Friedrich Nietzsche on Christianity
By Ralph Perrier
Quotes
-To call the taming of an animal its ‘improvement’ is in our ears almost a joke. Whoever knows what goes on in zoos is doubtful whether the beasts in them are ‘improved’. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, they become sickly beasts through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through injuries, through hunger. It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has ‘improved’. In the early Middle Ages, when the church was in fact above all a zoo, one . . . improved, for example, the noble Teutons. But what did such a Teuton afterwards look like when he had been ‘improved’ and led into a monastery? Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a sinner; he was in a cage; one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts . . . . There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself, full of hatred for the impulses toward life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, [he was] a Christian. - The Antichrist, Section 61.
-The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep–where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The ‘savage’ (or, in moral terms, the evil man) is a return to nature–and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from ‘culture’. - The Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature”, Aphorism 1.
-I call an animal, a species or an individual depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is harmful to it. A history of the ‘higher feelings’, of the ‘ideals of mankind’ [. . .] would almost also constitute an explanation of why man is so depraved. I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuance, for accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking, there is decline. My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the supreme values of mankind — that values of decline, nihilistic values, hold sway under the holiest names. – The Antichrist, Section 6.
-This is precisely why the Jews are the most disastrous people in world history: they have left such a falsified humanity in their wake that even today Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism. - The Antichrist, Section 24.
-The Jews, that priestly people of ressentiment who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply rooted priestly desire for revenge. - On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay, Section 7.
-Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege:—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity, the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against race: the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love. - The Antichrist, Section 25.
-The act of most spiritual revenge. It was the Jews who, with awe inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang onto this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying, “the wretched alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God . . . and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity, and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, the accursed, and damned!. - On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay, Section 7.
-I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption [. . .] The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity, it has made of every value a disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind of integrity a vileness of soul. People still dare talk to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! [. . .] These are the blessings of Christianity! Parasitism as the sole practice of the church . . . of ‘holiness’ draining away all blood, all love, all hope for life; the Beyond as the will to deny reality of every kind; the Cross as a badge of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy there has ever been — a conspiracy against health, beauty, well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, benevolence of soul, against life itself . . . Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them — I can write in letters which make even the blind see . . . call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. - The Antichrist, Section 62.
-Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls on the ground against everything that is elevated. The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (—who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power). - The Antichrist, Section 43.
-The democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement. … The ‘equality of souls before God’, this lie of the lowest instincts, has become, thanks to the revolution, into the lie of the ‘equality of men’ and the ‘equality of rights’. - The Antichrist, Section 57.
-The whole of modern socialism is only the logical conclusion of the tyranny of Christian pity, which no longer believes in God but still believes in pity. - The Antichrist, Section 43.
-In the democratic movement, we see the completion of the Christian movement; it is Christianity minus the God. - The Will to Power (section 358)
-Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving,—by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle… Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one’s cause, one’s self included. Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other instincts; for instance, over the instincts of “happiness.” The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea—grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams. The free man is a warrior. - Twilight of the Idols
-The whole of the West has been Christianized, and the whole of the West has been infected with the Christian disease… The democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement. - Twilight of the Idols (section 5 in the “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” chapter)
-The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. - The Antichrist, Section 15.
-What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry - Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature”, Aphorism 2.
-The Christian concept of God—God as a sick man, God as a spider, God as a vilely injured and overthrown man—is merely a projection of the sick and impotent instinct of the Christian. To talk of the will to power in connection with such a concept is a contradiction.- The Antichrist, Section 18.
-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 himself, 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! — The Antichrist, Section 5.
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Index of The Project Gutenberg Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58025/58025-h/58025-h.htm [link]
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