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a334vchhknHave you understood me?
I have not uttered a single word which I had not
already said five years ago through my mouthpiece Zarathustra. The
unmasking of Christian morality is an event which unequalled in history, it is
a real catastrophe.
The man who throws light upon it is a force majeure, a fatality; he breaks the
history of man into two. Time is reckoned up before him and after him. The
lightning flash of truth struck precisely that which theretofore had stood
highest: he who understands what was destroyed by that flash should look to
see whether he still holds anything in his hands. Everything which until then
was called truth, has been revealed as the most detrimental, most spiteful,
and most subterranean form of life; the holy pretext, which was the
"improvement" of man, has been recognised as a ruse for draining life of its
energy and of its blood. Morality conceived as Vampirism....
The man who[Pg 142] unmasks morality has also unmasked the
worthlessness of the values in which men either believe or have believed; he
no longer sees anything to be revered in the most venerable man—even in
the types of men that have been pronounced holy; all he can see in them is
the most fatal kind of abortions, fatal, because they fascinate. The concept
"God" was invented as the opposite of the concept life—everything
detrimental, poisonous, and slanderous, and all deadly hostility to life, wad
bound together in one horrible unit in Him. The concepts "beyond" and "true
world" were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists—in
order that no goal or aim, no sense or task, might be left to earthly reality.
The concepts "soul," "spirit," and last of all the concept "immortal soul," were
invented in order to throw contempt on the body, in order to make it sick and
"holy," in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling levity towards all things
in life which deserve to be treated seriously, i.e. the questions of nutrition
and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and
weather. Instead of health, we find the "salvation of the soul"—that is to say,
a folie circulate fluctuating between convulsions and penitence and the
hysteria of redemption.
The concept "sin," together with the torture instrument appertaining to it,
which is the concept "free will," was invented in order to confuse and muddle
our instincts, and to render the mistrust of them man's second nature! In the
concepts "disinterestedness" and "self-denial," the actual signs of decadence
are to be found. The allurement of that[Pg 143] which is detrimental, the
inability to discover one's own advantage and self-destruction, are made into
absolute qualities, into the "duty," the "holiness," and the "divinity" of man.
Finally—to keep the worst to the last—by the notion of the good man, all that
is favoured which is weak, ill, botched, and sick-in-itself, which ought to be
wiped out. The law of selection is thwarted, an ideal is made out of
opposition to the proud, well-constituted man, to him who says yea to life, to
him who is certain of the future, and who guarantees the future—this man is
henceforth called the evil one. And all this was believed in as morality!—
Ecrasez l'infâme!
