The Wagner diatribe and "The Twilight of the Idols" were published
immediately, but "The Antichrist" did not get into type until 1895. I
suspect that the delay was due to the influence of the philosopher's
sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but by no
means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas. During his dark
days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept
aloof, Frau Förster-Nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but
there were bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those
bounds were marked by crosses. One notes, in her biography of him--a
useful but not always accurate work--an evident desire to purge him of
the accusation of mocking at sacred things. He had, she says, great
admiration for "the elevating effect of Christianity ... upon the weak
and ailing," and "a real liking for sincere, pious Christians," and "a
tender love for the Founder of Christianity." All his wrath, she
continues, was reserved for "St. Paul and his like," who perverted the
Beatitudes, which Christ intended for the lowly only, into a universal
religion which made war upon aristocratic values. Here, obviously, one
is addressed by an interpreter who cannot forget that she is the
daughter of a Lutheran pastor and the grand-daughter of two others; a
touch of conscience gets into her reading of "The Antichrist."
She even
hints that the text may have been garbled, after the author's collapse,
by some more sinister heretic. There is not the slightest reason to
believe that any such garbling ever took place, nor is there any
evidence that their common heritage of piety rested upon the brother as
heavily as it rested upon the sister. On the contrary, it must be
manifest that Nietzsche, in this book, intended to attack Christianity
headlong and with all arms, that for all his rapid writing he put the
utmost care into it, and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it
stands. The ideas in it were anything but new to him when he set them
down. He had been developing them since the days of his beginning. You
will find some of them, clearly recognizable, in the first book he ever
wrote, "The Birth of Tragedy." You will find the most important of all
of them--the conception of Christianity as _ressentiment_--set forth at
length in the first part of "The Genealogy of Morals," published under
his own supervision in 1887. And the rest are scattered through the
whole vast mass of his notes, sometimes as mere questionings but often
worked out very carefully. Moreover, let it not be forgotten that it was
Wagner's yielding to Christian sentimentality in "Parsifal" that
transformed Nietzsche from the first among his literary advocates into
the most bitter of his opponents.
The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche