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

Introduction

“This book belongs to the very few.” So begins TheAntichrist—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...