THEANTI-CHRIST 1059
further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious. Under certain
circumstances, it may engender a total loss of life and vitality out of all proportion to
the magnitude of the cause (as in the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first
consideration, but there is a more important one.
Suppose we measure pity by the value of the reactions it usually produces; then
its perilous nature appears in an even brighter light. Quite in general, pity crosses the
law of development, which is the law of selection.It preserves what is ripe for
destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and
by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a
gloomy and questionable aspect.
Some have dared to call pity a virtue (in every nobleethic it is considered a weak-
ness); and as if this were not enough, it has been made thevirtue, the basis and source of all
virtues. To be sure—one should always keep this in mind—this was done by a philosophy
that was nihilistic and had inscribed the negation of lifeupon its shield. Schopenhauer was
consistent enough: pity negates life and renders it more deserving of negation.
Pity is the practiceof nihilism. To repeat: this depressive and contagious instinct
crosses those instincts which aim at the preservation of life and at the enhancement of its
value. It multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instru-
ment of the advancement of decadence: pity persuades men to nothingness!Of course, one
does not say “nothingness” but “beyond” or “God,” or “truelife,” or Nirvana, salvation,
blessedness.
This innocent rhetoric from the realm of the religious-moral idiosyncrasy appears
much less innocent as soon as we realize which tendency it is that here shrouds itself in
sublime words:hostility against life.Schopenhauer was hostile to life; therefore pity
became a virtue for him.
Aristotle, as is well known, considered pity a pathological and dangerous condi-
tion, which one would be well advised to attack now and then with a purge: he under-
stood tragedy as a purge. From the standpoint of the instinct of life, a remedy certainly
seems necessary for such a pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as it is rep-
resented by the case of Schopenhauer (and unfortunately by our entire literary and artis-
tic decadence from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner)—to puncture it and
make it burst.
In our whole unhealthy modernity there is nothing more unhealthy than Christian
pity. To be physicians here,to be inexorable here, to wield the scalpel here—that is our
part, that is ourlove of man, that is how we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans.
- With this I am at the end and I pronounce my judgment. I condemn
Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that
any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had
the will to the last corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing
untouched by its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into
a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its
“humanitarian” blessings! To abolishany distress ran counter to its deepest advantages:
it lived on distress, it createddistress to eternalize itself.
The worm of sin, for example: with this distress the church first enriched mankind.
The “equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this pretextfor the rancor of all the
base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern