The Antichrist

The sociopsychological illness Friedrich Nietzsche most vociferously accuses Christianity of imparting upon the world is décadence. With this anti-instinctual mindset, an individual is encouraged to love that which is detrimental to them. By cultivating this spirit, Christian theologians primed their adherents’ minds for the acceptance of truths as lies, and vice versa. Nietzsche argues that décadence is antithetical to the goodness of life in Section 6, the end of which can be seen as a thesis statement for the book as a whole:

Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names (18).

According to Nietzsche, the roots of Christian décadence lie in the post-traumatic centering of the crucifixion in Christian mythos. As Nietzsche thoroughly details in Section 42, the religion’s “centre of gravity” focused on death, the unfulfillable promise of a paradise beyond the end of life (49). Christ’s suffering and death, being the preamble to his ascension and that of all others, became the holiest of experiences.