The New Gospel

The whole problem of the Jews exists only in the framework of [modern] nation states, since it is here that their energy and higher intelligence, their mental capital and capital of will, accumulated from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must come to predominate to a degree that awakens envy and hatred.

Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.  The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity.

God is dead.

The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

The whole labor of the ancient world gone for naught:  I have no word to describe the feeling that such an enormity arouses in me — And considering the fact that its labor was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!  To what end the Greeks?  to what end the Romans?  All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably — that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road … Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready … What we have today conquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves … the whole integrity of knowledge … all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! … Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization.

The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science—the sound comprehension of cause and effect.  But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favorable conditions—a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect … “Therefore, man must be made unhappy,”—this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest. — It is easy to see what by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world: —“sin.”  This concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against science—against the deliverance of man from priests … Man must not look outward; he must look inward.   He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer ... And he must suffer so much he is always in need of a priest … I repeat that sin, man’s self-destruction par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible.