Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ
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The whole labour of the ancient world in vain: I have no words to express my feelings at something so dreadful. – And considering its labour was a preparation, that only the substructure for a labour of millennia had, with granite self-confidence, been laid, the whole meaning of the ancient world in vain!… Why did the Greeks exist? Why the Romans? – Every prerequisite for an erudite culture, all the scientific methods were already there, the great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been established – the prerequisite for a cultural tradition, for a uniform science; natural science, in concert with mathematics and mechanics, was on the best possible road – the sense for facts, the last-developed and most valuable of all the senses, had its schools and its tradition already centuries old! Is this understood? Everything essential for setting to work had been devised – methods, one must repeat ten times, are the essential, as well as being the most difficult, as well as being that which has habit and laziness against it longest. What we have won back for ourselves today with an unspeakable amount of self-constraint – for we all still have bad instincts, the Christian instincts, somewhere within us – the free view of reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge – was already there! already more than two millennia ago! And good and delicate taste and tact! Not as brain training! Not as ‘German’ culture with the manners of ruffians! But as body, as gesture, as instinct – in a word, as reality…. All in vain! Overnight merely a memory! – Greeks! Romans! nobility of instinct, of taste, methodical investigation, genius for organization and government, the faith in, the will to a future for mankind, the great Yes to all things, visibly present to all the senses as the Imperium Romanum, grand style no longer merely art but become reality, truth, life…. And not overwhelmed overnight by a natural event! Not trampled down by Teutons and other such clodhoppers! But ruined by cunning, secret, invisible, anaemic vampires! Not conquered – only sucked dry!… Covert revengefulness, petty envy become master ! Everything pitiful, everything suffering from itself, everything tormented by base feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul suddenly on top! – One has only to read any of the Christian agitators, Saint Augustine for example, to realize, to smell, what dirty fellows had therewith come out on top. One would be deceiving oneself utterly if one presupposed a lack of intelligence of any sort on the part of the leaders of the Christian movement – oh they are shrewd, shrewd to the point of holiness, these Church Fathers! What they lack is something quite different. Nature was neglectful when she made them – she forgot to endow them with even a modest number of respectable, decent, cleanly instincts…. Between ourselves, they are not even men.… If Islam despises Christianity, it is a thousand times right to do so: Islam presupposes men…
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Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, more closely related to us at bottom, speaking more directly to our senses and taste, than Greece and Rome, was trampled down (– I do not say by what kind of feet –): why? because it was noble, because it owed its origin to manly instincts, because it said Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite treasures of Moorish life!… Later on, the Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before – a culture compared with which even our nineteenth century may well think itself very impoverished and very ‘late’. – They wanted booty, to be sure: the Orient was rich…. But let us not be prejudiced! The Crusades – higher piracy, that is all! German knighthood, Viking knighthood at bottom, was there in its element: the Church knew only too well what German knighthood can be had for…. The German knights, always the ‘Switzers’ of the Church, always in the service of all the bad instincts of the Church – but well paid…. That it is precisely with the aid of German swords, German blood and courage, that the Church has carried on its deadly war against everything noble on earth! A host of painful questions arises at this point. The German aristocracy is virtually missing in the history of higher culture: one can guess the reason…. Christianity, alcohol – the two great means of corruption…. For in itself there should be no choice in the matter when faced with Islam and Christianity, as little as there should when faced with an Arab and a Jew. The decision is given in advance; no one is free to choose here. One either is Chandala or one is not…. ‘War to the knife with Rome! Peace, friendship with Islam’: this is what that great free spirit, the genius among German emperors, Friedrich the Second, felt, this is what he did. What? does a German have to be a genius, a free spirit, before he can have decent feelings? How a German could ever have felt Christian escapes me…
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Here it is necessary to touch on a memory a hundred times more painful for Germans. The Germans have robbed Europe of the last great cultural harvest Europe had to bring home – of the harvest of Renaissance. Is it at last understood, is there a desire to understand, what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of Christian values, the attempt, undertaken with every expedient, with every instinct, with genius of every kind, to bring about the victory of the opposing values, the noble values…. Up till now this has been the only great war, there has been no more decisive interrogation than that conducted by the Renaissance – the question it asks is the question I ask – : neither has there been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, and more strenuously delivered on the entire front and at the enemy’s centre! To attack at the decisive point, in the very seat of Christianity, to set the noble values on the throne, which is to say to set them into the instincts, the deepest needs and desires of him who sits thereon…. I see in my mind’s eye a possibility of a quite unearthly fascination and splendour – it seems to glitter with a trembling of every refinement of beauty, there seems to be at work in it an art so divine, so diabolically divine, that one might scour the millennia in vain for a second such possibility; I behold a spectacle at once so meaningful and so strangely paradoxical it would have given all the gods of Olympus an opportunity for an immortal roar of laughter – Cesare Borgia as Pope…. Am I understood?… Very well, that would have been a victory of the only sort I desire today – : Christianity would thereby have been abolished! – What happened? A German monk, Luther, went to Rome. This monk, all the vindictive instincts of a failed priest in him, fulminated in Rome against the Renaissance…. Instead of grasping with profound gratitude the tremendous event which had taken place, the overcoming of Christianity in its very seat – his hatred grasped only how to nourish itself on this spectacle. The religious man thinks only of himself. – What Luther saw was the corruption of the Papacy, while precisely the opposite was palpably obvious: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne! Life sat there instead! the triumph of life! the great Yes to all lofty, beautiful, daring things!… And Luther restored the Church: he attacked it…. The Renaissance – an event without meaning, a great in vain! – Oh these Germans, what they have already cost us! In vain – that has always been the work of the Germans. – The Reformation; Leibniz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the Wars of ‘Liberation’; the Reich – each time an in vain for something already in existence, for something irretrievable…. They are my enemies, I confess it, these Germans: I despise in them every kind of uncleanliness of concept and value, of cowardice in the face of every honest Yes and No. For almost a millennium they have twisted and tangled everything they have laid their hands on, they have on their conscience all the half-heartedness – three-eighths-heartedness! – from which Europe is sick – they also have on their conscience the uncleanest kind of Christianity there is, the most incurable kind, the kind hardest to refute, Protestantism.… If we never get rid of Christianity, the Germans will be to blame…
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– With that I have done and pronounce my judgement. I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any p
rosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption, it has had the will to the ultimate corruption conceivably possible. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity, it has made of every value a disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind of integrity a vileness of soul. People still dare to talk to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! To abolish any state of distress whatever has been profoundly inexpedient to it: it has lived on states of distress, it has created states of distress in order to eternalize itself…. The worm of sin, for example: it was only the Church which enriched mankind with this state of distress! – ‘Equality of souls before God’, this falsehood, this pretext for the rancune of all the base-minded, this explosive concept which finally became revolution, modern idea and the principle of the decline of the entire social order – is Christian dynamite…. ‘Humanitarian’ blessings of Christianity! To cultivate out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to falsehood at any price, an antipathy, a contempt for every good and honest instinct! These are the blessings of Christianity! – Parasitism as the sole practice of the Church; with its ideal of green-sickness, of ‘holiness’ draining away all blood, all love, all hope for life; the Beyond as the will to deny reality of every kind; the Cross as the badge of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy there has ever been – a conspiracy against health, beauty, well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, benevolence of soul, against life itself…
Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them – I can write in letters which make even the blind see.… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind…
And one calculates time from the dies nefastus* on which this fatality arose – from the first day of Christianity! – Why not rather from its last? – From today? – Revaluation of all values!
Glossary of Names
ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC) Nietzsche has only a slight interest in Aristotle, and his main concern with him is to refute his conception of tragedy as catharsis; the ‘magnanimous’ man of the Nicomachaean Ethics, however, is very like Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
AUGUSTINE (354–430) ‘These have mastered Christianity:… Platonism (Augustine)….’ (Will to Power 214); utterly unable to live in the manner of Jesus, Augustine employed Christianity as a vehicle for his own ideology in the manner of Paul.
BAUDELAIRE, Charles (1821–67) ‘Who was the first intelligent supporter of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire….’ (Ecce Homo II 5): Nietzsche’s interest in Baudelaire, such as it is, is part of his interest in proving that Wagner was at bottom a French décadent.
BORGIA, Cesare (d. 1507) ‘Borgia’ is an ideogram for the man of strong but unsublimated will to power, the ‘blond beast’, who is not ‘improved’ when he is tamed.
BUCKLE, Henry Thomas (1821–62) Historian, author of the unfinished History of Civilization in which he expounds his ideas on the general laws which govern the evolution of human societies. His reputation formerly stood much higher than it does now: in the Genealogy of Morals (1, 4) Nietzsche attacks the ‘plebeianism of the modern spirit’ as manifested in the ‘notorious case of Buckle’.
BURCKHARDT, Jacob (1818–97) Historian, best known for his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. He was an elder colleague of Nietzsche’s at Basel university and Nietzsche retained a great admiration for him.
CAESAR, Julius (101–44 BC) In Nietzsche’s works, Caesar is dehistoricized into an ideogram for the man of sublimated will to power (compare Borgia). Nietzsche does admire Caesar, but not specifically as a general and certainly not because he was a general (compare Napoleon).
CARLYLE, Thomas (1795–1881) In an aphorism in Dawn called ‘The cult of hero-worship and its fanatics’ (298), Nietzsche says of one who idealizes another that he ‘sets this person at so great a distance from himself that he can no longer see him clearly – and then he reinterprets what he still sees into the “beautiful”, which is to say the symmetrical, soft-lined, indefinite.’ The two men he accuses of doing this, Byron and Carlyle, are both as it happens Scotsmen, and it was another Scotsman, Thomas Campbell, who provided the formula for this kind of perspective in the lines, ‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue’ and thereby defined a good part of ‘Romanticism’. To Nietzsche, Carlyle was a ‘typical Romantic’.
CATILINE, Lucius Sergius (c. 109–62 BC) Unsuccessful conspiracy against the Senate 63–2 BC: his feelings towards that body are likened to Caesar’s, his handling of that body contrasted with Caesar’s.
COMTE, Auguste (1798–1857) French philosopher, author of the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42). Comte was for Nietzsche the great ‘embracer and conqueror of the pure sciences’ who at the end of his life allowed his scientific strictness to evaporate into ‘poetical mist and mystic lights’ (Dawn 542).
CORNARO, Luigi (1467–1566) After surviving a nearly fatal illness at forty, he advocated a sparing diet as a recipe for health and long life. ‘In later life he found one egg a day sufficient solid food.’ (Encyclopedia Britannica). His book, Discorsi sulla vita sobria (1558), was a best-seller in many languages.
DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321) The scattered references to Dante in Nietzsche’s works are highly contradictory.
DARWIN, Charles (1809–82) Confrontation with Darwin is a major motif of Nietzsche’s philosophy passim. There are four main points at issue: (i) in so far as ‘Darwinism’ means the theory of evolution it is ‘true but deadly’ because it proves that mankind is a continuation of the animals and that human life is therefore deprived of any special significance; Nietzsche’s hypothesis of sublimated will to power is designed to restore a distinction between man and animal; (ii) in so far as Darwinism is the theory of evolution by natural selection brought about by a ‘struggle for survival’ it is, Nietzsche maintains, untrue, because it presupposes a niggardliness and state of chronic distress in nature which does not exist, the state of nature being on the contrary ‘one of superfluity and prodigality, even to the point of absurdity’ (The Gay Science 349: the unconscious influence on Darwin’s theory of the condition of nineteenth-century England and of Victorian middle-class thriftiness and money-mindedness in general is now, I think, generally recognized); (iii) in as much as the effects accounted for by the hypothesis of a will to aggrandizement include those accounted for by the hypothesis of a ‘will to survive’ this latter hypothesis is superfluous; (iv) when a ‘struggle for survival’ does take place its outcome is not that implied by the theory of natural selection, that is to say it is not a higher type which emerges victorious.
DEMOCRITUS (flourished c. 420 BC) Greek philosopher, the founder, with Leucippus, of atomism. Nietzsche’s attitude towards Democritus’ atomism is instructive: he approves of its materialism and of the fact that it can get along without any teleology, but he sees that it is very far from being the complete victory over Parmenides its advocates took it to be: the projection of the notion of a ‘subject’ from the individual on to the outside world, where it assumes the shape of a ‘thing’, is certainly not done away with in atomism, for the ‘atom’ is a ‘thing’. The mechanistic idea of atoms as solid objects like billiard balls was instinctively rejected by Nietzsche: and in Human, All Too Human (19) he wrote: ‘the whole procedure of science has been pursuing the task of resolving everything thing-like (material) into motions.’