The Antichrist (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Criticism of Christianity

By Friedrich Nietzsche and Dennis Sweet

TheAntichrist is the most powerful criticism ever offered against modern values and beliefs. In earlier books Nietzsche had announced, “God is dead,” and in The Antichrist he seethes with contempt for Christianity’s imposition, upon humanity, of its perverse and unnatural vision.

Nietzsche contends that values offered by Christianity are created by people who are not qualified to create such values and ideals. These meanings and goals are unnatural distortions of reality provided by people who are themselves divorced from reality, and who seek to instill in others the same dissatisfaction with this world which infects them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428126

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.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

PREFACE

THE ANTICHRIST

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SUGGESTED READING

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Introduction and Suggested Reading

© 2006 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Originally published in 1895

This 2006 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7607-7770-1

ISBN-10: 0-7607-7770-5

eISBN : 978-1-411-42812-6

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK BELONGS TO THE VERY FEW. SO BEGINS THE ANTICHRIST—the most powerful and most bellicose criticism ever offered against modern values and beliefs. The objects of these critiques are the Christian Church and the Christian belief system. The very few to whom the book is addressed are those hyperboreans who possess "the courage for the forbidden; those who thirst for thunderbolts and great deeds. The author and critic is Friedrich Nietzsche: philosopher, psychologist, poet, and the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus. In earlier books Nietzsche had made that most profound announcement: God is dead. In other words, there are no absolute, unconditional, or objective values in the world. Whatever meanings that exist in life are put there by us, by human beings, by value-creators." The Antichrist was intended as the first part of a four-part work to be titled The Revaluation of All Values—Nietzsche’s desire to lay bare the psychological, social, and cultural weaknesses that humanity has imposed upon itself over the past two thousand years, and to point to a higher sense of health and creative development and responsibility for the future. An outline of this proposed work provides the following scheme: (1) The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity; (2) The Free Spirit: Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement; (3) The Immoralist: Critique of the Most Fatal Kind of Ignorance, Morality; and (4) Dionysus: Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence. The Antichrist is all that we have of this ambitious enterprise, which was the last flash of creative frenzy before Nietzsche’s mind was dimmed by madness.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Saxony on October 15, 1844. His father, Karl Ludwig, was a Lutheran pastor who passed away when his son was only four years old, owing to softening of the brain. Nietzsche and his younger sister, Elisabeth, were raised by their mother, Franziska, and their two maiden aunts. In 1858, he was admitted to the Pfortaschule, the most prestigious boarding school in Germany. After six years of the regimented life there, he spent a year as a theology student at the University of Bonn, then in 1865, he began the study of classical philology at the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche’s literary career began with the publication in 1872 of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. The book’s characterization of the creative impetus behind Greek drama in terms of a synthesis of the destructive Dionysian and the constructive Apollinian impulses, and its description of the Socratic attitude of reason over instinct as one of decadence, represents a seminal moment for the subsequent development of Nietzsche’s thought. However, with its hyperbolic praise of his friend, the composer Richard Wagner (1813-83), the book did little to further Nietzsche’s budding career as a professor of classical philology at Basel University in Switzerland. His friendship with Wagner, though, soon soured, and by 1878, they had become openly antagonistic toward one another. The following year Nietzsche resigned his teaching position at Basel, owing to the recurring health problems that plagued him throughout his life. These included severe eye pain and vision problems, intense headaches that would last for days, stomach and intestinal distress resulting in prolonged fits of vomiting, and chronic insomnia. Despite poor health and desperate loneliness, Nietzsche managed to produce a book (or a book-length supplement to an earlier publication) every year from 1878 to 1887. From 1883 to 1885, he published the four parts of his most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he introduced his idea of the overman (Übermensch) and developed his conception of the will to power and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. During the fall of 1888, in a flurry of energy and euphoria, Nietzsche wrote or completed four books: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. In early January 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, confused and incoherent. He spent the last eleven years of his life institutionalized or under the care of his family.

Nietzsche’s task, as he described it in Ecce Homo, his intellectual autobiography, was to uncover the greatest uncleanliness that humanity has on its conscience; a self-deception become instinctive. . . . Blindness to Christianity is the crime par excellence—the crime against life. (Ecce Homo, IV, 7.) This was a task that he took very seriously.

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. (Ecce Homo, IV, 1.)

The full force of this man made dynamite was Nietzsche’s last and greatest undertaking: The Revaluation of All Values. In a letter dated October 18, 1888, to his friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche writes:

It’s my greatest harvest time. Everything comes easy now, everything I do thrives, although I think hardly anyone has ever undertaken such momentous things. That the first volume of the Revaluation of All Values is finished, ready for printing [i.e., The Antichrist]—I tell you this with a feeling I can’t put into words. There’ll be four books, appearing separately. This time, old artilleryman that I am, I’m moving in my big guns. I fear I’ll be blasting the history of mankind into two halves. . . . (Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, 126.)

The Antichrist is not intended for the timid or the faint of heart. It seethes with contempt for what Nietzsche regards as mankind’s greatest crime—Christianity’s imposition, upon humanity, of its perverse and unnatural vision. Thematically the book stands with Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols. In each of these books Nietzsche had diagnosed Christian morality and values as the sources of our modern social and psychological maladies. Yet it is important to keep in mind that Nietzsche’s criticisms are aimed at Christianity, understood as organized religion, the Christian Church, or, to use Kierkegaard’s idiom, Christiandom. Nietzsche makes this point in his notebooks: "What did Christ deny? Everything that is today called Christian" (The Will to Power, § 158.). In The Antichrist the point is made with a more pithy sentiment: "truth to tell, there never was more than one Christian, and he died on the Cross" (§ 39).

An analysis of the corrupting character of Christianity is the modus operandi of The Antichrist. Overall, the book is a negative, critical work. It was intended to clear the ground for the more positive discussions in the subsequent parts of The Revaluation of All Values. Nietzsche contends that the corruption here is manifold. First, the natural world and our instincts are sacrificed for a fantastic apparition dredged up by unhealthy imaginations. Second, the values offered, the ideals to which we aspire, are created by people who are not qualified to create such values and ideals. These meanings and goals are unnatural distortions of reality provided by people who are themselves divorced from reality, and who seek to instill in others the same dissatisfaction with this world which infects them. Thus, the priests and theologians create in others the same psychological distress and dis-integration from which they themselves suffer, and then proffer the cure. Third, the so-called source of the values and meanings of reality, the Christian God, represents, for Nietzsche, the low watermark in divine types. In the past, a people or culture created gods as expressions of its will to power, as manifestations of its abundance of creative energy. The Jewish God, Jehovah, was such an expression in its original conception as rainmaker and helper of the Jewish people. According to Nietzsche, later, after internal turmoil and external invasions, the Jewish priests denaturalized Jehovah, turning him into a moral world-orderer and judge.

In this context we find one of the great ironies that Nietzsche expresses so well. It has to do with the relationship between the God represented in Judaism and the God of Christianity. Despite his intolerance of anti-Jewish prejudices, some of Nietzsche’s friends and acquaintances counted among the most notable anti-Semites of the period. These included Nietzsche’s brother-in-law, Bernhard Förster, and, of course, Richard Wagner. Much of their rhetoric was spent in dissociating the primitive Jewish God of the Old Testament from the enlightened Christian God of the New Testament. Nietzsche contends that the Christian conception of God grew from the same soil as the Jewish conception, and that both are grounded in the same anti-natural attitudes of herd resentment. The difference consists in the fact that Judaism remained more or less exclusive to a single culture while Christianity opened the doors to every kind of disenfranchised group or belief system in the vastly diverse Roman Empire. Thus, Christianity had to become as morbid, base and vulgar as the needs to which it had to minister were morbid, base and vulgar (The Antichrist, § 37).

Despite its negative, critical tone, its thunder and its lightning, a rainbow does appear in The Antichrist. Here and elsewhere in his writings, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the Christian dis-ease is both an indictment of past crimes and an inducement for future virtues. Consider, for example, the virtue of pity. According to Nietzsche, the Christian conception of pity functions to drain the strength and the power of those who pity, and it serves to preserve the existence of those whom nature has, in many cases, written off. But there is another, healthier kind of pity, one that is grounded in an altogether

Reviews for The Antichrist (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

[064-699196 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting opinions and essays, but I found it a bit too deep for myself.

[gottfried_leibniz-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As 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.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An 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.

[tullius22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It 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)

[uh8myzen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I 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.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Tal van knappe inzichten die intussen gemeengoed zijn geworden. Toch blijft hij met zijn religiekritiek steken in secundaire kwesties.