The Portable Nietzsche (78 page)

What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of a shipwrecked priest in his system, was outraged in Rome
—against
the Renaissance. Instead of understanding, with the most profound gratitude, the tremendous event that had happened here, the overcoming of Christianity in its very seat, his hatred understood only how to derive its own nourishment from this spectacle. A religious person thinks only of himself.

Luther saw the
corruption
of the papacy when precisely the opposite was more than obvious: the old corruption, the
peccatum originale,
Christianity no longer sat on the papal throne. But life! But the triumph of life! But the great Yes to all high, beautiful, audacious things! And Luther
restored the church:
he attacked it.

The Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great
in vain.
Oh, these Germans, what they have cost us already! In vain—that has always been the doing of the Germans. The Reformation, Leibniz, Kant and so-called German philosophy, the Wars of “Liberation,” the
Reich
—each time an in vain for something that had already been attained, for something irrevocable.

They are my enemies, I confess it, these Germans: I despise in them every kind of conceptual and valuational uncleanliness, of
cowardice
before every honest Yes and No. For almost a thousand years they have messed up and confused everything they touched with their fingers; they have on their conscience everything half-hearted—three-eighths-hearted!—of which Europe is sick; they also have on their conscience the most unclean kind of Christianity that there is, the most incurable, the most irrefutable: Protestantism. If we do not get rid of Christianity, it will be the fault of the
Germans
.

 

62

With this I am at the end and I pronounce my judgment. I
condemn
Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had the will to the last corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! To
abolish
any distress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it
created
distress to eternalize
itself.

The worm of sin, for example: with this distress the church first enriched mankind. The “equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this
pretext
for the rancor of all the base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society—is
Christian
dynamite. “Humanitarian” blessings of Christianity! To breed out of
humanitas
a self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to lie at any price, a repugnance, a contempt for all good and honest instincts! Those are some of the blessings of Christianity!

Parasitism as the
only
practice of the church; with its ideal of anemia, of “holiness,” draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed— against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit,
graciousness
of the soul,
against life itself.

This eternal indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls—I have letters to make even the blind see.

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean,
small
enough—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

And time is reckoned from the
dies nefastus
with which this calamity began—after the
first
day of Christianity!
Why not rather after its last day? After today?
Revaluation of all values!

No sooner had Nietzsche finished
The Antichrist
than he wrote the preface to
Twilight of the Idols
—in fact, on the same day. Then, instead of going to work on the second book of the
Revaluation,
tentatively entitled “The Free Spirit: A Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement,” he wrote
Ecce Homo
, an incomparably sarcastic review of his life and works, including sections on all of his books, except
The Antichrist,
which he now thought of holding back until
Ecce Homo
had prepared the public for it.

Ecce Homo
consists of four chapters: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am a Destiny.” Of the following selections, the first three are from sections 1, 5, and 7, respectively, of the first chapter; the bit on Heine is from section 4 of the second chapter; and the epigram on immortality is from the discussion of
Zarathustra
in the third chapter. The final sentence is from the third section of the last chapter.

The perfect lightness and levity, even exuberance of the spirit, which
The Dawn
reflects, are quite compatible in my case not only with the deepest physiological weakness, but even with excessive pain. Amid the tortures that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine and agonizing phlegm-wretching, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence, and very coldbloodedly thought through matters for which, in healthier states, I am not enough of a climber, not subtle, not
cold
enough. Perhaps my readers know in what way I consider dialectics a symptom of decadence; for example, in the most famous case of all: in the case of Socrates.

All sickly disturbances of the intellect, even that half-dazed state which follows a fever, are to this day complete strangers to me, and to instruct myself concerning their nature and frequency I have had to turn to scholars. My blood circulates slowly. Nobody has ever found me feverish. A physician who treated me as a nervous case for a while said in the end, ‟No! It is not a matter of your nerves; it is I who am nervous.” Any local degeneration is altogether indemonstrable; nor is there any organic disease of the stomach, though, as a consequence of over-all exhaustion, the gastric system is as weak as possible. My eye trouble too, which at times comes dangerously close to blindness, is only a consequence, not a cause; thus my vision has always improved again with every gain in vitality.

A long, all-too-long series of years signifies my convalescence; unfortunately, it also signifies relapse, ruin, and the periodic rhythm of a kind of decadence. Need I say after all this that I am
experienced
in questions of decadence? I have spelled them forward and backward. Even that filigree art of clasping and grasping in general, those fingers for nuances, that psychology which knows how to look around corners, and whatever else is characteristic of me, were learned only then, are the real gift of that time in which everything in me became more delicate: observation itself as well as all the organs of observation. To see
healthier
concepts and values in the perspective of the sick, and conversely, to look down out of the abundance and self-assurance of a
rich
life to behold the secret doings of the instinct of decadence —in this I have had the longest training, my most characteristic experience: here, if anywhere, I became a master. Now this gift is mine, now I have the gift of
reversing perspectives:
the first reason why it is perhaps for me alone that a “revaluation of values” is at all possible today.

It seems to me that even the bluntest word, the bluntest letter is still more good-natured, still more honest, than silence. Those who remain silent are almost always lacking in delicacy and politeness of the heart. Silence is an objection, and swallowing things down necessarily makes for a bad character—it even upsets the digestion. All who remain silent are dyspeptic. Clearly, I would not have bluntness underestimated: it is by far the
most humane
form of contradiction and, amid modern pampering, one of our foremost virtues. When one is rich enough for this, it is even good fortune to be wrong. Were a god to come down upon earth, he should do nothing but wrong: to take upon oneself
guilt
and not punishment, that alone would be godlike.

My practice of war may be summarized in four propositions. First: I attack only causes which are victorious—and at times I wait until they are victorious. Second: I attack only causes against which I cannot expect to find allies, against which I shall stand alone —against which I shall compromise myself alone. I have never taken a step in public which was not compromising: that is
my
criterion of doing what is right. Third: I never attack persons; I only avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass with which one can render visible a general but creeping calamity which it is otherwise hard to get hold of. Thus I attacked David Strauss—or more precisely, the
success
of a decrepit book among German “educated people”—here I caught these educated people in the act. Thus I attacked Wagner—or, more precisely, the falsity, the half-wittedness of instinct in our “culture,” which mistakes the subtle for the abundant, and the latecomers for the great. Fourth: I attack only causes in which any personal difference is out of the question, and in which any background of unwholesome experiences is lacking. On the contrary, to attack is with me a proof of good will, and sometimes of gratitude.

Heinrich Heine
gave me the highest conception of the lyric poet. I seek in vain in all the realms of thousands of years for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine sarcasm without which I cannot conceive the perfect. I estimate the value of human beings, of races, according to the necessity with which they cannot understand the god apart from the satyr. And how Heine handles the German language! It will be said one day that he and I have been by far the first artists of the German language—at an incalculable distance from everything that mere Germans have done with it.