The Twilight of the Idols - The Antichrist


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—I cannot here dispense with a psychology of "faith" and of the "faithful," which will naturally be to the advantage of the "faithful." If to-day there[Pg 201] are still many who do not know how very indecent it is to be a "believer"—or to what extent such a state is the sign of decadence, and of the broken will to Life,—they will know it no later than to-morrow. My voice can make even those hear who are hard of hearing.—If perchance my ears have not deceived me, it seems that among Christians there is such a thing as a kind of criterion of truth, which is called "the proof of power." "Faith saveth; therefore it is true."—It might be objected here that it is precisely salvation which is not proved but only promised: salvation is bound up with the condition "faith,"—one shall be saved, because one has faith.... But how prove that that which the priest promises to the faithful really will take place, to wit: the "Beyond" which defies all demonstration?—The assumed "proof of power" is at bottom once again only a belief in the fact that the effect which faith promises will not fail to take place. In a formula: "I believe that faith saveth;—consequently it is true."—But with this we are at the end of our tether. This "consequently" would be the absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.—Let us be indulgent enough to assume, however, that salvation is proved by faith (—not only desired, and not merely promised by the somewhat suspicious lips of a priest): could salvation—or, in technical terminology, happiness—ever be a proof of truth? So little is it so that, when pleasurable sensations make their influence felt in replying to the question "what is true," they furnish almost the contradiction of truth, or at any rate they make it in the highest degree suspicious. The proof through "happiness," is a proof of happiness—and[Pg 202] nothing else; why in the world should we take it for granted that true judgments cause more pleasure than false ones, and that in accordance with a pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their wake?—The experience of all strict and profound minds teaches the reverse. Every inch of truth has been conquered only after a struggle, almost everything to which our heart, our love and our trust in life cleaves, has had to be sacrificed for it Greatness of soul is necessary for this: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.—What then is meant by honesty in things intellectual? It means that a man is severe towards his own heart, that he scorns "beautiful feelings," and that he makes a matter of conscience out of every Yea and Nay!—-Faith saveth: consequently it lies....

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The fact that faith may in certain circumstances save, the fact that salvation as the result of an ide fixe does not constitute a true idea, the fact that faith moves no mountains, but may very readily raise them where previously they did not exist—all these things are made sufficiently clear by a mere casual stroll through a lunatic asylum. Of course no priest would find this sufficient: for he instinctively denies that illness is illness or that lunatic asylums are lunatic asylums. Christianity is in need of illness, just as Ancient Greece was in need of a superabundance of health. The actual ulterior motive of the whole of the Church's system of salvation is to make people ill. And is not the Church itself the Catholic madhouse as an ultimate[Pg 203] ideal?—The earth as a whole converted into a madhouse?—The kind of religious man which the Church aims at producing is a typical decadent The moment of time at which a religious crisis attains the ascendancy over a people, is always characterised by nerve-epidemics; the "inner world" of the religious man is ridiculously like the "inner world" of over-irritable and exhausted people; the "highest" states which Christianity holds up to mankind as the value of values, are epileptic in character,—the Church has pronounced only madmen or great swindlers in majorem dei honorem holy. Once I ventured to characterise the whole of the Christian training of penance and salvation (which nowadays is best studied in England) as a folie circulaire methodically generated upon a soil which, of course, is already prepared for it,—that is to say, which is thoroughly morbid. Not every one who likes can be a Christian: no man is "converted" to Christianity,—he must be sick enough for it ... We others who possess enough courage both for health and for contempt, how rightly we may despise a religion which taught men to misunderstand the body I which would not rid itself of the superstitions of the soul! which made a virtue of taking inadequate nourishment! which in health combats a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! which persuaded itself that it was possible to bear a perfect soul about in a cadaverous body, and which, to this end, had to make up for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically gushing ideal,—so-called "holiness,"—holiness, which in itself is simply a symptom of[Pg 204] an impoverished, enervated and incurably deteriorated body!... The movement of Christianity, as a European movement, was from first to last, a general accumulation of the ruck and scum of all sorts and kinds (—and these, by means of Christianity, aspire to power). It does not express the downfall of a race, it is rather a conglomerate assembly of all the decadent elements from everywhere which seek each other and crowd together. It was not, as some believe, the corruption of antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible: the learned idiocy which nowadays tries to support such a notion cannot be too severely contradicted. At the time when the morbid and corrupted Chandala classes became Christianised in the whole of the imperium, the very contrary type, nobility, was extant in its finest and maturest forms. The greatest number became master; the democracy of Christian instincts triumphed.... Christianity was not "national," it was not determined by race,—it appealed to all the disinherited forms of life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity is built upon the rancour of the sick; its instinct is directed against the sound, against health. Everything well-constituted, proud, high-spirited, and beautiful is offensive to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of St Paul's priceless words: "And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world; and base things of the world, and things which are despised": this was the formula, in hoc signo decadence triumphed.—God on the Cross—does no one yet understand the terrible ulterior motive of this[Pg 205] symbol?—Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine.... All of us hang on the cross, consequently we are divine .... We alone are divine.... Christianity was a victory; a nobler type of character perished through it,—Christianity has been humanity's greatest misfortune hitherto.——

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Christianity also stands opposed to everything happily constituted in the mind,—it can make use only of morbid reason as Christian reason; it takes the side of everything idiotic, it utters a curse upon "intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect. Since illness belongs to the essence of Christianity, the typically Christian state, "faith," must also be a form of illness, and all straight, honest and scientific roads to knowledge must be repudiated by the Church as forbidden.... Doubt in itself is already a sin.... The total lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest, which reveals itself in his look, is a result of decadence. Hysterical women, as also children with scrofulous constitutions, should be observed as a proof of how invariably instinctive falsity, the love of lying for the sake of lying, and the in ability either to look or to walk straight, are the expression of decadence. "Faith" simply means the refusal to know what is true. The pious person, the priest of both sexes, is false because he is ill: his instinct demands that truth should not assert its right anywhere. "That which makes ill is good: that which proceeds from abundance, from superabundance and from power, is evil": that is the view of the faithful. The constraint to lie—that is[Pg 206] the sign by which I recognise every predetermined theologian.—Another characteristic of the theologian is his lack of capacity for philology. What I mean here by the word philology is, in a general sense to be understood as the art of reading well, of being able to take account of facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing either caution, patience or subtlety owing to one's desire to understand. Philology as ephexis[8] in interpretation, whether one be dealing with books, newspaper reports, human destinies or meteorological records,—not to speak of the "salvation of the soul." ... The manner in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, interprets a verse from the "Scriptures," or an experience, or the triumph of his nation's army for instance, under the superior guiding light of David's Psalms, is always so exceedingly daring, that it is enough to make a philologist's hair stand on end. And what is he to do, when pietists and other cows from Swabia explain their miserable every-day lives in their smoky hovels by means of the "Finger of God," a miracle of "grace," of "Providence," of experiences of "salvation"! The most modest effort of the intellect, not to speak of decent feeling, ought at least to lead these interpreters to convince themselves of the absolute childishness and unworthiness of any such abuse of the dexterity of God's fingers. However small an amount of loving piety we might[Pg 207] possess, a god who cured us in time of a cold in the nose, or who arranged for us to enter a carriage just at the moment when a cloud burst over our heads, would be such an absurd God, that he would have to be abolished, even if he existed.[9] God as a domestic servant, as a postman, as a general provider,—in short, merely a word for the most foolish kind of accidents.... "Divine Providence," as it is believed in to-day by almost every third man in "cultured Germany," would be an argument against God, in fact it would be the strongest argument against God that could be Imagined. And in any case it is an argument against the Germans.



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