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The Antichrist
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Themes
Cultivation of Décadence in the Christian Tradition
The sociopsychological illness Friedrich Nietzsche most vociferously accuses Christianity of imparting upon the world is décadence. With this anti-instinctual mindset, an individual is encouraged to love that which is detrimental to them. By cultivating this spirit, Christian theologians primed their adherents’ minds for the acceptance of truths as lies, and vice versa. Nietzsche argues that décadence is antithetical to the goodness of life in Section 6, the end of which can be seen as a thesis statement for the book as a whole:
Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names (18).
According to Nietzsche, the roots of Christian décadence lie in the post-traumatic centering of the crucifixion in Christian mythos. As Nietzsche thoroughly details in Section 42, the religion’s “centre of gravity” focused on death, the unfulfillable promise of a paradise beyond the end of life (49). Christ’s suffering and death, being the preamble to his ascension and that of all others, became the holiest of experiences. Through the evangelism of Saint Paul and the theologians who followed, suffering and death themselves became sanctified. Nietzsche’s criticism of Paul permeates Section 42 in particular: “In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the ‘bearer of glad tidings’; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred” (49).
Nietzsche singles out Christianity’s love of martyrdom as a second quality proving its preference for décadence over life. In Section 53, Nietzsche argues against martyrdom’s ability to support the truth of any cause, saying “In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of ‘truth,’ that it is never necessary to refute him” (62). In Section 54, Nietzsche diagnoses the martyr’s intellectual flaw as a problem of “conviction” (i.e., certainty without logical support), which he distrusts as a positive dialectical quality; he prefers the malleability of the skeptic. The martyr might also commit themselves to death as a means of punctuating their conviction, which is supplementary to argument—doubly affronting to Nietzsche’s love of life.
Because of Christianity’s décadence, the desire to better oneself and excel beyond common humanity (that of the Hyperboreans) came to be viewed as prideful and sinful, as it glorified life and sought to overcome suffering altogether.
Proliferation of Christian Morality in a Scientific World
In Section 38, Nietzsche expresses bafflement at the continued presence of Christian morality in a post-Darwinian era—especially in his home country of Germany. In the face of post-Enlightenment scientific discoveries (culminating in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution), old Christian metaphysics (i.e., Earth being the gravitational center of the universe, etc.) collapsed. And yet, in Nietzsche’s view, Christian morality rooted in such metaphysics did not weaken:
Toward the past […] I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world […] I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age knows better… What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins (45).
Nietzsche blames Christianity’s persistence on the great Western (especially German) thinkers of his day. He singles out Immanuel Kant and his “categorical imperative”—the notion of a universal morality separate from and independent of life and human design—the conception of which sought to harness science to prove the existence of essential morality. Kant was and still is considered a central figure of the Enlightenment—from which modern Western scientific thinking sprung. Yet Nietzsche rails against Kant’s ideas in Section 11:
‘Virtue,’ ‘duty,’ ‘good for its own sake,’ goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity […] in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life […] To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life! […] An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection […] That is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy… Kant became an idiot (21).
Nietzsche believes such essentialist thinking to be meritless, as it shows hostility to life by revering concepts outside of it. Morality, Nietzsche proclaims, must arise from within the mind and be constantly scrutinized.
Nietzsche believes the proliferation of Christian morality is the strongest chain holding back the Hyperboreans from achieving their full potential. Though he finds Christian morality to be mostly benign among the “mediocre” masses, he bemoans his fellow “intellectual” elite thinking the “mediocrity” are their equals. He believes such a view only discourages the Hyperboreans from excelling in their practices, and thus holds back all of humanity.
Equal Rights Versus the Will to Power
The will to power constitutes the desire within everyone—especially the Hyperboreans—to overcome falsehoods and prejudices that limit their thoughts on the world. When the will to power is fully realized in the Hyperborean mind, Nietzsche believes a truly exceptional individual is introduced to the world. This belief is at the core of Nietzsche’s elitism, and his desire to cast aside all limits of morality to champion the power of such individuals forms the foundation of his hostility towards the Christian notion of “equal rights” in Section 57:
It is […] nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The superior caste […] has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon the earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness (68).
Nietzsche argues that the Christian fixation on equal rights was born within Christ’s teachings. In Section 29, he recalls Christ emphasizing all souls being equal in the eyes of God—regardless of birth, rank, or accomplishment. From this proclamation, Nietzsche argues that Christians placed the notion of equal rights at the fore of their mission on Earth.
Nietzsche cannot accept the rights of the Hyperboreans being limited to those of the “mediocrity” as doing so is to limit the Hyperboreans’ will to power itself. The Christian conception of equal rights—both in spirit and social construct—breaks down what Nietzsche sees as humanity’s most natural hierarchy:
The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the […] types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.—A right is a privilege (69).
In other words, Nietzsche believes equal rights (an “unearned” privilege) hold back the entirety of humanity, as the Hyperboreans cannot grow or evolve—and thus, cannot direct humanity towards greater achievements.
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