Are You Ancient or Christian?

Nietzsche on Master and Slave Morality—and Why You May Be Both

A greek marble statue juxtaposed with a crucifix.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.

In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only ‘racially pure’ Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.

Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the ‘good European’, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, ‘Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.’

Despite his contempt for nationalism, Nietzsche’s philosophy would later be appropriated by German nationalists and Nazis, helped along by Elisabeth after his collapse into insanity. Nietzsche held every herd in contempt, whether Christian, democratic, or nationalist. But he reserved his highest contempt for the nationalist herd.

Herd Mentality

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic literature and propaganda while neglecting Nietzsche’s work.

In that year, Nietzsche also published a new book, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). As the title suggests, this is not a work of normative ethics (what is good and evil) but of meta-ethics (what is meant by ‘good’ and ‘evil’). Nietzsche portrays the life-denying Western religion, morality, and philosophy as rooted in a ‘herd mentality’, and calls for the abandonment of binary morality. After the death of God, there can no longer be a universal perspective. Therefore, there can no longer be an objective truth. Although philosophical systems purport to be objective, they are no more than the ‘involuntary and unconscious memoirs’ of their prejudiced authors. ‘Truth’ is no more than ‘the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live’.

Master vs Slave Morality

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche also introduces the dichotomy between master and slave morality. Slave morality is often confused with herd mentality, but can be understood more precisely as a component and expression of herd mentality. If slave morality arises out of the resentment-driven inversion of values created by the weak in revenge against the strong, herd mentality is the broader mediocrity that enforces conformity and suppresses individuality.

For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the older Greco-Roman master morality. Master morality originates in the strong, and is marked by values such as pride, nobility, courage, truthfulness, health, creativity, and joy. The Homeric era of Achilles and Odysseus was a pure expression of master morality, a time when actions were either noble or base, rather than good or evil.

Achilles does not apologise for seeking kleos, or glory. Homer does not ask his heroes to be humble or compassionate. Their virtues are precisely those qualities which distinguish them from other men: courage, strength, cunning, eloquence, and the capacity for magnificent deeds. The Greek word aretē, usually translated as ‘virtue’, originally carried the broader sense of excellence, and in Aristotle virtue blends with excellence. Aristotle doesn’t even know what forgiveness means—because the concept hadn’t quite been invented.

So, too, any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Slave morality, in contrast, is the envious and vengeful reaction of the mild and mediocre to the oppression of the masters, to create an inverted morality by turning their weakness into virtue and the virtues of the masters into vice.

Thus, slave morality is marked by values such as humility, meekness, conformity, patience, compassion, and pity. Christianity is called the religion of pity, which deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. In master morality, the good is whatever is good for the masters; in slave morality, it is whatever constrains and emasculates the masters. By pretending that humility and docility are a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence and subjugation. Thus, pride becomes a vice or sin, humility is elevated into a supreme virtue, and the son of God washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified like a common criminal.

What This Means in Us

Slave morality is a cynical and pessimistic inverse morality that involves the systematic subversion of the old, natural master morality. It seeks not to transcend master morality, but, through ‘priestly vindictiveness’, to emasculate and enslave the strong by persuading them that their strength is an evil. Democracy, with its fixation on equality, is in fact the heir to Christianity, even if most democrats would rather trace their lineage to Ancient Athens. God may be dead, but Christian values survive God, sometimes in other forms.

But for all that, the old Greco-Roman morality, because it reflects reality and the natural impulse, cannot be vanquished, and vies with the inverted Judeo-Christian morality. Modern man is confused because he has constantly to juggle their contradictions, while himself being neither Christian nor Ancient but drifting in an ill-defined no-man’s land. Thus, he is taught to admire humility, while being told to believe in himself. He condemns pride, but values ambition. He insists upon equality while idolising exceptional athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs. He preaches self-sacrifice, but also self-realisation; contentment, but also achievement; meekness, but also assertiveness. In sum, he wants to be good, while also wanting to be great.

But might these two things be incompatible?