37.
—Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it
delude itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker
and Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity—and that
everything spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the
contrary, the whole history of Christianity—from the death on the cross
onward—is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an
original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among
larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that
gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and
barbarous—it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the
subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the
absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate
of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as
vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to
administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as
the church—the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all
honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all
spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian values—noble
values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have re-established
this greatest of all antitheses in values!. . . .
