My Brush with Satanism

A Letter About Nietzsche to My Younger Self

You’re reading a book called The Antichrist, and you think the title is just edgy. It’s not. It’s evil. Take it seriously as blasphemy. You won’t find masculinity in it — only emasculation and, ultimately, madness.

You’ll often read that Nietzsche abstained from attacking Christ and only attacked Christianity instead. But the scholars who say that conveniently ignore this book. Its principle insult is that Christ was an idiot:

Jesus is the very opposite of a genius: he is an idiot.

…Can you be more grossly mistaken than when you make a genius of Christ, who was an idiot?

Christ is ‘the idiot on the cross.’ Copying the pagan accusation that Christian worshipped a god with an ass’s head, Nietzsche even calls Christ an ‘ass’.

This theological rebellion is Satanic. That’s why, in chapter 48, Nietzsche tells the story of original sin from the only viewpoint that he believed was valid: the serpent’s viewpoint. Don’t listen to academics pussyfooting around this. In 1882, at the time of writing The Gay Science, Nietzsche said,

I have experienced, voluntarily and thoroughly, the OPPOSITE to a RELIGIOUS NATURE. I know the devil and the perspectives from which HE looks towards God.

Thorough, voluntary knowledge of the devil: think about that. In fact, as early as 1868-1869, Nietzsche had been haunted by a demonic presence:

What I fear is not the horrifying figure behind my chair, but its voice; and not the words, but the terribly inarticulate and inhuman tone of this figure. If only it spoke as men speak!

You think the idea of spirits is silly because materialism, the mainstream intellectual worldview, says only matter exists. But not even the properties of matter are matter. And some mistakes only intellectuals are clever enough to rationalise, but those mistakes are the most stupid ones of all.

It would be a silly mistake to think that there’s anything masculine about the perspective from which Nietzsche looks towards God. As he says, it’s the devil’s perspective. And that means it’s the perspective of envy. Nietzsche, in so many ways the philosopher of the modern world, rebels against God because he envies him. Indeed, in a note to Jean Bordeau in January 1889, Nietzsche — after his collapse into insanity — even wrote, ‘I am the Christ, Christ in person, Christ crucified.’

As Aquinas explains,

Lucifer who became Satan, leader of the fallen angels, wished to be as God. This prideful desire was not a wish to be equal to God, for Satan knew by his natural knowledge that equality of creature with creator is utterly impossible…What he wanted was to be as God; he wished to be like God in a way not suited to his nature, such as to create things by his own power, or to achieve final beatitude without God’s help, or to have command over others in a way proper to God alone.

To create oneself by one’s own power, save oneself without God’s help and command others — such are the fundamental elements of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power. And it sets the tone for most discussions of masculinity in the modern world, as I explain here.

Ultimately, we all have to take a stand for or against God. Nobody can live as an agnostic. You either worship God, or you don’t. As Jesus said, ‘He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth.’ (Matthew 12:30).

Nietzsche stood against God, and ‘the rest,’ as he says at the end of the book, ‘follows from that.’ In his final days in the mental asylum, he used to drink his own urine from his shoe, eat his own excrement, and begged for ‘a dressing gown for radical redemption.’