The Antichrist

Produced by Laura Wisewell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







THE ANTICHRIST


BORZOI POCKET BOOKS

A complete list to date of this series of popular reprints, bound
uniformly with a design and endpapers by Claude Bragdon, may be found at
the back of this volume. One book will appear each month, numbered for
convenience in ordering.




                             THE ANTICHRIST


                                  _by_

                            F. W. NIETZSCHE


                      _Translated from the German
                        with an introduction by_
                             H. L. MENCKEN



                               _New York_
                             ALFRED A. KNOPF



               COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

            _Pocket Book Edition, Published September, 1923
                    Second Printing, November, 1924_


      _Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press,
                           Binghamton, N. Y._

     _Paper manufactured by W. C. Hamilton & Sons, Miquon, Pa., and
            furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York._

             MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.




CONTENTS


                                            PAGE
    INTRODUCTION BY H. L. MENCKEN              7
    AUTHOR'S PREFACE                          37
    THE ANTICHRIST                            41




INTRODUCTION


Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, "Ecce Homo," "The
Antichrist" is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may
be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their
final form. Notes for it had been accumulating for years and it was to
have constituted the first volume of his long-projected _magnum opus_,
"The Will to Power." His full plan for this work, as originally drawn
up, was as follows:

  Vol.   I.  The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity.

  Vol.  II.  The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic
             Movement.

  Vol. III.  The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, the Most Fatal
             Form of Ignorance.

  Vol.  IV.  Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.

The first sketches for "The Will to Power" were made in 1884, soon after
the publication of the first three parts of "Thus Spake Zarathustra,"
and thereafter, for four years, Nietzsche piled up notes. They were
written at all the places he visited on his endless travels in search of
health--at Nice, at Venice, at Sils-Maria in the Engadine (for long his
favourite resort), at Cannobio, at Zuerich, at Genoa, at Chur, at
Leipzig. Several times his work was interrupted by other books, first by
"Beyond Good and Evil," then by "The Genealogy of Morals" (written in
twenty days), then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almost as often he changed
his plan. Once he decided to expand "The Will to Power" to ten volumes,
with "An Attempt at a New Interpretation of the World" as a general
sub-title. Again he adopted the sub-title of "An Interpretation of All
That Happens." Finally, he hit upon "An Attempt at a Transvaluation of
All Values," and went back to four volumes, though with a number of
changes in their arrangement. In September, 1888, he began actual work
upon the first volume, and before the end of the month it was completed.
The Summer had been one of almost hysterical creative activity. Since
the middle of June he had written two other small books, "The Case of
Wagner" and "The Twilight of the Idols," and before the end of the year
he was destined to write "Ecce Homo." Some time during December his
health began to fail rapidly, and soon after the New Year he was
helpless. Thereafter he wrote no more.

The Wagner diatribe and "The Twilight of the Idols" were published
immediately, but "The Antichrist" did not get into type until 1895. I
suspect that the delay was due to the influence of the philosopher's
sister, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but by no
means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas. During his dark
days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept
aloof, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but
there were bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those
bounds were marked by crosses. One notes, in her biography of him--a
useful but not always accurate work--an evident desire to purge him of
the accusation of mocking at sacred things. He had, she says, great
admiration for "the elevating effect of Christianity ... upon the weak
and ailing," and "a real liking for sincere, pious Christians," and "a
tender love for the Founder of Christianity." All his wrath, she
continues, was reserved for "St. Paul and his like," who perverted the
Beatitudes, which Christ intended for the lowly only, into a universal
religion which made war upon aristocratic values.