The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
22.
When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the _underworld_ of the ancient world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with _exhausted_ men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self-torture--in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is _not_ merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to embrace _barbaric_ concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet ripe for it--): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering _beasts of prey_; its modus operandi is to make them _ill_--to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for "_civilizing_." Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so much as begun--under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.