Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  The consequence of such a condition projects itself into a new practice, the true evangelic practice. It is not a ‘belief’ which distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by a different mode of acting. Neither by words nor in his heart does he resist the man who does him evil. He makes no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew (‘one’s neighbour’ is properly one’s co-religionist, the Jew). He is not angry with anyone, does not disdain anyone. He neither appears in courts of law nor claims their protection (‘not swearing’). Under no circumstances, not even in the case of proved unfaithfulness, does he divorce his wife. – All fundamentally one law, all consequences of one instinct. –

  The life of the redeemer was nothing else than this practice – his death too was nothing else.… He no longer required any formulas, any rites for communicating with God – not even prayer. He has settled his accounts with the whole Jewish penance-and-reconciliation doctrine; he knows that it is through the practice of one’s life that one feels ‘divine’, ‘blessed’, ‘evangelic’, at all times a ‘child of God’. It is not ‘penance’, not ‘prayer for forgiveness’ which leads to God: evangelic practice alone leads to God, it is God! – What was abolished with the Evangel was the Judaism of the concepts ‘sin’, ‘forgiveness of sin’, ‘faith’, ‘redemption by faith’–the whole of Jewish ecclesiastical teaching was denied in the ‘glad tidings’.

  The profound instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself ‘in Heaven’, to feel oneself ‘eternal’, while in every other condition one by no means feels oneself ‘in Heaven’: this alone is the psychological reality of ‘redemption’. – A new way of living, not a new belief…

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  If I understand anything of this great symbolist it is that he took for realities, for ‘truths’, only inner realities – that he understood the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasion for metaphor. The concept ‘the Son of Man’ is not a concrete person belonging to history, anything at all individual or unique, but an ‘eternal’ fact, a psychological symbol freed from the time concept. The same applies supremely to the God of this typical symbolist, to the ‘kingdom of God’, to the ‘kingdom of Heaven’, to ‘God’s children’. Nothing is more un-Christian than the ecclesiastical crudities of a God as a person, of a ‘kingdom of God’ which comes, of a ‘kingdom of Heaven’ in the Beyond, of a ‘Son of God’, the second person of the Trinity. All this – forgive the expression – a fist in the eye* – oh in what an eye! – of the Gospel: world-historical cynicism in the mockery of symbolism.… But it is patently obvious what is alluded to in the symbols ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ – not patently obvious to everyone, I grant: in the word ‘Son’ is expressed the entry into the collective feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness), in the word ‘Father’ this feeling itself, the feeling of perfection and eternity. – I am ashamed to recall what the Church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon† story at the threshold of Christian ‘faith’? And a dogma of ‘immaculate conception’ into the bargain?… But it has thereby maculated conception–

  The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart – not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’. The entire concept of natural death is lacking in the Gospel: death is not a bridge, not a transition, it is lacking because it belongs to quite another world, a merely apparent world useful only for the purpose of symbolism. The ‘hour of death’ is not a Christian concept – the ‘hour’, time, physical life and its crises, simply do not exist for the teacher of the ‘glad tidings’.… The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years’ – it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere…

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  This ‘bringer of glad tidings’ died as he lived, as he taught – not to ‘redeem mankind’ but to demonstrate how one ought to live. What he bequeathed to mankind is his practice: his bearing before the judges, before the guards, before the accusers and every kind of calumny and mockery – his bearing on the Cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him – more, he provokes it…. And he entreats, he suffers, he loves with those, in those who are doing evil to him. His words to the thief on the Cross contain the whole Evangel. ‘That was verily a divine man, a child of God!’ –says the thief. ‘If thou feelest this’ – answers the redeemer – ‘thou art in Paradise, thou art a child of God.’ Not to defend oneself, not to grow angry, not to make responsible.… But not to resist even the evil man – to love him…

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  – Only we, we emancipated spirits, possess the prerequisite for understanding something nineteen centuries have misunderstood – that integrity become instinct and passion which makes war on the ‘holy lie’ even more than on any other lie.… One has been unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit through which alone the divining of such strange, such delicate things is made possible: at all times one has, with shameless self-seeking, desired only one’s own advantage in these things, one constructed the Church out of the antithesis to the Gospel.

  If anyone were looking for a sign that an ironical divinity was at work behind the great universal drama he would find no small support in the tremendous question-mark called Christianity. That mankind should fall on its knees before the opposite of what was the origin, the meaning, the right of the Gospel, that it should have sanctified in the concept ‘Church’ precisely what the ‘bringer of glad tidings’ regarded as beneath him, behind him – one seeks in vain a grander form of world-historical irony –

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  – Our age is proud of its historical sense: how was it able to make itself believe in the nonsensical notion that the crude miracle-worker and redeemer fable comes at the commencement of Christianity – and that everything spiritual and symbolic is only a subsequent development? On the contrary: the history of Christianity – and that from the very death on the Cross – is the history of progressively cruder misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity over even broader, even ruder masses in whom the preconditions out of which it was born were more and more lacking, it became increasingly necessary to vulgarize, to barbarize Christianity – it absorbed the doctrines and rites of every subterranean cult of the Imperium Romanum, it absorbed the absurdities of every sort of morbid reason. The fate of Christianity lies in the necessity for its faith itself to grow as morbid, low and vulgar as the requirements it was intended to satisfy were morbid, low and vulgar. As the Church, this morbid barbarism itself finally assumes power – the Church, that form of mortal hostility to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to discipline of spirit, to all open-hearted and benevolent humanity. – Christian values – noble values: it is only we, we emancipated spirits, who have restored this greatest of all value-antitheses! –

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  – At this point I shall not suppress a sigh. There are days when I am haunted by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy – contempt of man. And so as to leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporary. The man of today – I suffocate of his impure breath.… With regard to the past I am, like all men of knowledge, of a large tolerance, that is to say a magnanimous self-control: I traverse the madhouse-world of entire millennia, be it called ‘Christianity’, ‘Christian faith’, ‘Christian Church’, with a gloomy circumspection – I take care not to make mankind responsible for its insanities. But my feelings suddenly alter, burst forth, immediately I enter the modern age, our age. Our age knows…. What was formerly merely morbid has today become indecent – it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here is where my disgust commences. – I look around me: there is no longer a word left of what was formerly called ‘truth’, we no longer endure it when a pr
iest so much as utters the word ‘truth’. Even with the most modest claim to integrity one must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope does not merely err in every sentence he speaks, he lies – that he is no longer free to lie ‘innocently’, out of ‘ignorance’. The priest knows as well as anyone that there is no longer any ‘God’, any ‘sinner’, any ‘redeemer’ – that ‘free will’, ‘moral world-order’ are lies – intellectual seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of the intellect, no longer permits anyone not to know about these things.… All the concepts of the Church are recognized for what they are: the most malicious false-coinage there is for the purpose of disvaluing nature and natural values; the priest himself is recognized for what he is: the most dangerous kind of parasite, the actual poison-spider of life.… We know, our conscience knows today – what those sinister inventions of priest and Church are worth, what end they serve, with which that state of human self-violation has brought about which is capable of exciting disgust at the sight of mankind – the concepts ‘Beyond’, ‘Last Judgement’, ‘immortality of the soul’, the ‘soul’ itself: they are instruments of torture, they are forms of systematic cruelty by virtue of which the priest has become master, stays master.… Everyone knows this: and everyone none the less remains unchanged. Where have the last feelings of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, in other ways very unprejudiced kind of men and practical anti-Christians through and through, still call themselves Christians today and go to Communion?… A young prince at the head of his regiments, splendid as the expression of his people’s egoism and presumption – but without any shame professing himself a Christian!… Whom then does Christianity deny? what does it call ‘world’? Being a soldier, being a judge, being a patriot; defending oneself; preserving one’s honour; desiring to seek one’s advantage; being proud…. The practice of every hour, every instinct, every valuation which leads to action is today anti-Christian: what a monster of falsity modern man must be that he is none the less not ashamed to be called a Christian!

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  – To resume, I shall now relate the real history of Christianity. – The word ‘Christianity’ is already a misunderstanding – in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross. The ‘Evangel’ died on the Cross. What was called ‘Evangel’ from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived: ‘bad tidings’, a dysangel. It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief, perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian.… Even today, such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times.… Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things, a different being…. States of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example – every psychologist knows, this – are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts: to speak more strictly, the whole concept of spiritual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness. In fact there have been no Christians at all. The ‘Christian’, that which has been called Christian for two millennia, is merely a psychological self-misunderstanding. Regarded more closely, that which has ruled in him, in spite of all his ‘faith’, has been merely the instincts – and what instincts! ‘Faith’ has been at all times, with Luther for instance, only a cloak, a pretext, a screen, behind which the instincts played their game – a shrewd blindness to the dominance of certain instincts.… ‘Faith’ – I have already called it the true Christian shrewdness – one has always spoken of faith, one has always acted from instinct.… The Christian’s world of ideas contains nothing which so much as touches upon actuality: on the other hand, we have recognized in instinctive hatred for actuality the driving element, the only driving element in the roots of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That here, in psychologicis also, error is radical, that is to say determinant of the essence, that is to say substance. One concept removed, a single reality substituted in its place – and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothing! – From a lofty standpoint, this strangest of all facts, a religion not only determined by errors but inventive and even possessing genius only in harmful, only in life-poisoning and heart-poisoning errors, remains a spectacle for the gods – for those divinities which are at the same time philosophers and which I encountered, for example, during those celebrated dialogues on Naxos. In the hour when their disgust leaves them (– and leaves us!) they become grateful for the spectacle of the Christian: perhaps it is only for the sake of this curious case that the pathetic little star called Earth deserves a divine glance and divine participation.… For let us not undervalue the Christian: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, far surpasses the ape – with respect to Christians a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment…

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  – The fate of the Evangel was determined by the death – it hung on the Cross.… It was only the death, this unexpected shameful death, only the Cross, which was in general reserved for the canaille alone – it was only this terrible paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real enigma: ‘Who was that? What was that?’ – The feeling of being shaken and disappointed to their depths, the suspicion that such a death might be the refutation of their cause, the frightful question-mark ‘why has this happened?’ – this condition is only too understandable. Here everything had to be necessary, meaningful, reasonable, reasonable in the highest degree; a disciple’s love knows nothing of chance. Only now did the chasm open up: ‘Who killed him? who was his natural enemy?’ – this question came like a flash of lightning. Answer: ruling Judaism, its upper class. From this moment one felt oneself in mutiny against the social order, one subsequently understood Jesus as having been in mutiny against the social order. Up till then this warlike trait, this negative trait in word and deed, was lacking in his image; more, he was the contradiction of it. Clearly the little community had failed to understand precisely the main thing, the exemplary element in his manner of dying, the freedom from, the superiority over every feeling of ressentiment: – a sign of how little they understood of him at all! Jesus himself could have desired nothing by his death but publicly to offer the sternest test, the proof of his teaching.… But his disciples were far from forgiving his death – which would have been evangelic in the highest sense; not to speak of offering themselves up to a similar death in sweet and gentle peace of heart.… Precisely the most unevangelic of feelings, revengefulness, again came uppermost. The affair could not possibly be at an end with this death: one required ‘retribution’, ‘judgement’ (– and yet what can be more unevangelic than ‘retribution’, ‘punishment’, ‘sitting in judgement’!). The popular expectation of a Messiah came once more into the foreground; an historic moment appeared in view: the ‘kingdom of God’ is coming to sit in judgement on its enemies.… But with this everything is misunderstood: the ‘kingdom of God’ as a last act, as a promise! For the Evangel had been precisely the existence, the fulfilment, the actuality of this ‘kingdom’. Such a death was precisely this ‘kingdom of God’. Only now was all that contempt for and bitterness against Pharisee and theologian worked into the type of the Master – one thereby made of him a Pharisee and theologian! On the other hand, the enraged reverence of these utterly unhinged souls could no longer endure that evangelic equal right of everyone to be a child of God which Jesus had taught, and their revenge consisted in exalting Jesus in an extravagant fashion, in severing him from themselves: just as the Jews, in revenge on their enemies, had previously separated their God from themselves and raised him on high. The one God and the one Son of God: both products of ressentiment…

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  – And now an absurd problem came up: ‘How could God have permitted that?’ For this question t
he deranged reason of the little community found a downright terrifyingly absurd answer: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. All at once it was all over with the Gospel! The guilt sacrifice, and that in its most repulsive, barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of the guilty! What atrocious paganism! – For Jesus had done away with the concept ‘guilt’ itself – he had denied any chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his ‘glad tidings’.… And not as a special prerogative! – From now on there is introduced into the type of the redeemer step by step: the doctrine of a Judgement and a Second Coming, the doctrine of his death as a sacrificial death, the doctrine of the Resurrection with which the entire concept ‘blessedness’, the whole and sole reality of the Evangel, is juggled away – for the benefit of a state after death!… Paul, with that rabbinical insolence which characterizes him in every respect, rationalized this interpretation, this indecency of an interpretation, thus: ‘If Christ is not resurrected from the dead our faith is vain’. – All at once the Evangel became the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the impudent doctrine of personal immortality.… Paul himself even taught it as a reward!…

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  One sees what came to an end with the death on the Cross: a new, an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual and not merely promised happiness on earth. For this remains – I have already emphasized it – the basic distinction between the two décadence religions: Buddhism makes no promises but keeps them, Christianity makes a thousand promises but keeps none. – On the heels of the ‘glad tidings’ came the worst of all: those of Paul. In Paul was embodied the antithetical type to the ‘bringer of glad tidings’, the genius of hatred, of the vision of hatred, of the inexorable logic of hatred. What did this dysangelist not sacrifice to his hatred! The redeemer above all: he nailed him to his Cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel – nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth!… And once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same great crime against history – it simply erased the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, it devised for itself a history of primitive Christianity. More: it falsified the history of Israel over again so as to make this history seem the pre-history of its act: all the prophets had spoken of its ‘redeemer’.… The Church subsequently falsified even the history of mankind into the pre-history of Christianity.… The type of the redeemer, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of the death, even the sequel to the death – nothing was left untouched, nothing was left bearing even the remotest resemblance to reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence – in the lie of the ‘resurrected’ Jesus. In fact he could make no use at all of the redeemer’s life – he needed the death on the Cross and something in addition.… To regard as honest a Paul whose home was the principle centre of Stoic enlightenment when he makes of a hallucination the proof that the redeemer is still living, or even to believe his story that he had this hallucination, would be a real niaiserie on the part of a psychologist: Paul willed the end, consequently he willed the means.… What he himself did not believe was believed by the idiots among whom he cast his teaching. – His requirement was power; with Paul the priest again sought power – he could employ only those concepts, teachings, symbols with which one tyrannizes over masses, forms herds. What was the only thing Mohammed later borrowed from Christianity? The invention of Paul, his means for establishing a priestly tyranny, for forming herds: the belief in immortality – that is to say the doctrine of ‘judgement’…