Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  48

  – Has the famous story which stands at the beginning of the Bible really been understood – the story of God’s mortal terror of science;?… It has not been understood. This priest’s-book begins, as is only proper, with the priest’s great inner difficulty: he has only one great danger, consequently ‘God’ has only one great danger. –

  The old God, all ‘spirit’, all high priest, all perfection, promenades in his garden: but he is bored. Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.* What does he do? He invents man – man is entertaining…. But behold, man too is bored. God’s sympathy with the only kind of distress found in every Paradise knows no bounds: he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first blunder: man did not find the animals entertaining – he dominated them, he did not even want to be an ‘animal’. – Consequently God created woman. And then indeed there was an end to boredom – but also to something else! Woman was God’s second blunder. – ‘Woman is in her essence serpent, Heva’ – every priest knows that; ‘every evil comes into the world through woman’ – every priest knows that likewise. ‘Consequently, science too comes into the world through her’…. Only through woman did man learn to taste the tree of knowledge. – What had happened? A mortal terror seized on the old God. Man himself had become God’s greatest blunder; God had created for himself a rival, science makes equal to God – it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific! – Moral: science is the forbidden in itself – it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin. This alone constitutes morality. – ‘Thou shalt not know’ – the rest follows. – God’s mortal terror did not stop him from being shrewd. How can one defend oneself against science? – that was for long his chief problem. Answer: away with man out of Paradise! Happiness, leisure gives room for thought – all thoughts are bad thoughts…. Man shall not think. – And the ‘priest in himself invents distress, death, the danger to life in pregnancy, every kind of misery, age, toil, above all sickness – nothing but expedients in the struggle against science! Distress does not allow man to think…. And none the less! oh horror! the structure of knowledge towers up, heaven-storming, reaching for the divine – what to do! – The old God invents war, he divides the peoples, he makes men destroy one another (– priests have always had need of war…). War – among other things a great mischief-maker in science! – Incredible! knowledge, emancipation from the priest, increases in spite of wars. – And the old God comes to a final decision: ‘Man has become scientific – there is nothing for it, he will have to be drowned!’…

  49

  – Have I been understood? The beginning of the Bible contains the entire psychology of the priest. – The priest knows only one great danger: that is science – the sound conception of cause and effect. But science flourishes in general only under happy circumstances – one must have a superfluity of time and intellect in order to ‘know’…. ‘Consequently man must be made unhappy’ – this has at all times been the logic of the priest. – One will already have guessed what only came into the world therewith, in accordance with this logic – ‘sin’…. The concept of guilt and punishment, the entire ‘moral world-order’, was invented in opposition to science – in opposition to the detaching of man from the priest…. Man shall not look around him, he shall look down into himself; he shall not look prudently and cautiously into things in order to learn, 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! One has need of a Saviour. – 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 the causal sense of man: they are an outrage on the concept cause and effect! – And not an outrage with the fist, with the knife, with honest hatred and love! But one from the most cowardly, cunning, lowest instincts! An outrage of the priest! An outrage of the parasite! A vampirism of pale subterranean bloodsuckers!… When the natural consequences of an act are no longer ‘natural’ but thought of as effected by the conceptual ghosts of superstition, by ‘God’, by ‘spirits’, by ‘souls’, as merely ‘moral’ consequences, as reward, punishment, sign, chastisement, then the precondition for knowledge has been destroyed – then one has committed the greatest crime against humanity. – Sin, to say it again, that form par excellence of the self-violation of man, was invented to make science, culture, every kind of elevation and nobility of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin. –

  50

  – At this point I cannot absolve myself from giving an account of the psychology of ‘belief, of ‘believers’, for the use, as is only reasonable, of precisely the ‘believers’ them selves. If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to ‘believe’ – or a sign of décadence, of a broken will to live – well, they will know it tomorrow. My voice reaches even the hard-of-hearing. – It appears, if I have not misheard, that there exists among Christians a kind of criterion of truth called ‘proof by potency’. ‘Belief makes blessed: therefore it is true.’ – One might here object straight away that this making-blessed itself is not proved but only promised: blessedness conditional upon ‘believing’ – one shall become blessed because one believes…. But that what the priest promises the believer for a ‘Beyond’ inaccessible to any control actually occurs, how could that be proved? – The alleged ‘proof by potency’ is therefore at bottom only a further belief that the effect which one promises oneself from the belief will not fail to appear. In a formula: ‘I believe that belief makes blessed – consequently it is true’. – But with that we have already reached the end of the argument. This ‘consequently’ would be the absurdum itself as a criterion of truth. – But if, with no little indulgence, we suppose that the fact that belief makes blessed be regarded as proved (– not merely desired, not merely promised by the somewhat suspect mouth of a priest): would blessedness – more technically, pleasure – ever be a proof of truth? So little that it provides almost the counterproof, at any rate the strongest suspicion against ‘truth’, when feelings of pleasure enter into the answer to the question ‘what is true?’ The proof by ‘pleasure’ is a proof of pleasure – that is all; when on earth was it established that true judgements give more enjoyment than false ones and, in accordance with a predetermined harmony, necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their train? – The experience of all severe, all profound intellects teaches the reverse. Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, has had to be sacrificed to it. Greatness of soul is needed for it: the service of truth is the hardest service. – For what does it mean to be honest in intellectual things? That one is stern towards one’s heart, that one despises ‘fine feelings’, that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience! – Belief makes blessed: consequently it lies…

  51

  That under certain conditions belief makes blessed, that blessedness does not turn an idée fixe into a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but surely places mountains where there are none: a fleeting visit to a madhouse will provide ample enlightenment on these things. Not, I admit, to a priest: for he denies by instinct that sickness is sickness, that a madhouse is a madhouse. Christianity needs sickness almost as much as Hellenism needs a superfluity of health – making sick is the true hidden objective of the Church’s whole system of salvation procedures. And the Church itself – is it not the Catholic madhouse as an ultimate ideal? – The whole earth as a madhouse? – The religious man as the Church desires him to be is a typical décadent; the moment when a religious crisis has gained the upper hand of a people is always characterized by epidemics of neurosis; the ‘inner world’ of the religious man is so like the ‘inner world’ of the over-excited and exhausted as to be mistaken for it; the ‘highest’ states which Christianity has hung up over m
ankind as the most valuable of all values are forms of epilepsy – the Church has canonized only lunatics or great imposters in majorem death honorem.*… I once permitted myself to describe the entire Christian penance-and-redemption training (which can be studied best today in England) as a methodically induced folie circulaire, naturally on a soil already prepared for it, that is to say a thoroughly morbid soil. No one is free to become a Christian or not to do so; one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity – one must be sufficiently sick for it…. We others, who have the courage for health and also for contempt, what contempt we have for a religion which teaches misunderstanding of the body! which does not wish to get rid of the soul-superstition! which makes a ‘merit’ of eating too little! which combats health as a kind of enemy, devil, temptation! which has persuaded itself that a ‘perfect soul’ could be carried about in a cadaver of a body and to do so needed to concoct a new conception of ‘perfection’, a pale, sickly, idiot-fanatic condition, so-called ‘holiness’ – holiness itself merely a symptom-syndrome of the impoverished, enervated, incurably corrupted body!… As a European movement, the Christian movement has been from the very first a collective movement of outcast and refuse elements of every kind (– these want to come to power through Christianity). It is not the expression of the decline of a race, it is an aggregate formation of décadence types from everywhere crowding together and seeking one another out. It is not, as is generally believed, the corruption of antiquity itself, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible: the learned idiocy which even today maintains such a thing cannot be contradicted too severely. The period in which the morbid, corrupt Chandala classes of the entire Imperium were becoming Christian was precisely that in which the opposing type, the nobility, existed in its fairest and maturest form. The majority became master; the democratism of the Christian instincts conquered…. Christianity was not ‘national’, not racially conditioned – it turned to the disinherited of life of every kind, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has at its basis the rancune of the sick, the instinct directed against the healthy, against health. Everything well-constituted, proud, high-spirited, beauty above all, is hurtful to its ears and eyes. I recall again the invaluable saying of Paul: ‘God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, base things of the world and things which are despised’: that was the formula, in hoc signo décadence conquered. – God on the Cross – is the fearful hidden meaning behind this symbol still understood? – Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the Cross, is divine…. We all hang on the Cross, consequently we are divine…. We alone are divine…. Christianity was a victory, a nobler disposition perished by it – Christianity has been up till now mankind’s greatest misfortune. –

  52

  Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-constitutedness – it can use only the morbid mind as the Christian mind, it takes the side of everything idiotic, it proclaims a curse against the ‘spirit’, against the superbia of the healthy spirit. Because sickness belongs to the essence of Christianity, the typical Christian condition, ‘faith’, has to be a form of sickness, every straightforward, honest, scientific road to knowledge has to be repudiated by the Church as a forbidden road. Even to doubt is a sin…. The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest – it betrays itself in his glance – is a consequent phenomenon of décadence – one can observe in hysterical women and rickety children how regularly instinctive falsity, lying for the sake of lying, inability to look straight and act straight, are expressions of décadence.’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 shall not come into its own at any point. ‘What makes sick is good; what proceeds from abundance, from superfluity, from power, is evil’: that is what the believer feels. Compulsion to lie – in that I detect every predestined theologian. – Another mark of the theologian is his incapacity for philology. Philology is to be understood here in a very wide sense as the art of reading well – of being able to read off a fact without falsifying it by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, subtlety in the desire for understanding. Philology as ephexis* in interpretation: whether it be a question of books, newspaper reports, fate or the weather – to say nothing of the ‘salvation of the soul’…. The way in which a theologian, no matter whether in Berlin or in Rome, interprets a ‘word of the Scriptures’, or an experience, a victory of his country’s army for example, under the higher illumination of the psalms of David, is always so audacious as to make a philologist run up every wall in sight. And what on earth is he to do when pietists and other cows out of Swabia dress up the pathetic commonplace and stuffiness of their existence with the ‘finger of God’ into a miracle of ‘grace’, of ‘divine providence’, of ‘experience of salvation’! Yet the most modest expenditure of intelligence, not to say decency, would convince these interpreters of the complete childishness and unworthiness of such an abuse of divine dexterity.* Even the slightest trace of piety in us ought to make us feel that a God who cures a headcold at the right moment or tells us to get into a coach just as a downpour is about to start is so absurd a God he would have to be abolished even if he existed. A God as a domestic servant, as a postman, as an almanac-maker – at bottom a word for the stupidest kind of accidental occurrence…. ‘Divine providence’, as it is still believed in today by almost every third person in ‘cultured Germany’, would be a stronger objection to God than any other that could possibly be thought of. And in any case it is an objection to the Germans!…

  53

  – That martyrs prove anything about the truth of a cause is so little true I would be disposed to deny that a martyr has ever had anything whatever to do with truth. In the tone with which a martyr throws his opinion at the world’s head there is already expressed so low a degree of intellectual integrity, such obtuseness to the question of ‘truth’, that one never needs to refute a martyr. Truth is not something one person might possess and another not possess: peasants at the most, or peasant apostles like Luther, could think of truth in this fashion. One may be certain that modesty, moderation in intellectual matters, increases with the degree of conscientiousness in them. To know five things and gently decline to know anything else….’Truth’ as every prophet, every sectarian, every latitudinarian, every Socialist, every Churchman understands the word, is conclusive proof that not so much as a start has been made on that disciplining of the intellect and self-overcoming necessary for the discovery of any truth, even the very smallest. – Martyrdoms, by the way, have been a great misfortune in history: they have seduced…. The inference of all idiots, women and nations included, that a cause for which someone is willing to die (not to speak of those which, like primitive Christianity, produce epidemics of death-seeking) must have something in it – this inference has become an unspeakable drag on verification, on the spirit of verification and caution. Martyrs have harmed truth…. And even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honourable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself. – What? does the fact that someone gives up his life for it change anything in the value of a cause? – An error which becomes honourable is an error which possesses one seductive charm more: do you believe, messieurs the theologians, that we would give you an opportunity of becoming martyrs for your lies? – one refutes a thing by laying it respectfully on ice – just so does one refute theologians too…. The world-historical stupidity of all persecutors has lain precisely in giving their opponents the appearance of honourableness – in bestowing on them the fascination of martyrdom…. Woman is today on her knees before an error because she has been told someone died on the Cross for it. Is the Cross then an argument? – But on all these things one man alone has said the word that has been wanting for millennia – Zarathustra.

  They wrote letters of blood on the path they followed and their folly taught that truth is proved by blood.

&
nbsp; But blood is the worst witness of truth; blood poisons and transforms the purest teaching to delusion and hatred of the heart.

  And if someone goes through fire for his teaching – what does that prove? Truly, it is more when one’s own teaching comes out of one’s own burning!*

  54

  One should not let oneself be misled: great intellects are sceptics. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The vigour of a mind, its freedom through strength and superior strength, is proved by scepticism. Men of conviction simply do not come into consideration where the fundamentals of value and disvalue are concerned. Convictions are prisons. They do not see far enough, they do not see things beneath them: but to be permitted to speak about value and disvalue one must see five hundred convictions beneath one – behind one…. A spirit which wants to do great things, which also wills the means for it, is necessarily a sceptic. Freedom from convictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view, pertains to strength…. Grand passion, the ground and force of his being, even more enlightened, more despotic than he himself is, takes his whole intellect into its service; it makes him intrepid; it even gives him the courage for unholy means; if need be it permits him convictions. Conviction as a means: there is much one can achieve only by means of a conviction. Grand passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not submit to them – it knows itself sovereign. – Conversely: the need for belief, for some unconditional Yes and No, Carlylism if I may be excused the expression, is a requirement of weakness. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man – such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him. His instinct accords the highest honour to a morality of selflessness: everything persuades him to it, his intelligence, his experience, his vanity. Belief of any kind is itself an expression of selflessness, of self-alienation…. If one considers what need people have of an external regulation to constrain and steady them, how compulsion, slavery in a higher sense, is the sole and final condition under which the person of weaker will, woman especially, can prosper; then one also understands the nature of conviction, ‘faith’. Conviction is the backbone of the man of conviction. Not to see many things, not to be impartial in anything, to be party through and through, to view all values from a strict and necessary perspective – this alone is the condition under which such a man exists at all. But he is thereby the antithesis, the antagonist of the truthful man – of truth…. The believer is not free to have a conscience at all over the question ‘true’ and ‘false’: to be honest on this point would mean his immediate destruction. The pathological conditionality of his perspective makes of the convinced man a fanatic – Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon – the antithetical type of the strong, emancipated spirit. But the larger-than-life attitudes of these sick spirits, these conceptual epileptics, impresses the great masses – fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons…