The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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In point of fact, it matters greatly to what end one lies: whether one preserves or _destroys_ by means of falsehood. It is quite justifiable to bracket the _Christian_ and the _Anarchist_ together: their object, their instinct, is concerned only with destruction. The proof of this proposition can be read quite plainly from history: history spells it with appalling distinctness. Whereas we have just seen a religious legislation, whose object was to render the highest possible means of making life _flourish,_ and of making a grand organisation of society, eternal,—Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such an organisation, _precisely because life flourishes through it._ In the one case, the net profit to the credit of reason, acquired through long ages of experiment and of insecurity, is applied usefully to the most remote ends, and the harvest, which is as large, as rich and as complete as possible, is reaped and garnered: in the other case, on the contrary, the harvest is _blighted_ in a single night That which stood there, _ære perennius,_ the _imperium Romanum,_ the most magnificent form of organisation, under difficult conditions, that has ever been achieved, and compared with which everything that preceded, and everything which followed it, is mere patchwork, gimcrackery, and dilettantism,—those holy anarchists made it their “piety,” to destroy “the world”—that is to say, the _imperium Romanum,_ until no two stones were left standing one on the other,—until even the Teutons and other clodhoppers were able to become master of it The Christian and the anarchist are both decadents; they are both incapable of acting in any other way than disintegratingly, poisonously and witheringly, like _blood-suckers;_ they are both actuated by an instinct of _mortal hatred_ of everything that stands erect, that is great, that is lasting, and that is a guarantee of the future....
Christianity was the vampire of the _imperium Romanum,_—in a night it shattered the stupendous achievement of the Romans, which was to acquire the territory for a vast civilisation which could _bide its time._—Does no one understand this yet? The _imperium Romanum_ that we know, and which the history of the Roman province teaches us to know ever more thoroughly, this most admirable work of art on a grand scale, was the beginning, its construction was calculated _to prove_ its worth by millenniums,—unto this day nothing has ever again been built in this fashion, nor have men even dreamt since of building on this scale _sub specie aterni!_—This organisation was sufficiently firm to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personalities must have nothing to do with such matters—the _first_ principle of all great architecture. But it was not sufficiently firm to resist the _corruptest_ form of corruption, to resist the Christians....
These stealthy canker-worms, which under the shadow of night, mist and duplicity, insinuated themselves into the company of every individual, and proceeded to drain him of all seriousness for _real_ things, of all his instinct for _realities;_ this cowardly, effeminate and sugary gang have step by step alienated all “souls” from this colossal edifice,—those valuable, virile and noble natures who felt that the cause of Rome was their own personal cause, their own personal seriousness, their own personal _pride._ The stealth of the bigot, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the _unto mystica_ in the drinking of blood, above all the slowly kindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge—such things became master of Rome, the same kind of religion on the pre-existent form of which Epicurus had waged war. One has only to read Lucretius in order to understand what Epicurus combated, _not_ Paganism, but “Christianity,” that is to say the corruption of souls through the concept of guilt, through the concept of punishment and immortality. He combated the _subterranean_ cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was at that time a genuine _deliverance._—And Epicurus had triumphed, every respectable thinker in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean: _then St Paul appeared_ ...
St Paul, the Chandala hatred against Rome, against “the world,” the Jew, the eternal Jew _par excellence,_ become flesh and genius. ... What he divined was, how, by the help of the small sectarian Christian movement, independent of Judaism, a universal conflagration could be kindled; how, with the symbol of the “God on the Cross,” everything submerged, everything secretly insurrectionary, the whole offspring of anarchical intrigues could be gathered together to constitute an enormous power. “For salvation is of the Jews.”—Christianity is the formula for the supersession, _and_ epitomising of all kinds of subterranean cults, that of Osiris, of the Great Mother, of Mithras for example: St Paul’s genius consisted in his discovery of this. In this matter his instinct was so certain, that, regardless of doing violence to truth, he laid the ideas by means of which those Chandala religions fascinated, upon the very lips of the “Saviour” he had invented, and not only upon his lips,—that he _made_ out of him something which even a Mithras priest could understand.... This was his moment of Damascus: he saw that he had _need of_ the belief in immortality in order to depreciate “the world,” that the notion of “hell” would become master of Rome, that with a “Beyond” _this life_ can be killed. ... Nihilist and Christian,—they rhyme in German, and they do not only rhyme.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.