The Antichrist () is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895.

Content

Preface

Nietzsche claims in the preface to have written the book for a very limited readership. To understand the book, he asserts that the reader "must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of hardness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion".<blockquote>Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?—The rest are merely humanity.—One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.</blockquote>

Decadent values

In section 1, Nietzsche expresses his dissatisfaction with modernity, listing his dislikes for the contemporary "lazy peace", "cowardly compromise", "tolerance" and "resignation".

Nietzsche introduces his concept of the will to power in § 2, using its relation to define notions of good, bad and happiness: <blockquote>What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.</blockquote>Nietzsche follows this passage with provocative and shocking language:

Mankind, according to Nietzsche, is corrupt and its highest values are depraved. He asserts that "all the values in which mankind at present summarizes its highest desiderata are decadence values". Mankind is depraved because it has lost its instincts and prefers what is harmful to it:<blockquote>[I]n the role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of décadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue.</blockquote>He goes on further, mentioning that the moderns Leo Tolstoy and Richard Wagner adopted Schopenhauer's viewpoint. Aristotle, who lived in 384–322 BC, on the other hand, recognized the unhealthiness of pity and prescribed tragedy as a purgative.

Christian God

Nietzsche claims that the Christian religion and its morality are based on imaginary fictions. Nietzsche opposes the Christian concept of God because: <blockquote>God degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! </blockquote>Recalling Schopenhauer's description of the denial of the will to live and the subsequent empty nothingness, Nietzsche proclaims of the Christian God that "[i]n him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!..." He maintains that the traditional "pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism" supports "all the instincts of décadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!"

Origin of Christianity

Jewish priesthood

Jewish, and subsequently—to a greater degree—Christian, priests survived and attained power by siding with decadents, Nietzsche claims. They turned against the natural world. Their "instincts of ressentiment" against those who were well–constituted led them to "invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable".

To survive, the Jewish priests made use of the decadents and their large population. The Jews were not decadents, themselves—they are the "very opposite". Rather, according to Nietzsche, they have "the most powerful national will to live, that has ever appeared on earth". However, "they have simply been forced into appearing" as decadents, to "put themselves at the head of all décadent movements (—for example, the Christianity of Paul—), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life".

  1. Concept of God is falsified: Yahweh became a demanding god. "Jahveh, the god of "justice"—he is in accord with Israel no more, he no longer vizualizes the national egoism". The past is translated into religious terms; it was a record of guilt, punishment, piety, and reward in relation to Yahweh. A moral world order is established which assigns value to actions that obey the will of God (and which claims that this general will, i.e. the right way of life for everyone, is eternal and unchanging). Priests teach that "the ruling power of the will of God, expressed as punishment and reward according to the degree of obedience, is demonstrated in the destiny of a nation, of an individual".

Nietzsche asserts that the psychological reality of redemption was a "new way of life, not a new faith". It is "[t]he deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is 'in heaven.<blockquote>A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church—the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian values—noble values.</blockquote>

Nietzsche distinguishes the Gospel (the "Glad Tidings" preached by Jesus) from the four Gospels, which he sees as "evidence of the corruption already persistent within the primitive community" and as containing a largely false account of Jesus' ministry:

<blockquote>As an artistic triumph in psychological corruption,the gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them...this positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal "holiness" unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art...the underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities.</blockquote>

Paul and the promise of eternal life

The apostles claimed that Jesus' death was a sacrifice of an innocent man for the sins of the guilty. But "Jesus himself had done away with the very concept of "guilt", he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was precisely his 'glad tidings'"

To assert that there is life after death, the apostles ignored Jesus' example of blessed living. Paul emphasizes the concept of immortality in First Corinthians 15:17, as Nietzsche explains: This changed Christianity from a peace movement that achieves actual happiness into a religion whose final judgment offers possible resurrection and eternal life. Paul falsified the history of Christianity, the history of Israel, and the history of mankind by making them all seem to be a preparation for the crucifixion. "The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion".

Nietzsche claims that Paul's pretense of holiness and his use of priestly concepts were typically Jewish. Christianity separated itself from Judaism as though it was the chosen religion, "just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the last judgment of all the rest".

Nietzsche is particularly opposed to the Christian notion of "equality of all souls before God", which laid the foundation for egalitarianism and eroded the great aristocracies of the past.

<blockquote>The poisonous doctrine, "equal rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization—out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons...let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals—for the pathos of distance.... </blockquote>

For Nietzsche, "wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of 'equal' rights".

The Holy Lie and belief

Lying, or not wanting to see as one sees, is a trait of those who are devoted to a party or faction. Lying is used by all priests, be they pagan, Jewish, or Christian:<blockquote>[T]he right to lie and the shrewd dodge of "revelation" belong to the general priestly type.... The "law", the "will of God", the "holy book", and "inspiration"—all these things are merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with which he maintains his power... </blockquote>

Condemnation

Nietzsche concludes his work with the insistence that Christianity "turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.... [I]t lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal".

"To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts", in Nietzsche's view, is the spirit of Christianity. Nietzsche believes the humanitarianism' of Christianity" to be a conspiracy "against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself".

Nietzsche does not demur of Jesus, conceding that he was the only one true Christian. He presents a Christ whose own inner life consisted of "wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be an enemy".

Nietzsche heavily criticizes the organized institution of Christianity and its class of priests. Christ's evangelism consisted of the good news that the "kingdom of God" is within you:

Publication

Title

The German title, Der Antichrist, is ambiguous and open to two interpretations: the Antichrist, or the Anti-Christian. However, its use within the work generally admits only an "Anti-Christian" meaning.

Suppressed passages

"The word idiot"

Section 29 originally contains three words that were suppressed by Nietzsche's sister in 1895: "das Wort Idiot" or, "the word idiot". H. L. Mencken's English translation does not contain these words. However, in 1931, the words were reinstated by Josef Hofmiller. Likewise, English translations by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale also contain them. According to Kaufmann, Nietzsche was referring to Dostoevsky's book The Idiot and its naïve protagonist. The passage reads: To accomplish this goal, Nietzsche parodied a passage from the New Testament, which the Nietzsche Archive, headed by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, decided to suppress so that there would be no doubt as to the strict correctness of Nietzsche's use of the Bible.

According to Nietzsche, one of the thieves, who was also being crucified, said, "This was truly a divine man, a child of God!" Nietzsche had Christ reply, "If you feel this, you are in Paradise, you are a child of God". In the Bible, only Luke related a dialogue between Christ and the thief in which the thief said, "This man has done nothing wrong" to which, Christ replies, "Today I tell you, you will be with me in Paradise". Nietzsche had the thief speaking the words that the centurion later spoke in Luke 23:47, Matthew 27:54, and Mark 15:39. In these passages, Christ was called the 'Son of God' by the soldier. The Nietzsche Archives' suppression was lifted in later editions and now appears exactly as Nietzsche wrote.

The full passage reads: This part consists of seven propositions that can be summarised as such:

  1. Priests should be imprisoned
  2. Participation in religion is an assassination attempt on public morality
  3. The location from which Christianity has spread should be eradicated
  4. The preaching of chastity is a public instigation to anti-nature and should be punished
  5. Priests are chandalas – anyone who associates with them should be ostracized and starved
  6. What was before called "holy" and "God" is to be called criminal and cursed
  7. "The rest follows from this"

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

  • Danto, Arthur. 2005. Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition, Columbia. .
  • Kaufmann, Walter. 1974. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. .
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1889] 1991. The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. .
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur. [1840] 2005. On the Basis of Morality. Dover. .
  • — [1818] 1969. The World as Will and Representation I. Dover. .
  • Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2000. Friedrich Nietzsche: Der Antichrist. Ein philosophisch-historischer Kommentar. Basel. — the comprehensive standard commentary on The Antichrist
  • (H. L. Mencken translation and German original)
  • (H. L. Mencken translation )