The Antichrist

condition--one _shall_ be blessed _because_ one believes.... But what of
the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly
transcendental "beyond"--how is _that_ to be demonstrated?--The "proof
by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief
that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a
formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness--_therefore_, it is
true."... But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be
_absurdum_ itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the
sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated
(--_not_ merely hoped for, and _not_ merely promised by the suspicious
lips of a priest): even so, _could_ blessedness--in a technical term,
_pleasure_--ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is
almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the
answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough
to make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a
proof _of_ "pleasure"--nothing more; why in the world should it be
assumed that _true_ judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and
that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily
bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all
disciplined and profound minds teaches _the contrary_. Man has had to
fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost
everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to.
Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is
the hardest of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of _integrity_
in things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own
heart, that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every
Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes blessed: _therefore_,
it lies....


51.

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for
blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an _idee fixe_ by no
means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves
no mountains, but instead _raises them up_ where there were none before:
all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a _lunatic
asylum_. _Not_, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to
the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic
asylums. Christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the Greek
spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior
purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_
people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic
asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort
of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _decadent_; the
moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked
by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man
is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that
it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of
mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are
actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy
only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_.... Once
I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of _training_[22] in
penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of
producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it,
which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a
Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first
be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the _courage_ for health
_and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that
teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the
superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient
nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation!
that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect
soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for
itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically
ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is
itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and
incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European
movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all
sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of
Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ represent the decay of a
race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _decadence_
products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of
_noble_ antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too
sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that
theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the
whole _imperium_ were Christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility,
reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master;
democracy, with its Christian instincts, _triumphed_.... Christianity
was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the
varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere.
Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct
against the _healthy_, against _health_. Everything that is
well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence
to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying:
"And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_
things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which
are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the
_decadence_ triumphed.--_God on the cross_--is man always to miss the
frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers,
everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_.... We all hang on the
cross, consequently _we_ are divine.... We alone are divine....
Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed
by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of
humanity.--

[22] The word _training_ is in English in the text.

[23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.