THE ANTICHRIST
By
Friedrich Nietzsche
Translation: H.L. Mencken
37.
--Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude it
self 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 it
self 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!. . . .