The Case of Wagner Complete Works, Volume 8 · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Philosophic heads must occupy themselves one day with the collective account of antiquity and make up its balance-sheet. If we have this, antiquity will be overcome. All the shortcomings which now vex us have their roots in antiquity, so that we cannot continue to treat this account with the mildness which has been customary up to the present. The atrocious crime of mankind which rendered Christianity possible, as it actually became possible, is the _guilt_ of antiquity. With Christianity antiquity will also be cleared away.--At the present time it is not so very far behind us, and it is certainly not possible to do justice to it. It has been availed of in the most dreadful fashion for purposes of repression, and has acted as a support for religious oppression by disguising itself as "culture." It was common to hear the saying, "Antiquity has been conquered by Christianity." This was a historical fact, and it was thus thought that no harm could come of any dealings with antiquity. Yes; it is so plausible to say that we find Christian ethics "deeper" than Socrates! Plato was easier to compete with! We are at the present time, so to speak, merely chewing the cud of the very battle which was fought in the first centuries of the Christian era--with the exception of the fact that now, instead of the clearly perceptible antiquity which then existed, we have merely its pale ghost; and, indeed, even Christianity itself has become rather ghostlike. It is a battle fought _after_ the decisive battle, a post-vibration. In the end, all the forces of which antiquity consisted have reappeared in Christianity in the crudest possible form: it is nothing new, only quantitatively extraordinary.
What severs us for ever from the culture of antiquity is the fact that its foundations have become too shaky for us. A criticism of the Greeks is at the same time a criticism of Christianity; for the bases of the spirit of belief, the religious cult, and witchcraft, are the same in both.--There are many rudimentary stages still remaining; but they are by this time almost ready to collapse. This would be a task: to characterise Greek antiquity as irretrievably lost, and with it Christianity also and the foundations upon which, up to the present time, our society and politics have been based. Christianity has conquered antiquity--yes; that is easily said. In the first place, it is itself a piece of antiquity; in the second place, it has preserved antiquity; in the third place, it has never been in combat with the pure ages of antiquity. Or rather: in order that Christianity itself might remain, it had to let itself be overcome by the spirit of antiquity--for example, the idea of empire, the community, and so forth. We are suffering from the uncommon want of clearness and uncleanliness of human things; from the ingenious mendacity which Christianity has brought among men. It is almost laughable to see how nearly all the sciences and arts of modern times grow from the scattered seeds which have been wafted towards us from antiquity, and how Christianity seems to us here to be merely the evil chill of a long night, a night during which one is almost inclined to believe that all is over with reason and honesty among men. The battle waged against the natural man has given rise to the unnatural man.
With the dissolution of Christianity a great part of antiquity has become incomprehensible to us, for instance, the entire religious basis of life. On this account an imitation of antiquity is a false tendency: the betrayers or the betrayed are the philologists who still think of such a thing. We live in a period when many different conceptions of life are to be found: hence the present age is instructive to an unusual degree; and hence also the reason why it is so ill, since it suffers from the evils of all its tendencies at once. The man of the future: the European man. The German Reformation widened the gap between us and antiquity: was it necessary for it to do so? It once again introduced the old contrast of "Paganism" and "Christianity"; and it was at the same time a protest against the decorative culture of the Renaissance--it was a victory gained over the same culture as had formerly been conquered by early Christianity. In regard to "worldly things," Christianity preserved the grosser views of the ancients. All the nobler elements in marriage, slavery, and the State are unchristian. It _required_ the distorting characteristics of worldliness to prove itself. The connection between humanism and religious rationalism was emphasised as a Saxonian trait by Köchly: the type of this philologist is Gottfried Hermann.[14]
I understand religions as narcotics: but when they are given to such nations as the Germans, I think they are simply rank poison. All religions are, in the end, based upon certain physical assumptions, which are already in existence and adapt the religions to their needs: for example, in Christianity, the contrast between body and soul, the unlimited importance of the earth as the "world," the marvellous occurrences in nature. If once the opposite views gain the mastery--for instance, a strict law of nature, the helplessness and superfluousness of all gods, the strict conception of the soul as a bodily process--all is over. But all Greek culture is based upon such views.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.