We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this _higher_ type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of _antagonism_ to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!-- 6. It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the _rottenness_ of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used--and I wish to emphasize the fact again--without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of _decadence_: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are _decadence_-values. I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it _prefers_, what is injurious to it. A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and it is possible that I'll have to write it--would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for _power_: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that the values of _decadence_, of _nihilism_, now prevail under the holiest names. 7.