Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  8

  It is necessary to say whom we feel to be our antithesis – the theologians and all that has theologian blood in its veins – our entire philosophy.… One must have seen the fatality from close up, better still one must have experienced it in oneself, one must have almost perished by it, no longer to find anything funny here (the free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists is to my mind funny – they lack passion in these things, they do not suffer from them –). That poison extends much further than one thinks: I have discovered the arrogant theologian-instinct wherever anyone today feels himself to be an ‘idealist’ – wherever anyone assumes, by virtue of a higher origin, a right to cast strange and superior looks at actuality.… Just like the priest, the idealist has all the great concepts in his hand (– and not only in his hand!), he plays them out with a benevolent contempt against the ‘understanding’, the ‘senses’, ‘honours’, ‘luxury’, ‘science’, he sees these things as beneath him, as harmful and seductive forces above which ‘the spirit’ soars in pure self-sufficiency – as though humility, chastity, poverty, in a word holiness, had not hitherto done life unutterably more harm than any sort of frightfulness or vice whatever.… Pure spirit is pure lie.… So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of ‘truth’…

  9

  I make war on this theologian instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has theologian blood in his veins has a wrong and dishonest attitude towards all things from the very first. The pathos that develops out of this is called faith: closing one’s eyes with respect to oneself for good and all so as not to suffer from the sight of incurable falsity. Out of this erroneous perspective on all things one makes a morality, a virtue, a holiness for oneself, one unites the good conscience with seeing falsely – one demands that no other kind of perspective shall be accorded any value after one has rendered one’s own sacrosanct with the names ‘God’, ‘redemption’, ‘eternity’. I have dug out the theologian instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels to be true must be false: this provides almost a criterion of truth. It is his deepest instinct of self-preservation which forbids any part of reality whatever to be held in esteem or even spoken of. Wherever the influence of the theologian extends value judgement is stood on its head, the concepts ‘true’ and ‘false’ are necessarily reversed: that which is most harmful to life is here called ‘true’, that which enhances, intensifies, affirms, justifies it and causes it to triumph is called ‘false’.… If it happens that, by way of the ‘conscience’ of princes (or of nations –), theologians stretch out their hands after power, let us be in no doubt what at bottom is taking place every time: the will to the end, the nihilistic will wants power…

  10

  Among Germans one will understand immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale.* Definition of Protestantism: the half-sided paralysis of Christianity – and of reason.… One has only to say the words ‘College of Tübingen’† to grasp what German philosophy is at bottom – a cunning theology.… The Swabians are the best liars in Germany, they lie innocently.… Why the rejoicing heard throughout the German academic world – three-quarters composed of the sons of pastors and teachers – at the appearance of Kant? Why the Germans’ conviction, which still finds an echo even today, that with Kant things were taking a turn for the better? The theologian instinct in the German scholar divined what was henceforth possible once again.… A secret path to the old ideal stood revealed, the concept ‘real world’, the concept of morality as the essence of the world (– these two most vicious errors in existence!) were once more, thanks to a crafty-sly scepticism, if not demonstrable yet no longer refutable.… Reason, the right of reason does not extend so far.… One had made of reality an ‘appearance’; one had made a completely fabricated world, that of being, into reality.… Kant’s success is merely a theologian’s success: German integrity was far from firm and Kant, like Luther, like Leibniz, was one more constraint upon it…

  11

  A word against Kant as moralist. A virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defence and necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. What does not condition our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect for the concept ‘virtue’, as Kant desired it, is harmful. ‘Virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘good in itself’, impersonal and universal – phantoms, expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life, of Kônigsbergian Chinadom. The profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand the reverse of this: that each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general. Nothing works more profound ruin than any ‘impersonal’ duty, any sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction. – Kant’s categorical imperative* should have been felt as mortally dangerous!… The theologian instinct alone took it under its protection! – An action compelled by the instinct of life has in the joy of performing it the proof it is a right action: and that nihilist with Christian-dogmatic bowels understands joy as an objection.… What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? as an automaton of ‘duty’? It is virtually a recipe for décadence, even for idiocy.… Kant became an idiot. – And that was the contemporary of Goethe! This fatal spider counted as the German philosopher – still does! I take care not to say what I think of the Germans.… Did Kant not see in the French Revolution the transition from the inorganic form of the state to the organic? Did he not ask himself whether there was an event which could be explained in no other way than by a moral predisposition on the part of mankind, so that with it the ‘tendency of man to seek the good’ would be proved once and for all? Kant’s answer: ‘The Revolution is that.’ The erring instinct in all and everything, anti-naturalness as instinct, German décadence as philosophy – that is Kant! –

  12

  I exclude a few sceptics, the decent type in the history of philosophy: but the rest are ignorant of the first requirements of intellectual integrity. These great visionaries and prodigies behave one and all like little women – they consider ‘fine feelings’ arguments, the ‘heaving bosom’ the bellows of divinity, conviction the criterion of truth. Finally Kant, in his ‘German’ innocence, tried to give this form of corruption, this lack of intellectual conscience, a scientific colouring with the concept ‘practical reason’: he designed a reason specifically for the case in which one was supposed not to have to bother about reason, namely when morality, when the sublime demand ‘thou shalt’ makes itself heard. If one considers that the philosopher is, in virtually all nations, only the further development of the priestly type, one is no longer surprised to discover this heirloom of the priest, self-deceptive fraudulence. If one has sacred tasks, for example that of improving, saving, redeeming mankind – if one carries the divinity in one’s bosom, is the mouthpiece of an other-world imperative, such a mission already places one outside all merely reasonable valuations – one is already sanctified by such a task, one is already the type of a higher order!… What does a priest care about science! He is above it! – And the priest has hitherto ruled! – He has determined the concept ‘true’ and ‘untrue’!…

  13

  Let us not undervalue this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a ‘revaluation of all values’, an incarnate declaration of war and victory over all ancient conceptions of ‘true’ and ‘untrue’. The most valuable insights are the last to be discovered; but the most valuable insights are methods. All the methods, all the prerequisites of our present-day scientificality have
for millennia been the objects of the profoundest contempt: on their account one was excluded from associating with ‘honest’ men – one was considered an ‘enemy of God’, a despiser of truth, a man ‘possessed’. As a practitioner of science one was Chandala.… We have had the whole pathos of mankind against us – its conception of what truth ought to be; every ‘thou shalt’ has hitherto been directed against us.… Our objectives, our practices, our quiet, cautious, mistrustful manner – all this appeared utterly unworthy and contemptible to mankind. – In the end one might reasonably ask oneself whether it was not really an aesthetic taste which blinded mankind for so long: it desired a picturesque effect from truth, it desired especially that the man of knowledge should produce a powerful impression on the senses. It was our modesty which offended their taste the longest.… Oh, how well they divined that fact, those turkey-cocks of God –

  14

  We have learned better. We have become more modest in every respect. We no longer trace the origin of man in the ‘spirit’, in the ‘divinity’, we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his spirituality is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a vanity which would like to find expression even here: the vanity that man is the great secret objective of animal evolution. Man is absolutely not the crown of creation: every creature stands beside him at the same stage of perfection.… And even in asserting that we assert too much: man is, relatively speaking, the most unsuccessful animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts – with all that, to be sure, the most interesting! – As regards the animals, Descartes was the first who, with a boldness worthy of reverence, ventured to think of the animal as a machine: our whole science of physiology is devoted to proving this proposition. Nor, logically, do we exclude man, as even Descartes did: our knowledge of man today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge of him as a machine. Formerly man was presented with ‘free will’ as a dowry from a higher order: today we have taken even will away from him, in the sense that will may no longer be understood as a faculty. The old word ‘will’ only serves to designate a resultant, a kind of individual reaction which necessarily follows a host of partly contradictory, partly congruous stimuli – the will no longer ‘effects’ anything, no longer ‘moves’ anything.… Formerly one saw in man’s consciousness, in his ‘spirit’, the proof of his higher origin, his divinity; to make himself perfect man was advised to draw his senses back into himself in the manner of the tortoise, to cease to have any traffic with the earthly, to lay aside his mortal frame: then the chief part of him would remain behind, ‘pure spirit’. We have thought better of this too: becoming-conscious, ‘spirit’, is to us precisely a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an attempting, fumbling, blundering, as a toiling in which an unnecessarily large amount of nervous energy is expended – we deny that anything can be made perfect so long as it is still made conscious. ‘Pure spirit’ is pure stupidity: if we deduct the nervous system and the senses, the ‘mortal frame’, we miscalculate – that’s all!…

  15

  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 Devil’, ‘the proximity of God’); an imaginary teleology (‘the kingdom of God’, ‘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 ‘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! –), it is the expression of a profound discontent with the actual.… But that explains 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, however, provides the formula for décadence…

  16

  A critical examination of the Christian concept of God invites a similar conclusion. – A people which still believes in itself still also has its own God. In him it venerates the conditions through which it has prospered, its virtues – it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power on to a being whom one can thank for them. He who is rich wants to bestow; a proud people needs a God in order to sacrifice.… With in the bounds of such presuppositions religion is a form of gratitude. One is grateful for oneself: for that one needs a God. – Such a God must be able to be both useful and harmful, both friend and foe – he is admired in good and bad alike. The anti-natural castration of a God into a God of the merely good would be totally undesirable here. One has as much need of the evil God as of the good God: for one does not owe one’s existence to philanthropy or tolerance precisely.… Of what consequence would a God be who knew nothing of anger, revengefulness, envy, mockery, cunning, acts of violence? To whom even the rapturous ardeurs of victory and destruction were unknown? One would not understand such a God: why should one have him? – To be sure: when a people is perishing; when it feels its faith in the future, its hope of freedom vanish completely; when it becomes conscious that the most profitable thing of all is submissiveness and that the virtues of submissiveness are a condition of its survival, then its God has to alter too. He now becomes a dissembler, timid, modest, counsels ‘peace of soul’, no more hatred, forbearance, ‘love’ even towards friend and foe. He is continually moralizing, he creeps into the cave of every private virtue, becomes a God for everybody, becomes a private man, becomes a cosmopolitan.… Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsting for power in the soul of a people: now he is merely the good God.… There is in fact no other alternative for Gods: either they are the will to power – and so long as they are that they will be national Gods – or else the impotence for power – and then they necessarily become good…

  17

  Wherever the will to power declines in any form there is every time also a physiological regression, a décadence. The divinity of décadence, pruned of all its manliest drives and virtues, from now on necessarily becomes the God of the physiologically retarded, the weak. They do not call themselves the weak, they call themselves ‘the good’.… One will understand without further indication at what moment of history the dual fiction of a good and an evil God first becomes possible. The same instinct which makes the subjugated people reduce its God to the ‘good in itself makes them expunge the good qualities from the God of their conqueror; they revenge themselves on their masters by changing their masters’ God into a devil. – The good God and the Devil: both products of décadence. – How can one today still defer so far to the simplicity of Christian theologians as to join them in proclaiming that the evolution of the concept of God from the ‘God of Israel’, the national God, to the Christian God, the epitome of everything good, is an advance? – But even Renan does so. As if Renan had a right to simplicity! For it is the opposite which leaps to the eye. When the prerequisites of ascending life, when everything strong, brave, masterful, proud is eliminated from the concept of God; when he declines step by step to the
symbol of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for all who are drowning; when he becomes the poor people’s God, the sinner’s God, the God of the sick par excellence, and the predicate ‘saviour’, ‘redeemer’ as it were remains over as the predicate of divinity as such: of what does such a transformation speak? such a reduction of the divine? – To be sure: ‘the kingdom of God’ has thereby grown larger. Formerly he had only his people, his ‘chosen’ people. In the meantime, just like his people itself, he has gone abroad, gone wandering about; since then he has sat still nowhere: until at last he is at home everywhere, the great cosmopolitan – until he has got ‘the great majority’ and half the earth on his side. But the God of the ‘great majority’, the democrat among Gods, has none the less not become a proud pagan God: he has remained a Jew, he has remained the God of the nook, the God of all the dark corners and places, of all unhealthy quarters throughout the world!… His world-empire is as before an underworld-empire, a hospital, a souterrain-empire, a ghetto-empire.… And he himself so pale, so weak, so décadent.… Even the palest of the pale have still been able to master him, messieurs the metaphysicians, the conceptual albinos. These have spun their web around him so long that, hypnotized by their movements, he himself became a spider, a metaphysician. Thence forward he span the world again out of himself – sub specie Spinozae – thenceforward he transformed himself into something ever paler and less substantial, became an ‘ideal’, became ‘pure spirit’, became ‘absolutum’, became ‘thing in itself.… Decay of a God: God became ‘thing in itself’…