The Antichrist

From the Lesson

In the last week of September 1888, in a rented third-floor room above the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche completed the manuscript of Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum. He had four productive months left. On January 3, 1889, in the same piazza, he would collapse weeping upon the neck of a cab-horse being flogged by its driver, and the working life of the most incendiary philosopher in the Western tradition would end. Der Antichrist is his last completed prose book — its companion, Ecce Homo, is autobiography — and its argument is the sharpest instrument he ever forged.

The title has misled readers for a hundred and thirty years. Nietzsche is not attacking the historical Jesus. In §32 he treats the man from Nazareth with a strange tenderness, calling him — borrowing Dostoevsky's word — an idiot, meaning a holy fool of the Myshkin type: interior, non-resistant, incapable of the priestly move he is about to diagnose. Nietzsche's target is the two-thousand-year apparatus that was built on the corpse of that man: the Pauline theology, the ascetic priesthood, the moralised universe, the metaphysical accountancy of sin and grace. The Antichrist is not against Christ; the Antichrist is against Christendom.

Ressentiment and the Priestly Inversion

The book stands upon a distinction Nietzsche had developed the previous year in Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887): the distinction between master morality and slave morality. The strong, the healthy, the well-constituted name themselves good — they are self-affirming, and bad is an afterthought applied to what they are not. The weak, humiliated, unable to discharge their reaction outwardly, perform an inversion: they name their oppressor evil, and derive good as the negation of evil. Slave morality is reactive; master morality is active. Slave morality is the theology of ressentiment.

Ressentiment is Nietzsche's most important loanword — he keeps it in French because German has no exact equivalent. It is the poisoned interior of those who cannot strike back and who, in the impotence of their situation, revalue their impotence as virtue. Meekness becomes holy. Poverty becomes blessed. Chastity becomes purity. The body becomes suspect. The successful become suspect. Vitality itself becomes suspect. Every quality that in an aristocratic morality would be a mark of the good is, under the priestly inversion, a mark of the evil.

The priestly caste — Nietzsche is precise: he attacks the caste, not the founder — is the professional cultivator of ressentiment. Its economic base is the sick flock, because a sick flock requires a physician. The priest, therefore, has a structural interest in your sickness. He does not want you well; he wants you well through him. This is the same operation, Nietzsche saw with the eye of a physiologist, that a parasite performs upon its host: the parasite must keep the host alive but must not permit it to flourish, because a flourishing host does not need the parasite.

Platonism for the People

In the Preface to Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Nietzsche had already given the compressed formula: Christianity is Platonism for the people. The Platonic move — the invention of a true world behind the apparent world, more real, more valuable, accessible only through the trained intellect of the philosopher — was democratised by the Christian priesthood into a true world behind this world, more real, more valuable, accessible on credit to anyone who submitted to the sacraments. The metaphysical backworld became a heaven. The philosophical class became a clergy. The Platonic dualism became a mass religion.

Der Antichrist is the demolition of this backworld. Nietzsche's charge is not that heaven does not exist; his charge is that the use of heaven is to render this life contemptible, to make you weak in your one incarnation, to route your gratitude and your ambition away from the earth toward a phantom. The doctrine is life-denying, and life-denial is Nietzsche's single ethical criterion.

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