THE ANTICHRIST
By
Friedrich Nietzsche
Translation: H.L. Mencken
47.
--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find
God, either in
history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard what has been honoured as
God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life. . . We deny that
God is
God . . . If any one were to show us this
Christian God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a
religion as
Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of
science--and it will give the name of
good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual con
science, and all noble coolness and
freedom of the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes
science--in praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.--The
God that Paul invented for him
self, a
God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing him
self: to give one's own will the name of
God, thora--that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the
good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the "holy
books," and as a physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical
Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud.". . .