For these little prigs miscalculate precisely where it matters most. They attack, but everything they attack is distinguished thereby. To be attacked by a “first Christian” is not to be soiled. On the contrary: it is an honor to be opposed by “first Christians.” One does not read the New Testament without a predilection for that which is maltreated in it—not to speak of “the wisdom of this world,” which an impudent windmaker tries in vain to ruin with “foolish preaching.”
But even the Pharisees and scribes derive an advantage from such opposition: they must have been worth something to have been hated in so indecent a manner. Hypocrisy—what a reproach in the mouths of “first Christians”! In the end, they were men of privilege: that is enough—chandala hatred requires no further grounds. The “first Christian”—I am afraid, the “last Christian” too, and I may yet live to see him—is, from his lowest instincts, a rebel against everything privileged: he lives, he fights always for “equal rights.” Examined more closely, he has no choice. If one wants to be “chosen by God”—or a “temple of God” or a “judge of the angels”—then any other principle of selection—for example, according to integrity, spirit, virility and pride, beauty and freedom of the heart—is merely “world,” evil in itself. Moral: every word in the mouth of a “first Christian” is a lie; every act he performs a falseness of instinct—all his values, all his goals are harmful; but whomever he hates, whatever he hates, that has value. The Christian, the priestly Christian in particular, is a criterion of value.
Need I add that in the whole New Testament there is only a single figure who commands respect? Pilate, the Roman governor. To take a Jewish affair seriously —he does not persuade himself to do that. One Jew more or less—what does it matter? The noble scorn of a Roman, confronted with an impudent abuse of the word “truth,” has enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has value—one which is its criticism, even its annihilation: “What is truth?”
47
That we find no God—either in history or in nature or behind nature—is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as “godlike” but as miserable, as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life. We deny God as God. If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him. In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.51
A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, which crumbles as soon as reality is conceded its rights at even a single point, must naturally be mortally hostile against the “wisdom of this world,” which means science. It will applaud all means with which the discipline of the spirit, purity and severity in the spirit’s matters of conscience, the noble coolness and freedom of the spirit, can be poisoned, slandered, brought into disrepute. “Faith” as an imperative is the veto against science—in practice, the lie at any price.
Paul comprehended that the lie—that “faith”—was needed; later the church in turn comprehended Paul. The “God” whom Paul invented, a god who “ruins the wisdom of the world” (in particular, philology and medicine, the two great adversaries of all superstition), is in truth merely Paul’s own resolute determination to do this: to give the name of “God” to one’s own will, torah, that is thoroughly Jewish. Paul wants to ruin the “wisdom of the world”: his enemies are the good philologists and physicians with Alexandrian training—it is they against whom he wages war. Indeed, one cannot be a philologist or physician without at the same time being an anti-Christian. For as a philologist one sees behind the “holy books”; as a physician, behind the physiological depravity of the typical Christian. The physician says “incurable”; the philologist, “swindle.”
48
Has the famous story that stands at the beginning of the Bible really been understood? the story of God’s hellish fear of science? It has not been understood. This priestly book par excellence begins, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he knows only one great danger, consequently “God” knows only one great danger.
The old God, all “spirit,” all high priest, all perfection, takes a stroll in his garden; but he is bored. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He invents man—man is entertaining. But lo and behold! Man too is bored. God’s compassion with the sole distress that distinguishes all paradises knows no limits: soon he creates other animals as well. God’s first mistake: man did not find the animals entertaining; he ruled over them, he did not even want to be “animal.” Consequently God created woman. And indeed, that was the end of boredom—but of other things too! Woman was God’s second mistake. “Woman is by nature a snake, Heve” 52—every priest knows that; “from woman comes all calamity in the world”—every priest knows that, too. “Consequently, it is from her too that science comes.” Only from woman did man learn to taste of the tree of knowledge.
What had happened? The old God was seized with hellish fear. Man himself had turned out to be his greatest mistake; he had created a rival for himself; science makes godlike—it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the seed of all sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. "Thou shalt not know”—the rest follows.
God’s hellish fear did not prevent him from being clever. How does one resist science? This became his main problem for a long time. Answer: out of paradise with man! Happiness, idleness, give rise to ideas—all ideas are bad ideas. Man shall not think. And the "priest-as-such” invents distress, death, the mortal danger of pregnancy, every kind of misery, old age, trouble, and, above all, sickness—all means in the fight against science. Distress does not permit man to think. And yet—horrible!—the edifice of knowledge begins to tower, heaven-storming, suggesting twilight to the gods. What is to be done? The old God invents war, he divides the peoples, he fixes it so men will annihilate each other (priests have always required wars). War —among other things a great disrupter of science! Incredible! Knowledge, the emancipation from the priest, continues to grow in spite of wars. And the old God makes a final decision: “Man has become scientific—there is no other way, he has to be drowned.”
49
I have been understood. The beginning of the Bible contains the whole psychology of the priest. The priest knows only one great danger: that is science, the sound conception of cause and effect. But on the whole science prospers only under happy circumstances—there must be a surplus of time, of spirit, to make “knowledge” possible. “Consequently, man must be made unhappy” —this was the logic of the priest in every age.
It will now be clear what was introduced into the world for the first time, in accordance with this logic: “sin.” The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral world order,” was invented against science, against the emancipation of man from the priest. Man shall not look outside, he shall look into himself; he shall not look into things cleverly and cautiously, like a learner, he shall not look at all—he shall suffer. And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest at all times. Away with physicians! A Savior is needed. The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of “grace,” of “redemption,” of "forgiveness”—lies through and through, and without any psychological reality—were invented to destroy man’s causal sense: they are an attempt to assassinate cause and effect. And not an attempt to assassinate with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hatred and love! But born of the most cowardly, most cunning, lowest instincts. A priestly attempt! A parasite’s attempt! A vampirism of pale, subterranean bloodsuckers!
When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer “natural,” but thought of as caused by the conceptual specters of superstition, by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls,” as if they were merely “moral” consequences, as reward, punishment, hint, means of education, then the presupposition of knowledge has been destroyed—then the greatest crime
against humanity has been committed. Sin, to repeat it once more, this form of man’s self-violation par excellence, was invented to make science, culture, every elevation and nobility of man, impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin.
50
At this point I do not let myself off without a psychology of "faith,” of "believers”—precisely for the benefit of “believers,” as is fitting. If today there is no lack of people who do not know in what way it is indecent to "believe”—or a sign of decadence, of broken will to life—tomorrow they will already know it. My voice reaches even the hard of hearing.
Unless I have heard wrong, it seems that among Christians there is a kind of criterion of truth that is called the “proof of strength.” “Faith makes blessed: hence it is true.” Here one might object first that it is precisely the making blessed which is not proved but merely promised: blessedness tied to the condition of "faith”—one shall become blessed because one believes. But whether what the priest promises the believer in fact occurs in a “beyond” which is not subject to any test—how is that proved? The alleged “proof of strength” is thus at bottom merely another faith, namely, that the effect one expects from faith will not fail to appear. In a formula: “I believe that faith makes blessed; consequently it is true.” But with this we are already at the end. This “consequently” would be absurdity itself as the criterion of truth.
But let us suppose, with some leniency, that it was proved that faith makes blessed (not merely desired, not merely promised by the somewhat suspicious mouth of a priest): would blessedness—or more technically speaking, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth? This is so far from the case that it almost furnishes a counterproof; in any event, the greatest suspicion of a “truth” should arise when feelings of pleasure enter the discussion of the question “What is true?” The proof of “pleasure” is a proof of "pleasure”—nothing else: how in all the world could it be established that true judgments should give greater delight than false ones and, according to a pre-established harmony, should necessarily be followed by agreeable feelings?
The experience of all severe, of all profoundly inclined, spirits teaches the opposite. At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one’s heart, that one despises “beautiful sentiments,” that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies.
51
That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none—a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this. Not, to be sure, a priest: for he denies instinctively that sickness is sickness, that madhouse is madhouse. Christianity needs sickness just as Greek culture needs a superabundance of health—to make sick is the true, secret purpose of the whole system of redemptive procedures constructed by the church. And the church itself—is it not the catholic madhouse as the ultimate ideal? The earth altogether as a madhouse?
The religious man, as the church wants him, is a typical decadent; the moment when a religious crisis overcomes a people is invariably marked by epidemics of the nerves; the “inner world” of the religious man looks exactly like the “inner world” of the overexcited and the exhausted; the “highest” states that Christianity has hung over mankind as the value of all values are epileptoid forms—only madmen or great impostors have been pronounced holy by the church in maiorem dei honorem. I once permitted myself to designate the whole Christian repentance and redemption training (which today is best studied in England) as a methodically produced folie circulaire, as is proper, on soil prepared for it, that is to say, thoroughly morbid soil. Nobody is free to become a Christian: one is not "converted” to Christianity—one has to be sick enough for it.
We others who have the courage to be healthy and also to despise—how may we despise a religion which taught men to misunderstand the body! which does not want to get rid of superstitious belief in souls! which turns insufficient nourishment into something “meritorious”! which fights health as a kind of enemy, devil, temptation! which fancies that one can carry around a “perfect soul” in a cadaver of a body, and which therefore found it necessary to concoct a new conception of "perfection”—a pale, sickly, idiotic-enthusiastic character, so-called "holiness.” Holiness—merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, unnerved, incurably corrupted body.
The Christian movement, as a European movement, has been from the start a collective movement of the dross and refuse elements of every kind (these want to get power through Christianity). It does not express the decline of a race, it is an aggregate of forms of decadence flocking together and seeking each other out from everywhere. It is not, as is supposed, the corruption of antiquity itself, of noble antiquity, that made Christianity possible. The scholarly idiocy which upholds such ideas even today cannot be contradicted harshly enough. At the very time when the sick, corrupt chandala strata in the whole imperium adopted Christianity, the opposite type, nobility, was present in its most beautiful and most mature form. The great number became master; the democratism of the Christian instincts triumphed. Christianity was not “national,” not a function of a race—it turned to every kind of man who was disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. At the bottom of Christianity is the rancor of the sick, instinct directed against the healthy, against health itself. Everything that has turned out well, everything that is proud and prankish, beauty above all, hurts its ears and eyes. Once more I recall the inestimable words of Paul: “The weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base and despised things of the world hath God chosen.”53 This was the formula; in hoc signo decadence triumphed.
God on the cross—are the horrible secret thoughts behind this symbol not understood yet? All that suffers, all that is nailed to the cross, is divine. All of us are nailed to the cross, consequently we are divine. We alone are divine. Christianity was a victory, a nobler outlook perished of it—Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.
52
Christianity also stands opposed to every spirit that has turned out well; it can use only sick reason as Christian reason, it sides with everything idiotic, it utters a curse against the spirit, against the superbia of the healthy spirit. Because sickness is of the essence of Christianity, the typical Christian state, "faith,” must also be a form of sickness, and all straight, honest, scientific paths to knowledge must be rejected by the church as forbidden paths. Even doubt is a sin.
The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest—betrayed by his eyes—is a consequence of decadence: one should observe hysterical females and children with a tendency to rickets to see how regularly instinctive falseness, the inclination to lie in order to lie, and the incapacity for straight glances and steps are the expression of decadence. “Faith” means not wanting to know what is true.
The pietist, the priest of both sexes, is false because he is sick: his instinct demands that truth not be conceded its right at any point. “Whatever makes sick is good; whatever comes out of fullness, out of superabundance, out of power, is evil”—thus feels the believer. Having no choice but to lie—from that I can see at a glance if a man is a predestined theologian. Another sign of the theologian is his incapacity for philology. What is here meant by philology is, in a very broad sense, the art of reading well—of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand. Philology as ephexis in interpretation—whether it is a matter of books, the news in a paper, destinies, or weather conditions, not to speak of the “salvation of the soul.” The manner in which a theologian, in Berlin as in Rome, in
terprets a “verse of Scripture” or an event—for example, a victory of the armies of the fatherland, in the higher light of the Psalms of David—is always so audacious that a philologist can only tear his hair. And what is he to do when pietists and other cows from Swabia, with the aid of the “finger of God,” transform the wretched everyday and the parlor smoke of their existence into a miracle of “grace,” of “providence,” of “experiences of salvation”? Even the most modest expenditure of spirit, not to speak of decency, would suffice to bring these interpreters to the point of convincing themselves of the utter childishness and unworthiness of such an abuse of the dexterity of the divine fingers. Possessing even the tiniest bit of piety in the body, we should find a god who cures a cold at the right time or who bids us enter a coach at the very moment when a violent rainstorm begins, such an absurd god that we should have to abolish him if he existed. A god as servant, as mailman, as calendar man—at bottom, a word for the most stupid of all accidents. “Divine providence” of the kind in which approximately every third person in “educated Germany” still believes would be an objection to God so strong that one simply could not imagine a stronger one. And in any case, it is an objection to the Germans!
53
That martyrs prove anything about the truth of a matter is so far from true that I would deny that any martyr ever had anything whatsoever to do with truth. The tone with which a martyr throws his considering-something-true into the face of the world expresses such a low degree of intellectual integrity, such an obtuseness for the question of truth, that one never needs to refute a martyr. Truth is not something which one person might have and another not have: only peasants and peasant apostles like Luther can think that way about truth. One may be sure that modesty, moderation in this matter, becomes greater in proportion to the degree of conscientiousness in matters of the spirit. To have knowledge of five matters, and to refuse with a gentle hand to have other knowledge.