The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen
Nietzsche · en
in concepts and valuations in them, every kind of cowardice in the
face of every honest yea or nay. For almost one thousand years, now,
they have tangled and confused everything they have laid their hands
on; they have on their conscience all the half-measures, all the
three-eighth measures of which Europe is sick; they also have the
most unclean, the most incurable, and the most irrefutable kind of
Christianity—Protestantism—on their conscience.... If we shall never
be able to get rid of Christianity, the _Germans_ will be to blame.
62
—With this I will now conclude and pronounce my judgment. I _condemn_
Christianity and confront it with the most terrible accusation that
an accuser has ever had in his mouth. To my mind it is the greatest
of all conceivable corruptions, it has had the will to the last
imaginable corruption. The Christian Church allowed nothing to escape
from its corruption; it converted every value into its opposite, every
truth into a He, and every honest impulse into an ignominy of the
soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its humanitarian blessings!
To _abolish_ any sort of distress was opposed to its profoundest
interests; its very existence depended on states of distress; it
created states of distress in order to make itself immortal.... The
cancer germ of sin, for instance: the Church was the first to enrich
mankind with this misery!—The “equality of souls before God,” this
falsehood, this _pretext_ for the _rancunes_ of all the base-minded,
this anarchist bomb of a concept, which has ultimately become the
revolution, the modern idea, the principle of decay of the whole of
social order,—this is _Christian_ dynamite ... The “humanitarian”
blessings of Christianity! To breed a self-contradiction, an art of
self-profanation, a will to lie at any price, an aversion, a contempt
of all good and honest instincts out of _humanitas!_ Is this what you
call the blessings of Christianity?—Parasitism as the only method of
the Church; sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope of life
out of mankind with anæmic and sacred ideals. A “Beyond” as the will to
deny all reality; the cross as the trade-mark of the most subterranean
form of conspiracy that has ever existed,—against health, beauty,
well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, kindliness of soul, _against
Life itself...._
This eternal accusation against Christianity I would fain write on all
walls, wherever there are walls,—I have letters with which I can make
even the blind see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one
enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge,
for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and
too _petty,_—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind....
And _time_ is reckoned from the _dies nefastus_ upon which this
fatality came into being—from the first day of Christianity!—_why
not rather from its last day?—From to-day?_—Transvaluation of all
Values!...