The Anti-Christ

"In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."

The Anti-Christ is regarded by many as one of the greatest critiques of Christianity and morality ever written. At the time, no other author heralded the decline of modern Western civilization as emphatically.

Nietzsche sets out to denounce and de-legitimize not only Christianity itself as a belief and a practice, but also the ethical-moral value system which modern western civilization has inherited from it.

Nietzsche argues that that Christianity has made people pessimistic and weak by regarding pity and related sentiments as the highest virtues.

Thus, the language of "good" and "bad," which was originally used for the purpose of amorally denoting one's station in life, was revaluated into the language of "good" and "evil," in which what is "good" is common, ordinary, poor, and familiar, and what is "evil" is damnable, unfamiliar, cruel, godless, accursed, and unblessed.

Not a few of the faithful have been shaken by their encounters with Nietzsche's scorching attack on Christianity as being anti-life, and anti-intellectual.

A philosopher who writes a book called The Anti-Christ (and who identifies with the title) is no shrinking violet when it comes to polemics. It is no wonder that many atheists prize Nietzsche as their champion prosecutor against Christianity. Nietzsche himself claimed that a robust soul needs good enemies, and Christians do well to take up Nietzsche's challenge.

Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, The Anti-Christ has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (18441900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Nietzsche's body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew early inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Goethe. A powerfully original thinker, Nietzsche's influence on successive writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre, was significant.

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