24.
Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of
Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is this:
that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from
which it sprung—it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is
their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring
logic of the Jews. In the words of the Saviour, “salvation is of the
Jews.” [1]—The second
thing to remember is this: that the psychological type of the Galilean
is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form
(which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it
could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Saviour
of mankind.
—The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the
world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to
be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any
price: this price involved a radical falsification of all
nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as
well as of the outer. They put themselves against all those
conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had
even been permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an
idea which stood in direct opposition to natural conditions—one
by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and
psychology until each became a contradiction of its natural
significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an
incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church,
put beside the “people of God,” shows a complete lack of any
claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most fateful
people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified
the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the Christian can
cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the final
consequence of Judaism.
In my “Genealogy of Morals” I give the first psychological
explanation of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a
noble morality and a ressentiment
morality, the second of which is a mere product of the denial of the former. The
Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the second division, and in every detail.
In order to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending
evolution of life—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to
self-approval—the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright
genius, had to invent an other world in which the acceptance of
life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically,
the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when
they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily,
and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts
which make for décadence—not as if mastered by them, but
as if detecting in them a power by which “the world” could be
defied. The Jews are the very opposite of
décadents: they have simply been forced into
appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the
non plus ultra of histrionic genius
they have managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent
movements (—for example, the Christianity of Paul—), and so make
of them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the
sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,—that
is to say, to the priestly class—décadence is no more
than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind
sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,”
“true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous
to life, but also slanders it.
Footnotes