Sections 1–10
Original German
1 — Sehen wir uns ins Gesicht. Wir sind Hyperboreer — wir wissen gut genug, wie abseits wir leben. »Weder zu Lande noch zu Wasser wirst du den Weg zu den Hyperboreern finden«: das hat schon Pindar von uns gewußt. Jenseits des Nordens, des Eises, des Todes — unser Leben, unser Glück… Wir haben das Glück entdeckt, wir wissen den Weg, wir fanden den Ausgang aus ganzen Jahrtausenden des Labyrinths. Wer fand ihn sonst? — Der moderne Mensch etwa? — »Ich weiß nicht aus noch ein; ich bin alles, was nicht aus noch ein weiß« — seufzt der moderne Mensch … An dieser Modernität waren wir krank — am faulen Frieden, am feigen Kompromiß, an der ganzen tugendhaften Unsauberkeit des modernen Ja und Nein. Diese Toleranz und largeur des Herzens, die alles »verzeiht«, weil sie alles »begreift«, ist Schirokko für uns. Lieber im Eise leben, als unter modernen Tugenden und andern Südwinden!… Wir waren tapfer genug, wir schonten weder uns noch andere: aber wir wußten lange nicht, wohin mit unsrer Tapferkeit. Wir wurden düster, man hieß uns Fatalisten. Unser Fatum — das war die Fülle, die Spannung, die Stauung der Kräfte. Wir dürsteten nach Blitz und Taten, wir blieben am fernsten vom Glück der Schwächlinge, von der »Ergebung«… Ein Gewitter war in unsrer Luft, die Natur, die wir sind, verfinsterte sich — denn wir hatten keinen Weg. Formel unsres Glücks: ein Ja, ein Nein, eine gerade Linie, ein Ziel…
2 Was ist gut? — Alles, was das Gefühl der Macht, den Willen zur Macht, die Macht selbst im Menschen erhöht.
Was ist schlecht? — Alles, was aus der Schwäche stammt.
Was ist Glück? — Das Gefühl davon, daß die Macht wächst — daß ein Widerstand überwunden wird.
Nicht Zufriedenheit, sondern mehr Macht; nicht Friede überhaupt sondern Krieg; nicht Tugend, sondern Tüchtigkeit (Tugend im Renaissance-Stile, virtú, moralinfreie Tugend).
Die Schwachen und Mißratenen sollen zugrunde gehn: erster Satz unsrer Menschenliebe. Und man soll ihnen noch dazu helfen.
Was ist schädlicher als irgendein Laster? — Das Mitleiden der Tat mit allen Mißratnen und Schwachen — das Christentum …
3 Nicht was die Menschheit ablösen soll in der Reihenfolge der Wesen, ist das Problem, das ich hiermit stelle (- der Mensch ist ein Ende —): sondern welchen Typus Mensch man züchten soll, wollen soll, als den höherwertigeren lebenswürdigeren, zukunftsgewisseren.
Dieser höherwertigere Typus ist oft genug schon dagewesen: aber als ein Glücksfall, als eine Ausnahme, niemals als gewollt. Vielmehr ist er gerade am besten gefürchtet worden, er war bisher beinahe das Furchtbare — und aus der Furcht heraus wurde der umgekehrte Typus gewollt, gezüchtet, erreicht: das Haustier, das Herdentier, das kranke Tier Mensch —der Christ…
4 Die Menschheit stellt nicht eine Entwicklung zum Besseren oder Stärkeren oder Höheren dar, in der Weise, wie dies heute geglaubt wird. Der »Fortschritt« ist bloß eine moderne Idee, das heißt eine falsche Idee. Der Europäer von heute bleibt in seinem Werte tief unter dem Europäer der Renaissance; Fortentwicklung ist schlechterdings nicht mit irgendwelcher Notwendigkeit Erhöhung, Steigerung, Verstärkung.
In einem andern Sinne gibt es ein fortwährendes Gelingen einzelner Fälle an den verschiedensten Stellen der Erde und aus den verschiedensten Kulturen heraus, mit denen in der Tat sich ein höherer Typus darstellt: etwas, das im Verhältnis zur Gesamt-Menschheit eine Art Übermensch ist. Solche Glücksfälle des großen Gelingens waren immer möglich und werden vielleicht immer möglich sein. Und selbst ganze Geschlechter, Stämme, Völker können unter Umständen einen solchen Treffer darstellen.
5 Man soll das Christentum nicht schmücken und herausputzen: es hat einen Todkrieg gegen diesen höheren Typus Mensch gemacht, es hat alle Grundinstinkte dieses Typus in Bann getan, es hat aus diesen Instinkten das Böse, den Bösen herausdestilliert — der starke Mensch als der typisch Verwerfliche, der »verworfene Mensch«. Das Christentum hat die Partei alles Schwachen, Niedrigen, Mißratnen genommen, es hat ein Ideal aus dem Widerspruch gegen die Erhaltungs-Instinkte des starken Lebens gemacht; es hat die Vernunft selbst der geistig stärksten Naturen verdorben, indem es die obersten Werte der Geistigkeit als sündhaft, als irreführend, als Versuchungen empfinden lehrte. Das jammervollste Beispiel: die Verderbnis Pascals, der an die Verderbnis seiner Vernunft durch die Erbsünde glaubte, während sie nur durch sein Christentum verdorben war! —
6 Es ist ein schmerzliches, ein schauerliches Schauspiel, das mir aufgegangen ist: ich zog den Vorhang weg von der Verdorbenheit des Menschen. Dies Wort, in meinem Munde, ist wenigstens gegen einen Verdacht geschützt: daß es eine moralische Anklage des Menschen enthält. Es ist — ich möchte es nochmals unterstreichen — moralinfrei gemeint: und dies bis zu dem Grade, daß jene Verdorbenheit gerade dort von mir am stärksten empfunden wird, wo man bisher am bewußtesten zur »Tugend«, zur »Göttlichkeit« aspirierte. Ich verstehe Verdorbenheit, man errät es bereits, im Sinne von décadence: meine Behauptung ist, daß alle Werte, in denen jetzt die Menschheit ihre oberste Wünschbarkeit zusammenfaßt, décadence-Werte sind.
Ich nenne ein Tier, eine Gattung, ein Individuum verdorben, wenn es seine Instinkte verliert, wenn es wählt, wenn es vorzieht, was ihm nachteilig ist. Eine Geschichte der »höheren Gefühle«, der »Ideale der Menschheit« — und es ist möglich, daß ich sie erzählen muß — wäre beinahe auch die Erklärung dafür, weshalb der Mensch so verdorben ist. Das Leben selbst gilt mir als Instinkt für Wachstum, für Dauer, für Häufung von Kräften, für Macht: wo der Wille zur Macht fehlt, gibt es Niedergang. Meine Behauptung ist, daß allen obersten Werten der Menschheit dieser Wille fehlt — daß Niedergangs-Werte, nihilistische Werte unter den heiligsten Namen die Herrschaft führen.
7 Man nennt das Christentum die Religion des Mitleidens. — Das Mitleiden steht im Gegensatz zu den tonischen Affekten, welche die Energie des Lebensgefühls erhöhn: es wirkt depressiv. Man verliert Kraft, wenn man mitleidet. Durch das Mitleiden vermehrt und vervielfältigt sich die Einbuße an Kraft noch, die an sich schon das Leiden dem Leben bringt. Das Leiden selbst wird durch das Mitleiden ansteckend; unter Umständen kann mit ihm eine Gesamt-Einbuße an Leben und Lebens-Energie erreicht werden, die in einem absurden Verhältnis zum Quantum der Ursache steht (— der Fall vom Tode des Nazareners). Das ist der erste Gesichtspunkt; es gibt aber noch einen wichtigeren. Gesetzt, man mißt das Mitleiden nach dem Werte der Reaktionen, die es hervorzubringen pflegt, so erscheint sein lebensgefährlicher Charakter in einem noch viel helleren Lichte. Das Mitleiden kreuzt im ganzen großen das Gesetz der Entwicklung, welches das Gesetz der Selektion ist. Es erhält, was zum Untergange reif ist, es wehrt sich zugunsten der Enterbten und Verurteilten des Lebens, es gibt durch die Fülle des Mißratenen aller Art, das es im Leben festhält, dem Leben selbst einen düsteren und fragwürdigen Aspekt. Man hat gewagt, das Mitleiden eine Tugend zu nennen (— in jeder vornehmen Moral gilt es als Schwäche —); man ist weitergegangen, man hat aus ihm die Tugend, den Boden und Ursprung aller Tugenden gemacht — nur freilich, was man stets im Auge behalten muß, vom Gesichtspunkt einer Philosophie aus, welche nihilistisch war, welche die Verneinung des Lebens auf ihr Schild schrieb. Schopenhauer war in seinem Recht damit: durch das Mitleid wird das Leben verneint, verneinungswürdiger gemacht — Mitleiden ist die Praxis des Nihilismus. Nochmals gesagt: dieser depressive und kontagiöse Instinkt kreuzt jene Instinkte, welche auf Erhaltung und Wert-Erhöhung des Lebens aus sind: er ist ebenso als Multiplikator des Elends wie als Konservator alles Elenden ein Hauptwerkzeug zur Steigerung der décadence — Mitleiden überredet zum Nichts! … Man sagt nicht »Nichts«: man sagt dafür »Jenseits«: oder »Gott«; oder »das wahre Leben«; oder Nirvana, Erlösung, Seligkeit… Diese unschuldige Rhetorik aus dem Reich der religiös-moralischen Idiosynkrasie erscheint sofort viel weniger unschuldig, wenn man begreift, welche Tendenz hier den Mantel sublimer Worte um sich schlägt: die lebensfeindliche Tendenz. Schopenhauer war lebensfeindlich: deshalb wurde ihm das Mitleid zur Tugend … Aristoteles sah, wie man weiß, im Mitleiden einen krankhaften und gefährlichen Zustand, dem man gut täte, hier und da durch ein Purgativ beizukommen: er verstand die Tragödie als Purgativ. Vom Instinkte des Lebens aus müßte man in der Tat nach einem Mittel suchen, einer solchen krankhaften und gefährlichen Häufung des Mitleids, wie sie der Fall Schopenhauer (und leider auch unsre gesamte literarische und artistische décadence von St. Petersburg bis Paris, von Tolstoi bis Wagner) darstellt, einen Stich zu versetzen: damit sie platzt… Nichts ist ungesunder, inmitten unsrer ungesunden Modernität, als das christliche Mitleid. Hier Arzt sein, hier unerbittlich sein, hier das Messer führen — das gehört zu uns, das ist unsre Art Menschenliebe, damit sind wir Philosophen, wir Hyperboreer! —
8 Es ist notwendig zu sagen, wen wir als unsern Gegensatz fühlen — die Theologen und alles, was Theologen-Blut im Leibe hat — unsre ganze Philosophie… Man muß das Verhängnis aus der Nähe gesehn haben, noch besser, man muß es an sich erlebt, man muß an ihm fast zugrunde gegangen sein, um hier keinen Spaß mehr zu verstehn — (die Freigeisterei unsrer Herren Naturforscher und Physiologen ist in meinen Augen ein Spaß — ihnen fehlt die Leidenschaft in diesen Dingen, das Leiden an ihnen —). Jene Vergiftung reicht viel weiter, als man denkt: ich fand den Theologen-Instinkt des Hochmuts überall wieder, wo man sich heute als »Idealist« fühlt — wo man, vermöge einer höheren Abkunft, ein Recht in Anspruch nimmt, zur Wirklichkeit überlegen und fremd zu blicken … Der Idealist hat, ganz wie der Priester, alle großen Begriffe in der Hand (— und nicht nur in der Hand!), er spielt sie mit einer wohlwollenden Verachtung gegen den »Verstand«, die »Sinne«, die »Ehren«, das »Wohlleben«, die »Wissenschaft« aus, er sieht dergleichen unter sich, wie schädigende und verführerische Kräfte, über denen »der Geist« in reiner Fürsich-heit schwebt — als ob nicht Demut, Keuschheit, Armut, Heiligkeit mit einem Wort, dem Leben bisher unsäglich mehr Schaden getan hätten, als irgendwelche Furchtbarkeiten und Laster … Der reine Geist ist die reine Lüge… Solange der Priester noch als eine höhere Art Mensch gilt, dieser Verneiner, Verleumder, Vergifter des Lebens von Beruf, gibt es keine Antwort auf die Frage: was ist Wahrheit? Man hat bereits die Wahrheit auf den Kopf gestellt, wenn der bewußte Advokat des Nichts und der Verneinung als Vertreter der »Wahrheit« gilt…
9 Diesem Theologen-Instinkte mache ich den Krieg: ich fand seine Spur überall. Wer Theologen-Blut im Leibe hat, steht von vornherein zu allen Dingen schief und unehrlich. Das Pathos, das sich daraus entwickelt, heißt sich Glaube: das Auge ein für alle Mal vor sich schließen, um nicht am Aspekt unheilbarer Falschheit zu leiden. Man macht bei sich eine Moral, eine Tugend, eine Heiligkeit aus dieser fehlerhaften Optik zu allen Dingen, man knüpft das gute Gewissen an das Falschsehen — man fordert, daß keine andre Art Optik mehr Wert haben dürfe, nachdem man die eigne mit den Namen »Gott«, »Erlösung«, »Ewigkeit« sakrosankt gemacht hat. Ich grub den Theologen-Instinkt noch überall aus: er ist die verbreitetste, die eigentlich unterirdische Form der Falschheit, die es auf Erden gibt. Was ein Theologe als wahr empfindet, das muß falsch sein: man hat daran beinahe ein Kriterium der Wahrheit. Es ist sein unterster Selbsterhaltungs-Instinkt, der verbietet, daß die Realität in irgendeinem Punkte zu Ehren oder auch nur zu Worte käme. So weit der Theologen-Einfluß reicht, ist das Wert-Urteil auf den Kopf gestellt, sind die Begriffe »wahr« und »falsch« notwendig umgekehrt: was dem Leben am schädlichsten ist, das heißt hier »wahr«, was es hebt, steigert, bejaht, rechtfertigt und triumphieren macht, das heißt »falsch«… Kommt es vor, daß Theologen durch das »Gewissen« der Fürsten (oder der Völker —) hindurch nach der Macht die Hand ausstrecken, zweifeln wir nicht, was jedesmal im Grunde sich begibt: der Wille zum Ende, der nihilistische Wille will zur Macht…
10 Unter Deutschen versteht man sofort, wenn ich sage, daß die Philosophie durch Theologen-Blut verderbt ist. Der protestantische Pfarrer ist Großvater der deutschen Philosophie, der Protestantismus selbst ihr peccatum originale. Definition des Protestantismus: die halbseitige Lähmung des Christentums — und der Vernunft… Man hat nur das Wort »Tübinger Stift« auszusprechen, um zu begreifen, was die deutsche Philosophie im Grunde ist — eine hinterlistige Theologie… Die Schwaben sind die besten Lügner in Deutschland, sie lügen unschuldig… Woher das Frohlocken, das beim Auftreten Kants durch die deutsche Gelehrtenwelt ging, die zu drei Vierteln aus Pfarrer- und Lehrer-Söhnen besteht — woher die deutsche Überzeugung, die auch heute noch ihr Echo findet, daß mit Kant eine Wendung zum Besseren beginne? Der Theologen-Instinkt im deutschen Gelehrten erriet, was nunmehr wieder möglich war… Ein Schleichweg zum alten Ideal stand offen, der Begriff »wahre Welt«, der Begriff der Moral als Essenz der Welt (— diese zwei bösartigsten Irrtümer, die es gibt!) waren jetzt wieder, dank einer verschmitzt-klugen Skepsis, wenn nicht beweisbar, so doch nicht mehr widerlegbar … Die Vernunft, das Recht der Vernunft reicht nicht so weit… Man hatte aus der Realität eine »Scheinbarkeit« gemacht; man hatte eine vollkommen erlogne Welt, die des Seienden, zur Realität gemacht… Der Erfolg Kants ist bloß ein Theologen-Erfolg: Kant war, gleich Luther, gleich Leibniz, ein Hemmschuh mehr in der an sich nicht taktfesten deutschen Rechtschaffenheit — —
Musean translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the German of the preface, all sixty-two sections and the seven-article Law Against Christianity, for fidelity, the author’s force and cadence, and modern clarity. Nietzsche’s own emphasis is kept.
1 —Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how far off the beaten path we live. "Neither by land nor by water will you find the way to the Hyperboreans": Pindar already knew that about us. Beyond the north, the ice, death—our life, our happiness… We have discovered happiness; we know the way; we found the way out of whole millennia of the labyrinth. Who else found it?—Modern man, perhaps?—"I know neither a way out nor a way in; I am everything that knows neither a way out nor a way in"—modern man sighs… We were sick with this modernity—with its rotten peace, its cowardly compromise, all the virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. This tolerance and breadth of heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to us. Better to live in ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!… We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for a long time we did not know where to turn our bravery. We grew gloomy; they called us fatalists. Our fate—that was the fullness, the tension, the damming up of forces. We thirsted for lightning and deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of weaklings, from "resignation"… A thunderstorm was in our air; the nature that we are grew dark—for we had no path. The formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…
2 What is good?—Everything that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in the human being.
What is bad?—Everything that comes from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power is growing—that a resistance is being overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but prowess (virtue in the Renaissance style, excellence, virtue free of moraline).
The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of humanity. And they should even be helped to do so.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Active pity for all failures and weaklings—Christianity…
3 The problem I pose here is not what should replace humanity in the succession of beings (—the human being is an end—), but what type of human being we should breed, should will, as the more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of a future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough already: but as a stroke of luck, as an exception, never as something willed. On the contrary, he in particular has been feared most of all; until now he has been almost the embodiment of terror—and out of that fear the opposite type was willed, bred, attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man—the Christian…
4 Humanity does not represent a development toward the better or stronger or higher in the way people believe today. "Progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to say a false idea. In value, today's European remains far below the European of the Renaissance; further development is simply not by any necessity an elevation, an enhancement, a strengthening.
In another sense, individual successes continually appear in the most varied places on earth and out of the most varied cultures, and in them a higher type does indeed emerge: something that, in relation to humanity as a whole, is a kind of overhuman. Such strokes of luck, such great successes, have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire lineages, tribes, peoples may, under certain circumstances, represent such a lucky hit.
5 Christianity must not be decked out and prettified: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of human being; it has placed all the fundamental instincts of this type under a ban; from these instincts it has distilled evil, the evil one—the strong human being as the very type of the reprehensible, the "reprobate." Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, low, and ill-formed; it has made an ideal out of opposition to the self-preserving instincts of strong life; it has corrupted the reason of even the intellectually strongest natures by teaching people to feel the highest values of the intellect to be sinful, misleading, temptations. The most pitiable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed his reason had been corrupted by original sin, when it had been corrupted only by his Christianity!—
6 It is a painful, a dreadful spectacle that has opened before me: I drew back the curtain on the corruption of the human being. This word, in my mouth, is protected against at least one suspicion: that it contains a moral indictment of humanity. Its meaning—I should like to underline this once more—is free of moraline: so much so that I feel this corruption most keenly precisely where people have so far aspired most consciously to "virtue," to "divinity." I understand corruption, as will already have been guessed, in the sense of decadence: my contention is that all the values in which humanity now sums up its highest aspirations are values of decadence.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what harms it. A history of the "higher feelings," of the "ideals of humanity"—and it is possible that I shall have to tell it—would also come close to explaining why the human being is so corrupt. Life itself, to me, is an instinct for growth, for endurance, for the accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking, there is decline. My contention is that all humanity's highest values lack this will—that values of decline, nihilistic values, rule under the holiest names.
7 Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions that heighten the energy of the feeling of life: it has a depressive effect. We lose strength when we pity. Through pity, the loss of strength that suffering already brings to life is further increased and multiplied. Suffering itself becomes contagious through pity; under certain circumstances, it can bring about a total loss of life and vital energy absurdly out of proportion to the magnitude of its cause (—the case of the Nazarene's death). That is the first consideration; but there is a still more important one. Suppose we measure pity by the value of the reactions it usually produces: its life-threatening character then appears in a far brighter light. Broadly speaking, pity thwarts the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it fights on behalf of life's disinherited and condemned; through the abundance of failures of every kind that it holds fast in life, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect. People have dared to call pity a virtue (—in every noble morality it counts as weakness—); they have gone further and made it the virtue, the ground and origin of all virtues—though only, as we must always keep in mind, from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, that inscribed the negation of life on its banner. Schopenhauer was right in this: through pity, life is negated, made more worthy of negation—pity is the practice of nihilism. To say it again: this depressive and contagious instinct thwarts those instincts directed toward preserving life and enhancing its value: as a multiplier of misery and as a preserver of everything miserable, it is a chief instrument for intensifying decadence—pity persuades us toward nothingness!… People do not say "nothingness": instead they say "the beyond"; or "God"; or "true life"; or nirvana, redemption, blessedness… This innocent rhetoric from the realm of religious-moral idiosyncrasy at once appears far less innocent once we grasp what tendency is wrapping itself here in the mantle of sublime words: the tendency hostile to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity became a virtue for him… Aristotle, as we know, saw pity as a morbid and dangerous condition that one would do well to treat now and then with a purgative: he understood tragedy as a purgative. From the standpoint of life's instinct, we would indeed have to seek a means of puncturing such a morbid and dangerous accumulation of pity as the case of Schopenhauer represents (and unfortunately our entire literary and artistic decadence as well, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner): so that it bursts… Nothing is more unhealthy, amid our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be a physician here, to be relentless here, to wield the knife here—that belongs to us, that is our kind of love of humanity, that is what makes us philosophers, us Hyperboreans!—
8 It is necessary to say whom we feel to be our opposite—the theologians and everything with theologians' blood in its veins—our entire philosophy… One must have seen this calamity at close range; better still, one must have experienced it oneself, must have almost perished from it, to stop treating this as a joke—(the freethinking of our gentlemen natural scientists and physiologists is a joke in my eyes—they lack passion in these matters, the suffering they entail—). That poisoning reaches much further than people think: I have rediscovered the theologian's instinct of arrogance wherever people today feel themselves to be "idealists"—wherever, by virtue of a higher descent, they claim the right to look upon reality from above and as strangers… Like the priest, the idealist holds all the great concepts in his hand (—and not only in his hand!); with benevolent contempt he plays them off against "understanding," the "senses," "honors," "good living," "science"; he sees such things beneath him, as harmful and seductive forces above which "the spirit" hovers in pure self-contained being—as though humility, chastity, poverty, in a word holiness, had not done life unspeakably more harm than any horrors and vices… Pure spirit is pure lie… As long as the priest still counts as a higher kind of human being, this negator, slanderer, poisoner of life by profession, there is no answer to the question: what is truth? Truth has already been turned on its head when the conscious advocate of nothingness and negation counts as the representative of "truth"…
9 I wage war on this theologian's instinct: I found its traces everywhere. Anyone with theologians' blood in his veins stands from the outset in a crooked and dishonest relation to all things. The pathos that develops from this calls itself faith: closing one's eyes to oneself once and for all, so as not to suffer at the sight of incurable falsity. One makes a morality, a virtue, a holiness for oneself out of this faulty view of all things; one attaches a good conscience to seeing falsely—one demands that no other way of seeing be allowed any value, having made one's own sacrosanct with the names "God," "redemption," "eternity." Wherever I dug, I unearthed the theologian's instinct: it is the most widespread, the truly subterranean form of falsity on earth. What a theologian feels to be true must be false: one has almost a criterion of truth in that. It is his deepest instinct of self-preservation that forbids reality from being honored, or even heard, at any point. As far as the theologian's influence reaches, value judgment is turned on its head, the concepts "true" and "false" are necessarily reversed: what harms life most is called "true" here; what elevates, enhances, affirms, justifies it and makes it triumph is called "false"… When theologians reach for power through the "conscience" of princes (or of peoples—), let us not doubt what is really happening each time: the will to the end, the nihilistic will, wills power…
10 Among Germans, people understand at once when I say that philosophy is corrupted by theologians' blood. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself its original sin. Definition of Protestantism: paralysis of one side of Christianity—and of reason… One need only say "Tübingen Seminary" to grasp what German philosophy is at bottom—a cunning theology… The Swabians are the best liars in Germany; they lie innocently… What explains the jubilation that swept through the German scholarly world at the appearance of Kant—a world made up three-quarters of pastors' and teachers' sons—what explains the German conviction, still echoed today, that Kant marks a turn for the better? The theologian's instinct in the German scholar divined what was now possible again… A back way to the old ideal lay open; the concept of the "true world," the concept of morality as the essence of the world (—the two most pernicious errors there are!), were now, thanks to a shrewdly cunning skepticism, if not provable, at least no longer refutable… Reason, the jurisdiction of reason, does not reach that far… Reality had been made into an "appearance"; a completely fabricated world, the world of being, had been made into reality… Kant's success is merely a theologian's success: Kant, like Luther, like Leibniz, was one more brake on German honesty, which is none too sure-footed to begin with——
Plain English translation
Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the same German text of the preface, all sixty-two sections and the Law Against Christianity. Nietzsche’s own emphasis is kept.
1 —Let's look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how far from everyone else we live. “Neither by land nor by water will you find the way to the Hyperboreans”: Pindar already knew that about us. Beyond the north, the ice, death—our life, our happiness… We have discovered happiness. We know the way. We found the exit from a labyrinth that lasted whole thousands of years. Who else found it?—Modern people, perhaps?—“I don't know which way to turn; I am everything that doesn't know which way to turn,” the modern person sighs… We were sick from this modernity—from its rotten peace, its cowardly compromises, all the virtuous filth of its Yes and No. This tolerance and open-heartedness, which “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything, is a sirocco to us. Better to live in ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!… We were brave enough. We spared neither ourselves nor anyone else. But for a long time we didn't know where to direct our courage. We grew gloomy; people called us fatalists. Our fate was fullness, tension, a buildup of forces. We thirsted for lightning and action. Nothing was further from us than the happiness of weaklings, than “resignation”… A thunderstorm was in our air. Our very nature grew dark—because we had no path. The formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…
2 What is good?—Everything that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in a person.
What is bad?—Everything that comes from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power is growing—that resistance is being overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace as such, but war; not virtue, but ability (virtue in the Renaissance style, excellence, virtue free of moralizing).
The weak and the failures should perish: the first principle of our love of humanity. And they should even be helped to do it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Acting out of pity for all the failures and the weak—Christianity…
3 The problem I am posing here is not what should replace humanity in the succession of beings (the human being is an end). It is what type of human being we should breed, should want, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of a future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough already. But it has appeared as a lucky accident, an exception, never as something intended. In fact, this type has been feared more than any other. Until now it has been almost the thing to fear. That fear led people to want, breed, and achieve the opposite type: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal—the Christian…
4 Humanity is not developing into something better or stronger or higher in the way people now believe. “Progress” is just a modern idea, which means a false idea. In value, today's European is far below the European of the Renaissance. Further development is simply not necessarily a rise, an increase, a strengthening.
In another sense, individual cases keep turning out well in very different parts of the earth and in very different cultures. In these cases a higher type really does appear: something that is a kind of superhuman being compared with humanity as a whole. Such lucky cases of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be. Under certain conditions, even whole families, tribes, and peoples can be such a success.
5 We should not dress Christianity up and make it look pretty. It has fought a war to the death against this higher human type. It has outlawed all this type's basic instincts. From these instincts it has distilled evil and the evil person—the strong person as the standard example of someone wicked, the “rejected person.” Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and failed. It has made an ideal out of opposition to the instincts that preserve strong life. It has corrupted the reason of even people with the strongest minds by teaching them to see the highest intellectual values as sinful, misleading, as temptations. The most pitiful example is Pascal's corruption. He believed that original sin had corrupted his reason, when only his Christianity had corrupted it!—
6 A painful, horrifying sight has opened up before me: I pulled back the curtain on human corruption. In my mouth, at least, this word is safe from one suspicion: that it contains a moral accusation against humanity. It is meant—I want to stress this again—without moralizing. So much so that I feel this corruption most strongly precisely where people have most consciously aimed at “virtue,” at “divinity.” By corruption, as you will already have guessed, I mean decadence. My claim is that all the values in which humanity now sums up what it most desires are values of decadence.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what harms it. A history of the “higher feelings,” of the “ideals of humanity”—and I may have to tell that history—would almost also explain why humanity is so corrupt. I regard life itself as an instinct for growth, for endurance, for gathering strength, for power. Where the will to power is missing, there is decline. My claim is that all humanity's highest values lack this will—that values of decline, nihilistic values, rule under the holiest names.
7 Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity works against the feelings that strengthen us and heighten our sense of being alive: it depresses us. We lose strength when we feel pity. Pity increases and multiplies the loss of strength that suffering already brings to life on its own. Pity makes suffering itself contagious. In some circumstances it can produce a total loss of life and vital energy absurdly out of proportion to the size of its cause—the case of the Nazarene's death. That is the first point of view, but there is a more important one. Suppose we measure pity by the value of the reactions it usually produces. Then its life-threatening character appears in a much clearer light. On the whole, pity works against the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction. It fights on behalf of those disinherited and condemned by life. By the mass of failures of every kind that it keeps alive, it makes life itself look gloomy and questionable. People have dared to call pity a virtue—in every noble morality it counts as weakness. They have gone further, making it the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues. But this was, of course—and we must always keep this in mind—from the standpoint of a nihilistic philosophy, a philosophy that wrote the denial of life on its banner. Schopenhauer was right about this: pity denies life and makes it more deserving of denial—pity is the practice of nihilism. To say it again: this depressing and contagious instinct works against the instincts aimed at preserving life and increasing its value. Both as a multiplier of misery and as a preserver of everything miserable, it is a chief tool for increasing decadence—pity persuades people to choose nothingness!… People don't say “nothingness.” Instead they say “the beyond,” or “God,” or “the true life,” or nirvana, redemption, bliss… This innocent rhetoric from the realm of religious and moral peculiarities at once looks much less innocent when we understand what tendency is wrapping itself in a cloak of sublime words here: the tendency hostile to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity became a virtue for him… Aristotle, as we know, saw pity as a sick and dangerous condition best treated with a purgative now and then. He understood tragedy as a purgative. From the standpoint of life's instinct, we really should look for a way to puncture such a sick and dangerous buildup of pity as the case of Schopenhauer represents—and, unfortunately, so does our whole literary and artistic decadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner—so that it bursts… Nothing in our unhealthy modern world is unhealthier than Christian pity. To be a doctor here, to be ruthless here, to wield the knife here—that is our business, that is our kind of love for humanity, that is what makes us philosophers, us Hyperboreans!—
8 We need to say whom we see as our opposite—the theologians and everything with theologians' blood in its body—our whole philosophy… You must have seen this disaster up close. Better still, you must have experienced it yourself, must have almost perished from it, to stop taking anything lightly here. (To my eyes, the freethinking of our natural scientists and physiologists is a joke. They lack passion in these matters, the suffering over them.) This poisoning reaches much further than people think. I have found the theologian's instinctive arrogance everywhere people today feel themselves to be “idealists”—where they claim, on the strength of some higher ancestry, the right to look down on reality as something foreign to them… Just like the priest, the idealist has all the great concepts in his hands—and not just in his hands! With kindly contempt, he plays them off against “understanding,” “the senses,” “honors,” “good living,” “science.” He sees such things as beneath him, as harmful and seductive forces above which “the spirit” floats, purely on its own—as though humility, chastity, poverty, holiness in a word, had not done unspeakably more harm to life up to now than any horrors or vices… Pure spirit is pure falsehood… As long as the priest still counts as a higher kind of human being—this denier, slanderer, and poisoner of life by profession—there is no answer to the question: what is truth? Truth has already been turned upside down when the conscious advocate of nothingness and denial counts as the representative of “truth”…
9 I make war on this theologian's instinct: I have found its traces everywhere. Anyone with theologians' blood in his body takes a crooked, dishonest position toward everything from the start. The passionate attitude that develops from this calls itself faith: shutting your eyes to yourself once and for all, to avoid suffering at the sight of incurable falsehood. You turn this faulty way of seeing everything into your own morality, virtue, holiness. You attach a good conscience to seeing falsely. Once you have made your own outlook sacred with the names “God,” “redemption,” “eternity,” you demand that no other outlook be allowed any value. Wherever I dug, I uncovered the theologian's instinct. It is the most widespread form of falsehood on earth, the truly underground form. What a theologian feels to be true must be false. That almost gives us a test for truth. His deepest instinct of self-preservation forbids reality to be honored on any point, or even allowed a word. Wherever the theologian's influence reaches, value judgments are turned upside down, and the concepts “true” and “false” are necessarily reversed. What harms life most is called “true” here. What lifts it, strengthens it, affirms it, justifies it, and makes it triumph is called “false”… When theologians reach for power through the “conscience” of rulers (or of peoples), let us not doubt what is really happening each time: the will to the end, the nihilistic will, wants power…
10 Germans understand at once when I say that philosophy is corrupted by theologians' blood. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its original sin. Definition of Protestantism: paralysis of one side of Christianity—and of reason… You only have to say “Tübingen Seminary” to understand what German philosophy really is—a sneaky theology… The Swabians are Germany's best liars. They lie innocently… Why did rejoicing sweep through the German scholarly world when Kant appeared—a world in which three quarters were sons of pastors and teachers? Why the German conviction, still echoed today, that Kant marked a turn for the better? The theologian's instinct in the German scholar guessed what was now possible again… A back way to the old ideal stood open. Thanks to a sly, clever skepticism, the idea of the “true world,” the idea of morality as the essence of the world—the two most malignant errors there are!—could once again, if not be proved, at least no longer be refuted… Reason, the authority of reason, does not reach that far… Reality had been turned into “mere appearance.” A completely fabricated world, the world of true being, had been made into reality… Kant's success is only a theologian's success. Like Luther, like Leibniz, Kant was one more brake on German honesty, which has trouble keeping a steady rhythm anyway——
About this section
Sections 1–10 is part of The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is section 2 of 8 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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