A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same conclusion.--A
nation that still believes in
itself holds fast to its own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it
to survive, to its virtues--it
projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer
thanks. He who is rich will give of
his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices. . . Religion,
within these limits, is a form of
gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.--Such a
god must be able to work
both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or foe--he is wondered
at for the good he does as
well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all nature, of such a god,
making him a god of goodness
alone, would be contrary to human inclination. Mankind has just as much need for an evil
god as for a good god; it
doesn't have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for its own existence. . . . What
would be the value of a
god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps
never experienced the
rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why
should any one want
him?--True enough, when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its
own future, its hope of
freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the
virtues of submission as
measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite,
timorous and demure;
he counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more, leniency, "love" of friend
and foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps
into every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private citizen,
a cosmopolitan. . .
Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and
thirsty for power in the soul
of a people; now he is simply the good god...The truth is that there is no other
alternative for gods: either they are
the will to power--in which case they are national gods--or incapacity for power--in which
case they have to be good.
17.
Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an
accompanying decline
physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine
virtues and passions, is
converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course,
they do not call themselves
the weak; they call themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate
the moments in history at which the
dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first became possible. The same instinct which
prompts the inferior to
reduce their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to eliminate all
good qualities from the god of their
superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's god.--The
good god, and the devil
like him--both are abortions of decadence.--How can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of
Christian theologians as to
join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of
Israel," the god of a people, to the
Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?--But even
Renan does this. As if Renan
had a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in the face. When everything
necessary to ascending life;
when all that is strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the
concept of a god; when he
has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the
drowning; when he be comes the
poor man's god, the sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and the attribute of
"saviour" or "redeemer"
remains as the one essential attribute of divinity--just what is the significance of such
a metamorphosis? what does
such a reduction of the godhead imply?--To be sure, the "kingdom of God" has
thus grown larger. Formerly he had
only his own people, his "chosen" people. But since then he has gone wandering,
like his people themselves, into
foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel
at home everywhere, and
is the great cosmopolitan--until now he has the "great majority" on his side,
and half the earth. But this god of the
"great majority," this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god:
on the contrary, he remains a
Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the
noisesome quarters of the
world! . . His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a
souterrain kingdom, a ghetto
kingdom. . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so decadent . . . Even the palest of the
pale are able to master
him--messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. They spun their webs
around him for so long that
finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another metaphysician.
Thereafter he resumed
once more his old business of spinning the world out of his inmost being sub specie
Spinozae; thereafter he be came
ever thinner and paler--became the "ideal," became "pure spirit,"
became "the absolute," became "the
thing-in-itself." . . . The collapse of a god: he became a
"thing-in-itself."
18.
The Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of
cobwebs, the god as a
spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it
probably touches low-water
mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God degenerated into the contradiction of
life. Instead of being its
transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to
live! God becomes the
formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the
"beyond"! In him nothingness is
deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! . . .
19.
The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this Christian god
does little credit to their gift
for religion--and not much more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an
end of such a moribund
and worn-out product of the decadence. A curse lies upon them because they were not equal
to it; they made illness,
decrepitude and contradiction a part of their instincts--and since then they have not
managed to create any more
gods. Two thousand years have come and gone--and not a single new god! Instead, there
still exists, and as if by
some intrinsic right,--as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the power to create
gods, of the creator spiritus
in mankind--this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay,
conjured up out of
emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of decadence, all
the cowardices and
wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!--
20.
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion
with an even larger number
of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic
religions--they are both decadence
religions--but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact
that he is able to compare
them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.--Buddhism is
a hundred times as realistic as
Christianity--it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems
objectively and coolly; it is the product of
long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, "god," was already
disposed of before it appeared.
Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this
applies even to its
epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism) --It does not speak of a "struggle
with sin," but, yielding to reality,
of the "struggle with suffering." Sharply differentiating itself from
Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in
moral concepts be hind it; it is, in my phrase,beyond good and evil.--The two
physiological facts upon which it
grounds itself and upon which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive
sensitiveness to sensation, which
manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an extraordinary
spirituality, a too protracted
concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of which the instinct of
personality has yielded to
a notion of the "impersonal." (--Both of these states will be familiar to a few
of my readers, the objectivists, by
experience, as they are to me). These physiological states produced a depression, and
Buddha tried to combat it by
hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel;
moderation in eating and a careful
selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of
the passions that foster a
bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no worry, either on one's own account or on
account of others. He
encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good cheer--he finds means to
combat ideas of other
sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health.
Prayer is not included, and
neither is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative nor any disciplines, even within
the walls of a monastery
(--it is always possible to leave--). These things would have been simply means of
increasing the excessive
sensitiveness above mentioned. For the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with
unbelievers; his
teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion, ressentiment
(--"enmity never brings an end to
enmity": the moving refrain of all Buddhism. . .) And in all this he was right, for
it is precisely these passions which,
in view of his main regiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The mental fatigue that he
observes, already plainly
displayed in too much "objectivity" (that is, in the individual's loss of
interest in himself, in loss of balance and of
"egoism"), he combats by strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests
back to the ego. In Buddha's teaching
egoism is a duty. The "one thing needful," the question "how can you be
delivered from suffering," regulates and
determines the whole spiritual diet. (--Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who
also declared war upon pure
"scientificality," to wit, Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a
morality) .
21.
The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and
liberality, and no
militarism; moreover, it must get its start among the higher and better educated classes.
Cheerfulness, quiet and
the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are attained. Buddhism is not a
religion in which perfection
is merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.--Under Christianity the
instincts of the subjugated
and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their
salvation in it. Here the
prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin,
self-criticism, the inquisition of
conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called "God") is pumped up (by
prayer); here the highest good is
regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as "grace." Here, too, open dealing is
lacking; concealment and the darkened
room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is denounced as sensual; the church
even ranges itself
against cleanliness (--the first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed
the public baths, of which
there were 270 in Cordova alone) . Christian, too; is a certain cruelty toward one's self
and toward others; hatred of
unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in the foreground;
the most esteemed states of
mind, bearing the most respectable names are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to
engender morbid symptoms
and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the
earth, to the
"aristocratic"--along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (--one resigns
one's "body" to them--one wantsonly
one's "soul" . . . ). And Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of
courage of freedom, of intellectual
libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in
general . . .
22.
When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the underworld
of the ancient world, and
began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men,
but with men still
inwardly savage and capable of self torture--in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here,
unlike in the case of the
Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely a
general sensitiveness and
susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on
others, a tendency to obtain
subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to embrace barbaric
concepts and valuations in
order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of
the first-born, the drinking
of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its
forms, whether bodily or not; the
whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of
development, for races that have
become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet ripe for it--): it is a
summons 'that takes them back
to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of
the body. Christianity aims
at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them ill--to make feeble is the
Christian recipe for
taming, for "civilizing." Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied
stages of civilization. Christianity
appears before civilization has so much as begun--under certain circumstances it lays the
very foundations thereof.
23.
Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no
longer has to justify its
pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it
simply says, as it simply thinks,
"I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely
understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an
explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering
altogether, or to endure it in
silence.) Here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent
and terrible enemy--there was no
need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.
--At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the Orient. In
the first place, it knows that
it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed
to be true. Truth and faith:
here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite
worlds--the road to the one and
the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact thoroughly--this is almost
enough, in the Orient, to
make one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows
it. When, for example,
a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not
necessary for him to be actually
sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is thus exalted above everything else,
it necessarily follows that
reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth
becomes a forbidden
road.--Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than
any sort of realized joy can
ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with
actuality can dash it--so high,
indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.
(Precisely because of this power
that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of
evils, as the most malign of
evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil.)3--In order that love may be
possible, God must become a person;
in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To
satisfy the ardor of the
woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there
must be a virgin. These
things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some
aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has
already established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity
greatly strengthens the
vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it makes the cult warmer, more
enthusiastic, more
soulful.--Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The
force of illusion reaches its
highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. When a man is in
love he endures more
than at any other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which
would allow one to love:
by this means the worst that life has to offer is overcome--it is scarcely even
noticed.--So much for the three
Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian
ingenuities.--Buddhism is in too late a
stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.--
24.
Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first thing
necessary to its solution is this:
that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it
is not a reaction against
Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the
awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In
the words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." 4--The second thing to
remember is this: that the psychological
type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate
form (which is at once maimed
and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has
been used: as a type of the
Saviour of mankind.
--The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were
confronted with the
question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at
any price: this price involved
a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole
inner world, as well as of the outer.
They put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been
able to live, or had even
been permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct
opposition to natural
conditions--one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and
psychology until each became a
contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in
an incalculably
exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of
God," shows a complete lack
of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most fateful
people in the history of the world:
their influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the
Christian can cherish
anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
In my "Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation of the
concepts underlying those two
antithetical things, a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is
a mere product of the denial
of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the second division, and in
every detail. In order to be
able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of life--that is, to
well-being, to power, to beauty,
to self-approval--the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to
invent an other world in which
the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable.
Psychologically, the Jews are a
people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves
facing impossible
conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a profound talent for
self-preservation, the side of all those
instincts which make for decadence--not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in
them a power by which "the
world" could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply
been forced into appearing
in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic
genius they have managed to
put themselves at the head of all decadent movements (--for example, the Christianity of
Paul--), and so make of
them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who
reach out for power
under Judaism and Christianity,--that is to say, to the priestly class-decadence is no
more than a means to an end.
Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values
of "good" and "bad,"
"true" and "false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but
also slanders it.
25.
The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt to denaturize all
natural values: I point to five
facts which bear this out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel
maintained the right attitude
of things, which is to say, the natural attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its
consciousness of power, its joy in
itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory and salvation and through
him they expected nature to
give them whatever was necessary to their existence--above all, rain. Jahveh is the god of
Israel, and consequently
the god of justice: this is the logic of every race that has power in its hands and a good
conscience in the use of it.
In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this self-approval stand revealed.
The nation is grateful for
the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the benign
procession of the seasons, and
for the good fortune attending its herds and its crops.--This view of things remained an
ideal for a long while, even
after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the Assyrian
without. But the people still
retained, as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at
once a gallant warrior and an
upright judge--a vision best visualized in the typical prophet (i.e., critic and satirist
of the moment), Isaiah. --But
every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do what he used to do. He
ought to have been
abandoned. But what actually happened? simply this: the conception of him was changed--the
conception of him
was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paid for keeping him.--Jahveh, the god
of "justice"--he is in
accord with Israel no more, he no longer visualizes the national egoism; he is now a god
only conditionally. . . The
public notion of this god now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators,
who interpret all
happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or disobedience to
him, for "sin": that
most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the
world" is set up, and the
fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on their heads.
Once natural causation has been swept out
of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of unnatural causation
becomes necessary: and all
other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. A god who demands--in place of a god
who helps, who gives counsel,
who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of courage and self-reliance. .
. Morality is no longer a
reflection of the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people;
it is no longer the primary
life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and in opposition to life--a fundamental
perversion of the fancy, an "evil
eye" on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its
innocence; unhappiness
polluted with the idea of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a
"temptation"; a physiological disorder
produced by the canker worm of conscience...
