The Antichrist

by Friedrich Nietzsche

call themselves Christians and go to the communion-table?… A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people—and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian!… Who...

what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!—

God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!—Jesus

One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth—real, not merely promised.

the essential difference between the two religions of décadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.—Hard

In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching,...

of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth!… Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Goin...

prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his “Saviour.”… Later on the church even falsified the history of man in o...

What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs.

the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment”…

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity

altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of life… . Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common

welfare, and try to serve it?… Merely so many “temptations,” so many strayings from the “straight path.”—“One thing only is necessary”… . That every man, because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf—it

funny

is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence.

this miserable flattery of per...

The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves around me.”…

out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited

revolutions—it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime!

if we could actually see these astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an end,—and it is precisely because I cannot read

a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made an end of them… . I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.—For

—Let us not be led astray: they say “judge not,” and yet they condemn to hell who...

… One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction:

little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of “God,” “the truth,” “the light,” “the

spirit,” “love,” “wisdom” and “life,” as if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the “world”;

—Principle of “Christian love”: it insists upon being well paid in the end…

the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge…

. 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.

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?… ”

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.

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,

—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror of science?…