58.
In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great
difference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect
likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct,
points only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof
of this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just
studied a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the
conditions which cause life to flourish into an “eternal”
social organization,—Christianity found its mission in putting an end to
such an organization, because life flourished under it. There the
benefits that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and
insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to
bring in a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as
possible; here, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight.
. . .That which stood there aere perennis,
the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent
form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved,
and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork,
bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made it a matter
of “piety” to destroy “the world,”which is to say,
the imperium Romanum, so that in the
end not a stone stood upon another—and even Germans and other such
louts were able to become its masters. . . . The Christian and the anarchist:
both are decadents; both are incapable of any act that is not
disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have
an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is
great, and has durability, and promises life a future. . . . Christianity was
the vampire of the imperium Romanum,—
overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the
soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this
fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum
that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better
and better,—this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was
merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove
its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even
dreamed of!—This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the
accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—the first
principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong
enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of
corruption—against Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which under
the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual,
sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all
instinct for reality—this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated
gang gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that
colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble
natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own
serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy,
the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the
sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica
in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of
Chandala revenge—all that sort of thing became master of Rome: the same
kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has
but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon—not
paganism, but “Christianity,” which is to say, the corruption of
souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.—He
combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to
deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation.—Epicurus
had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean—when
Paul appeared. . . Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of “the
world,” in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal
Jew par excellence. . . . What he saw was how, with the aid of the
small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a “world
conflagration” might be kindled; how, with the symbol of “God on
the cross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues
in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. “Salvation
is of the Jews.”—Christianity is the formula for exceeding and
summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of
the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this
fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that,
with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination
to every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the “Saviour”
as his own inventions, and not only into the mouth—he made out
of him something that even a priest of Mithras could understand. . . This was
his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the
belief in immortality in order to rob “the world” of its value,
that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that the notion
of a “beyond” is the death of life. Nihilist and Christian:
they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme.