ABSTRACT
The morality of Christianity is in fact the product of the ressentiment felt by the oppressed against their oppressors, which resulted in the first revaluation of values, the replacement of the good/bad evaluative scheme of the oppressors with the good/evil evaluative scheme of the oppressed. Ressentiment is a distinctive psychological state that is the core of the First Essay's contribution to a naturalistic explanation of morality's origins. The moral psychology of the birth of Christianity may best serve Nietzsche's polemical ends, even if it does not exhaust the explanatory forces at work. It is also useful to keep in mind the actual historical event to which Nietzsche is alluding most generally in the First Essay, namely the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The focus of the argument in the Genealogy is at the psychological level: three fundamental psychological mechanisms: ressentiment, bad conscience, and the will to power that are native to creatures to do all the explanatory work.
