The Antichrist

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it—so high, indeed, that no fulfilment 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...

—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.

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.

To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,—that is to say, to the priestly class—décadence 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.

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

swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of un-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other var...

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 repre...

the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the

“sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it—in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it… . For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse

of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the “moral...

The fact requires a sanction—a power to grant values becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such values is by denying nature… . The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only...

Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest, to “the law,” now gets the name of “si...

“reconciliation with God” are, of course, precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the thumb of...

Psychologically considered, “sins” are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins...

Prime axiom: “God forgiveth him that repenteth”—in plain...

submitteth to the...

the small insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is

simply the Jewish instinct redivivus—in other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actually denies the church…

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so great that it senses all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (—that is to say, as harmful, as prohibited by the instinct

regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerous—love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life… . These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung.

a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly...

The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain—the end of this can be nothing save a religion of love…

the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with

characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda.

That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us—a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladie...

It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent—I mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish.

Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike India’s, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and

ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan’s malice as “le grand maître en ironie.”

the greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they se...

When the early Christians had need of an adroit, contenti...

maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a “god” that met that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the Gospels—“the second coming,” “the last ...

What the “glad tidings” tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith—it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit.

what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of

denial of the Gospels…

That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as

beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical irony—

the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian

What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins.—I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame

for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.”

the priest himself is seen as he actually is—as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation…

the concepts “the other world,” “the last

judgment,” “the immortality of the soul,” the “soul” itself: they are all merely so many instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master…

What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoro...