THE ANTICHRIST
By
Friedrich Nietzsche
Translation: H.L. Mencken
38.
--I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--contempt of man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today--I am suffocated by his foul breath! . . . Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous
self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this mad house of a world, call it "
Christianity," "
Christian faith" or the "
Christian church," as you will--I take care not to hold
mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times,our times. Our age knows better. . . What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a
Christian today. And here my disgust begins.--I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a
pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies--and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "
God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies--: serious reflection, the profound
self-conquest of the
spirit,allow no man to pretend that he does not know it. . . All the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest him
self is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation. . - - We know, our con
science now knows--just what the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what ends they have served, with their debasement of
humanity to a state of
self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the
soul," the "
soul" it
self: they are all merely so many in instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master. . .Every one knows this,but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of
self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-
Christian in their acts, now call themselves
Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the
egoism and arrogance of his
people--and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a
Christian! . . . Whom, then, does
Christianity deny? what does it call "the world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's
self; to be careful of one's honour; to desire one's own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows it
self in a deed, is now anti-
Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call him
self nevertheless, and without shame, a
Christian!--