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 indifferent (the blasé 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 expression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and mild—it is a sort of gratitude towards all that lies hidden, including that which it entirely lacks, viz., bitterness, disillusionment, and resentment. 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, consisting 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 resentment 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 movement, 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.