ness and lunatic asylums not lunatic
asylums. Christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the Greek
spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior
purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_
people ill. And the church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic
asylum as the ultimate ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort
of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _decadent_; the
moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked
by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man
is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that
it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of
mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are
actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy
only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_.... Once
I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of _training_[22] in
penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of
producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it,
which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a
Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first
be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the _courage_ for health
_and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that
teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the
superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient
nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation!
that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect
soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for
itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically
ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is
itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and
incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European
movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all
sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of
Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ represent the decay of a
race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _decadence_
products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another
out. It was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity,