From "The Antichrist," by Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited by Alexander Tille, translated by Thomas Common. Publishers: Macmillan & Co. New York.
I MAKE war against this theological instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is from the very beginning ambiguous and disloyal with respect to everything. The pathos which develops therefrom calls itself belief: the closing of the eye once for all with respect to one's self, so as not to suffer from the sight—of incurable falsity. A person makes for himself a morality, a virtue, a sanctity out of this erroneous perspective towards all things, he unites the good conscience to the false mode of seeing,—he demands that no other mode of perspective be any longer of value, after he has made his own sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation," and "eternity." I have digged out the theologist-instinct everywhere; it is the most diffused, the most peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels as true, must needs be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth. It is his most fundamental self-preservative instinct which forbids reality to be held in honor, or even to find expression on any point. As far as theologist-influence extends, the judgment of value is turned right about, the concepts of "true" and "false" are necessarily reversed: what is most injurious to life is here called "true," what raises, elevates, affirms, justifies, and makes it triumph is called "false."
Let us not underestimate this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a "Transvaluation of all Values," an incarnate declaration of war against and triumph over all old concepts of "true" and "untrue." The most precious discernments into things are the latest discovered: the most precious discernments, however, are the methods. All methods, all presuppositions of our present-day science, have for millenniums been held in the most profound contempt: by reason of them a person was excluded from intercourse with "honest" men—he passed for an "enemy of God," a despiser of truth, a "possessed" person. As a scientific man, a person was a Chandala.... We have had the entire pathos of mankind against us—their concept of that which truth ought to be, which the service of truth ought to be: every "thou shalt" has been hitherto directed against us. Our objects, our practices, our quiet, prudent, mistrustful mode—all appeared to mankind as absolutely unworthy and contemptible.—In the end one might, with some reasonableness, ask one's self if it was not really an esthetic taste which kept mankind in such long blindness: they wanted a picturesque effect from truth, they wanted in like manner the knowing ones to operate strongly on their senses. Our modesty was longest against the taste of mankind.... Oh how they made that out, these turkey-cocks of God——.
The Christian concept of God—God as God of the sick, God as cobweb-spinner, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God ever arrived at on earth; it represents perhaps the gauge of low water in the descending development of the God-type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and its eternal yea! In God, hostility announced to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as the formula for every calumny of "this world," for every lie of "another world!" In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness declared holy!
That the strong races of Northern Europe have not thrust from themselves the Christian God, is verily no honor to their religious talent, not to speak of their taste. They ought to have got the better of such a sickly and decrepit product of décadence. There lies a curse upon them, because they have not got the better of it: they have incorporated sickness, old age and contradiction into all their instincts—they have created no God since! Two millenniums almost, and not a single new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an ultimatum and maximum of the God-shaping force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of ruin, derived from nullity, concept and contradiction in which all décadence instincts, all cowardices and lassitudes of soul have their sanction!
Has the celebrated story been really understood which stands at the commencement of the Bible—the story of God's mortal terror of science? It has not been understood. This priest-book par excellence begins appropriately with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he has only one great danger, consequently "God" has only one great danger.—
