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Category: Axiology

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Axiology Liberalism

Slave

(Connections, 2nd Season, Episode 20).

I’m not finished with James Burke, and I’d like to add to what I said about him in the comments section on Tuesday.

I have just watched episode 20 of the second season of Connections. I draw the viewer’s attention to what Burke says about the German concept of Lebensraum from this point until the end of the episode.

What impresses me about Burke, as what impresses me about two other Britons of whom in previous years I have spoken much on this site—Kenneth Clark and Tom Holland—is that, while I admire their intelligence and penetration in their observations—artistic and western history (Clark), religious, axiological and historical (Holland) and scientific, technological and historical (Burke)—, all three are prisoners of Christian morality.

If it were possible (obviously no BBC or similar TV service would fund my project) I would make a series of thirteen programmes explaining what Holland says: how the morality of the contemporary atheist, even the radical one, is still dominated by Christian ethics. But I would film that series from an opposite scale of values to that of the neochristian Holland.

In the segment linked above, for example, Burke reproves the doctrine of Lebensraum, which some Germans planned to implement in Africa or Latin America. Because of that scale of values that seems so natural to Burke and virtually all contemporary Britons, I live in a horrid world, and in a Latin American city at that.

What good is brilliance in explaining technological inventions that have revolutionised mankind if Burke remains a slave to Christian morality? Obviously, he has never asked himself this question because there are no transvalued men on his island.

Or are there?

Categories
Axiology Science

James Burke

The Day the Universe Changed: A Personal View by James Burke is a television documentary series produced by the BBC in 1985, written, produced and hosted by science historian James Burke. Its theme is the social impact of the development of science and technology. It was televised from 19 March to 21 May 1985. Although I saw some episodes that year, I am now trying to watch all the episodes (the first one can be seen here).

Yes: Burke is a normie. Although he is a secular humanist, he ignores some chapters of Christianity’s criminal history and, naturally, he also ignores race realism. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see how science didn’t accept meteorites for a long time because it seemed absurd to think of stones falling from the sky. In another episode, he used Galileo’s paradigm to illustrate a great truth: ‘Experimentation itself depends on what’s official and what’s not’. Later he says: ‘Today’s version of the truth about the world is irreconcilable with the previous version’.

The big mistake of the proponents of race realism in the US is that it is impossible to convince Christians or atheistic neochristians of the goodness of scientific racism without first transvaluing their values. Whatever Burke’s limitations, his thesis is fascinating for understanding the fool’s errand if we limit ourselves with the tools of science to attack a medieval mindset.

Despite technological developments, the Christian mindset from which atheists still suffer is basically medieval. Think for example of how Charles Darwin predicted the extinction of the Negroes because he believed that the white man of the future would think in exclusively scientific terms. What happened was the diametrically opposite because of the absolute DOMINION of Christian morality in today’s secular world (those who haven’t read Tom Holland’s book by that title should read it now).

Although I might add something in the comments section in case there is something important to say about the next episodes, I would like to end this short entry with some words from Burke taken from that TV series: ‘The so-called voyage of discovery has as often as not made landfall for reasons little to do with the search of knowledge. Science, like all other human activities, is a product of what society at the time thinks it is important’ (emphasis added).

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Axiology

He is back!

by Robert Morgan

Editor’s Note: I am pleased to report that, after a half-year absence, Morgan has returned to discuss with the conservative commenters at The Unz Review. In the comments section, I will quote a couple of more recent comments in other discussion threads by Morgan on that webzine whose commenters—except for Morgan and a few others—exemplify the deficiencies of the racial right, incapable of realising that the root of all evil is what Morgan points out in the article below:

 

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In his 1927 essay The Future of an Illusion Sigmund Freud took up the question of religion generally, not just Christianity, and put it in a Darwinian context, characterizing man’s religious inclinations as evolutionary adaptations needed to socialize him and make him more amenable to the requirements of civilization. That much seems true, but at the end, he concludes that the advance of science will eventually eliminate the illusion, and indeed, even in his time it looked as if it were already starting to do so. Interestingly enough, Adolf Hitler expressed a very similar opinion in his after-dinner talks with his subordinates. He expected Christianity to wither away under the relentless assault of science, eventually dying out completely. The great Aryan and the great Jew may have been in agreement, but both forecasts were wrong.

The much-exaggerated ‘death’ of Christianity is only appearing to take place because technological civilization is sucking out its essence. Christianity’s obsession with human equality and human rights are the moral codes that are at its core [emphasis by Ed.]. They have now been distilled into law, made into principles upon which that civilization is re-organizing itself, while at the same time the primitive parts, superstitious mumbo-jumbo such as the virgin birth, the immaculate conception, miracles, angels and demons, the belief in the existence of a soul, and the value of faith in a personal God who watches over mankind, etc., are discarded as dregs for which it has no further use. So Christianity isn’t dying at all, and shows no sign of doing so.

Far from having been killed off by the ‘progress’ of science, it has merely changed form. Preferences in law, academia, and finance for the negro and other lowly groups is the legal expression of Jesus’ prophecy that the first shall be last, and the last first. Through taxes and re-distribution of wealth the Christian admonition to give to the poor has become both secularized and compulsory. The system’s intense hostility to white racial survival and patriarchy, already codified into law in a thousand ways, are its embodiment of the notion of human equality as expressed in Galatians 3:28. Consequently, what further need is there of old-time forms of this religion? It may well be that they’re dying out, churches being abandoned and sold off, but this makes no difference when the racially poisonous core of Christianity—its ‘soul’, as it were—is immediately re-incarnated in the form of technological civilization itself.

Categories
Axiology Might is right (book)

Might is right, 6

He who saith unto himself, ‘I must believe, I must not question’ is not a man but a mere pusillanimous mental gelding. He who believes ‘because it has been handed down’ is a menial in his heart; and he who believes ‘because it has been written’ is a fool in his folly. Sagacious spirits doubt all things, and hold fast only to that which is demonstrably true.

The rules of life are not to be found in Korans, Bibles, Decalogues and Constitutions, but rather the rules of decadence and death. The ‘law of laws’ is not written in Hebrew consonants or upon tables of brass and stone, but in every man’s own heart. He who obeys any standard of right and wrong, but the one set up by his own conscience, betrays himself into the hands of his enemies, who are ever laying in wait to bind him to their millstones. And generally a man’s most dangerous enemies are his neighbours.

Masterful men laugh with contempt at spiritual thunders, and have no occasion to dread the decisions of any human tribunal. They are above and beyond all that. Laws and regulations are only for conquered vassals. The free man does not require them. He may manufacture and post up Decalogue regulations, to bind and control dependents with, but he does not himself bow down before those inventions of his own hands—except as a lure.

Statute books and golden rules, were made to fetter slaves and fools. Very useful are they, for controlling the herds of sentenced convicts, who fill the factories and cultivate the fields. All moral principles therefore are the servitors, not the masters of the strong. Power made moral codes, and Power abrogates them.

A man is under no obligation to obey anything or anybody. It is only serving-men that must obey, because they are caitiffs by birth, breeding, and condition. Morals are only required in an immoral community, that is to say a community held in a state of conquest.

Fear God, bridle the spirit, and obey the law, is advice most excellent, as from a philosopher to a yokel, but when directed in all earnestness at a man of inherent might, he smiles to himself in silent scorn. Full well he knows that in actual life the path to victory and renown, does not lie through Gethsemanies, but over fallen enemies, the ruins of rival combines, through Aceldamas. ‘Meekness of spirit’ is regarded by him as a convenient superstition, very useful for regulating the lives of his servants, his women and his children, but otherwise inoperative.

‘I rest my hopes on nothing,’ proclaimed Goethe, and masterful minds in all ages have never done otherwise. This unspoken thought gives to all truly great men their manifest superiority over the brainless, vociferating herd. The ‘common people’ have always had to be befooled with some written or wooden or golden Idol—some constitution, declaration or gospel.

Consequently the majority of them have ever been mental thralls, living and dying in an atmosphere of strong illusion. They are befooled and hypnotized even to this hour, and a large proportion of them must remain so, until time is no more. Indeed the masses of mankind are but the sediment from which all the more valuable elements have been long ago distilled. They are totally incapable of real freedom, and if it was granted to them, they would straightway vote themselves a master, or a thousand masters within twenty-four hours.

Mastership is right—Mastership is natural—Mastership is eternal. But only for those who cannot overthrow it, and trample it beneath their hoofs. Is it not a fact that in actual life, the ballot-box votes of ten million subjective personalities are as thistle down in the balance, when weighed against the far seeing thought, and material prowess of, say, ten strong silent men?

Categories
Axiology French Revolution Might is right (book)

Might is right, 4

All ethics, politics and philosophies are pure assumptions, built upon assumptions. They rest on no sure basis. They are but shadowy castles-in-the-air erected by day-dreamers, or by rogues, upon nursery fables. It is time they were firmly planted upon an enduring foundation. This can never be accomplished until the racial mind has first been thoroughly cleansed and drastically disinfected of its depraved, alien, and demoralizing concepts of right and wrong. In no human brain can sufficient space be found, for the relentless logic of hard fact, until all pre-existent delusions have been finally annihilated.

Half measures are of no avail, we must go down to the very roots and tear them out, even to the last fibre. We must be, like nature, hard, cruel, relentless.

Too long the dead hand has been permitted to sterilize living thought—too long, right and wrong, good and evil, have been inverted by false prophets. In the days that are at hand, neither creed nor code must be accepted upon authority, human, superhuman or ‘divine’ (morality and conventionalism are for subordinates). Religions and constitutions and all arbitrary principles, every mortal theorem, must be deliberately put to the question. No moral dogma must be taken for granted—no standard of measurement deified. There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are all the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy.

He that is slow to believe anything and everything is of great understanding, for belief in one false principle, is the beginning of all unwisdom. The chief duty of every new age is to up-raise new men to determine its liberties, to lead it towards material success—to rend (as it were) the rusty padlocks and chains of dead custom that always prevent healthy expansion. Theories and ideals and constitutions, that may have meant life and hope, and freedom, for our ancestors, may now mean destruction, slavery and dishonour to us. As environments change no human ideal standeth sure.

Wherever, therefore, a lie has built unto itself a throne, let it be assailed without pity and without regret, for under the domination of a falsehood, no nation can permanently prosper. Let established sophisms be dethroned, rooted out, burnt and destroyed, for they are a standing menace to all true nobility of thought and action. Whatever alleged ‘truth’ is proven by results, to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage.

The most dangerous of all enthroned lies is the holy, the sanctified, the privileged lie—the lie that ‘everybody’ believes to be a model truth. It is the fruitful mother of all other popular errors and delusions. It is hydra-headed. It has a thousand roots. It is a social cancer. The lie that is known to be a lie is half eradicated, but the lie that even intelligent persons regard as a sacred fact—the lie that has been inculcated around a mother’s knee—is more dangerous to contend against than a creeping pestilence. Popular lies have ever been the most potent enemies of personal liberty. There is only one way to deal with them. Cut them out, to the very core, just as cancers are. Exterminate them root and branch, or they will surely eat us all up. We must annihilate them, or they will us. Half and half remedies are of no avail.

However, when a lie has gone too far—when it has taken up its abode in the very tissues, bones and brains of a people, then all remedies are useless. Even the lancet is of no avail. Repentance of past misdeeds cannot ‘save’ decadents from extermination. The fatal bolt is shot; and into the fiery furnace of wholesale slavery, and oblivion, they must go, to be there righteously consumed. From their ashes something new, something nobler, may possibly evolve, but even that is the merest optimistic supposition.

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s interpolated note: My red emphasis! A strong possibility is that the white race is already doomed to extinction because of the sin of Christians—racialist Christians included—and those whom commenter Gaedhal has called hyper-Christian atheists. See image above. The ‘anti-Christian’ Jacobin revolutionaries used the symbol of the Mosaic tablets to present Christian injunctions (human rights, etc.) in a secular form.

Ragnar Redbeard continues:
 

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In nature the wages of sin is always death. Nature does not love the wrong-doer, but endeavours in every possible way to destroy him. Her curse is on the brow of the ‘meek and lowly.’ Her blessing is on the very hearts’ blood of the strong and the brave. Only Jews and Christs and other degenerates, think that rejuvenation can ever come through law and prayer. ‘All the tears of all the martyrs’ might just as well have never been shed.

Categories
Axiology Might is right (book) Theology

Might is right, 3

How is it that ‘men of light and leading’ hardly ever call in question the manufactured ‘moral codes,’ under which our once vigorous Northern race is slowly and surely eating out its heart in peaceful inaction and laborious dry-rot?

Standard ‘moral principles’ are arbitrarily assumed by their orthodox apologist to be a fixed and unalterable quantity, and that to doubt the divine-rightness of these ‘principles’ is treason and sacrilege. When the greatest thinkers of a race are incapable, or afraid to perform their manifest and logical function, it is scarcely to be wondered that average citizens are also somewhat unwilling to ‘risk life, fortune and sacred honour’ for the overthrow of popularized ‘right and wrong’ concepts, that they know from bitter personal experience, are unworkable falsities.

Note of the Editor: Of this collage of Western thinkers, only Machiavelli, Darwin, Nietzsche (and perhaps Jung) could be useful for the sacred words. Whoever put together this collage was unaware that there is a brutal discontinuity between the Greek philosophers and the theologians beginning with St. Augustine. Cf. Karlheinz Deschner’s
Christianity’s Criminal History, here and here.

Although the average man feels in his heart that nearly all political and religious conventionalisms are dynamic deceits, yet how cautiously he avoids any open display of antagonism thereto? He has not the courage of his opinions. He is afraid to say openly what he thinks secretly. In other words he is living in a state of subjectiveness; of vassalage. He allows his brain to be dominated and held in bondage by the brain of another. From his infancy he has been deliberately subjected to a continuous external pressure, especially designed to coerce his understanding into strict accord with pre-arranged views of moral, political or religious ‘duty.’ He has not been permitted one moment of real mental liberty. He imbibed fraudulent conventionalisms with his mother’s milk. He listens to the most hideous lies being glorified in his presence as sublime truths.

He hears falsehoods sung in swelling chorus. He hears them sounded on bugles of silver and brass. He hears them intoned by congregations of the faithful amid peals of sacred music, and the solemn roll of chanted prayer. Thus his mind is sterilized by authority before it has had a chance to mature. Thus youth is mentally castrated, that its natural vitality may be afterwards used up in the yoke of custom—which is the yoke of slavery. In the nursery, at school, and at college, plastic brain-pulp is deliberately forced into the pre-arranged mould. Everything that a corrupt civilisation can do, is done to compress the growing intellect into unnatural channels. Thus the great mass of men who inhabit the world of today have no initiative, no originality or independence of thought, but are mere subjective individualities, who have never had the slightest voice in fashioning the ideals that they formally revere.

Although the average man has taken no part in manufacturing moral codes and statute laws, yet how he obeys them with dog-like submissiveness? He is trained to obedience, like oxen are broken to the yoke of their masters. He is a born thrall habituated from childhood to be governed by others.

Chinese civilization deliberately distorts its children’s feet, by swathing them in bandages of silk and hoop-iron. Christian civilization crushes and cramps the minds of its youth by means of false philosophies, artificial moral codes and ironclad political creeds. Deleterious sub-theories of good and evil are systematically injected into our natural literatures, and gradually (without serious obstruction) they crystallize themselves into cast-iron formulas, infallible constitutions, will-o-the-wisp evangels, and other deadly epidemics.

Modern ‘leaders of thought’ are almost wholly wanting in originality and courage. Their wisdom is foolishness, their remedies poison. They idiotically claim that they guide the destinies of nations, whereas, in reality, they are but the flotsam and scum-froth that glides smoothly down the dark stream of decadence.

Thus all the people of the earth are helpless, Seeing those that lead are blind.

Mankind is aweary, aweary of its sham prophets, its demagogues and its statesmen. It crieth out for kings and heroes. It demands a nobility—a nobility that cannot be hired with money, like slaves or beasts of burden. The world awaits the coming of mighty men of valour, great destroyers; destroyers of all that is vile, angels of death. We are sick unto nausea of the ‘good Lord Jesus,’ terror-stricken under the executive of priest, mob and proconsul. We are tired to death of ‘Equality.’ Gods are at a discount, devils are in demand. He who would rule the coming age must be hard, cruel, and deliberately intrepid, for softness assails not successfully the idols of the multitude. Those idols must be smashed into fragments, burnt into ashes, and that cannot be done by the gospel of love.

The living forces of evil are to be found in the living ideals of today. The Commandments and laws and moral codes that we are called upon to reverence and obey are themselves the insidious enginery of decadence. It is moral principles that manufacture beggars. It is golden rules that glorify meekness. It is statute laws that make spaniels of men.

A man may keep every one of the Ten Commandments and yet remain a fool all the days of his life. He may obey every written law of the land, and yet be a caitiff and a slave. He may ‘love Jesus,’ delight in the golden rule and yet continue to the hour of his death, a failure and dependent. Truly the way to hell is by fulfilling the commandments of God. If the all-conquering race to which we belong, is not to irretrievably dwindle into multitudinous nothingness (like the inferior herds it has outdistanced or enslaved), then it is essential that the Semitic spider webs (so astutely woven for ages into the brains of our chiefs) be remorselessly torn out by the very roots, even though the tearing out process be both painful and bloody.

If we would retain and defend our inherited manhood, we must not permit ourselves to be forever rocked to repose, with the sweet lullabies of eastern idealisms. Too long we have been hypnotized by the occult charm of Hebrew Utopianism. If we continue to obey the insidious spell that has been laid upon us, we will wake up some dread morning with the gates of hell—of hell upon earth yawning wide open, to close again upon us forever…

In actual operation Nature is cruel and merciless to men, as to all other beings. Let a tribe of human animals live a rational life, Nature will smile upon them and their posterity; but let them attempt to organize an unnatural mode of existence an equality elysium, and they will be punished even to the point of extermination.

Categories
Axiology Literature Might is right (book)

Might is right, 2

I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world; to interrogate the ‘laws’ of man and of ‘God.’ I request reasons for your Golden Rule and ask the why and wherefore of your Ten Commands. Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence and he who saith ‘thou shalt’ to me is my mortal foe.

I demand proof over all things, and accept (with reservations) even that which is true. I dip my forefinger in the watery blood of your impotent mad-redeemer (your Divine Democrat—your Hebrew Madman) and write over his thorn-torn brow, ‘The true prince of Evil—the king of the Slaves!’

No hoary falsehood shall be a truth to me—no cult or dogma shall encramp my pen. I break away from all conventions. Alone, untrammeled. I raise up in stern invasion the standard of Strong.

I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah, and pluck him by the beard—I uplift a broad-axe and split open his worm-eaten skull. I blast out the ghastly contents of philosophic whited sepulchres and laugh with sardonic wrath. Then reaching up the festering and varnished facades of your haughtiest moral dogmas, I write thereon in letters of blazing scorn: —‘Lo and behold, all this is fraud!’

I deny all things! I question all things! And yet! And yet!—Gather around me O! ye death-defiant, and the earth itself shall be thine, to have and to hold.

What is your ‘civilisation and progress’ if its only outcome is hysteria and downgoing? What is ‘government and law’ if their ripened harvests are men without sap? What are ‘religions and literatures’ if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves? What is ‘evolution and culture’ if their noxious blossoms are sterilized women? What is ‘education and enlightenment’ if their dead-sea-fruit is a caitiff race, with rottenness in its bones?

Categories
Axiology Might is right (book) Racial right

Might is right, 1

by Ragnar Redbeard

Editor’s Note:

I don’t presume to have read all of Ragnar Redbeard’s book, but I might be adding some excerpts in a new series, such as the following passage from the preface.

It is interesting to compare this book published in 1896 with the lectures of those on the American racial right 128 years later (e.g., this recent one), who are still stuck in unwarlike Christian ethics.

The mysterious Redbeard (a pen name) wrote:

 

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Virtue is rewarded in this world, remember. Natural law makes no false judgments. Its decisions are true and just, even when dreadful. The victor gets the gold and the land every time. He also gets the fairest maidens, the glory tributes. And—why should it be otherwise? Why should the delights of life go to failures and cowards? Why should the spoils of battle belong to the unwarlike? That would be insanity, utterly unnatural and immoral.

Behold the crucifix, what does it symbolize?
Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree.

In the wars of the Great Cæsar, and Grim Hannibal, in the times of Belzchazzar, the Pharaohs and all; the days of Rienzi and Roland the Bold; all banners are waving for women and gold.
It is might against might, remember, by land and sea, man against man, money against money, brains against brains, and—everything to the winner.

Categories
Axiology Intelligence quotient (IQ) Racial studies

Ogre

My last book, Crusade against the Cross, contains a passage in which I refer to Hollywood contributing to the prolefeed with films that end with the drama being resolved (unlike in real life, where much ends in tragedy, as the Greek tragedians Nietzsche spoke of saw). An example of this American mentality that there are no tragedies, only dramas, can be seen in a YouTube interview of anti-racist Lex Fridman with scientist Richard Haier about The Bell Curve, ‘the most controversial book ever published in science’.

Within a minute from this moment, the interviewer gives away that he has malware installed in his mind: ‘It’s just, it is difficult in a way that… we are limited by our own biology. It’s difficult, and it is, ahem, at least from the American perspective you like to believe that everything is possible in this world’.

Because Fridman is accustomed to the American ideology that the individual of any race or gender who sets out to succeed can make it in the US—the malware precisely!—, he is pained, almost panicked one might say, that there are genetic differences in intelligence. Such science, I would add, would strike a hard blow to the accepted wisdom of the human mind. This is because the psychological mythology of the US is based on Calvinist ethics that the ‘human soul’ is ‘free’ to choose.

‘Common grace’ is a theological concept in Protestant Christianity that refers to the grace of ‘God’ (the mythical god of the Judeo-Christians) that is supposedly common to all humanity, and is limited only by unnecessary cultural factors. It is ‘common’ because its benefits are experienced by or intended for the entire human race, without distinction between one person and another; and it is ‘grace’ because, according to this Reformed thinking of 19th and 20th century Calvinists, it is unmerited and sovereignly bestowed by their god.

Fridman’s interview evokes once again what in my most recent book I called ‘neotheology’: his rationalisations and fears about IQ studies are expressed at a purely secular level. Those fears remind me of an older interview, between David Rubin and Stefan Molyneux, in which the latter was hurt by the IQ difference between the races (though at least Molyneux accepts the data).

What neither Molyneux nor Fridman ask is why, once we move out of countries that emerged from Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular, people no longer suffer from this ‘ogre of the superego’ as far as racial studies are concerned. In Crusade against the Cross I also mentioned that I exchanged emails with Robert Sheaffer last year, a Nietzsche scholar, but I omitted that he told me that race and IQ studies are the most controversial and radioactive subjects in science.

This is true if one only looks at one’s cultural navel. Go to countries that never were, or continue to be, Christian, and neochristianity disappears completely. The Chinese, for example, not only expel Muslims and discriminate against blacks, but they can study eugenics freely in their universities without any guilt whatsoever.

Whites were like the Chinese, and even more racist. I first read The Antichrist forty-eight years ago, and I remember then coming across the passage in which Nietzsche speaks of Manu’s laws in the Indo-Aryan religion (which resemble the Nuremberg laws): a time when no white man was tearing his hair out over this racism simply because the Aryan collective unconscious hadn’t yet been infected with this ogre of the superego.

Categories
Axiology Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Renaissance Richard Wagner

Year 100 P.C.

I read ‘Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist: Looking Back From the Year 100’ in late 1993, in a hard copy issued in the winter of 1988/1989: one of the back copies of Free Inquiry that arrived in the mail when I discovered that organisation of freethinkers.

I met the author, Robert Sheaffer, at the 1994 CSICOP conference. If memory serves, he wore sandals, was dressed casually and had a beard. Last year I exchanged some correspondence with him.

Sheaffer is anything but a Hitlerite. However, the article that I abridge below is perfect for understanding a central part of esoteric Hitlerism. I mean that Uncle Adolf’s anti-Christianity, which wasn’t revealed to the masses of Germans (hence the epithet ‘esoteric’), already had antecedents in Germany.

Sheaffer’s complete article can be read here. Red emphasis is mine:

 

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Secular humanists have not infrequently criticized the beliefs and practices of the Christian religion, and its harmful effects on civilization and culture. Unfortunately, their voice is seldom heard. The proponents of the Christian world-view vastly outnumber secularists both in number and in activity. While humanists wonder what they they can do to more effectively convey their criticisms of religion, most of them have never read, and indeed have barely even heard of, a book written exactly a century ago containing the most devastating and complete philosophical attack on Christian psychology, Christian beliefs and Christian values ever written: Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist.

1888 was the final productive year of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, but it was a year of incredible activity. He wrote five books during a six-month period in the latter part of that year. After that, he wrote nothing. Nietzsche’s works of 1888 have not received enough attention, especially given the inclination of many to concentrate primarily on the flamboyant and somewhat confusing Also Spracht Zarathustra, a book of intricate allegories and parables which requires that one already understand the principal elements of Nietzschean thought in order to decipher its hidden relationships and meanings. Zarathustra will be clearer if it is read at the end of a course of study of Nietzsche, not at the beginning.

The first book of 1888 was The Case of Wagner, in which Nietzsche set forth his aesthetic and philosophical objections to the music and the writings of his former close friend Richard Wagner… Next came The Twilight of the Idols (in German, Die Gotzen-dammerung, an obvious parody of Wagner’s Die Gotterdammerung, “The Twilight of the Gods”), in which he criticizes romanticism, Schopenhauer’s pessimism, German culture, Socrates’ acceptance of death as a “healing” of the disease of life, Christianity, and a good many other things. Then, in September of 1888, Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist.

Unlike Zarathustra, there can be no mistaking the language or the intention of Der Antichrist, a work of exceedingly clear prose and seldom-equalled polemics. Even today, the depth of Nietzsche’s contempt for everything Christianity represents will surprise and shock many people, and not only devout Christians. Unlike other critics of religion, Nietzsche’s attack extends beyond religious theology to Christian-derived concepts that have spread out far beyond their ecclesiastical origins, to the very core of the value-system of Western, Christianized society.

Der Antichrist begins with a warning that “This book belongs to the very few,” perhaps to no one yet living. Nietzsche hints that only those who have already mastered the obscure symbolism of his Zarathustra could appreciate this work. Warnings aside, he begins by sketching the idea of declining vs. ascending life and culture. An animal, a species, or an individual is “depraved” or “decadent” when it loses its instincts for that which sustains its life, and “prefers what is harmful to it.” Life itself presupposes an instinct for growth, for sustinence, for “the will to power”, the striving for some degree of control and mastery of one’s surroundings. Christianity sets itself up in opposition to those instincts, and hence Christianity is an expression of decadence, a negation of the will to life [Antichrist, section 6].

“Pity”, says Nietzsche, is “practical nihilism”, the contagion of suffering. By elevating pity to a value—indeed, the highest value—its depressive effects thwart those instincts which preserve life, establishing the deformed or the sick as the standard of value. [A 7] To Nietzsche, the rejection of pity did not proscribe generosity, magnanimity, or benevolence—indeed, the latter are mandated for “higher” types—; what is rejected is to allow the ill-constituted to define what is good. Nietzsche was not hostile to the sick—Zarathustra bids the sick to “become convalescents”, and expresses sympathetic understanding of their unhappy frame of mind [Z I 3]—but what he opposed was the use of the existence of sickness and other afflications to thereby claim “life is refuted” [Z I 9].

No doubt Nietzsche’s attack on “pity” was triggered in part by his revulsion against Wagner’s blatantly irrational opera Parsifal, in which the formerly irreligious Wagner returned once again to pious Christian themes. In Parsifal, a series of calamities occur because a once-holy knight succumbs to “sins of the flesh,” and it is prophesied that the situation cannot be remedied by any act of self-directed effort, but only by one “through pity made wise, a pure fool.” Nietzsche’s contempt for the limp Christianity in Parsifal and for “the pure fool” knew no bounds. The already-strained bond between the two men, who were once extremely close, was irreparably broken.

Nietzsche explains that the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is, like Chrisitanity, decadent. Schopenhauer taught that since it is impossible to satisfy the desires of the will, one must ceaselessly renounce striving for what one wants, and become resigned to unhappiness. In the late 19th century Schopenhauer’s doctrines were extremely popular, especially among the Wagnerians. Wagner’s monumental Tristan and Isolde is an expression of Schopenhauerian nihilism, as the lovers sing of the impossibility of earthly happiness, and of their expected mystical union in the realm of “night” after their death. The opera closes with Isolde’s famous liebestod, or “love-death”, as she sings of a vision of her dead lover gloriously and mystically transfigured in the nether-regions, then dies to join him. Schopenhauer was hostile to life, says Nietzsche, “therefore pity became for him a virtue.” [A 7]

Nietzsche charges that Christianity denigrates the world around us as mere “appearance”, a position grounded in the philosophy of Plato and Kant, and hence invents a “completely fabricated” world of pure spirit. However, “pure spirit is pure lie,” and hence the theologian requires one to see the world falsely in order to remain a member in good standing in the religion. The Christian outlook was, he says, immensely bolstered against the attacks of the Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy renders reality unknowable. (For Kant a virtue is something harmful to one’s life, a view Nietzsche could never accept. If you want to do something, Kant would say your action cannot possibly be virtuous; any action which contains an element of self-interest is by definition not virtuous.) Nietzsche summarizes, “anti-nature as instinct, German decadence as philosophy—that is Kant.” [A 8-11]

Nietzsche praises the skeptic (or “free spirit”) who rejects the priestly inversion of “true” and “untrue”. He says we skeptics no longer think of human life as having its origins in “spirit” or in “divinity”, but recognize the human race as a natural part of the animal kingdom… [A 12-14].

Returning to the theme of Christian doctrine as misrepresentation, Nietzsche charges that “in Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.” The religion deals with imaginary causes (such as God, soul, spirit) and imaginary effects (sin, grace, etc.), and the relationships between imaginary beings (God, souls, angels, etc.). It also has its own imaginary natural science (wholly anthropormorphic and non-naturalistic), an imaginary human psychology (based on repentance, temptation, etc.), as well as an imaginary teleology (apocalypse, the kingdom of God, etc.). Nietzsche concludes that this “entire fictional world has its roots in the hatred of the natural” world, a hatred which reveals its origin. For “who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it” [A 15]. Here is the proof which convinced Nietzsche that Christianity is not only decadent in its origins, but rotten to its very core: no one reasonably satisfied with his own mind and abilities would wish to see the real world replaced with a lie.

Comparing religions, Nietzsche came to the conclusion that in a healthy society, its gods represent the highest ideals, aspirations, and sense of competence of that people. For example, Zeus and Apollo were obviously powerful ideals for Greek society, an image of the mightiest mortals projected into the heavens. Such gods are fully human, and display human strengths and weaknesses alike. The Christian God, however, shows none of the normal human attributes and appetites. It is unthinkable for this God to desire sex, food, or even openly display revengefulness (as did the Greek gods). Such a God is clearly emaciated, sick, castrated, a reflection of the people who invented him. If a god symbolizes a people’s perceived sense of impotence, he will degenerate into being merely “good” (an idealized image of the kind master, as desired by all slaves), void of all genuinely human attributes. The Christian God represents the “divinity of decadence,” the reduction of the divine into a God who is the contradiction of life. Those impotent people who created such a God in their own image do not wish to call themselves “the weak,” so they call themselves “the good.” [A 16-19].

Nietzsche next compares Christianity to Buddhism. Both, he says, are religions of decadence, but Buddhism is a hundred times wiser and more realistic. Buddha does not demand prayer or aesceticism, demanding instead ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness. Buddhism, he says, is most at home in the higher and learned classes, while Christianity represents the revengeful instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed. Buddhism promotes hygiene, while Christianity repudiates hygiene as sensuality. Buddhism is a religion for mature, older cultures, for persons grown kindly and gentle—Europe is not nearly ripe for Buddhism. Christianity, however, tamed uncivilized barbarians, needing to subjugate wild “beasts of prey,” who cannot control their own “will to power.” The way it did so was to make them sick, making them thereby too weak to follow their destructive instincts. Thus Buddhism is a religion suited to the decadence and fatigue of an ancient civilization, while Christianity was useful in taming barbarians, where no civilization had existed at all. [A 20-22].

Nietzsche next emphasises Christianity’s origin in Judaism, and its continuity with Jewish theology. He was fond of pointing out the essential Jewishness of Christianity as a foil to the anti-Semites he so despised, effectively taunting them, “you who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?”. It was the Jews, he asserts, who first falsified the inner and outer world with a metaphysically complete anti-world, one in which natural causality plays no role. (One might of course object that such a concept considerably predates Old Testament times.) The Jews did this, however, not out of hatred or decadence, but for a good reason: to survive. The Jews’ will for survival is, he asserts, the most powerful “vital energy” in history, and Nietzsche admired those who struggle mightily to survive and prevail. As captives and slaves of more powerful civilizations—the Babylonians and the Egyptians—the Jews shrewdly allied themselves with every “decadence” movement, with everything that weakens a society, not because they were decadent themselves, but in order to weaken their oppressors. Thus, Nietzsche views the Jews as shrewdly inculcating guilt, resentment, and other values hostile to life among their oppressors as a form of ideological germ warfare, taking care not to become fully infected themselves. This technique was ultimately successful in defeating stronger parties—Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans—by in essence making them “sick,” and hence less powerful. (The Romans, of course, succumbed to the Christian form of Judaism, in this view.) This parallels St. Augustine’s comment, quoting Seneca, that the Jews “have imposed their customs on their conquerors.” [A 23-26; De Civitate Dei VI 11]

“On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed.” The revolt led by Jesus was not primarily religious, says Nietzsche, but was instead a secular revolt against the power of the Jewish religious authorities. The very dregs of Jewish society rose up in “revolt against ‘the good and the just’, against ‘the saints of Israel’.” This was the political crime of Jesus, a crime of which he was surely guilty, and for which he was crucified. Nietzsche examines the psychology of Jesus, as is best possible from the Biblical accounts, and detects a profound sense of withdrawl: resist not evil, the kingdom of God is within you, etc. He sees parallels in the psychology of Christ not with some hero, but with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. (Dostoyevsky is not mentioned here by name, but we know from other sources that this is the “idiot” Nietzsche had in mind.)

Nietzsche deduces that the earliest Christians sought to retreat into a state of extreme withdrawl from “the world”, undisturbed by reality of any kind. They rejected all strong feelings, favorable or otherwise. Their fear of pain, even in infinitely small amounts, “cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.” Thus Nietzsche sees early Christianity as promoting an extremely dysfunctional state resembling autism, a defense mechanism for those who cannot deal with reality. Noting Christianity’s claims to deny the world, and its stand in opposition to every active virtue, Nietzsche asks how can any person of dignity and accomplishment not feel ashamed to be called a Christian? [A 27-30; 38]…

By placing the center of life outside of life, in “the beyond”, Nietzsche says we deprive life of any focus or center whatsoever. The invention of the immortal soul automatically levels all rank in society: “‘immortality’ conceded to every Peter and Paul has so far been greatest, the most malignant attempt to assassinate noble humanity”. Thus “little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes,” thereby obiliterating all distinctions grounded in merit, knowledge or accomplishment. Christianity owes its success to this flattering of the vanity of “all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it.” For Christianity is “a revolt of everything that crawls upon the ground directed against that which is elevated: the gospel of the ‘lowly’ makes low.” Here we clearly see Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christianity’s attitudes as well as its theology: as he pointedly noted in Ecce Homo, “no one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him”. All others saw it as an unattainable ideal. [A 43; EH 4 (“Why I Am a Fatality”) 8] Pre-Christian thinkers did not, of course, see poverty as suggestive of virtue, but rather of its absence. One point Nietzsche was unable to either forgive or forget was that the enemies of the early Christians were “the intelligent ones”, persons far more civilized, erudite, and accomplished than themselves, people who Nietzsche felt more fit to rule than the Christians.

Nietzsche sees the Gospels as proof that corruption of Christ’s ideals had already occurred in those early Christian communities. They say “Judge Not!”, then send to Hell anyone who stands in their way. Arrogance poses as modesty. He explains how the Gospel typifies the morality of ressentiment ( a French term Nietzsche used in his German texts), a spirit of vindictiveness and covert revengefulness common among those who are seething with a sense of their own impotence, and hence must hide their desire for vengeance. “Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge,” writes Nietzsche [A 44-45]…

At this point, Nietzsche advises the reader to “put on gloves” when reading the New Testament, because one is in proximity to “so much uncleanliness.” It is impossible, he says, to read the New Testament without feeling a partiality for everything it attacks. The Scribes and the Pharisees must have had considerable merit, to have been attacked by the rabble in such a manner. Everything the first Christians hate has value, for theirs is the unthinking hatred of the rabble for everyone who is not a wretched failure like themselves. Nietzsche sees Christianity’s origins in what Marxists would call “class warfare,” and sides with those possessing learning and self-discipline against those having neither. [A 46].

He next turns to a point essential for the understanding of Nietzschean thought: the inevitability of a “warfare” between Christianity and science. Because Christianity is a religion which has no contact with reality at any point, it “must naturally be a mortal enemy of ‘the wisdom of the world,’ that is to say, of science.” Here “science” is not to be understood as merely the physical sciences, but as any rigorous and disciplined field of human knowledge, all of which are potentially threats to Christian dogma. Hence Christianity must calumniate the “disciplining of the intellect” and intellectual freedom, bringing all organized secular knowledge into disrepute; for “Paul understood the need for the lie, for faith.” Nietzsche refers to the Genesis fable of Eve’s temptation, asking whether its significance has really been understood: “God’s mortal terror of science”? The priest perceives only one great danger: the human intellect unfettered. Continuing the metaphor of science as eating from the tree of knowledge:

Science makes godlike—it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality “Thou shalt not know”—the rest follows.

The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy. [A 47-49]

In previous works, Nietzsche had emphasised the necessity of struggling hard to uncover truth, of preferring an unpleasant truth to an agreeable delusion. [The Gay Science 344; Beyond Good and Evil 39] Consequently, he sees another reason for being suspicious of Christianity in its notion that “faith makes blessed,” that is, creates a state of pleasure in harmony with God. He re-iterates that whether or not a doctrine is comforting tells us nothing about its truth. Nor does the willingness of martyrs to suffer and die for a belief constitute any proof of veracity, suggesting that a visit to a madhouse will suffice to demonstrate the fallaciousness of such arguments. Martyrdoms have, in fact, been a great misfortune throughout history because “they have seduced” us into questionable doctrines. “Blood is the worst witness of truth”. [A 50-51, 53]

Christianity, says Nietzsche, needs sickness as much as Hellenism needed health. (To understand this point, compare a Greek statue of a tall, handsome, naked God with a Christian religious image of an unhygenic, slovenly figure suffering greatly.) One does not “convert” to Christianity, but rather one must be made “sick enough” for it. The Christian movement was, from its beginning, “a collective movement of outcast and refuse elements of every kind,” seeking to come to power through it. “In hoc signo decadence conquered.” Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. Nietzsche defines faith as “not wanting to know what is true,” a description which strikes me as stunning, and quite exact. [A 51-52]…

Nietzsche now turns to consider why the lie is told. Once again, Christian teachings are compared to those of another religion, that of Manu, “an incomparably spiritual and superior work.” Unlike the Bible, the Law-Book of Manu is a means for the “noble orders” to keep the mob under control. Here, human love, sensuality, and procreation are treated not with revulsion, but with reverence and respect. After a people acquires a certain experience and success in life, its most “enlightened,” most “reflective and far-sighted class” sets down a law summarizing its formula for success in life, which is represented as a revelation from a deity, for it to be accepted unquestioningly. Such a set of rules is a formula for obtaining “happiness, beauty, benevolence on earth.” This aristocratic group considers “the hard task a privilege… life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases.” All ugly manners and pessimism are below such leaders: “indignation is the privilege of the Chandala” (Indian untouchable). What is bad? “Everything that proceeds from weakness, from revengefulness.” [A 57]

Thus Nietzsche holds that the purpose for the lie of “faith” makes a great difference in the effect it will have on society. Do the priests lie in order to preserve (as in the book of Manu, and presumably Greek myth), or to destroy (as in Christianity)? Thus Christians and socialist Anarchists are identical in their instincts: both seek solely to destroy. The Roman civilization was a magnificent edifice for the prosperity and advancement of life, “the most magnificent form of organization under difficult circumstances which has yet been achieved”, which Christianity sought to destroy because life prospered within it. These “holy anarchists” made it a religious duty to “destroy the world”, which actually meant, “destroy the Roman Empire”. They weakened the Empire so much that even “Teutons and other louts” could conquer it. Christianity was the “vampire” of the Roman Empire. These “stealthy vermin,” shrouded in night and fog, crept up and “sucked out” from everyone “the seriousness for true things and any instinct for reality.” Christianity moved truth into “the beyond”, and “with the beyond one kills life.”

Before charging Nietzsche with possibly irresponsible invective, compare the above with Gibbon’s summary of the role of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

On the positive side, Gibbon notes that even though Christianity clearly hastened the demise of Rome, it “mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors”. This would seem to parallel Nietzsche’s view that Christianity seeks to control the uncivilized not by teaching them the self-discipline needed to control their own impulses, but by making them too “sick” to do a great deal of harm. [A 58; Gibbon, Chapter 38 ]

“The whole labor of the Ancient World in vain!”: thus does Nietzsche overstate the magnitude of the calamity. (Our civilization’s heritage from classical antiquity is obviously far from nothing!). Nonetheless, no one who prefers civilization to barbarism can be indifferent to the point here raised. Nietzsche emphasises that the foundations for a scholarly culture, for science, medicine, philosophy, and art, had all been magnificently laid in antiquity, only to be destroyed by the advent of Christianity. Today, he says, we have certainly made great progress, but each of us still retains bad Christian habits and instincts which we must work hard to overcome. Two thousand years ago, we had acquired that clear eye for reality, patience, attention to detail, seriousness in even small matters—and it was not obtained by “drill” or from habit, but flowed naturally from a civilized instinct. All this was lost! And it was not lost to some natural disaster or destroyed by “Teutons and other buffalos” (Nietzsche’s contempt for German nationalism and militarism knew no bounds!) but it was “ruined by cunning, stealthy, invisible, anemic vampires. Not vanquished-merely drained. Hidden vengefulness, petty envy become master.” Everything that was miserable and filled with bad feelings about itself came to the top at once. [A 59]…

The meaning and significance of the Renaissance is considered in this next-to-last section of Der Antichrist. “The Germans have cheated Europe out of the last great cultural harvest which Europe could still have brought home—that of the Renaissance.” Nietzsche views the Renaissance as “the revaluation of Christian values,” that is, the repudiation of life-denying Christian values and their replacement with secular values which emphasise art, culture, learning, and so on. With the Renaissance in Italy, Christianity was being repudiated at its very seat. “Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne! Life sat there instead!”

Nietzsche envisions the immortal roar of laughter that would have risen up from the gods on Mount Olympus had Cesare Borgia actually succeeded in his ruthless quest to become Pope. (The notorious murderer and poisoner Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, spread his power ruthlessly across Italy. Father and son appointed or poisoned Cardinals as needed to position the son for election as the next Pope. However, the plan went awry when they accidentally tasted some wine that had been “prepared” to rid themselves of a wealthy cardinal! The father died, and the son became gravely ill, and was hence in no position to coerce the selection of his father’s successor.)

Nietzsche laments that this great world-historical event—life returning to Western culture—was ultimately undone by the work of “a German monk,” Martin Luther, who harbored the vengeful instincts of “a failed priest.” Through Luther’s Reformation, and Catholicism’s answer to it, the Counter-Reformation, Christianity was restored. [A 60] One might be tempted to dismiss Nietzsche’s dramatic interpretation of the Renaissance, except that his view meshes with that of Jacob Burckhardt, the single most influential historian of Renaissance civilization who ever lived. Burckhardt’s monumental work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), has influenced the study of that period as much as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall did that of ancient Rome. Neitzsche and Burckhardt were colleagues at the University of Basle, and friends as well. In the first section of his Civilization, Burchkardt writes that the greatest danger ever faced by the Papacy was its secularization during the Renaissance.

The danger that came from within, from the Popes themselves and their nipoti (relativies, “nepotism”), was set aside for centuries by the German Reformation… The moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies… Without the Reformation—if indeed it is possible to think it away—the whole ecclesiastical state would have passed into secular hands long ago.

Pope Julius II, powerfully anti-Borgia, was “the savior of the Papacy,” who put an end to the practice of the buying and selling of Church positions. However, the Counter-Reformation “annihlated the higher spiritual life of the people,” according to Burckhardt. Nietzsche would have said this was because they had become Christian once again.

The final section of Der Antichrist contains “the most terrible charge” against the Christian Church that “any prosecutor has ever uttered… I 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.” Nietzsche suggests that instead of calculating time from the “unlucky day” on which this “fatality” arose, time should be measured instead from its last day: “from today.” [A 62].

Needless to say, Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist did not prove to be the dagger in the heart of Christianity he hoped it would. After finishing this work (which was not actually published until 1895), Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, a philosophical autobiography, in which we first see signs of the self-aggrandizing delusions which were to characterize his incipient mental collapse. The final major work of 1888 was Nietzsche Contra Wagner, containing more polemics against the “decadence” and anti-Semetism of Wagner’s followers, much of which was taken from his earlier published works. Nietzsche’s philosophical writings end there, in the closing weeks of 1888. No doubt the breakdown which followed was hastened by the frantic pace of work during that period. Living in Turin, Italy, alone as was his habit, he continued to send letters to his family and friends.

Early in January, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin. Some local people helped him back to his room, and he was soon alone again. On January 6 he sent letters to Burckhardt and to Franz Overbeck, another friend and colleague at the University of Basle, displaying obvious signs of insanity. Burckhardt, quite concerned, consulted Overbeck, who was soon on a train headed for Turin to assist his friend. Overbeck brought Nietzsche back to his mother in Germany. He was placed in an institution for a few months, and was then released to the care of his family, where he lived another eleven years as an invalid. Nietzsche actually died twice: his mind died in 1889, while his body lived on helplessly until 1900…

If Nietzsche’s polemically effective suggestion had been adopted—to begin counting time from the start of Christianity’s presumed demise, the writing of Der Antichrist—then I would now be writing these words in the year 100 P.C., the hundredth year of the post-Christian era. It would obviously be premature to expect such a calendar to gain widespread acceptance today! Yet the failure of Nietzsche’s impossibly high expectations should not cause us to overlook the significance of this monumental work, with its searing insights into the psychology of Christian belief. All those who wish not to renounce life but to affirm it, all who seek to proclaim a triumphant “yes” to human prosperity, knowledge, and happiness, will find in Der Antichrist invaluable insights on how those goals can be achieved—and on what stands on the way of them.
 

Notes:

There are two excellent English translations of Der Antichrist readily available, one by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1968), the other by Walter Kaufmann (in Kaufmann’s The Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1978).