THE ANTICHRIST
By
Friedrich Nietzsche
Translation: H.L. Mencken
5.
We should not deck out and embellish
Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of
evil, of the
evil One him
self, out of these instincts--the strong man as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men."
Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of
antagonism to all the
self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has
corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the
corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by
Christianity!--