completely diverse worlds of interest, almost antithetical worlds ‑ one gets to them by fundamentally different roads. To be knowledgeable in this ‑ in the Orient that is almost enough to constitute a sage: thus the Brahmins understood it, thus Plato understands it, thus does every student of esoteric wisdom understand it. If, for example, there is happiness to be found in believing oneself redeemed from sin, it is not necessary for a man first to be sinful, but for him to feel himself sinful. If, however, it is belief as such which is necessary above all else, then one has to bring reason, knowledge, inquiry into disrepute: the road to truth becomes the forbidden road. ‑ Intense hope is a much stronger stimulant to life than any single instance of happiness which actually occurs. Sufferers have to be sustained by a hope which cannot be refuted by any actuality ‑‑ which is not done away with by any fulfilment: a hope in the Beyond. (It was precisely on account of this capacity for keeping the unhappy in suspense that the Greeks considered hope the evil of evils, the actual malignant evil: it remained behind in the box of evil.) ‑ so that love shall be possible, God has to be a person; so that the lowest instincts shall have a voice, God has to be young. To satisfy the ardour of the women a handsome saint is moved into the foreground, to satisfy that of the men a Mary. This on the presupposition that Christianity desires to become master on a soil where the worship of Adonis or Aphrodite has already determined the concept of what religious worship is. The requirement of chastity increases the vehemence and inward intensity of the religious instinct ‑ it renders the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful. ‑ Love is the state in which man sees things most of all as they are not. The illusion‑creating force is there at its height, likewise the sweetening and transforming force. One endures more when in love than one otherwise would, one tolerates everything. The point was to devise a religion in which love is possible: with that one is beyond the worst that life can offer ‑ one no longer even sees it. ‑ so much for the three Christian virtues faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian schrewdnesses. ‑‑ Buddhism is too late, too positivistic still to be shrewd in this fashion.

The Anti-Christ 23

What are the 'glad tidings' ? True life, eternal life is found ‑ it is not promised, it is here, it is within you; as life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of God ‑ Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone ‑ as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else.... To make a hero of Jesus! ‑‑ And what a worse misunderstanding is the word ' genius'! Our whole concept, our cultural concept 'spirit' had no meaning whatever in the world Jesus lived in. To speak with the precision of the physiologist a quite different word would rather be in place here: the word idiot. We recognize a condition of morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch which makes it shrink back in horror from every contact, every grasping of a firm object. Translate such a physiological habitus into its ultimate logic ‑‑ as instinctive hatred of every reality, as flight into the ' ungraspable', into the 'inconceivable', as antipathy towards every form, every spacial and temporal concept, towards everything firm, all that is custom, institution, Church, as being at home in a world undisturbed by reality of any kind, a merely ' inner world, a 'real' world, an 'eternal' world.... 'The kingdom of God is within you' . . .

The Anti-Christ 29

It is precisely on condition that nothing he says is taken literally that this antirealist can speak at all. Among Indians he would have made use of Sankhyam concepts, among Chinese those of Laozi and would not have felt the difference.. ‑ One could, with some freedom of expression, call Jesus a 'free spirit' ‑ he cares nothing for what is fixed: the word killeth, everything fixed killeth The concept, the experience 'life' in the only form he knows it is opposed to any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. He speaks only of the inmost thing: 'life' or 'truth' or 'light' is his expression for the inmost thing ‑ everything else, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, possesses for him merely the value of a sign, a metaphor. ‑ on this point one must make absolutely no mistake, however much Christian, that is to say ecclesiastical prejudice, may tempt one to do so: such a symbolist par excellence stands outside of all religion, all conceptions of divine worship, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all acquirements, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art ‑ his ' knowledge' is precisely the pure folly of the fact that anything of this kind exists. He has not so much as heard of culture, he does not need to fight against it ‑ he does not deny it.... The same applies to the state, to society and the entire civic order, to work, to war ‑‑ he never had reason to deny 'the world', he had no notion of the ecclesiastical concept 'world'.... Denial is precisely what is totally impossible‑ for him. ‑ Dialectics are likewise lacking, the idea is lacking that a faith, a 'truth' could be proved by reasons (‑ his proofs are inner 'lights', inner feelings of pleasure and self‑affirmations, nothing but ' proofs by potency' ‑). Neither can such a doctrine argue: it simply does not understand that other doctrines exist, can exist, it simply does not know how to imagine an opinion contrary to its own.... Where it encounters one it will, with the most heartfelt sympathy, lament the 'blindness' ‑ for it sees the 'light' ‑ but it will make no objection . . .

The Anti-Christ 32

The life of the redeemer was nothing else than this practice his death too was nothing else.... He no longer required any formulas, any rites for communicating with God ‑ not even prayer. He has settled his accounts with the whole Jewish penance‑and‑reconciliation doctrine; he knows that it is through the practice of one's life that one feels 'divine', 'blessed', 'evangelic', at all times a 'child of God'. It is not 'penance', not 'prayer for forgiveness' which leads to God: evangelic practice alone leads to God, it is God! ‑ What was abolished with the Evangel was the Judaism of the concepts ' sin', 'forgiveness of sin', 'faith', 'redemption by faith' ‑ the whole of Jewish ecclesiastical teaching was denied in the 'glad tidings'. 

The profound instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself 'in Heaven', to feel oneself 'eternal' while in every other condition one by no means feels oneself ' in Heaven ': this alone is the psychological reality of ' redemption'. ‑ A new way of living, not a new belief . . . 

The Anti-Christ 33

The ' kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart ‑ not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death'. The entire concept of natural death is lacking in the Gospel: death is not a bridge, not a transition, it is lacking because it belongs to quite another world, a merely apparent world useful only for the purpose of symbolism. The 'hour of death' is rot a Christian concept ‑ the 'hour', time, physical life and its crises, simply do not exist for the teacher of the ' glad tidings'. . . . The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ' in a thousand years' ‑ it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere . . .

The Anti-Christ 34

‑ Our age is proud of its historical sense: how was it able to make itself believe in the nonsensical notion that the crude miracle‑worker and redeemer fable comes at the commencement of Christianity ‑ and that everything spiritual and symbolic is only a subsequent development? On the contrary: the history of Christianity ‑ and that from the very death on the Cross ‑ is the history of progressively cruder misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity over even broader, even ruder masses in whom the preconditions out of which it was born were more and more lacking, it became increasingly necessary to vulgarize, to barbarize Christianity; it absorbed the doctrines and rites of every subterranean cult of the Imperium Romanum,  it absorbed the absurdities of every sort of morbid reason. The fate of Christianity lies in the necessity for its faith itself to grow as morbid, low and vulgar as the requirements it was intended to satisfy were morbid, low and vulgar. As the Church, this morbid barbaric itself finally assumes power ‑ the Church, that form of mortal hostility to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to discipline of spirit, to all open‑hearted and benevolent humanity. ‑ Christian values ‑ noble values: it is only we, we emancipated spirits, who have restored this greatest of all value‑antitheses l

The Anti-Christ 37

‑ To resume, I shall now relate the real history of Christianity. ‑ The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding ‑ in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross. The 'Evangel' died on the Cross. What was called 'Evangel' from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived: 'bad tidings', a dysangel. It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a 'belief', perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian pra e, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian.... Even today such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times.... Not a belief but a doing, above all a not‑doing of many things, a different being.... States of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example ‑ every psychologist knows this ‑ are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts: to speak more strictly, the whole concept of spiritual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness. In fact, there have been no Christians at all. The 'Christian', that which has been called Christian for two millennia, is merely a psychological self‑misunderstanding.

The Anti-Christ 39

‑ And now an absurd problem came up: ' How could God have permitted that ? ' For this question the deranged reason of the ‑ little community found a downright terrifyingly absurd answer: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. All at once it was all over with the Gospel! The guilt sacrifice, and that in its most repulsive, barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of the guiltyl What atrocious paganism ‑ For Jesus had done away with the concept ' guilt' itself ‑ he had denied any chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his 'glad tidings '.... And not as a special prerogative! ‑ From now on there is introduced into the type of the redeemer step by step: the doctrine of a Judgement and a Second Coming, the doctrine of his death as a sacrificial death, the doctrine of the Resurrection with which the entire concept 'blessedness ', the whole and sole reality of the Evangel, is juggled away ‑ for the benefit of a state after death! . . . Paul, with that rabbinical insolence which characterizes him in every respect, rationalized this interpretation, this indecency of an interpretation, thus: 'If Christ is not resurrected from the dead our faith is vain'. ‑ All at once the Evangel became the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the impudent doctrine of personal immortality.... Paul himself even taught it as a reward! . . . 

The Anti-Christ 41

One sees what came to an end with the death on the Cross. a new, an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual and not merely promised happiness on earth. For this remains ‑ I have already emphasized it ‑ the basic distinction between the two decadance religions: Buddhism makes no promises but keeps them, Christianity makes a thousand promises but keeps none. ‑ On the heels of the 'glad tidings came the worst of all: those of Paul. In Paul was embodied the antithetical type to the 'bringer of glad tidings' the genius of hatred, of the vision of hatred, of the inexorable logic of hatred. What did this dysangelist not sacrifice to his hatred! The redeemer above all: he nailed him to his Cross 

The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel ‑ nothing was left once this  hate‑obsessed false‑coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth I . . . And once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same great crime against history ‑ it simply erased the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, it devised for itself a history of primitive Christianity. More: it falsified the history of Israel over again so as to make this history seem the pre‑history of its act: all the prophets had spoken of its 'redeemer'.... The Church subsequently falsified even the history of mankind into the pre‑history of Christianity.... The type of the redeemer, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of the death, even the sequel to the death ‑ nothing was left untouched, nothing was left bearing even the remotest resemblance to reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence‑in the lie of the ' resurrected' Jesus. In fact he could make no use at all of the redeemer's life ‑ he needed the death on the Cross and something in addition.... To regard as honest a Paul whose home was the principal centre of Stoic enlightenment when he makes of a hallucination the proof that the redeemer is still living, or even to believe his story that he had this hallucination, would be a real niaiserie on the part of a psychologist: Paul willed the end, consequently he willed the means.... What he himself did not believe was believed by the idiots among whom he cast his teaching. ‑ His requirement was power; with Paul the priest again sought power ‑ he could employ only those concepts, teachings, symbols with which one tyrannizes over masses, forms herds. What was the only thing Mohammed later borrowed from Christianity ? The invention of Paul, his means for establishing a priestly tyranny, for forming herds: the belief in immortality ‑ that is to say the doctrine of 'judgement'.  . . .

The Anti-Christ 42

There are still harmless self-observers who believe 'immediate certainties' exist, for example 'I think' ... But I shall reiterate a hundred times 'immediate certainty' like ' absolute knowledge' and 'thing in itself', contains a contradiction in terms... when I analyze the event expressed in the sentence 'I think' I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove - for example. that it is I which thinks, that it has to be a something at all which thinks that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a has cause, that an 'I' exists, finally that what is designated by 'thinking' has already been determined -- that I know what thinking is . . . In this way the philosopher acquires in place of that 'immediate certainty' . . . . a series of metaphysical questions . . .: 'Whence do I take the concept thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effeect? What gives me the right to speak of an I . . . an I as cause. . .an I as cause of thoughts?' . . . (Beyond Good and Evil 16.) ^[5]

[...] The singular family resemblance between all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is easy enough to explain Where there exists a language affinity it is quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of grammar‑ I mean thanks to unconscious domination and directing by similar grammatical functions ‑ to avoid everything being prepared in advance for a similar evolution and succession of philosophical systems: just as the road seems to be barred to certain other possibilities of world interpretation. [. . .]  [BGE 20] ^[6]

^[1] Martin Luther was a key figure in the Protesant (°ò ·þ ±Ð ) reformation.  Lutheranism is the dominant religion in Germany.

^[2] »y ¨¥ ¾Ç .

^[3] Positivism is a scientific attitude toward philosophy that denies that value statements are meaningful or cognitively significant.

^[4] See above: Nietzsche's idea is that Buddhism does not moralize about suffering.

^[5] Translation from Hollingdale 1968 p. 194

^[6] Translation from Hollingdale 1977 p. 64-5.