The Antichrist

Written in 1888 and held back until 1895, The Antichrist is Nietzsche's direct attack on Christianity, which he accuses of turning weakness into a virtue and teaching people to despise life in this world. It is short, furious and often deliberately offensive, yet it also draws a striking line between the figure of Jesus and the church that Paul built in his name.

Read it as a document of Nietzsche's last productive year rather than as a balanced argument; its force comes from its anger. The book is easier to understand after Beyond Good and Evil, where his ideas about master and slave morality are worked out more patiently.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.