The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
51.
The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an _idée fixe_ by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead _raises them up_ where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a _lunatic asylum_. _Not_, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_ people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _décadent_; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_.... Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of _training_[22] in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first be sick enough for it....
We others, who have the _courage_ for health _and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _décadence_ products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of _noble_ antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory.
At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole _imperium_ were Christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, _triumphed_.... Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the _healthy_, against _health_. Everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_ things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the _décadence_ triumphed.--_God on the cross_--is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_.... We all hang on the cross, consequently _we_ are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.-- [22] The word _training_ is in English in the text. [23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.