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attack on the Christian morality of his time a direct link to Nazi neo–
paganism. Having abandoned the Lutheranism of his childhood, Niet–
zsche (especially in his last works) proclaimed a war to the death against
the value system of Christianity, accusing it of having distorted and
denatured all life-affirming values. The ethics of the Sermon on the
Mount, the love of one's neighbor, charity, humility, and compassion,
stood in sharp contrast to his own Dionysian vision of an authentic and
empowered existence. At the center of his philosophy lay a sustained
celebration of creativity, the affirmation of life and natural instincts, the
invention of new values and norms that were antithetical to those prop–
agated by the German Protestant Christianity which had formed his
childhood and adolescence.
One can certainly agree that Nietzsche was a vehement opponent of
Judeo-Christianity, whose legacy was eagerly invoked by many fascists
and Nazis . His diatribes against "the Jewish fanaticism of a St. Paul"
(seen by him as the "greatest of all apostles of revenge") are well
known. The early Christians-inspired by priestly Judaism-had in his
opinion brought down the Roman Empire through their enmity to
everything noble, proud, and privileged. For Nietzsche this was the
most fateful and catastrophic revaluation
(Umwertung)
of values in
world history. He blamed Second Temple Judaism and early Christian–
ity for having spread notions of sin, guilt punishment, and repentance–
thereby creating the fiction of a "moral world order"-which had
subverted everything that was strong, healthy, beautiful, and brave.
Priestly Judaism (and its offshoots in the Gospels) was for Nietzsche the
beginning of "the slave-revolt in morals," a source of "decadence"
which he believed found its modern secular echoes in the leveling doc–
trines of liberalism, utilitarian rationalism, and socialism.
Nietzsche did regard the Jewish revolution in ethics which had tri–
umphed in Pauline Christianity as the ultimate victory of Judaic ressen–
timent, by means of which the Jews had overthrown Greco-Roman
aristocratic values and taken their revenge on a hostile Gentile world.
Under the sign of the Cross, they had achieved the triumph of Judea
over Rome, for ever since this spiritual revolution, almost half of the
earth had bowed down to three Jews and one Jewess-Jesus, Peter, Paul,
and Mary! According to Nietzsche's dramatic interpretation, the Jews
had in effect created Christianity-a religion in which they did not
believe-in order to undermine their Roman conquerors. They were
responsible for the ghastly paradox of a "God on the Cross," the awe–
some image of an "unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of
God for the salvation of man." The priestly culture of Judaism which
