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“19 Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21, NRSVUE):

Matthew 6:19 reminds us not to store up treasures on earth, where they can be destroyed or stolen, but to focus on storing treasures in heaven. This verse teaches us to value spiritual riches over material possessions. Earthly wealth fades, but the love, faith, and good works we do for God endure forever.  Previously we talked about the questionable nature of loving one’s enemy just because Christ mandates it in the Sermon on the Mount, and so ultimately doing good because it’s scoring points with God hardly earns one a boy scout morality badge. This aspect of Jesus’ message was a failure, though he makes a comeback.

The apostle Paul debated the philosophers of his time and Paul represented exemplary resentment and rejection of this fleshly life, noting that if the dead are not raised we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die (1 Cor 15:32).  This was an explicit rejection of some ancient Judaism which did not picture a blessed afterlife but that we live on through our male bloodline.  Paul was the culmination of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, Abraham essentially saying pleasing God was more important than world and legacy.  It’s common in some secular circles to frame the faithful as “God’s Ass” (for lack of a more elegant phrase), chasing the elusive carrot of eternity (while bringing about the Kingdom of God on Earth as an afterthought), but I will challenge that below from a limited angle.  Nietzsche argues Paul is the problem, as Jesus has some noble traits.

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche portrays Paul as the true founder of Christianity, a power-hungry organizer who perverted Jesus’s simple, life-affirming ethics into a world-dominating, decadent religion based on resentment, weakness, and a preoccupation with the afterlife, particularly the concept of sin and salvation through faith rather than deeds, thereby undermining aristocratic values. Nietzsche sees Paul as a master manipulator who used the crucifixion and belief in immortality to establish priestly tyranny and offer false hope to the masses, shifting focus from real life to a “beyond.”  Paul is accused of ignoring Jesus’s actual teachings of selling everything to give to the poor and the forgiveness of God, focusing instead on his belief in Christ’s substitutionary death and resurrection as a means to create a new cult, transforming a personal ethic into a universal, metaphysical system.  In contrast to Christ’s ethical focus on good works, Paul’s Galatians 2:21 reads: “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” Paul even stays silent on Christ’s ministry for this reason. Paul’s teachings, with their emphasis on the afterlife, and judging others, are seen as born from the resentment of the weak against the strong, leading to the destruction of noble values.  Nietzsche contrasts Paul’s crucified Christ with a life-affirming, Dionysian Jesus, who celebrated life, while Paul created a “decadent” Christianity that elevates the weak, promises an eternal reward, and makes war on natural human greatness. 

Jesus did not suffer values but created his own, as we noted with “You have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say love your enemy and bless those who persecute you.”  Nietzsche characterizes his Übermensch or Overman/Ideal human as “Caesar with the soul of Christ.”  Life is perspectival and so can be transformed by a healthy disposition, as Nietzsche says “that which does not kill me makes me stronger.”  In this way Nietzsche synthesizes the best of Caesar with the best of Jesus to imagine a human that utterly overcomes the Pauline demonizing of the flesh and this world while simultaneously overcoming what caused Rome to fall.

 Friedrich Nietzsche heavily discussed the fall of Rome, arguing it wasn’t due to external invaders or systemic issues, but rather Christianity’s “slave morality”, a life-denying value system that undermined the strong, life-affirming “master morality” of the Romans, effectively destroying the Empire from within by changing its very values and goals. He called Christianity the “vampire of the imperium Romanum,” claiming it replaced Roman greatness with weakness, guilt, and otherworldly focus, leading to a spiritual decline that doomed the colossal Roman structure.  Rome embodied a “master morality” valuing strength, power, honor, and earthly achievement (the “noble” type). Christianity introduced “slave morality,” valuing pity, humility, obedience, and the afterlife, a reversal designed by the weak against the strong.  Christians, through “stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual,” gradually drained the Roman spirit, turning noble individuals away from real-world goals towards a supernatural future.  Christianity offered a form of “Chandal revenge” (revenge of the outcast) by proclaiming the world’s destruction and promising a greater kingdom in the afterlife, devaluing Rome’s earthly power.  By punishing greatness (money, power, etc) and elevating the weak (poverty, weakness, etc.), Christianity stifled the production of great individuals and ultimately destroyed the very foundation of Roman ambition and life-affirmation.  For example, the Antichrist contains strong condemnations of Christianity as the destroyer of Roman greatness.  On the Genealogy of Morality explores the origins of Christian morality as a transvaluation of Roman values, a “spiritual revenge”.  The Dawn of Day (Aphorism 71) touches on how Christian hatred united against Rome, bringing a new future focus (the Last Judgment) that undermined Roman imperial identity.  In essence, Nietzsche saw Christianity as a parasitic force that infected the Roman system with an opposing morality, leading to its internal collapse, a much different view than most historians who point to economic, military, or political factors.

Nietzsche does imply that the Roman Empire suffered from an internal weakness, which he termed “decadence”, that allowed it to succumb to Christianity. He did not just blame Christianity in isolation, but saw the Roman system as having become susceptible to this “slave morality”. Nietzsche’s argument is that the Roman elite’s inability to maintain their “master morality” created a vacuum that the “slave revolt in morality” (Christianity) was able to exploit. This susceptibility manifested in several ways:

A “Weariness of Life” (Decadence): Nietzsche used the term décadence to describe a general decline in the “instincts of a strong life” within the later Roman Empire. He believed the Romans had become too comfortable, too intellectualized, and had lost the raw, “pagan” vitality that had driven their earlier conquests and cultural achievements. We saw in ancient Greeks the fall of the collective polis culture and arete that morphed into the inward turn of the sophists and philosopher. A person’s collective Being was thus lost.

Inability to “Take Seriously” Enemies: The strong, noble type (representing Rome) was characterized by their self-affirmation and a certain nonchalance, making them unable to “take seriously for any length of time their enemies”. This overconfidence or lack of vigilance allowed the “weak” (early Christians) to work from within and gain power through a clever, psychological subversion.

Loss of the “Will to Power”: The core Roman “will to power” – the drive for strength, dominance, and self-preservation – became depleted. Christianity’s emphasis on pity, humility, and the afterlife directly contradicted and actively undermined these healthy, earthly instincts, corrupting the Roman “men of spirit” from within.

Internal Corrupting Forces: He viewed the rise of subterranean cults and the eventual dominance of Christian ideas as a form of “corruption of souls” by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and an abstract immortality. This internal focus alienated Romans from the civic, public-minded virtues that had been the foundation of the Republic and early Empire.

Therefore, while Nietzsche primarily blamed Christianity as the active, destructive “vampire” of Rome, he also saw Rome’s own internal décadence as the underlying condition that allowed such a life-denying philosophy to take root and ultimately triumph.  We see then how the overman overcomes the life-denying of Pauline Christianity and the decadence of Rome as the true Caesar.  Nietzsche’s philosophy of “the perspectival” lives on in many academic pursuits, such as Cognitive Behavioral Psychology where the goal is developing a glass half full / silver lining disposition toward a world that is open to interpretation.

Nietzsche mentions the Overman as “Caesar with the soul of Christ” primarily in his posthumously published notes, particularly within *The Will to Power (specifically fragment 983 in some editions or KGW VII 2:289), describing a figure who embodies powerful, life-affirming leadership (Caesar) tempered by compassion and spiritual depth (Christ’s soul), creating values rather than succumbing to nihilism, a powerful but paradoxical ideal of self-mastery and divine-like humanity.

Caesar represents earthly power, mastery, the will to power, and aristocratic values.  Christ’s Soul signifies a spiritual, compassionate, and transcendent love (agape), but reinterpreted by Nietzsche to mean a profound affirmation of life and overcoming, not traditional Christian pity.  The Overman synthesizes these, creating values from strength (Caesar) but with a profound, life-affirming spirit (Christ), conquering internal struggles rather than external enemies through simple domination. It’s an ideal of self-overcoming, not a tyrant.