Nietzsche did not deal significantly with his late works in his Ecce Homo, and he gave no attention to The Anti-Christ except for some slight reference in the final chapter. Hollingdale notes that the German title, Der Antichrist, is ambiguous since the German word Christ means Christian and the Christ is translated Christus in German. There are, in that sense, grounds to call the book "The Anti-Christian," which also seems consistent with the text. Nevertheless, Nietzsche's own use of these words may make the other reading appropriate. The book is, at any rate, a powerful, protracted critique of Christianity, Nietzsche's final statement regarding what he saw as a plague to Western Civilization.
In the following, I will discuss only a few aspects of this book (and briefly); this will not be a comprehensive critique of the whole work. In #1 Nietzsche locates his thesis in the general problem of modernity. Modern man sighs, "I know not which way to turn;" it is from this illness that Nietzsche and his few comprehending readers have arisen. The theme of "illness" has been with Nietzsche all along. Western Civilization has become unhealthy at its roots and strong medicine is needed. This, of course, stood at the foundation of Nietzsche's admiration for Greek tragedy.
"What is good? --- All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man." "What is more harmful than any vice? --- Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak --- Christianity." (#2) This too has been a persistent theme. In Nietzsche's anthropological view, strength is superior to truth, not in the brute sense of merely overwhelming, but in the subtle sense that value is to be judged over the long term by survival and the utility of truth is only just now being tested. (GS)
And, finally, we should not go easy on Christianity because "it has waged a war to the death against [his] higher type of man. . . Christianity has taken the side of the weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life." (#5) "Where the will to power is lacking there is decline. My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the supreme values of mankind --- that values of decline, nihilistic values hold sway under the holiest names." (#6) Thus the argument begins. In Nietzsche's mind, Christianity holds a major share in responsibility for the reduction of Western Civilization to decadence and nihilism. Besides that, it has persecuted and destroyed people who attempted to stand out against it.
Note at #13 Nietzsche's remark, "we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a "revaluation of all values," an incarnate declaration of war and victory over all ancient conceptions of "true" and "untrue"." The Anti-Christ was initially fashioned as the leading chapter in a larger work to be called "the revaluation of all values." To achieve this end is difficult, of course; it means saying No to a great deal and saying Yes bravely and tentatively.
In #16 we find an important insight into how Nietzsche thinks anthropologically about a healthy religious people. "A people which still believes in itself still has its own God. In him it venerates the conditions through which it has prospered, its virtues --- it projects its joys in itself, its feeling of power on to a being whom one can thank for them. . . Within the bounds of such presuppositions religion is a form of gratitude. One is grateful for oneself: For that one needs a God." Then, "when a people is perishing; when it feels its faith in the future, its hope of freedom vanish completely; when it becomes conscious that the most profitable thing of all is submissiveness and that the virtues of submissiveness are a condition of its survival, then its God has to alter too. . . Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people. . . now he is merely the good God." Concluding this, he writes, "Either they [Gods] are the will to power --- and so long as they are that they will be national Gods --- or else the impotence for power --- and then they necessarily become good. . ." (#16)
The Christian God, then, the God of ressentiment, has "degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!" "In [the Christian] God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified!" (#18) Hence, for Nietzsche, a national god is the reflection of a people and a powerful god is a reflection of their will to power, their strength and vitality. When Nietzsche says that the Christian God has died, indeed been murdered, it is clear now that he means to say something about the decline of a people into impotence. The sickness of Western Civilization is a will to nothingness --- nihilism --- in contrast to a people's healthy will to power. From #24 through #30, Nietzsche traces out the pathology of nihilism through the fate of the Jewish people and into Christianity.
At #39 Nietzsche begins what he calls "the real history of Christianity." This is largely devoted to an analysis of how the followers of Jesus --- especially Paul --- corrupted the true values of his life and death in order to build a powerful priestly theology. It is interesting to note, here, that Nietzsche holds Jesus himself in a position of considerable respect for his obvious boldness and bravery --- including what Nietzsche interprets as a life of questioning and challenging the priestly class of the Jews. "In reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross."
This extensive discussion of decisions the early church fathers must have made is an opportunity to see more clearly what it is about Christianity that Nietzsche sees as so damaging. Problem: How could God have allowed Jesus to die on the cross? "For this question the deranged reason of the little community found a downright terrifyingly absurd answer: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. All at once it was all over for the Gospel! The guilt sacrifice, and that in its most repulsive barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of the guilty!" This was no Christian invention; rather it was an appropriation out of numerous primordial cultures.
The concept of sin, especially the concept of original sin and damnation, is an affront to life. Guilt at birth! No chance for innocence, for escaping the priestly judgment! But it is the doctrine of salvation and immortality that disturbed Nietzsche most. "If one shifts the centre of gravity of life out of life into the "Beyond" --- into nothingness --- one has deprived life as such of its centre of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct --- all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering." (#43) Of course, the Christian has a counter-argument here by simply stating, "This is reality; we are informed." Nietzsche, in contrast, subscribes to no reality. What we have are diverse world views. Each is an expression of a will to power and each carries with it inherent values belonging to our self-overcomings --- the ways we stretch ourselves to live in these worlds. The Christian is self-destructive, in Nietzsche's mind, because the Christian foregoes value --- in effect, wills nothingness to "this world" --- for something well removed from life itself.
Finally, as though to answer the accusation of being godless, Nietzsche says, "What sets us apart is not that we recognize no God, either in history or in nature or behind nature --- but that we find that which has been reverenced as God not "godlike" but pitiable, absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life." (#47) "Christianity needs sickness almost as much as Hellenism needs superfluity of health --- making sick is the true hidden objective of the Church's whole system of salvation procedures." (#51) At the end of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, he writes, "Have I been understood? --- Dionysus versus the Crucified!" Kaufmann suggests reference, here, to a fragment written in March-June 1888: "To determine: whether the typical religious man is a form of decadence." Nietzsche is skeptical except for the pagan and asks, "is the pagan cult not a form of thanksgiving and affirmation of life?" He goes on to say, "Dionysus versus the "Crucified": there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom --- it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering --- the "Crucified as the innocent one" --- counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation. . . The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so." (Will to Power, #1052)
copyright 1995, 1998 by Tad Beckman