to every form of intellectual move ment, to all philosophy: it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, learned, intellectually independent: in all these it suspects the element of success and domination.
155. In Buddhism this thought prevails: " All passions, everything which creates emotions and leads to blood, is a call to action " to this extent alone are its believers warned against evil. For action has no sense, it merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irration- alism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror. For instance: " On no account seek after revenge! Be the enemy of no one! " The Hedonism of the weary finds its highest expression here. Nothing is more utterly foreign to Buddhism than the Jewish fanaticism of St. Paul: nothing could be more contrary to its instinct than the tension, fire, and unrest of the religious man, and, above all, that form of sensuality which sanctifies Christianity with the name " Love." Moreover, it is the cultured and very intellectual classes who find blessedness in Buddhism: a race wearied and besotted by centuries of philosophical quarrels, but not beneath all culture as those classes were from which Christianity sprang. ... In the Buddhistic ideal, there is essentially an emancipa tion from good and evil: a very subtle suggestion of a Beyond to all morality is thought out in its teaching, and this Beyond is supposed to be compatible with perfection, the condition being, that even good actions are only needed pro tern., merely as a means, that is to say, in order to be free from all action.
156. How very curious it is to see a Nihilistic religion such as Christianity, sprung from, and in keeping with, a decrepit and worn-out people, who have outlived all strong instincts, being transferred step by step to another environment that is to say, to a land of young people, who have not yet lived at all The joy of the final chapter, of the fold and of the evening, preached to barbarians and Germans! How thoroughly all of it must first have been barbarised, Germanised! To those who had dreamed of a Walhalla: who found happiness only in war! A -national religion preached in the midst of chaos, where no nations yet existed even.
157. The only way to refute priests and religions is this: to show that their errors are no longer beneficent -that they are rather harmful; in short, that their own " proof of power " no longer holds good. . . .
2. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
158. Christianity as an historical reality should not be confounded with that one root which its name recalls. The other roots, from which it has sprung, are by far the more important. It is an unprecedented abuse of names to identify such manifestations of decay and such abortions as the "Christian Church," "Christian belief," and "Christian life," with that Holy Name. What did Christ deny? Everything which today is called Christian.
159. The whole of the Christian creed all Christian " truth," is idle falsehood and deception, and is precisely the reverse of that which was at the bottom of the first Christian movement. All that which in the ecclesiastical sense is Christian, is just exactly what is most radically anti- Christian: crowds of things and people appear instead of symbols, history takes the place of eternal facts, it is all forms, rites, and dogmas instead of a " practice " of life. To be really Christian would mean to be absolutely indifferent to dogmas, cults, priests, church, and theology. The practice of Christianity is no more an im possible phantasy than the practice of Buddhism is: it is merely a means to happiness.
160. Jesus goes straight to the point, the " Kingdom of Heaven " in the heart, and He does not find the means in duty to the Jewish Church; He even regards the reality of Judaism (its need to maintain itself) as nothing; He is concerned purely with the inner man. Neither does He make anything of all the coarse forms relating to man s intercourse with God: He is opposed to the whole of the teaching of repentance and atonement; He points out how man ought to live in order to feel himself" deified," and how futile it is on his part to hope to live properly by showing repentance and contrition for his sins. " Sin is of no account " is practically his chief standpoint. Sin, repentance, forgiveness, all this does not belong to Christianity ... it is Judaism or Paganism which has become mixed up with Christ s teaching.
161. The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of the heart (of children it is written, " for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven "): it has nothing to do with superterrestrial things. The Kingdom of God " cometh," not chronologically or historically, not on a certain day in the calendar; it is not something which one day appears and was not previously there; it is a " change of feeling in the individual," it is something which may come at any time and which may be absent at any time. . . .
162. The thief on the cross; When the criminal him self, who endures a painful death, declares: " the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without a murmur of revolt or enmity, graciously and resignedly, is the only right way," he assents to the gospel; and by this very fact he is in Paradise. . . .
163. Jesus bids us: not to resist, either by deeds or in our heart, him who ill-treats us; He bids us admit of no grounds for separating ourselves from our wives; 135 He bids us make no distinction between foreigners and fellow-countrymen, strangers and familiars; He bids us show anger to no one, and treat no one with contempt; give alms secretly; not to desire to become rich; not to swear; not to stand in judgment; become reconciled with our enemies and forgive offences; not to worship in public. " Blessedness " is nothing promised: it is here, with us, if we only wish to live and act in a par ticular way.
164. Subsequent Additions; The whole of the prophet- and thaumaturgist-attitudes and the bad temper; while the conjuring-up of a supreme tribunal of justice is an abominable corruption (see Mark vi. 1 1: " And whosoever shall not receive you. . . . Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha," etc.). The "fig tree" (Matt. xxi. 18, 19): "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee hence forward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away."
165. The teaching of rewards and punishments has become mixed up with Christianity in a way which is quite absurd; everything is thereby spoilt. I3 6 In the same way, the practice of the first ecclesia militant, of the Apostle Paul and his attitude, is put forward as if it had been commanded or pre- determined. The subsequent glorification of the actual life and teaching of the first Christians: as if every thing had been prescribed beforehand and had been only a matter of following directions And as for the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies: how much of all that is more than forgery and cooking?
166. Jesus opposed a real life, a life in truth, to ordinary life: nothing could have been more foreign to His mind than the somewhat heavy nonsense of an eternal Peter," of the eternal duration of a single person. Precisely what He combats is the exaggerated importance of the " person ": how can He wish to immortalise it? He likewise combats the hierarchy within the community; He never promises a certain propor tion of reward for a certain proportion of deserts: how can He have meant to teach the doctrine of punishment and reward in a Beyond?
167. Christianity is an ingenuous attempt at bringing about a Buddhistic movement in favour of peace, sprung from the very heart of the resenting masses ... but transformed by Paul into a mysterious pagan cult, which was ultimately able to accord 137 with the whole of State organization . . . and which carries on war, condemns, tortures, conjures, and hates. Paul bases his teaching upon the need of mystery felt by the great masses capable of religious emotions: he seeks a victim a bloody phantasmagoria, which may be equal to a contest with the images of a secret cult: God on the cross, the drinking of blood, the unto mystica with the " victim." He seeks the prolongation of life after death (the blessed and atoned after-life of the individual soul) which he puts in causal relation with the victim already referred to (according to the type of Dionysos, Mithras, Osiris). He feels the necessity of bringing notions of guilt and sin into the foreground, not a new practice of life (as Jesus Himself demonstrated and taught), but a new cult,a newbelief,a beliefin a mira culous metamorphosis (" Salvation " through belief).
