a decadent and a fool. "From time to time," exclaims Nietzsche, "grant me but one look upon something that is complete, something that is finished, something perfect, mighty, triumphant, something in which there is still something to fear. Upon a man who justifies mankind, upon a complementary and redeeming accident of man, for whose sake we can hold fast to our belief in mankind." That nature can produce a single man of this type is a consolation to Nietzsche, is enough to fill him with admiration and joy. He would agree with old Heraclitus: "To me one man is ten thousand if he be the best."
Traditional morality is repudiated by Nietzsche because and in so far as it contradicts the principle of life. For the same reason he rejects religion, particularly the Christian religion. The leading religions, he thinks, cause the race to deteriorate, they preserve too much of what ought to perish. Christianity, especially, is a crime against life. It falsifies, negates and depreciates reality. It preaches asceticism, the denial of life, pessimism, pity, effeminacy, contempt for the world, peace, non-resistance, opposition to struggle, equality and original sin. It is hostile to nature and the natural healthy instincts, calling them sinful; it glorifies the weak and sick and would have them rule over the strong; it tries to make the unequal equal; it destroys man's pleasure in himself and in the world; it is the religion of the decadent, of the played out, of the unnerved. In short, it condemns and negates this life, and points us in its stead to fictions of another world: to God, an immortal soul, a future life and a free will. It has nothing but imaginary causes (God, soul, ego, spirit, free will); nothing but imaginary effects (sin, redemption, grace, punishment, forgiveness of sins); an intercourse between imaginary beings (God, spirits, souls); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric: complete absence of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (repentance, pangs of conscience, temptation of the devil, the proximity of God); an imaginary teleology (the kingdom of God, the last judgment, eternal life). This entire world of fictions has its root in Christianity's hatred of the natural (the reality), it is the expression of a profound contempt for reality. But that explains everything. Who alone has reason to lie himself out of reality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from reality is to be a failure of reality. The surplus of the pain-feelings over the pleasure-feelings is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion—such a surplus, however, represents the formula of decadence. Christianity is the insurrection of the failures; it is the religion of the lower classes, women, slaves and plebeians. "Every philosophy that places peace above war, every ethics that gives the notion of happiness a negative form, every metaphysics that makes a state of equilibrium and final rest the goal of development, every esthetic, ethical or religious yearning for a better
