THE ANTICHRIST
By
Friedrich Nietzsche
Translation: H.L. Mencken
27.
Christianity sprang from a soil so
corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural value, every reality was opposed by the deepest instincts of the ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. The "holy
people," who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as "unholy," "worldly," "sinful"--this
people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the point of
self-annihilation: as
Christianity it actually denied even the last form of reality, the "holy
people," the "chosen
people," Jewish reality it
self. The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus--in other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization.
Christianity actually denies the church...
I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the Jewish church--"church" being here used in exactly the same sense that the word has today. It was an insurrection against the "
good and just," against the "prophets of
Israel," against the whole hierarchy of society--not against
corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was unbelief in "
superior men," a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy that was called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which, above everything, was necessary to the safety of the Jewish
people in the midst of the "waters"--it represented their last possibility of
survival; it was the final residuum of their independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon the most profound national instinct, the most
powerful national will to live, that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the
people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things--and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today--this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins--there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.--