The Antichrist

I recently finished reading the Antichrist, one of Nietzsche’s last books. Oftentimes Nietzsche asks to be read slowly and carefully, but this particular book seemed to have a torrential pace and I had to read it really quickly, like each section pushed me onto the next section and it was hard to stop. Turns out he also wrote it really fast: it was “the work of so few days that I hesitate to mention how many,” (Ecce Homo). By the end I feel like it got less controlled, more repetitive and not as exciting. But on my first sitting I was basically riveted and he puts his ideas very clearly and forcefully.

I can't summarize the whole thing, but it's mainly a invective of Christianity as an insidious subterranean conspiracy born of weakness and envy and revenge against everything that is healthy, powerful, and privileged. It's kind of ridiculous at times and also can sound anti-semitic because of his insistence that Christianity is the culmination of Jewishness, but it's good to remember here that he was writing in an environment full of fanatic Christian anti-Semites (like his sister) and this was a knife-twisting irony at their expense. Along the way he talks about all sort of things, including pity, Kant, the French Revolution, Buddhism, Jesus, the Gospels, the fall of the Roman Empire, the law of Manu, the Renaissance and Luther. As he's denouncing, at least/especially in the beginning, you get a sense of the type and way of thought way outside of Christianity from which he is speaking and this positive element sustains the reading more than anything for me.

The part about Buddhism was fascinating to me because he usually doesn't talk about it explicitly but mentions it really cryptically in passing so it's hard to tell what he thinks about it. Here he actually spends a few passages on it, and it compares so favorably to Christianity that it almost reads as an endorsement. He says Buddhism fulfills where Christianity only promises, Buddhism is a hundred times more truthful by talking in plain terms of suffering rather than sin, he expresses admiration for its lack of prayer, asceticism, and compulsion, he likes its practical focus on the individual (how can I stop suffering?), and even says "Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires to perfection: perfection is the normal case." He is still not a Buddhist because he believes it is also nihilistic, meant to help those who suffer from life, but it's interesting to see how much he admires it. His interpretation of Jesus was really interesting too (he definitely does not equate Jesus' teachings with what ended up being Christianity) but I don't want to get into it now. My summaries are bound to be pretty superficial and slightly misleading anyhow.

Anyway, I don't think the Antichrist is Nietzsche's best book but I'm glad I read it. I don't remember whether or not I read it for my Nietzsche class long ago; if I did I forgot it all. But he leaves no room for doubt about his position on Christianity; he ends by calling it "the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough" and even "the one immortal blemish of mankind." And then, because he's ridiculous, after lamenting that we reckon time from the beginning of this 'calamity', the first day of Christianity, he says, "why not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!" and that's how he ends the book: why not mark this moment the beginning of time because I say so? Of course, he didn't go around erasing calendars after that and it probably occurred to him in the heat of the moment, but it gives you an idea of how seriously he took the importance of his thought.

Unfortunately he never quite finished. The Antichrist was to be the first of four books that together would make up the grand work called The Revaluation of All Values. As it was, he had a mental breakdown and went permanently insane upon seeing a driver beating a horse in Turin a little more than three months later. That didn't stop him from writing two more books (an autobiography and an edited compilation) in between.

Incidentally, for those of you who were not previously aware, we are now on the 21st day of the 120th year on the Immoralist's Calendar. I guess it'd still be a Monday.