The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
61.
Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the _Renaissance_. Is it understood at last, _will_ it ever be understood, _what_ the Renaissance was? _The transvaluation of Christian values_,--an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the _opposite_ values, the more _noble_ values.... This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance--it is _my_ question too--; there has never been a form of _attack_ more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say, to _insinuate_ them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there ...
I see before me the _possibility_ of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:--it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter--_Cæsar Borgia as pope!_... Am I understood?... Well then, _that_ would have been the sort of triumph that _I_ alone am longing for today--: by it Christianity would have been _swept away_!--What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion _against_ the Renaissance in Rome.... Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its _capital_--instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself.--Luther saw only the _depravity_ of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the _peccatum originale_, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life!
Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!... And Luther _restored the church_: he attacked it.... The Renaissance--an event without meaning, a great futility!--Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us! _Futility_--that has always been the work of the Germans.--The Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire--every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something _irrecoverable_.... These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of,--they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible--Protestantism.... If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the _Germans_ will be to blame....
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.