Beyond Good and Evil · Chapter
The Cost of Religions as Final Ends explained
The chapter critiques religions, particularly Christianity, when they rule as ultimate ends rather than serving as a disciplinary tool for the philosopher.
What happens
The chapter critiques religions, particularly Christianity, when they rule as ultimate ends rather than serving as a disciplinary tool for the philosopher. It argues that by systematically preserving the weak, suffering, and defective, these religions have worked to deteriorate the European race, reversing natural values and preventing the emergence of higher, stronger types of humanity.
Themes in this chapter
The Role of Religion
Analyzes religion's destructive impact when it seeks to be a final end, preserving the weak and reversing natural values, leading to racial deterioration.
Nobility and Order of Rank
Condemns the Christian doctrine of 'equality before God' for obscuring the 'radically different grades of rank' between men, producing a mediocre species.
Characters to notice
- Epicurus
Invoked as the perspective of a derisive, impartial god observing the 'comedy of European Christianity.'
- Blaise Pascal
Cited as a prime example of the 'voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind' produced by European Christianity.
- Christianity
The primary subject of critique, identified as the most portentous presumption for preserving the weak and reversing natural values.
Key passages
“The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will succeed... What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the surplus of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved.”
Superior individuals are least likely to thrive, yet religions like Christianity actively work to preserve the weak and failing majority.
Contrasts natural selection with religious intervention.
“To reverse all estimates of value— that is what they had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty... to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things— that is the task the Church imposed on itself.”
Christianity's core mission was a transvaluation of values: weakening the strong, condemning earthly power and beauty, and promoting hatred of the world.
Describes the systematic value inversion undertaken by the Church.
“I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning man... with their 'equality before God,' have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe.”
Christianity is an arrogant overreach by mediocre men unfit to shape humanity, who have imposed their doctrine of equality and thereby controlled Europe's fate.
Condemns the architects of Christianity as unworthy 'artists' of man.