The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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The fact that faith may in certain circumstances save, the fact that salvation as the result of an _idée fixe_ does not constitute a true idea, the fact that faith moves _no_ mountains, but may very readily raise them where previously they did not exist—all these things are made sufficiently clear by a mere casual stroll through a _lunatic asylum._ Of course _no_ priest would find this sufficient: for he instinctively denies that illness is illness or that lunatic asylums are lunatic asylums. Christianity is in _need_ of illness, just as Ancient Greece was in need of a superabundance of health. The actual ulterior motive of the whole of the Church’s system of salvation is to _make people ill._ And is not the Church itself the Catholic madhouse as an ultimate ideal?—The earth as a whole converted into a madhouse?—The kind of religious man which the Church aims at producing is a typical _decadent_ The moment of time at which a religious crisis attains the ascendancy over a people, is always characterised by nerve-epidemics; the “inner world” of the religious man is ridiculously like the “inner world” of over-irritable and exhausted people; the “highest” states which Christianity holds up to mankind as the value of values, are epileptic in character,—the Church has pronounced only madmen _or_ great swindlers _in majorem dei honorem_ holy. Once I ventured to characterise the whole of the Christian training of penance and salvation (which nowadays is best studied in England) as a _folie circulaire_ methodically generated upon a soil which, of course, is already prepared for it,—that is to say, which is thoroughly morbid. Not every one who likes can be a Christian: no man is “converted” to Christianity,—he must be sick enough for it ...
We others who possess enough courage both for health and for contempt, how rightly _we_ may despise a religion which taught men to misunderstand the body I which would not rid itself of the superstitions of the soul! which made a virtue of taking inadequate nourishment! which in health combats a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! which persuaded itself that it was possible to bear a perfect soul about in a cadaverous body, and which, to this end, had to make up for itself a new concept of “perfection,” a pale, sickly, idiotically gushing ideal,—so-called “holiness,”—holiness, which in itself is simply a symptom of an impoverished, enervated and incurably deteriorated body!... The movement of Christianity, as a European movement, was from first to last, a general accumulation of the ruck and scum of all sorts and kinds (—and these, by means of Christianity, aspire to power). It does _not_ express the downfall of a race, it is rather a conglomerate assembly of all the decadent elements from everywhere which seek each other and crowd together. It was not, as some believe, the corruption of antiquity, of _noble_ antiquity, which made Christianity possible: the learned idiocy which nowadays tries to support such a notion cannot be too severely contradicted.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.