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).