The Twilight of the Idols: How to Philosophize with the Hammer by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, novel, book, bestseller, top10, interactive media, urban romantics
Publisher: The Big Nest
Published: 2019-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

—Only we spirits that have become free, possess the necessary condition for understanding something which nineteen centuries have misunderstood,—that honesty which has become an instinct and a passion in us, and which wages war upon the “holy lie” with even more vigour than upon every other lie.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our beneficent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the mind, which, alone, renders the solution of such strange and subtle things possible: at all times, with shameless egoism, all that people sought was their own advantage in these matters, the Church was built up out of contradiction to the gospel....

Whoever might seek for signs pointing to the guiding fingers of an ironical deity behind the great comedy of existence, would find no small argument in the huge note of interrogation that is called Christianity. The fact that mankind is on its knees before the reverse of that which formed the origin, the meaning and the rights of the gospel; the fact that, in the idea “Church,” precisely that is pronounced holy which the “messenger of glad tidings” regarded as beneath him, as behind him—one might seek in vain for a more egregious example of world-historic irony—-

37

—Our age is proud of its historical sense: how could it allow itself to be convinced of the nonsensical idea that at the beginning Christianity consisted only of the clumsy fable of the thaumaturgist and of the Saviour, and that all its spiritual and symbolic side was only developed later? On the contrary: the history of Christianity—from the death on the cross onwards—is the history of a gradual and ever coarser misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity over ever larger and ruder masses, who were ever less able to grasp its first principles, the need of vulgarising and barbarising it increased proportionately—it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, as well as the nonsense of every kind of morbid reasoning. The fatal feature of Christianity lies in the necessary fact that its faith had to become as morbid, base and vulgar as the needs to which it had to minister were morbid, base and vulgar. Morbid barbarism at last braces itself together for power in the form of the Church—the Church, this deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of the soul, to all discipline of the mind, to all frank and kindly humanity.—Christian and noble values: only we spirits who have become free have re-established this contrast in values which is the greatest that has ever existed on earth!—

38

—I cannot, at this point, stifle a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—the contempt of man. And in order that I may leave you in no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: I declare that it is the man of to-day, the man with whom I am fatally contemporaneous. The man of to-day, I am asphyxiated by his foul breath.

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