The Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche

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is the product of the op pressed class, one should read the New Testament (which, according to Indian and Arian points of view, is a religion for the Chandala). If one wish to see a negative Arian religion, which is the product of the ruling classes, one should study Buddhism. It is quite in the nature of things that we have no Arian religion which is the product of the oppressed classes; for that would have been a contradiction: a race of masters is either para mount or else it goes to the dogs.

      146. Religion, per se, has nothing to do with morality; yet both offshoots of the Jewish religion are essentially moral religions which prescribe the rules of living, and procure obedience to their principles by means of rewards and punishment.

      147. Paganism Christianity. Paganism is that which says yea to all that is natural, it is innocence in being natural, " naturalness." Christianity is that which says no to all that is natural, it is a certain lack of dignity in being natural; hostility to Nature. " Innocent ": Petronius is innocent, for in stance. Beside this happy man a Christian is absolutely devoid of innocence. But since even the Christian status is ultimately only a natural condition, the term " Christian " soon begins to mean the counterfeiting of the psychological inter pretation.

      148. The Christian priest is from the root a mortal enemy of sensuality: one cannot imagine a greater contrast to his attitude than the guileless, slightly awed, and solemn attitude, which the religious rites of the most honorable women in Athens maintained in the presence of the symbol of sex. In all non-ascetic religions the procreative act is the secret per se: a sort of symbol of perfection and of the designs of the future: re-birth, im mortality.

      149. Our belief in ourselves is the greatest fetter, the most telling spur, and the strongest pinion. Christianity ought to have elevated the innocence of man to the position of an article of belief men would then have become gods: in those days believing was still possible.

      150. The egregious lie of history: as if it were the corruption of Paganism that opened the road to Christianity. As a matter of fact, it was the enfeeblement and moralisation of the man of antiquity. The new interpretation of natural functions, which made them appear like vices, had already gone before!

      151. Religions are ultimately wrecked by the belief in morality. The idea of the Christian moral God becomes untenable, hence " Atheism," as though there could be no other god. Culture is likewise wrecked by the belief in morality. For when the necessary and only possible conditions of its growth are revealed, nobody will any longer countenance it (Buddh ism).

      152. The physiology of Nihilistic religions. All in all, the Nihilistic religions are systematized histories of sickness described in religious and moral ter- m in o logy. In pagan cultures it is around the interpretation of the great annual cycles that the religious cult turns; in Christianity it is around a cycle of paralytic phenomena.

      153. This Nihilistic religion gathers together all the decadent elements and things of like order which it can find in antiquity, viz.: (a) The weak and the botched (the refuse of the ancient world, and that of which it rid itself with most violence). (b} Those who are morally obsessed and anti- pagan. (c) Those who are weary of politics and in different (the bias Romans), the denationalised, who know not what they are. (d) Those who are tired of themselves who are happy to be party to a subterranean conspiracy.

      154. Buddha versus Christ. Among the Nihilistic religions, Christianity and Buddhism may always be sharply distinguished. Buddhism is the ex pression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and mild it is a sort of gratitude towards all that . I lies hidden, including that which it entirely lacks, viz., bitterness, disillusionment, and resent ment. Finally it possesses lofty intellectual love; it has got over all the subtlety of philosophical contradictions, and is even resting after it, though it is precisely from that source that it derives its intellectual glory and its glow as of a sunset (it originated in the higher classes). Christianity is a degenerative movement, con sisting of all kinds of decaying and excremental elements: it is not the expression of the downfall of a race, it is, from the root, an agglomeration of all the morbid elements which are mutually attractive and which gravitate to one another. ... It is therefore not a national religion, not determined by race: it appeals to the disinherited everywhere; it consists of a foundation of resent ment against all that is successful and dominant: it is in need of a symbol which represents the damnation of everything successful and dominant. It is opposed to every form of intellectual move ment, to all philosophy: it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, learned, intellectually independent: in all these it suspects the element of success and domination.

      155. In Buddhism this thought prevails: " All passions, everything which creates emotions and leads to blood, is a call to action " to this extent alone are its believers warned against evil. For action has no sense, it merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irration- alism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror. For instance: " On no account seek after revenge! Be the enemy of no one! " The Hedonism of the weary finds its highest expression here. Nothing is more utterly foreign to Buddhism than the Jewish fanaticism of St. Paul: nothing could be more contrary to its instinct than the tension, fire, and unrest of the religious man, and, above all, that form of sensuality which sanctifies Christianity with the name " Love." Moreover, it is the cultured and very intellectual classes who find blessedness in Buddhism: a race wearied and besotted by centuries of philosophical quarrels, but not beneath all culture as those classes were from which Christianity sprang. ... In the Buddhistic ideal, there is essentially an emancipa tion from good and evil: a very subtle suggestion of a Beyond to all morality is thought out in its teaching, and this Beyond is supposed to be compatible with perfection, the condition being, that even good actions are only needed pro tern., merely as a means, that is to say, in order to be free from all action.

      156. How very curious it is to see a Nihilistic religion such as Christianity, sprung from, and in keeping with, a decrepit and worn-out people, who have outlived all strong instincts, being transferred step by step to another environment that is to say, to a land of young people, who have not yet lived at all The joy of the final chapter, of the fold and of the evening, preached to barbarians and Germans! How thoroughly all of it must first have been barbarised, Germanised! To those who had dreamed of a Walhalla: who found happiness only in war! A -national religion preached in the midst of chaos, where no nations yet existed even.

      157. The only way to refute priests and religions is this: to show that their errors are no longer beneficent -that they are rather harmful; in short, that their own " proof of power " no longer holds good. . . .

      2. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.

      158. Christianity as an historical reality should not be confounded with that one root which its name recalls. The other roots, from which it has sprung, are by far the more important. It is an unprecedented abuse of names to identify such manifestations of decay and such abortions as the "Christian Church," "Christian belief," and "Christian life," with that Holy Name. What did Christ deny? Everything which today is called Christian.

      159. The whole of the Christian creed all Christian " truth," is idle falsehood and deception, and is precisely the reverse of that which was at the bottom of the first Christian movement. All that which in the ecclesiastical sense is Christian, is just exactly what is most radically anti- Christian: crowds of things and people appear instead of symbols, history takes the place of eternal facts, it is all forms, rites, and dogmas instead of a " practice " of life. To be really Christian would mean to be absolutely indifferent to dogmas, cults, priests, church, and theology. The practice of Christianity is no more an im possible phantasy than the practice of Buddhism is: it is merely a means to happiness.

      160. Jesus goes straight to the point, the " Kingdom of Heaven " in the heart, and He does not find the means in duty to the Jewish Church; He even regards the reality of Judaism (its need to maintain itself) as nothing; He is concerned purely with the inner man. Neither does He make anything of all the coarse forms relating to man s intercourse with God: He is opposed to the whole of the teaching of repentance and atonement; He points out how man ought to live in order to feel himself" deified," and how futile it is on his part to hope to live properly by showing repentance and

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