_Paul_: seeks power _against_ ruling Judaism,--his attempt is too weak.... Transvaluation of the notion "Jew": the "race" is put aside: but that means denying the very basis of the whole structure. The "martyr," the "fanatic," the value of all _strong_ belief. Christianity is the _form of decay_ of the old world, after the latter's collapse, and it is characterised by the fact that it brings all the most sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top. _Consequently other_ instincts had to step into the foreground, in order to _constitute_ an entity, a power able to stand alone--in short, a condition of tense sorrow was necessary, like that out of which the Jews had derived their _instinct of self-preservation...._ The persecution of Christians was invaluable for this purpose. Unity in the face of danger; the conversion of the masses becomes the only means of putting an end to the persecution of the individual. (The notion "conversion" is therefore made as elastic as possible.) 174. The _Christian Judaic_ life: here resentment did not prevail. The great persecutions alone could have driven out the passions to that extent--as also the _ardour of love_ and _hate._ When the creatures a man most loves are sacrificed before his eyes for the sake of his faith, that man becomes _aggressive_; the triumph of Christianity is due to its persecutors. _Asceticism_ is not specifically Christian: this is what Schopenhauer misunderstood. It only shoots up in Christianity, wherever it would have existed without that religion. Melancholy Christianity, the torture and torment of the conscience, also only a peculiarity of a particular soil, where Christian values have taken root: it is not Christianity properly speaking. Christianity has absorbed all the different kinds of diseases which grow from morbid soil: one could refute it at one blow by showing that it did not know how to resist any contagion. But _that_ precisely is the essential feature of it. Christianity is a type of decadence. 175.