The Antichrist

he was destined to write "Ecce Homo." Some time during December his
health began to fail rapidly, and soon after the New Year he was
helpless. Thereafter he wrote no more.

The Wagner diatribe and "The Twilight of the Idols" were published
immediately, but "The Antichrist" did not get into type until 1895. I
suspect that the delay was due to the influence of the philosopher's
sister, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but by no
means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas. During his dark
days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept
aloof, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but
there were bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those
bounds were marked by crosses. One notes, in her biography of him--a
useful but not always accurate work--an evident desire to purge him of
the accusation of mocking at sacred things. He had, she says, great
admiration for "the elevating effect of Christianity ... upon the weak
and ailing," and "a real liking for sincere, pious Christians," and "a
tender love for the Founder of Christianity." All his wrath, she
continues, was reserved for "St. Paul and his like," who perverted the
Beatitudes, which Christ intended for the lowly only, into a universal
religion which made war upon aristocratic values. Here, obviously, one
is addressed by an interpreter who cannot forget that she is the
daughter of a Lutheran pastor and the grand-daughter of two others; a
touch of conscience gets into her reading of "The Antichrist." She even
hints that the text may have been garbled, after the author's collapse,
by some more sinister heretic. There is not the slightest reason to
believe that any such garbling ever took place, nor is there any
evidence that their common heritage of piety rested upon the brother as
heavily as it rested upon the sister. On the contrary, it must be
manifest that Nietzsche, in this book, intended to attack Christianity
headlong and with all arms, that for all his rapid writing he put the
utmost care into it, and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it
stands. The ideas in it were anything but new to him when he set them
down. He had been developing them since the days of his beginning. You
will find some of them, clearly recognizable, in the first book he ever
wrote, "The Birth of Tragedy." You will find the most important of all
of them--the conception of Christianity as _ressentiment_--set forth at
length in the first part of "The Genealogy of Morals," published under
his own supervision in 1887. And the rest are scattered through the
whole vast mass of his notes, sometimes as mere questionings but often
worked out very carefully. Moreover, let it not be forgotten that it was
Wagner's yielding to Christian sentimentality in "Parsifal" that
transformed Nietzsche from the first among his literary advocates into
the most bitter of his opponents. He could forgive every other sort of
mountebankery, but not that. "In me," he once said, "the Christianity of
my forbears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern intellectual
conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns _against_
Christianity. In me Christianity ... devours itself."

In truth, the present philippic is as necessary to the completeness of
the whole of Nietzsche's system as the keystone is to the arch. All the
curves of his speculation lead up to it. What he flung himself against,
from beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last
analysis, Christianity in some form or other--Christianity as a system
of practical ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as
metaphysics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth. It would be
difficult to think of any intellectual enterprise on his long list that
did not, more or less directly and clearly, relate itself to this master
enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostasy from the
faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert,
and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every
other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man. The will
to power was his answer to Christianity's affectation of humility and
self-sacrifice; eternal recurrence was his mocking criticism of
Christian optimism and millennialism; the superman was his candidate for
the place of the Christian ideal of the "good" man, prudently abased
before the throne of God. The things he chiefly argued for were
anti-Christian things--the abandonment of the purely moral view of life,
the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and
timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of
dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the
priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the
healthy, lordly "innocence" that was Greek. If he was anything in a
word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His
dreams were thoroughly Hellenic; his whole manner of thinking was
Hellenic; his peculiar errors were Hellenic no less. But his Hellenism,
I need not add, was anything but the pale neo-Platonism that has run
like a thread through the thinking of the Western world since the days
of the Christian Fathers. From Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us
must get, but his real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus
that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe--a view, to
wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic
representation. The God that Nietzsche imagined, in the end, was not far
from the God that such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines--a supreme
craftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing
of lines and forces, and yet always failing to work out the final
harmony.

The late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury of the Western
nations, and therewith all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos
and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon Nietzsche, as upon the
most daring and provocative of recent amateur theologians. The Germans,
with their characteristic tendency to explain their every act in terms
as realistic and unpleasant as possible, appear to have mauled him in a
belated and unexpected embrace, to the horror, I daresay, of the Kaiser,
and perhaps to the even greater horror of Nietzsche's own ghost. The
folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with their equally characteristic tendency to
explain all their enterprises romantically, simultaneously set him up as
the Antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. The result was a great
deal of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of him. From the pulpits