"The
Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world
ugly and bad."
". . . the hatred of the senses, of the
delights of the senses, of all delight, is Christian . . ."
"Christianity desires to become master of beasts
of prey; its expedient is to make them sick—weakening is
the Christian recipe for taming, for 'civilization.'"
"Decadence, for the class of men who aspired
to power in Judaism and Christianity (a priestly class) is
but a means; this class of men has a vital interest in making
mankind sick, and in reversing the concepts 'good' and 'bad,'
'true' and 'false' into mortally dangerous and world-calumniating signification."
". . . the history of Christianity . . . is the history
of the gradually grosser and grosser misunderstanding of an original
symbolism. With every extension of Christianity over still broader,
still ruder masses in whom the pre-requisites out of which it was born
were more and more lacking, it became more necessary to vulgarize,
to barbarize Christianity,—it has taken into itself doctrines
and rites from all subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum,
and the absurdity of all kinds of sickly reason. The fate of Christianity
lay in the necessity that its faith itself had to become as sickly,
as low and vulgar as the needs were sickly, low, and vulgar which had
to be gratified by it."