# The Antichrist *Friedrich Nietzsche's last finished polemic, written in 1888 and published in 1895. In 62 short numbered sections he condemns Christianity as the "one great curse" on humanity: a religion of pity and of the weak that, he says, turned the ancient world's noble values upside down. He sets the historical Jesus, a gentle "bearer of glad tidings" and the only real Christian, against the Church that Paul and the priests built on his death.* > **What I read.** The full text of H. L. Mencken's 1918 translation (Project Gutenberg #19322): the preface and all 62 sections. Mencken's text follows the censored early German edition, so it lacks the passages Nietzsche's sister and his friends suppressed. For those I relied on Wikipedia and the sources it cites. Quotations below are Mencken's wording unless marked otherwise. Related in this vault: - [[Book Summaries/Holland, Tom/Dominion - Tom Holland|Dominion]] by Tom Holland, cited in the same source video. It turns Nietzsche's diagnosis into a historical thesis. - *Beyond Good and Evil*, next in the queue. Section 46 of that book is the source of the video's "transvaluation of all ancient values". ## 1. Book facts | | | |---|---| | Title | *Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum* ("Curse on Christianity"). The German *Antichrist* can mean "the Antichrist" or "the anti-Christian"; Kaufmann argues for "Antichrist" because Nietzsche meant to provoke | | Author | Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) | | Written | 1888, the last year before his collapse. The book dates itself from 30 September 1888, the "Year One" of its proposed new calendar (Wikipedia) | | First published | 1895, held back by Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast), with passages cut under Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's Nietzsche Archive (Wikipedia). Some cuts were restored in 1899, 1906 and 1931; the full text was restored in later critical editions (Schlechta 1955; Colli–Montinari, KSA vol. 6) | | Plan | Meant as the first of four books of a *Revaluation of All Values* (Kaufmann, via Wikipedia) | | English translations | **Mencken**, Knopf 1918 (public domain; Borzoi pocket edition 1923). **Ludovici**, in *Complete Works* vol. 16, 1911 (public domain). **Walter Kaufmann**, in *The Portable Nietzsche*, Viking 1954. **R. J. Hollingdale**, Penguin Classics 1968, with *Twilight of the Idols* (1990 printing ISBN 0-14-044514-5, 208 pp.). **Judith Norman**, ed. Aaron Ridley, Cambridge 2005, *The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings*, ISBN 978-0-521-01688-9, 338 pp. | | Structure | Preface; 62 numbered sections (no chapters); the separately written "Decree against Christianity", which was suppressed and is printed in some later editions | | Cover | [Open Library cover](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/1759313-L.jpg) | **Where it came up.** - Video: Nils Glenn, ["Our Understanding of Jesus Just Changed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs). - At [28:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1696s) Glenn describes Christianity, through Nietzsche, as the "slave revolt". - At [28:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1737s) he names *The Antichrist* and quotes it: the "equality of souls before God… is Christian dynamite" (§62). - His gloss: "Nietzsche and the church agreed about what had happened, they just disagreed on whether it was good news." - Requested by Video Summaries on 2026-11-07. - Vault note: [[Video Summaries/Nils Glenn/Our Understanding of Jesus Just Changed]]. ## 2. Book resources **Reference and catalog pages** - Open Library: work [OL15692719W](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15692719W) (385 editions); Penguin [OL7355304M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7355304M); Cambridge [OL3394645M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3394645M). - Google Books: [search](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=Nietzsche+Antichrist). - WorldCat: [search](https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3Aantichrist+au%3Anietzsche). - Publisher pages: [Penguin Classics](https://www.penguin.co.uk/search-results?q=twilight%20of%20the%20idols%20anti-christ); [Cambridge](https://www.cambridge.org/9780521016889). - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antichrist_(book)). **Free (legal; the book is in the public domain)** - Project Gutenberg: [Mencken translation #19322](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19322) (the text used here); [#28734](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28734); [Ludovici translation, with *Twilight of the Idols*, #52263](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52263). - German critical text: [Nietzsche Source, eKGWB](http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/AC) (the Colli–Montinari edition online, free). - Internet Archive: [Knopf 1920 printing (Duke Libraries)](https://archive.org/details/antichrist02niet); [Haldeman-Julius 1930](https://archive.org/details/antichrist00niet). - LibriVox, free audio: - [English, 3 h 58 min](https://librivox.org/the-antichrist-by-nietzsche/) - [German, 2 h 55 min](https://librivox.org/der-antichrist-by-friedrich-nietzsche/) - Libby/OverDrive: - Naxos AudioBooks *Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist*, read by Barnaby Edwards: [OverDrive 4562597](https://www.overdrive.com/media/4562597) - Wordsworth ebook *Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo*: [1998529](https://www.overdrive.com/media/1998529) - German audio *Der Antichrist* (Author's Republic): [2966486](https://www.overdrive.com/media/2966486) - Hoopla: not checked; [search Hoopla](https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=nietzsche%20antichrist). **Paid** - Amazon print: [Penguin Classics 0140445145](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140445145); [Cambridge 0521016886](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521016886). - Kindle: many free or cheap public-domain editions; [Kindle search](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nietzsche+antichrist&i=digital-text). - Audible: [search](https://www.audible.com/search?keywords=nietzsche+antichrist); the Naxos recording is the best-known professional one. ## 3. Author biography **Early life and Basel.** Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, Prussian Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when he was four. He studied classical philology at Bonn and Leipzig. In 1869, at 24 and before finishing his doctorate, he was appointed professor at the University of Basel. His friendship with Richard Wagner shaped his first book, *The Birth of Tragedy* (1872), and he later broke with Wagner. Chronic ill health forced him to resign in 1879. **The wandering decade.** For ten years he lived on a small pension in Swiss and Italian lodgings, chiefly Sils-Maria, Genoa, Nice and Turin. In those years he wrote *The Gay Science*, *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, *Beyond Good and Evil* and *On the Genealogy of Morality*. In 1888 alone he wrote *The Case of Wagner*, *Twilight of the Idols*, *The Antichrist*, *Ecce Homo* and *Nietzsche contra Wagner*. **Collapse and legacy.** He collapsed in Turin in January 1889 and never recovered. He was cared for by his mother and then by his sister Elisabeth, and died in Weimar on 25 August 1900. Elisabeth, wife of the antisemitic agitator Bernhard Förster, controlled his papers through the Nietzsche Archive. She edited and cut his texts, and later courted the Nazis. Postwar scholars, chiefly Walter Kaufmann and Giorgio Colli with Mazzino Montinari, worked to separate Nietzsche from that legacy. Nietzsche himself repeatedly attacked antisemites. *The Antichrist* nonetheless contains crude ethnic sneers, for example the "Polish Jews" remark in §46. Sources: [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Friedrich Nietzsche"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/); [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche); Mencken's introduction (Gutenberg #19322), which discusses Elisabeth's role. ## 4. Author interviews and talks Nietzsche gave no recorded interviews and left no recordings. He died in 1900, and his working life ended in 1889. The nearest substitutes: - **His own account of the book** in *Ecce Homo* (written late 1888): [Gutenberg #52190](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52190) (Ludovici translation, *Complete Works* vol. 17); German text [#7202](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7202). - **Mencken's 1918 introduction**, pp. 7–36 of the Gutenberg text. An American admirer's framing, polemical in its own right (it calls American Methodism "naïve pishposh"). - **Philosophize This! (Stephen West), episode 159, "The Creation of Meaning"**: uses §2's "What is good?" passage. Listed on [Podcast Book Picks](https://podcastbookpicks.com/podcast/philosophize-this?page=5); I did not check the episode itself. - **Walter Kaufmann, *Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist*** (Princeton, 1950; 4th ed. 1974). The classic scholarly study, which takes its subtitle from this book. Ebook on OverDrive: [506690](https://www.overdrive.com/media/506690). ## 5. Summary ### Thesis Good is whatever raises the feeling of power, and bad is whatever comes from weakness. Christianity is the most consequential "décadence" movement in history: a revolt of the sick, the weak and the resentful ("Chandala") against noble, healthy, life-affirming values. Its tools are pity, sin, the "beyond", faith, and the priest's "holy lie". Jesus himself was something else, a gentle figure who lived an inner state of blessedness without resistance or guilt. His death was reinterpreted by Paul and the Church into sacrifice, judgment and personal immortality, the reverse of his "glad tidings". The "equality of souls before God" is the explosive Christian doctrine behind democracy, revolution and "equal rights". Nietzsche closes by condemning Christianity outright and calling for a new calendar starting from "today": "The transvaluation of all values!" ### Outline The book has 62 numbered sections and no chapters. The groupings below are mine. - **Preface.** "This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive… Some men are born posthumously." A reader must be honest in intellectual matters "to the point of hardness". - **§§1–7: The standard of value.** - §1: "We are Hyperboreans", against modern "lazy peace" and "tolerance". - §2: the definitions of good, bad and happiness by power: "The weak and the botched shall perish… What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity." - §§3–6: the question is what higher type of man to breed. "Progress" is a modern illusion. Christianity has waged war on the higher type, and Pascal is its victim. Modern values are "décadence values". - §7: pity as a depressant that preserves what should perish. Against Schopenhauer, Tolstoy and Wagner, Nietzsche invokes Aristotle's view of tragedy as a purgative. - **§§8–14: War on the theologians.** - §§8–10: "theological blood" spoils philosophy. "The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy." - §§11–12: Kant attacked as a moralist, and philosophers as lacking "intellectual integrity". - §§13–14: free spirits are already "a transvaluation of all values". Science has put man back among the beasts. - **§§15–19: The Christian God.** - §15: Christianity's world of purely imaginary causes and effects. - §16: a nation that believes in itself has its own god. - §§17–18: the Christian god as the "god of the sick", "the contradiction of life". - §19: the northern races accepted him: "Two thousand years have come and gone—and not a single new god!" - **§§20–23: Buddhism compared.** Both religions are nihilistic and décadent. Buddhism is "a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective": it fights suffering, not sin, and arises among the cultivated. Christianity, by contrast, needed barbarians and tamed them by making them sick. - **§§24–27: The origin in Judaism.** - §24: the priestly instinct turned against nature. - §§25–26: five stages of "denaturizing" Israel's values: 1. Yahweh as the nation's self-affirmation; 2. God falsified into a god of demands; 3. morality falsified; 4. history rewritten as sin and punishment; 5. a priestly holy book sanctifying the priest's power. - §27: the Jesus movement as the priestly instinct turned against the priesthood itself. Jesus was a "holy anarchist" who roused "the Chandala of Judaism", "a political criminal… He died for his *own* sins." - **§§28–35: The psychology of the Redeemer.** - Against Renan's "genius" and "hero", the type is one of hypersensitivity and the "instinctive hatred of reality" (§30). Here, in §29, Nietzsche wrote "the word idiot". The phrase was suppressed in 1895 and is absent from Mencken's text. - The glad tidings: no sin, guilt or reward; "the kingdom of God is within you" (§§32–34). - §35: he "died as he lived and *taught*—*not* to 'save mankind,' but to show mankind how to live." In the uncensored text this section includes his reworked words to the thief on the cross. - **§§36–44: The "authentic history of Christianity."** - §38: contempt for "the man of today", who calls himself Christian and lives otherwise. In the original this included the suppressed "young prince" passage, which was read as aimed at Wilhelm II. - §39: "The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." - §§40–42: the shameful death on a cross "usually reserved for the *canaille*" forced the disciples to invent judgment, sacrifice for sins and the resurrection. What ended on the cross was a "Buddhistic peace movement". - §§42–44: Paul, "the cynical logic of a rabbi", builds the doctrine of personal immortality: "If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!" (1 Cor. 15:17). "The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct" (§43). - **§§45–49: Reading the New Testament.** - §45: sample sayings put "into the mouth of the Master". - §46: "One had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament." Pilate is "the solitary figure… worthy of honour" ("What is truth?"). - §47: what was honoured as God is "pitiable, absurd, injurious". - §§48–49: Genesis read as "God's mortal terror of *science*". The priest's one great danger is sound knowledge of cause and effect. - **§§50–55: Faith, martyrs and the holy lie.** - §§50–52: faith as not wanting to know what is true. Blessedness proves nothing; Christianity "pronounces a curse upon 'intellect'". - §53: martyrs prove nothing about truth. - §54: "great intellects are sceptical"; convictions are prisons. - §55: convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Every priesthood's "right to lie" is dressed up as "revelation", "law" and "the will of God". - **§§56–58: Manu and the rank order.** - §§56–57: the Hindu *Law of Manu* is praised as a holy lie in the service of life, caste and rank. The long §57 sets out Nietzsche's ideal order of castes: "Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of 'equal' rights." - §58: "There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist"; Paul as the Chandala's genius against Rome. - **§§59–61: The lost harvests.** - §59: Christianity destroyed antiquity's achievement: its science, its method and the *Imperium Romanum*. - §60: it destroyed Moorish Spain, by way of the crusades. - §61: German Reformation destroyed the Renaissance. The Renaissance was "the transvaluation of Christian values", and "*Cæsar Borgia as pope!*" would have swept Christianity away from within. Instead "a German monk, Luther, came to Rome" and "restored the church". - **§62: Judgment.** "I *condemn* Christianity… the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity." The "equality of souls before God… this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea… is *Christian* dynamite." Time should be reckoned "from today": "The transvaluation of all values!" - **"Decree against Christianity."** A separate "law" dated "the first day of the Year One (30 September 1888)". It was suppressed and is not in Mencken. ### Key ideas - **Master and slave morality applied to history.** Christianity is the "slave revolt" of the *Genealogy*, now indicted rather than analysed. - **Pity as poison.** Compassion preserves weakness and is anti-life. - **Jesus against Christianity.** The first Christian was also the last; the Church is a reversal of him, and Paul is its true founder. - **The holy lie.** Every priesthood rules by fictions. What matters is whether the lie serves life (Manu) or denies it (Christianity). - **Egalitarianism as Christian.** Democracy, socialism, anarchism and equal rights are secularised Christianity. This is the claim Tom Holland's *Dominion* later turns into praise. - **Revaluation of all values.** The book is the manifesto for replacing Christian values. ## 6. Fact-check The book is mostly polemic and philosophy. The table covers its checkable historical claims and the source video's use of it. | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |---|---|---| | The book contains the "Christian dynamite" line about the "equality of souls before God" (video, 28:57) | **Supported** | §62, Mencken translation, Gutenberg #19322 | | The video's "transvaluation of all ancient values" line | **Supported**, but it is from *Beyond Good and Evil* §46, not this book | Video Summaries note. *The Antichrist* uses "transvaluation of all values" in §§13 and 62 | | Crucifixion was a death "usually reserved for the canaille" (§40) | **Supported** | Cicero, *Against Verres* 2.5; Martin Hengel, *Crucifixion* (1977) (standard references; not opened this run) | | Israel's scriptures were shaped by a priestly class around the Exile (§§25–26) | **Partly supported** | Modern biblical scholarship does date a "Priestly" source and much editing to the exilic and post-exilic period. Nietzsche's "falsification by priests for power" framing is his polemic, not a scholarly finding. That he drew on Julius Wellhausen is often said but **unverified** here | | Buddhism began "among the higher and better educated classes" (§21) | **Partly supported** | The Buddha came from the kṣatriya class, and early patrons were elites. Its spread across classes complicates the generalisation | | Christianity "destroyed… the whole harvest of ancient civilization" (§§59–60) | **Disputed** | A Gibbon-style thesis that most historians reject in this form. Monasteries and Byzantine scholars preserved much classical learning, though some was lost or suppressed | | The Reformation killed the Renaissance (§61) | **Disputed** (polemical counterfactual) | The Renaissance continued for a century after 1517 in Italy and beyond. "Cæsar Borgia as pope" is Nietzsche's fantasy, not history | | The *Law of Manu* as Nietzsche presents it (§§56–57) | **Disputed** (source problem) | Nietzsche read Manu in Louis Jacolliot's French version, which later Indologists judge unreliable. This is widely noted in Nietzsche scholarship (e.g. Annemarie Etter, *Nietzsche-Studien* 16, 1987), but **unverified**: not opened this run | | Jesus's words to the thief on the cross (§35, uncensored text) | **Disputed** (misquotation) | In Luke 23:39–43 the thief says "this man has done nothing wrong". Nietzsche gives him the centurion's words (Luke 23:47; Mark 15:39). See [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antichrist_(book)#Suppressed_passages) | | Paul's line "If Christ did not rise…" (§42) | **Supported** (paraphrase) | 1 Corinthians 15:14, 17 | | The 1895 edition was censored (the "idiot" phrase, the thief, the young prince, the *anno Domini* passage, the Decree) | **Supported** | Wikipedia, citing Malcolm Brown, ["The suppressed passages of 'Der Antichrist'"](https://web.archive.org/web/20081024061938/https://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/sidelights/antichrist.html) (Nietzsche Chronicle, Dartmouth) and Montinari. Mencken's text indeed lacks "the word idiot" and the thief passage (checked) | | Mencken translation dated 1918 | **Supported** | Knopf copyright notice in the Gutenberg text: "Copyright, 1918, by Alfred A. Knopf" | ## 7. Citations and references **Works the book engages** - The New Testament, especially the Gospels, 1 Corinthians and Paul's letters. - Genesis. - The *Law of Manu*, via Jacolliot. - Ernest Renan, *Vie de Jésus* (1863): [Gutenberg search](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=renan+life+of+jesus). - Schopenhauer, Kant, Pascal, Tolstoy (*What I Believe*), Dostoevsky (*The Idiot*, per Kaufmann, via Wikipedia). - Pindar, Aristotle (*Poetics*, catharsis). - Nietzsche's own *Human, All-Too-Human*, *Genealogy of Morals* and *Zarathustra*. - Secondary sources on the book: - Walter Kaufmann, *Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist* (4th ed. 1974). - Arthur Danto, *Nietzsche as Philosopher*, ch. 6. - Evlampiev & Kolychev, on Tolstoy's influence, [*Rivista di Estetica* 56 (2014)](https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/901). - Morgan Rempel, ["Nietzsche on the Deaths of Socrates and Jesus"](https://web.archive.org/web/20080227173029/http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/vol10/Jesus.pdf), *Minerva* 10 (2006). **Links used in this note** - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19322 (text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19322/pg19322.txt) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28734 ; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52263 ; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52190 ; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7202 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antichrist_(book) - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche - https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15692719W ; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7355304M ; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3394645M - https://archive.org/details/antichrist02niet ; https://archive.org/details/antichrist00niet - https://librivox.org/the-antichrist-by-nietzsche/ ; https://librivox.org/der-antichrist-by-friedrich-nietzsche/ - https://www.overdrive.com/media/4562597 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/1998529 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/2966486 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/506690 - http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/AC - https://podcastbookpicks.com/podcast/philosophize-this?page=5 - https://web.archive.org/web/20081024061938/https://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/sidelights/antichrist.html - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs