The Translator and his Shadow, part 3

Nietzsche's "Curse Upon Christianity" through the lens of Schopenhauer and Machiavelli

In his landmark book Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann’s chapter on “Nietzsche’s Repudiation of Christ” is not particularly focused or interesting in its arguments. As usual Kaufmann trots out his reliable insistence that no sentence of Nietzsche can be evaluated on its own terms without the vaunted “wider context” of his other writings, and the core of his argument rests on a crude antithesis between things that Nietzsche supposedly “liked,” like the Old Testament, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, “spirituality,” and things that he disliked, like the New Testament, the “Jesus of the Creeds,” and to use Kaufmann’s words again, “resentful bourgeois morality that purports to be Christian.”

The popular conception of Nietzsche’s anti-Christianity is that Nietzsche thinks Christianity made Europe weak — while this is not wrong, there are many aspects of Nietzsche’s theory of Christianity that still remain niche subjects in all circles, including right-wing ones, if they are discussed at all:

• The influence of Schopenhauer’s distinction between Jewish and Gentile conceptions of nature, idealism, and heredity on Nietzsche

• The two great denaturalizations of Jewish values in the ancient world as described in The Antichrist

• The concept of the chandala and Jacolliot’s theory of the racial origin of the Semitic peoples as a central inspiration for The Antichrist

As with the first two installments it’s not feasible or desirable to try to expound Nietzsche’s ideas about Christianity, but a good start can be made by understanding what Nietzsche means by “Jewish” and “Aryan” conceptions of nature and morality — and this is best done by seeing how Nietzsche’s ideas on Jewish and Aryan views of heredity evolved out of Schopenhauer’s.

In Schopenhauer’s essay on religion, the philosopher distinguishes between the “optimistic and realist” character of Jewish Old Testament religion from the “pessimistic and idealistic” character which Platonism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the New Testament have in common. In Schopenhauer’s telling, the key to the Jewish conception of nature as expressed in the book of Genesis and throughout the Old Testament lies in the belief that God unaccountably breathed life into inert matter out of nothing, motivating two doctrines which are, in Schopenhauer’s eyes, destructive: First, that animals and the natural world are mere machines designed for use by humans, and second, that life is created out of nothing. The optimistic aspect of Jewish religion derives also from Genesis: “and God saw that it was good” — the implication being that existence is worthwhile.

To all of this Schopenhauer opposes Plato, eastern religion, and the New Testament as pessimistic and idealist worldviews that teach that existence is not worthwhile, that teach the Wisdom of Silenus: it is better never to be born; if born, to die as soon as possible—

The Augustinian conception of the enormous number of the sinners and the very small number of those who deserve eternal bliss, which is in itself a correct conception, is also to be discovered in Brahmanism and Buddhism, where, however, the doctrine of metempsychosis robs it of its repellent character. It is true that in the former final redemption and in the latter Nirvana is also granted to very few, but these do not come into the world specially chosen and privileged, their deserts are those they have acquired in a previous life and which they continue to maintain in the present one. The rest, however, are not cast into the everlasting pit of Hell, they are transported to the kind of world which is in keeping with their deeds. If, consequently, you should ask the propounders of these religions where and what all those who have not attained to redemption are, they would reply: “Look around you: here is where they are, this is what they are: this is their arena, this is Sansara, i.e. the world of desire, of birth, of pain, of age, of sickness and of death.’ — On the other hand, if this Augustinian dogma of the tiny number of the elect and the great number of the eternally damned is understood merely sensu allegorico and interpreted in the sense of our own philosophy, then it agrees with the fact that only very few achieve denial of the will and thereby redemption from this world (as in Buddhism very few achieve Nirvana). What, on the other hand, this dogma hypostasizes as eternal damnation is nothing other than this world of ours: this is what devolves upon all the rest: it is Purgatory, it is Hell, and devils are not lacking in it. Only consider what men sometimes inflict upon men, with what ingenious torments one will slowly torture another to death, and ask yourself whether devils could do more. And sojourn in this place is likewise eternal for all those who obdurately persist in affirming the will to live. But in truth, if one from Asia should ask me what Europe is, I would have to reply: it is the continent utterly possessed by the unheard-of and incredible delusion that the birth of man is his absolute beginning and that he is created out of nothing. —Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena

Schopenhauer’s emphasis is that the doctrine of original sin and of eternal damnation is correct as a description not of another world, but are allegories for this world, and that it is only the unnatural marriage of these two Eastern concepts to the anomalous Jewish doctrine of nature begotten from nothing that makes Christianity sadistic if interpreted literally. This is also the provenance of the reference to the “Jewish hatred of matter” in Bronze Age Mindset, by the way.

Nietzsche would end up turning Schopenhauer’s ideas upside down, preferring the Old Testament to the maudlin slave morals of the New Testament, with the latter’s “pawing and nuzzling before God,” but he retained Schopenhauer’s essential distinction between Jewish and Gentile views of nature — in particular, of differing concepts of heredity — and his view of Christianity as an unnatural marriage of two irreconcilable visions of life.

Aryan versus Semitic Conceptions of Nature in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Machiavelli

The story of Prometheus is the indigenous property of all Aryan peoples, and a testament to their talent for profundity and tragedy — indeed it may well be that this myth has precisely the same characteristic meaning for the Aryan as does the myth of the Fall for the Semitic, and that the two myths are as siblings to one another. But the premise for the Prometheus myth is the supreme value that primitive man places on fire as the true palladium of any rising culture: but the idea that man has complete control of fire, and does not only receive it as a gift from heaven, as a kindling bolt of lightning or a warming sunbeam, struck those contemplative primitive men as a sacrilege, a plundering of divine nature. And thus the first philosophical problem created a painful and insoluble contradiction between man and the gods, and placed it like a boulder at the gates of every culture. The best and highest blessing that mankind can attain was won by an act of sacrilege, and man must now take the consequences — the tide of suffering and troubles with which the offended divinities punish the nobly ambitious human race: a severe idea, which by the dignity that it confers on sacrilege contrasts oddly with the Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility, lasciviousness — a whole series of predominantly feminine attributes — were seen as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan version is the sublime idea of active sin as the truly Promethean virtue: this provides both the ethical background to pessimistic tragedy and the justification of human evil, and hence of human guilt as well as the suffering it brings. Misfortune the essence of things — which the contemplative Aryan was not inclined to quibble away – the contradiction at the heart of the world was revealed to him as a confusion of different worlds, a divine and a human world, for example, both individually in the right, but each merely one individual beside one another, suffering from its individuation. In the individual’s heroic effort to achieve universality, in the attempt to escape the spell of individuation, to become the only being in the world, he encounters the hidden primal contradiction — he commits sacrilege, that is, and he suffers. Thus the Aryans saw sacrilege as a man, while the Semites saw sin as a woman, just as the primal sacrilege was committed by man, the primal sin by woman. —Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Even in Nietzsche’s first book, when he was still under Schopenhauer’s spell, we can see Nietzsche already had a different antithesis of worldviews in mind than that of optimistic-realist versus pessimistic-idealist. In Nietzsche’s account of the myth of Prometheus, the contradiction at the heart of nature is the background to the Greek tragic view of life and to Greek art. Good and evil are in this sense entwined, so that in later books like Beyond Good and Evil it is philosophical dualism of this kind, the dreaming of another world (whether in Kant or Schopenhauer or Plato or the New Testament), that Nietzsche opposes to the Hellenic worldview. In other words, Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer’s optimist/realist-versus-pessimist/idealist dichotomy with his own opposition of good/bad-versus-good/evil: not just as systems of morality but as a distinction between those that recognize the inherently tragic character of life and those that deny it through the construction of another world.

"How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of their own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself—there must be their source, and nowhere else!"—This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values. —Beyond Good and Evil sec. 2

As an aside, Machiavelli expresses the same thought when he writes in the Discourses: “It appears that in the actions of men, […] one finds that close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that good so closely that it appears impossible to be able to miss the one if one wishes for the other.” Indeed, Machiavelli expresses most of Nietzsche’s ideas about Christianity in a more guarded and naive way.

The Two Great Revaluations of Values

At this point I will make a bold positive statement about that most-abused of adjectives, “Nietzschean”: to see the world through Nietzschean eyes is to see morality as the most powerful force in human affairs, the fruit of the most spiritual will to power, the domain that governs the valuation of everything in life, death and breeding, the future of tribes and races. Nietzsche said that Christ was the only true Christian, and maybe Nietzsche himself was the only Nietzschean. But if there are any Nietzscheans, they are Hyperboreans, “beyond the North, the ice, the death,” viewing history from a great distance: and the Nietzschean sees human history as the history of spiritual warfare, of the war of moralities and philosophies.

Nietzsche’s history of the world is punctuated by three great Revaluations. From section 25 of The Antichrist:

The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of all denaturalization of natural values: I shall refer to five facts accordingly. Originally, especially in the time of the Kingdom, Israel too stood in the correct, that is, the natural relationship to all things. Their Yahweh was the expression of the consciousness of power, of joy in itself, of hope for itself: in him, they expected victory and salvation, with him they trusted nature to give them what the people needed — above all rain. Yahweh is the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice: the logic of every people that is in power and has a good conscience about it. […] This state of affairs remained the ideal for a long time, even when it was sadly done away with: anarchy within, the Assyrian from without. But as their highest desirability, the people clung to that vision of a king who is a good soldier and stern judge: above all that typical prophet (that is, critic and satirist of the moment, Isaiah). — But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old God became incapable of the things he was formerly capable of doing. They ought to have let him go. What happened? They altered his concept — they denaturalized his concept: at this price they kept him. — Yahweh the God “of justice,” — no longer at one with Israel, an expression of the people’s feeling of selfhood: now just a God subject to conditions . . . His concept becomes a tool in the hand of priestly agitators, who from now on interpret all fortune as reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience toward God, or “sin”: that most mendacious manner of interpretation of an alleged “moral world order” with which, once and for all, the natural concept of “cause” and “effect” is stood on its head. Once natural causality is banished from the world through reward and punishment, an anti-natural causality is needed: the entire remainder of unnaturalness now follows. A God who demands — in place of a God who helps, gives advice, who is at bottom the word for every inspiration of courage and self-confidence . . . Morality no longer the expression for the life and growth of a people, no longer its most basic instinct for life, but instead turned abstract, turned into antithesis to life — morality as a fundamental degradation of the imagination, as the “evil eye” for all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; misfortune besmirched with the concept of “sin”; well-being as danger, as “temptation”; physiological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience. . .

This is the first great revaluation of all values in the Nietzschean history of morality. In section 27 he describes the second:

In a false soil of this sort, where every natural disposition, every natural value, every reality had the deepest instincts of the ruling class against it, Christianity grew, a form of deadly animosity toward reality that has yet to be surpassed. The “holy people,” who had retained only priestly values and priestly words for all things, and who with fear-inducing consistency had isolated themselves against everything powerful that still existed on earth, shunning it as “unholy,” as “world,” as “sin” — this people produced a final formula for its instinct that was logical to the point of self-denial: as Christianity, it denied even the last remaining form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” the Jewish reality itself. This case is first-class: the small, rebellious movement, baptized in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, is the Jewish instinct once again — or rather, the priestly instinct that can no longer tolerate the priest as reality, the invention of an even more remote form of existence, of an even more unreal vision of the world than the organization of a Church presupposes. Christianity negates the Church . . .

I cannot see what the revolt, understood or misunderstood as originated by Jesus, was directed against if it was not a revolt against the Jewish church, taking church in exactly the same sense as we take the word today. It was a revolt against the “good and the just,” against “the saints of Israel,” against the hierarchy of society — not against its corruption but against caste, privilege, order, formula; it was disbelief in the “superior humans,” the No spoken against all that was priest and theologian. But the hierarchy, challenged in this way if only for a moment, was the pile dwelling, in the midst of the “waters,” upon which the Jewish people continued to survive at all, the painstakingly achieved last chance for survival, the residue of its politically unique existence: an attack on it was an attack on the deepest instinct of the people, on the most tenacious people’s will to life there has ever been on earth. This holy anarchist who incited the humble, the outcasts and “sinners,” the chandala within Judaism, to protest against the ruling order — using language that even today would send him to Siberia, if the Gospels are to be believed, was a political criminal insofar as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society. This put him on the cross: proof of which is the inscription on the cross. He died for his guilt — there are no grounds at all for saying, however often it’s been claimed, that he died for the guilt of others. —

This, then, is how Nietzsche sees Christianity in relation to the contemporary Jewish establishment: not as a new movement rebelling against Jewish instincts, but as radicalized Jewish instincts annihilating the remnants of hierarchy and master morality, reminders of that time, distant even in Christ’s day, when the Jews were still a free people. This is the basis for his dislike of contemporary anti-Semites in Germany: because in their embrace of Christianity, they were adopting the purest and most destructive, most “anti-Aryan” form of that “Semitism” which they claimed to oppose.

The reader is likely familiar with the aftermath of this second revaluation of values in Nietzsche’s telling: “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome,” the triumph of slave morality over Roman nobility, the gelding of European man over two millennia.

The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided. One might even say that it has risen ever higher and thus become more and more profound and spiritual: so that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature,” a more spiritual nature, than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed values.

The symbol of this struggle, inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is "Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome": — there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction.

At this point we can come back to Kaufmann for a moment. What does he make of all this? What does he make of Nietzsche’s preference for the Old Testament, on the grounds that it reflects a kind of ancient Jewish master morality, before the Jews became slaves? In the chapter of his book entitled “The Master Race,” Kaufmann writes:

These Hellenic seeds of the doctrine of the master race and the pseudo-scientific justification of slavery which the Greeks bestowed on us together with their tragedies and temples should not be confused with the basically different conception of the chosen people.

But what does Nietzsche say about the concept of the “chosen people”? It is already quoted above from The Antichrist! — Nietzsche’s narrative is the following: When the Jews were free, when they had their own sovereignty, “Yahweh is the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice: the logic of every people that is in power and has a good conscience about it.” And then after the Jews become unfree, they denaturalize their own values until “this people produced a final formula for its instinct that was logical to the point of self-denial: as Christianity, it denied even the last remaining form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” the Jewish reality itself.”

In other words, Nietzsche speaks about the Jewish concept of the “chosen people” in exactly the same way he speaks about how the Aryan aristocracy understood itself. Compare the remarks on the chosen people above to the following passage from Genealogy:

Granted that, in the majority of cases, [nobles] designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commanders”) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as “the rich,” “the possessors” (this is the meaning of arya; and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic.) […] Our German gut even: does it not signify “the godlike,” the man of “godlike race”? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble) name of the Goths? The grounds for this conjecture cannot be dealt with here.—

Kaufmann states that the concept of the chosen people is completely different than the Hellenic concept of the master race. This assertion may or may not be true, but it is definitely not what Nietzsche himself believes — rather it is clear from Nietzsche’s narrative of the Jewish moral revolutions that he sees the notion of “chosen people” as a naive self-definition dating from those centuries when the Jews were still a master race. Without understanding this idea of the denaturalization of Jewish values in the ancient world as they transformed from a tribe of masters to a tribe of slaves, it is impossible to understand Nietzsche’s views on Christianity.

The Chandala

On the Hindu caste system from Twilight of the Idols:

But even this organization found it necessary to be terrible,—not this time in a struggle with the animal-man, but with his opposite, the non-caste man, the hotch-potch man [dem Nicht-Zucht-Menschen, dem Mischmasch-Menschen], the Chandala. And once again it had no other means of making him weak and harmless, than by making him sick,—it was the struggle with the greatest “number.” Nothing perhaps is more offensive to our feelings than these measures of security on the part of Indian morality. The third edict, for instance (Avadana-Sastra I.), which treats “of impure vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment that the Chandala should be allowed must consist of garlic and onions, as the holy scriptures forbid their being given corn or grain-bearing fruit, water and fire. The same edict declares that the water which they need must be drawn neither out of rivers, wells or ponds, but only out of the ditches leading to swamps and out of the holes left by the footprints of animals. They are likewise forbidden to wash either their linen or themselves since the water which is graciously granted to them must only be used for quenching their thirst. Finally Sudra women are forbidden to assist Chandala women at their confinements, while Chandala women are also forbidden to assist each other at such times. The results of sanitary regulations of this kind could not fail to make themselves felt; deadly epidemics and the most ghastly venereal diseases soon appeared, and in consequence of these again “the Law of the Knife,”—that is to say circumcision, was prescribed for male children and the removal of the small labia from the females. Manu himself says: “the Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (—this is the necessary consequence of the idea of breeding). Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron, and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits; without rest they shall wander from place to place. They are forbidden to write from left to right or to use their right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and writing from left to right are reserved to people of virtue, to people of race.”

These regulations are instructive enough: we can see in them the absolutely pure and primeval humanity of the Aryans,—we learn that the notion “pure blood,” is the reverse of harmless. On the other hand it becomes clear among which people the hatred, the Chandala hatred of this humanity has been immortalised, among which people it has become religion and genius. From this point of view the gospels are documents of the highest value; and the Book of Enoch is still more so. Christianity as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-movement against that morality of breeding, of race and of privilege:—it is essentially an anti-Aryan religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low, the general insurrection of all the down-trodden, the wretched, the bungled and the botched, against the “race,”—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love.

What is the Chandala? It is not just a synonym for Dalit — and there is a particular reason, rarely addressed in English language scholarship, why Nietzsche associates the Chandala with early Christianity so strongly.

Nietzsche’s idea of the Chandala and the Hindu caste system comes primarily from two writers: Max Müller and Louis Jacolliot. Jacolliot was the author of Les législateurs religieux: Manou, Moïse, Mahomet. This book included a controversial translation of the Laws of Manu, but even more influential on Nietzsche was a 20+ page footnote in which Jacolliot at great length proposes an elaborate racial theory connecting ancient Jews to the Chandala of the Laws of Manu:

Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians and Arabs therefore owe their origin to the different tribes of tchandalas who emigrated from Hindustan at different times, during the long and bloody struggles of Brahmins and Buddhists.

In turn, the Hebrews were the product of a Chaldean emigration.

Egypt was the only one of these countries which was colonized by the high castes of Hindustan, so its social state, its beliefs, its worship, its traditions were simple reproductions, copies of the customs of the mother country. The same priestly influences, the same caste divisions, the same impossibility of leaving them, the same penal law which, as in India, produced this crowd of non-caste peoples [decasteés] and of the same peoples who, as the Bible observes, fled from Egypt with the Hebrews.

Jacolliot’s book is very rarely mentioned in English-language scholarship on Nietzsche, and this theory of the Jews (and of all Semitic-speaking peoples) as descended from exiles of the Hindu caste system goes unmentioned by men such as Kaufmann and Hollingdale, both of whom heavily de-emphasize the importance of The Antichrist in Nietzsche’s career. There are some English-language books that address the subject, but their readership has been small: two examples are Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem by Robert C. Holub, and an article by Koenraad Elst called “Manu as a Weapon against Egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu Political Philosophy” in the 2008 anthology Nietzsche, Power and Politics. But in general, a very small proportion of the many, many writers on Nietzsche in any language since 1945 are aware of the provenance of his anti-Christianity, and Jacolliot’s book remains untranslated into English as far as I know. Some scholars have pointed out that Jacolliot’s book had a poor reputation even in Nietzsche’s lifetime, and in all honesty, it is an enormous testament to the poor imagination and lack of curiosity of today’s anti-Nietzscheans that their criticism almost never mentions Jacolliot or the chandala.

A Third Revaluation?

The degree to which Machiavelli inspired Nietzsche in his view of moral revolution is not recognized enough. Machiavelli anticipates Nietzsche’s ideas on the character of Christianity quite closely, as we will see. But in the Discourses, he also lays out the fundamental concept of the Revaluation:

That changes in Sects and Tongues, and the happening of Floods and Pestilences, obliterate the Memory of the Past.

To those philosophers who will have it that the world has existed from all eternity, it were, I think, a good answer, that if what they say be true we ought to have record of a longer period than five thousand years; did it not appear that the memory of past times is blotted out by a variety of causes, some referable to men, and some to Heaven.

Among the causes which have a human origin are the changes in sects and tongues; because when a new sect, that is to say a new religion, comes up, its first endeavour, in order to give itself reputation, is to efface the old; and should it so happen that the founders of the new religion speak another tongue, this may readily be effected. This we know from observing the methods which Christianity has followed in dealing with the religion of the Gentiles, for we find that it has abolished all the rites and ordinances of that worship, and obliterated every trace of the ancient belief. True, it has not succeeded in utterly blotting out our knowledge of things done by the famous men who held that belief; and this because the propagators of the new faith, retaining the Latin tongue, were constrained to use it in writing the new law; for could they have written this in a new tongue, we may infer, having regard to their other persecutions, that no record whatever would have survived to us of past events. For any one who reads of the methods followed by Saint Gregory and the other heads of the Christian religion, will perceive with what animosity they pursued all ancient memorials; burning the works of poets and historians; breaking images; and destroying whatsoever else afforded any trace of antiquity. So that if to this persecution a new language had been joined, it must soon have been found that everything was forgotten.

We may believe, therefore, that what Christianity has sought to effect against the sect of the Gentiles, was actually effected by that sect against the religion which preceded theirs; and that, from the repeated changes of belief which have taken place in the course of five or six thousand years, the memory of what happened at a remote date has perished, or, if any trace of it remain, has come to be regarded as a fable to which no credit is due; like the Chronicle of Diodorus Siculus, which, professing to give an account of the events of forty or fifty thousand years, is held, and I believe justly, a lying tale.

As for the causes of oblivion which we may refer to Heaven, they are those which make havoc of the human race, and reduce the population of certain parts of the world to a very small number. This happens by plague, famine, or flood, of which three the last is the most hurtful, as well because it is the most universal, as because those saved are generally rude and ignorant mountaineers, who possessing no knowledge of antiquity themselves, can impart none to those who come after them. Or if among the survivors there chance to be one possessed of such knowledge, to give himself consequence and credit, he will conceal and pervert it to suit his private ends, so that to his posterity there will remain only so much as he may have been pleased to communicate, and no more.

That these floods, plagues, and famines do in fact happen, I see no reason to doubt, both because we find all histories full of them, and recognize their effect in this oblivion of the past, and also because it is reasonable that such things should happen. For as when much superfluous matter has gathered in simple bodies, nature makes repeated efforts to remove and purge it away, thereby promoting the health of these bodies, so likewise as regards that composite body the human race, when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.

Etruria, then, as has been said above, was at one time powerful, abounding in piety and valour, practising her own customs, and speaking her own tongue; but all this was effaced by the power of Rome, so that, as I have observed already, nothing is left of her but the memory of a name.

Machiavelli says that what Christianity did to overthrow pagan religion, the Romans must have done to the religion that preceded them. And indeed this is likely the case with the introduction of Aryan religion into Bronze Age Europe, if the case of Greece is at all suggestive, in which the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians in Hesiod and references to θεοι προτεροι in literature strongly imply that the invasion of Greek-speaking peoples became encoded in their syncretic myths and even in the etymology of their most basic vocabulary: γενναιος, καλος, etc.¹

Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche see Christianity as the preeminent example of a Revaluation of values, of a moral revolution that fundamentally changes the texture and horizons of human life. They also both look toward an overthrow of Christianity by a future revaluation: in Machiavelli’s philosophy this is suggested by the exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians and his veiled dream of Cesare Borgia as Pope. In Nietzsche’s work, the overthrow of Christianity is meant to signify a Third Revaluation to succeed the two denaturalizations of Jewish values described above.

But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality has had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much "God" sacrificed every time? If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law — let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled! — Genealogy Essay 2 section 24

Nietzsche only hints at this in Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil but it is clear even in those books what he sees as necessary: for Europe to overcome the hangover of Christian morality and actively persecute it, to bring in a new reign of master morality. This is the positive prescription that is so conspicuously absent from any current mainstream account of Nietzsche. The end of Genealogy Essay 1 is hardly obscure in its meaning:

Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More: must one not desire it with all one's might? even will it? even promote it?

Whoever begins at this point, like my readers, to reflect and pursue his train of thought will not soon come to the end of it- reason enough for me to come to an end, assuming it has long since been abundantly clear what my aim is, what the aim of that dangerous slogan is that is inscribed at the head of my last book Beyond Good and Evil.— At least this does not mean "Beyond Good and Bad."— . . .

And in The Antichrist, he ends with the following laws which are absent from the Kaufmann and Hollingdale editions, as well as many others prior to the 1969 Colli-Montinari publications:

Law against Christianity

Given on the Day of Salvation, on the first day of the year one (—30 September 1888, according to the false calculation of time)

War to the death against vice: the vice is Christianity

First proposition. — Every type of anti-nature is a vice. The priest is the most vicious type of person: he teaches anti-nature. Priests are not to be reasoned with, they are to be locked up.

Second proposition. — Any participation in church services is an attack on public morality. One should be harsher with Protestants than with Catholics, harsher with liberal Protestants than with orthodox ones. The criminality of being Christian increases with your proximity to science. The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.

Third proposition. — The execrable location where Christianity brooded over its basilisk eggs should be razed to the ground and, being the depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity. Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it.

Fourth proposition. — The preacher of chastity is a public incitement to anti-nature. Contempt for sexuality, making it unclean with the concept of ‘uncleanliness,’ these are the real sins against the holy spirit of life.

Fifth proposition. — Eating at the same table as a priest ostracizes: you are excommunicated from honest society. The priest is our Chandala, — he should be ostracized, starved, driven into every type of desert.

Sixth proposition. — The ‘holy’ history should be called by the name it deserves, the accursed history; the words ‘God’, ‘saviour’, ‘redeemer’, ‘saint’ should be used as terms of abuse, to signify criminals.

Seventh proposition. — The rest follows from this.

It should be abundantly clear at this point that whenever pundits of whatever flavor wring their hands about post-1945 forms of “the new religion,” “the successor ideology,” and so on, they are aping Nietzsche — badly. Whatever these phrases refer to is, in Nietzsche’s view, just the hangover effect of Christianity, a Slave Morality radicalized since it can no longer adopt metaphysical pretensions. The real successor ideology, the Third Revaluation, in the Nietzschean view of world history, means something altogether different.

Links

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280624879_Manu_as_a_weapon_against_egalitarianism_Nietzsche_and_Hindu_political_philosophy

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/NIETZSCHE-UND-DAS-GESETZBUCH-DES-MANU-Etter/d91977ec8101af20e37af63a1e235461b71cfecc

https://archive.org/details/leslgislateurs00jaco/page/118/mode/2up

1. Cf. Genealogy Essay 1 section 5