We owe to Nietzsche perhaps the most withering intellectual attack yet mounted on Christianity as a religious belief system. In Beyond Good and Evil and elsewhere, Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the way in which Christianity, he said, taught “even the lowliest how to place themselves through piety in an illusory higher order of things and thus to maintain their contentment with the real order, in which their life is hard enough—and precisely this hardness is necessary.” He wanted nothing less than to annihilate the Christian ethic—which he contemptuously dismissed as a psychology of “devotion, self-sacrifice for one’s neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial . . .”
Of course Nietzsche wanted the weak sent to the wall so that the heroic man alone could dictate the values by which the mass of men live their lives. Only if the Sklaven-moral, or slave morality, is replaced by the Herren-moral, or the morality of the master, can the Ubermensch evolve. Christianity is an impediment to the development of the Superman.
Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet. Men, not high and hard enough to have any right to try to form man as artists; men, not strong and far-sighted enough to let the foreground law of thousandfold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them sublime self-conquest; men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway
