Product Description

Here is Friedrich Nietzsche's great masterpiece The Anti-Christ, wherein Nietzsche attacks Christianity as a blight on humanity. This classic is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Nietzsche and his place within the history of philosophy. "We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts-the strong man as the typical reprobate, the 'outcast among men.' Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!" -Friedrich Nietzsche

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64090 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 108 pages

Review

About the Author
German psychologist and philosopher FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) was appointed special professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the precocious age of 24, but soon found himself dissatisfied with academic life and created an alternative intellectual society for himself among friends including composer Richard Wagner, historian Jakob Burckhardt, and theologian Franz Overbeck. Among his philosophical works are Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Ecce Homo.

Customer Reviews

Great to have this much-neglected translation back in print
Nietzche's "The Anti-Christ" was one of the last books Nietzsche wrote before the onset of his insanity in 1888. Unlike many of Nietzsche's other books, which raise tantalizing questions and examine experience from a variety of angles, some of them contradictory, "The Anti-Christ" is a relatively straightforward presentation of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity. Contrary to what many think, Nietzsche did not advocate the general abolition of Christianity. He thought it served the needs of the majority of people quite well, but believed it had psychologically destructive effects on the minority of people in a society who were most capable of intellectual, artistic, and other achievement.

Mencken was one of the great American prose stylists of the Century, and, as one would expect, his translation of "The Anti-Christ" is an outstanding read. I happen to think it is a far better read than R.J. Hollingdale's translation, which is the one most often used by scholars and students. Whether it is more or less faithful to Nietzsche's original is a question I cannot answer, not being sufficiently fluent in German.

In any event, it's great to see Mencken's much-neglected 1917 translation back in print.

Good but not the best
The book has truth in it. It is good but not the best. Lewis in An Encounter With A Prophet acknowledges all of the false teachings of the Christian Church but does not lose God in the process.

Excellent Translation
This is Nietzsche's most vigorous work; it conains in little over one hundred pages, a summary of his later philosophy, and as such, should probably be read after all of his other works if one means to avoid misunderstanding what Nietzsche is saying. He portrays Christianity in gory detail as the religion of revenge, dishonesty, small-mindedness and pity which it is, and a leading cause of the west's descent into nihilism. (A reading of this book almost forms a mini spiritual biography of western civilisation of the last three centuries). The adherence to a religion like Christianity forms a sort of enslavement to an outdated meaning system thus causing anyone with a scrap of intellectual integrity to lie to theirselves as a means of supporting a bankrupt world-view and while appropriate for Zarathustra's "last men", is death for all higher types, and had waged a bitter war against all manner of vitality, stregnth and honour which are the hallmarks of die ubermensche. He talks of the psychology of the priest and the natural hatred of science that they all possess as well as the slave morality and cowardice that Christianity promotes, but for all the vim that the book possesses, it is not a very scholarly work, and contains many errors. Nietzsche understandably finds it difficult to restrain himself, but this gives the work a sort of amateurish tone. Mencken has done a wonderful job here -- all the more because he had a deep appreciation for Nietzsche -- the man and his work. For those who cannot understand Nietzsche's "hatred" of Christianity, I would recommend a very thorough reading of the Geneology of Morals, which goes into much greater detail and is much more scholarly and will provide better insight into the anti-Chrsitian perspective. One of the jewels of modern literature.