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—Caesar
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; Liebnitz;
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. . . .