The Antichrist
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was an acclaimed German philosopher who rose to prominence during the late nineteenth century. His work provides a thorough examination of societal norms often rooted in religion and politics. As a cultural critic, Nietzsche is affiliated with nihilism and individualism with a primary focus on personal development. His most notable books include The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is frequently credited with contemporary teachings of psychology and sociology.
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Reviews for The Antichrist
346 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An intense and damning work - one not to be caught reading in public where I live.
A fearsome, angry, snarl against Christianity, as it was at the time. Rails and rambles against the decadence and nihilism of Christianity, of weakness, of parasitism, of the promise of eternal life, the corruption of the Church and priesthood, and of the evils justified by religion. It is a means for which the weak can resent and dominate or refuse the strong, or the ways of the world, as he says.
As for Jesus? A misguided redeemer, who promised "The kingdom of god is within you", and perhaps the only true Christian.
This is not exactly a book one can read, and put aside, and say, "That was interesting. On to the next one." It stays with you - as madness or as a spark of genius.
As a side note, my copy was translated by H. L. Mencken, also famous for his acidic style and critique of American religion. A funny historical coincidence.
Recommended for Hyperboreans. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tal van knappe inzichten die intussen gemeengoed zijn geworden. Toch blijft hij met zijn religiekritiek steken in secundaire kwesties.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is possible to see this as too aristocratic. After all, 'Or can any teach God knowledge? Seeing as he judges those which are high.' But for all that, here is hot fury and cold steel, and it cuts deep...And, of course, it would be easy to draw facile comparisons between him and the 'New Atheists'--Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris--and it's been done; but that's just comparing children with a grown-up. Each one of them is--Smart Like A Moron! Though I suppose they're sure clever, since stupid people say so. After all, it's not like the Pharisees and the dictionary freaks (of monkish habit) are going to find the answer. They're as lost as Hitler!And, if anyone's wondering, Was Nietzsche German? I doubt it. Indeed, it was his cross to be so surrounded by the plague of Victorian Germanic-Teutonic introverted losers which had so infected and deformed the Europe of his day. Far more real of an infection than whatever dream of "Eastern Jews" that the Nazis used to fret of...like wrestlers with the sensibilities of snobs: "Eastern Jews! (Uneducated)!" Yet those old German military-academic scientists were really 'life unworthy of life', as the Nazis used to say. God! useless weak people, always trying to bully everyone. Like one of those two-and-a-half pound dogs that always wants to fight...Although I like the ones that are too grand to fight even better. They go through life with their eyes safely shut, and they if they provoke you, they'll never admit it, because their eyes are too weak to see you or your concerns, their eyes are too weak to even see their feet, although at least they have their conceit, even if they are too fat to reach their feet. And too grand, of course, to even want to. But whatever fools say, there is never anything wrong with wanting to be a little noble, no matter how low-born you are. So let them say of thee, that he, 'adventured his life far'. Or else is she, 'wild for to hold, though I seem tame'. But what do they know of life, who live as the dead? So rest in your conceit, Christians, for your sin rests on you. For, after all, they have no sense of correctness, only of conceit, and the privilege of little lords who are too lazy to do any work: so what is more weak than that? And jealousy of anything capable of real kindness and generosity: did they think that this too would go unnoticed? But, come, let us not disturb the moral invalids--the ethically feeble, more vexed by slights to their cloistered names and parochial words, than to the sorrows of the people and catastrophes of the others--let them rest in their sins, for their sins rest in them. (9/10)
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As a devout Christian,
I had very high expectations from this book.
I was surprised to learn that Nietzsche was not anti-semitic, that was something I learnt from this book.
He likes Buddhism better than Christianity. "Buddhism, I repeat is a hundred times colder, more truthful, more objective."
He goes on to attack the origin of Jewish concept of God, concept of sin, psychology of Christians, gospels.
He says,"Christian is the hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom and senses."
Indeed, I felt really funny reading this and I am in a better mood. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I found Friedrich Nietzsche when I was still in high school, and have been a huge fan ever since. Sadly, he is one of the most misunderstood and maligned thinkers, but stands as a huge influence on so much of modern thought. Nietzsche is not only a philosopher who is easy to read, but he is a joy to read. He is ecstatically involved in his thought and passes that ecstasy on the reader. I have always drawn strength from his work, and return to it often.
Book preview
The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche
62.
PREFACE
~
THIS BOOK BELONGS TO THE most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my Zarathustra
: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?—First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner—to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm.... Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self....
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?—The rest are merely humanity.—One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche.
THE ANTICHRIST
~
1.
~
—LET US LOOK EACH OTHER in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how remote our place is. Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans
: even Pindar, in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The man of today?—I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in
—so sighs the man of today.... This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,—we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that forgives
everything because it understands
everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from resignation
... There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal....
2.
~
WHAT IS GOOD?—WHATEVER AUGMENTS THE feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....
3.
~
THE PROBLEM THAT I SET here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (—man is an end—): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;—and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man—the Christian....
4.
~
MANKIND SURELY DOES NOT REPRESENT an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This progress
is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.
5.
~
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 décadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are décadence-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 décadence, ofnihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
7.
~
CHRISTIANITY IS CALLED THE RELIGION of pity.—Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity