The Antichrist

H.L. Mencken provides historical context for The Antichrist within Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and work—in particular, Nietzsche’s plan to publish the book as the first of four parts constituting a collection he hoped would be his magnum opus: Der Wille zur Macht, or The Will to Power.

The year Nietzsche wrote The Antichrist (1888) was a productive year: He completed two works, The Case of Wagner and Twilight of the Idols. The Antichrist was completed in September and immediately followed by Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s final work. In December, his health declined; by early 1889, he was paralyzed and would never write again.

Mencken covers The Antichrist’s delayed publication under the guidance of Nietzsche’s sister and inheritor, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a pious Christian who suspected the openly heretical Antichrist of being tainted by other hands. Mencken vehemently denies this, arguing that many of Nietzsche’s most famous concepts and coinages—such as the “will to power,” “eternal recurrence,” and the “Übermensch”—were all meant to oppose concordant concepts within Christianity.

Mencken argues, “If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late”—though he is careful to note that he does not mean “Greek” in a neo-Platonic sense, but a Heraclitan one, conceiving of an imperfect god like Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad’s (4).

Mencken addresses The Antichrist’s influence during World War I, arguing that Germans butchered its ideas to justify their part in the war, while Americans and the British feared and denounced Nietzsche, casting him as an anti-Christ himself.

Mencken also argues that the application of Nietzsche’s anti-democratic views by the Marxist Bolsheviks and “plutocracy” (traditional Western powers) are both misinterpretations. The Bolsheviks represent democracy of a different color, while the plutocracy seeks only comforts and sloth in subjugating the proletariat.

Nietzsche had no interest in destroying the mass-consumed version of Christianity—or at least, the parts he deemed benign. Rather, he intended to divorce the philosophical elite from it, which had already been accomplished metaphysically following the popular acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the 1880s. However, this divorce had yet to free philosophy from Christian morality—this separation being what Nietzsche attempts in The Antichrist.

Mencken attempts to defend Nietzsche from accusations of antisemitism, claiming that his exploration of Christianity—which necessitated further exploration of Judaism—led him to conclude the former was “superior” (10). However, Mencken’s own antisemitism comes through via his language and logic.

Mencken describes The Antichrist as Nietzsche’s most coherent work, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, rather than his usual “apothegms” (concise sayings)—a form detractors used to criticize him and his mental state. Mencken lauds Nietzsche’s refusal to submit to conventional written forms of philosophy.

Mencken closes his introduction by describing his translation as a private amusement that became a serious affair, though he never intended it as a replacement for the two previous English translations: Thomas Common’s Germanic version and Anthony Ludovici’s poetic one.