The Antichrist (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Criticism of Christianity - Softcover

9780760777701: The Antichrist (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Criticism of Christianity
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The Antichrist is the most powerful criticism ever offered against modern values and beliefs. In earlier books Nietzsche had announced, “God is dead,” and in The Antichrist he seethes with contempt for Christianity’s imposition, upon humanity, of its perverse and unnatural vision.

 

Nietzsche contends that values offered by Christianity are created by people who are not qualified to create such values and ideals. These meanings and goals are unnatural distortions of reality provided by people who are themselves divorced from reality, and who seek to instill in others the same dissatisfaction with this world which infects them.

 

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About the Author:

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Saxony on October 15, 1844. Nietzsche, whose father was a Lutheran pastor, spent a year as a theology student at the University of Bonn, before studying classical philology at the University of Leipzig. Despite poor health and desperate loneliness, Nietzsche managed to produce a book (or a book-length supplement to an earlier publication) every year from 1878 to 1887. In early January 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, confused and incoherent. He spent the last eleven years of his life institutionalized or under the care of his family.

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Introduction

 

“This book belongs to the very few.” So begins The Antichrist—the most powerful and most bellicose criticism ever offered against modern values and beliefs. The objects of these critiques are the Christian Church and the Christian belief system. The “very few” to whom the book is addressed are those “hyperboreans” who possess “the courage for the forbidden;” those who “thirst for thunderbolts and great deeds.” The author and critic is Friedrich Nietzsche: philosopher, psychologist, poet, and “the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus.” In earlier books Nietzsche had made that most profound announcement: “God is dead.” In other words, there are no absolute, unconditional, or objective values in the world. Whatever meanings that exist in life are put there by us, by human beings, by “value-creators.” The Antichrist was intended as the first part of a four-part work to be titled The Revaluation of All Values—Nietzsche’s desire to lay bare the psychological, social, and cultural weaknesses that humanity has imposed upon itself over the past two thousand years, and to point to a higher sense of health and creative development and responsibility for the future. An outline of this proposed work provides the following scheme: (1) The Antichrist: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity; (2) The Free Spirit: Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement; (3) The Immoralist: Critique of the Most Fatal Kind of Ignorance, Morality; and (4) Dionysus: Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence. The Antichrist is all that we have of this ambitious enterprise, which was the last flash of creative frenzy before Nietzsche’s mind was dimmed by madness.

 

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Saxony on October 15, 1844. His father, Karl Ludwig, was a Lutheran pastor who passed away when his son was only four years old, owing to “softening of the brain.” Nietzsche and his younger sister, Elisabeth, were raised by their mother, Franziska, and their two maiden aunts. In 1858, he was admitted to the Pfortaschule, the most prestigious boarding school in Germany. After six years of the regimented life there, he spent a year as a theology student at the University of Bonn, then in 1865, he began the study of classical philology at the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche’s literary career began with the publication in 1872 of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. The book’s characterization of the creative impetus behind Greek drama in terms of a synthesis of the destructive “Dionysian” and the constructive “Apollinian” impulses, and its description of the Socratic attitude of reason over instinct as one of decadence, represents a seminal moment for the subsequent development of Nietzsche’s thought. However, with its hyperbolic praise of his friend, the composer Richard Wagner (1813–83), the book did little to further Nietzsche’s budding career as a professor of classical philology at Basel University in Switzerland. His friendship with Wagner, though, soon soured, and by 1878, they had become openly antagonistic toward one another. The following year Nietzsche resigned his teaching position at Basel, owing to the recurring health problems that plagued him throughout his life. These included severe eye pain and vision problems, intense headaches that would last for days, stomach and intestinal distress resulting in prolonged fits of vomiting, and chronic insomnia. Despite poor health and desperate loneliness, Nietzsche managed to produce a book (or a book-length supplement to an earlier publication) every year from 1878 to 1887. From 1883 to 1885, he published the four parts of his most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he introduced his idea of the “overman” (Übermensch) and developed his conception of “the will to power” and his doctrine of “the eternal recurrence of the same.” During the fall of 1888, in a flurry of energy and euphoria, Nietzsche wrote or completed four books: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. In early January 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, confused and incoherent. He spent the last eleven years of his life institutionalized or under the care of his family.

 

Nietzsche’s task, as he described it in Ecce Homo, his intellectual autobiography, was to uncover “the greatest uncleanliness that humanity has on its conscience; a self-deception become instinctive.... Blindness to Christianity is the crime par excellence—the crime against life.” (Ecce Homo, IV, 7.)  This was a task that he took very seriously.

 

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. (Ecce Homo, IV, 1.)

 

The full force of this man made dynamite was Nietzsche’s last and greatest undertaking: The Revaluation of All Values. In a letter dated October 18, 1888, to his friend Franz Overbeck Nietzsche writes:

 

It’s my greatest harvest time. Everything comes easy now, everything I do thrives, although I think hardly anyone has ever undertaken such momentous things. That the first volume of the Revaluation of All Values is finished, ready for printing [i.e., The Antichrist]—I tell you this with a feeling I can’t put into words. There’ll be four books, appearing separately. This time, old artilleryman that I am, I’m moving in my big guns. I fear I’ll be blasting the history of mankind into two halves.... (Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters, 126.)

  

The Antichrist is not intended for the timid or the faint of heart. It seethes with contempt for what Nietzsche regards as mankind’s greatest crime—Christianity’s imposition, upon humanity, of its perverse and unnatural vision. Thematically the book stands with Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols. In each of these books Nietzsche had diagnosed Christian morality and values as the sources of our modern social and psychological maladies. Yet it is important to keep in mind that Nietzsche’s criticisms are aimed at Christianity, understood as “organized religion,” “the Christian Church,” or, to use Kierkegaard’s idiom, “Christiandom.” Nietzsche makes this point in his notebooks: “What did Christ deny? Everything that is today called Christian” (The Will to Power, § 158.).  In The Antichrist the point is made with a more pithy sentiment: “truth to tell, there never was more than one Christian, and he died on the Cross” (§ 39).

 

An analysis of the corrupting character of Christianity is the modus operandi of The Antichrist. Overall, the book is a negative, critical work. It was intended to clear the ground for the more positive discussions in the subsequent parts of The Revaluation of All Values. Nietzsche contends that the corruption here is manifold. First, the natural world and our instincts are sacrificed for a fantastic apparition dredged up by unhealthy imaginations. Second, the values offered, the ideals to which we aspire, are created by people who are not qualified to create such values and ideals. These meanings and goals are unnatural distortions of reality provided by people who are themselves divorced from reality, and who seek to instill in others the same dissatisfaction with this world which infects them. Thus, the priests and theologians create in others the same psychological distress and dis-integration from which they themselves suffer, and then proffer the cure. Third, the so-called source of the values and meanings of reality, the Christian God, represents, for Nietzsche, the low watermark in divine types. In the past, a people or culture created gods as expressions of its will to power, as manifestations of its abundance of creative energy. The Jewish God, Jehovah, was such an expression in its original conception as rainmaker and helper of the Jewish people. According to Nietzsche, later, after internal turmoil and external invasions, the Jewish priests “denaturalized” Jehovah, turning him into a moral world-orderer and judge.

 

In this context we find one of the great ironies that Nietzsche expresses so well. It has to do with the relationship between the God represented in Judaism and the God of Christianity. Despite his intolerance of anti-Jewish prejudices, some of Nietzsche’s friends and acquaintances counted among the most notable anti-Semites of the period. These included Nietzsche’s brother-in-law, Bernhard Förster, and, of course, Richard Wagner. Much of their rhetoric was spent in dissociating the “primitive” Jewish God of the Old Testament from the enlightened Christian God of the New Testament. Nietzsche contends that the Christian conception of God grew from the same soil as the Jewish conception, and that both are grounded in the same anti-natural attitudes of herd resentment. The difference consists in the fact that Judaism remained more or less exclusive to a single culture while Christianity opened the doors to every kind of disenfranchised group or belief system in the vastly diverse Roman Empire. Thus, Christianity “had to become as morbid, base and vulgar as the needs to which it had to minister were morbid, base and vulgar” (The Antichrist, § 37).

 

Despite its negative, critical tone, its thunder and its lightning, a rainbow does appear in The Antichrist. Here and elsewhere in his writings, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the Christian dis-ease is both an indictment of past crimes and an inducement for future virtues. Consider, for example, the virtue of pity. According to Nietzsche, the Christian conception of pity functions to drain the strength and the power of those who pity, and it serves to preserve the existence of those whom nature has, in many cases, written off. But there is another, healthier kind of pity, one that is grounded in an altogether different motive. In Beyond Good and Evil, he states the matter the following way:

 

Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller.... You want, if possible—and there is no more insane “if possible”—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever.... The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? (§ 225)

 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche draws a distinction between degenerative virtues and motives, and the generative or gift-giving motivation or virtue. While the former motives are grounded in a kind of neurotic lack or need in a person’s psyche, the latter expresses itself in terms of an over-abundance of goodwill. It was the gift-giving virtue that compelled Zarathustra to leave his cave after ten years of solitary reflection and to  “go under,” i.e., to return to the realm of human beings to share his wisdom: “like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands out-stretched to receive it.... Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the water may flow from it golden and carry everywhere the reflection of your delight” (Zarathustra’s Prologue, 1). It is the gift-giving virtue that expresses the love that the higher human has for his or her fellow human beings:

 

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls.... Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, 22, ii) 

 

In The Antichrist, the motive is the same even if the voice is shriller and the palliative is more caustic:

 

Nothing is more unhealthy in the midst of our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be doctors here, to be inexorable here, to wield the knife effectively here—all this is our business, all this is our kind of love to our fellows, this is what makes us philosophers, us hyperboreans! (§ 7)

 

In Greek mythology, the Hyperboreans were separated from the world of men by a vast distance of space: they dwelled far to the north in an unknown realm of the world. Nietzsche’s new Hyperboreans are (or will be) separated from his world by a vast distance of time. They are the philosophers of the future. His audience was, as yet, unborn. And as for the author himself: “Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously” (The Antichrist, preface).

 

While some are born posthumously, Nietzsche’s arrival in the twentieth century may be seen as a posthumous miscarriage. It is one of the saddest ironies in the history of ideas that his works were so misrepresented and misused by anti-Semites and by German nationalist organizations after his mental collapse. Nietzsche’s position regarding the “German” nation, spirit, people, etc., is clear from his many reference to these subjects. After a moment of patriotic fervor during the Franco-Prussian War, he completely rejected Bismarck’s expansionist policies and the attitudes that characterized the ‘new Germany’ of the zweite Reich, as well as the idealized conception of the “good German.” These views were clearly expressed, for example, in Daybreak, book 3; in Beyond Good and Evil, part 8, “Peoples and Fatherlands”; and in Twilight of the Idols, part 8, “What the Germans Lack.” His criticism of the Germans is essentially criticism of the kind of sentimental, narrow-minded shallowness which he regarded as prevalent characteristics of German Kultur during the 1870s and 1880s. But there was a more sinister poison at work here as well, one that went hand in hand with the rise of German nationalism. This was the poison of anti-Semitism.

 

Nietzsche’s views concerning the place and contribution of the Jews to German culture and to European culture in general were stated very well in his early aphoristic work, Human, All Too Human. These views never really changed.

 

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  • PublisherSterling Publishing
  • Publication date2006
  • ISBN 10 0760777705
  • ISBN 13 9780760777701
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages112
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