Second Mencken Chrestomathy (72 page)

Christianity has waged a war to the death against this
higher
type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of
antagonism
to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.…

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it
prefers
, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity” would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for
power
: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of
décadence
, of
nihilism
, now prevail under the holiest names.

Christianity is called the religion of
pity.
—Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. This depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of
protector
of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of
décadence
—pity persuades to extinction.… Of course, one doesn’t say “extinction,” one says “the other world,” or “God,” or “the
true
life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.… This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a
good deal less innocent
when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to
destroy life
.… Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors
here
, to be unmerciful
here
, to wield the knife
here
—all this is
our
business, all this is
our
sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers.

The poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as “idealists”—among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion.… The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (—and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against “understanding,” “the senses,” “honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such things as
beneath
him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which “the soul” soars as a pure thing-in-itself—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word,
holiness
, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices.… The pure soul is a pure lie.… So long as the priest, that
professional
denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a
higher
variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What
is
truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.…

The Christian concept of a god—the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God degenerated into the
contradiction
of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!…

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in
nothingness
—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future, is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning:
this
is now the “meaning” of life.

Christianity also stands in opposition to all
intellectual
well-being,—sick reasoning is the only sort that it
can
use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the
superbia
of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of “faith”
must
be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge
must
be banned by the church as
forbidden
ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start.… “Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud
because
he is sick: his instinct
demands
that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. “Whatever makes for illness is
good
; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is
evil
”: so argues the believer.

The whole labor of the ancient world gone for naught. To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the
methods
of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably—that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road—the
sense of fact
, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! Every
essential
to the beginning of the work was ready—and the
most
essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves—for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies—that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole
integrity
of knowledge—all these things were already there, and
had been there for 2,000 years!
All gone for naught!
Overnight it became merely a memory!

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; 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!

—With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I
condemn
Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it
creates
distress to make
itself
immortal.… For example, the worm of sin; it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!—The “equality of souls before God”—this fraud, this
pretext
for the
rancunes
of all the base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order—this is
Christian
dynamite.… The “humanitarian” blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of
humanitas
a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarianism” of Christianity! Parasitism as the
only
practise of the church; with its anaemic and “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect,
kindness
of soul—
against life itself
.…

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and
small
enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.

From the
Nation
, Dec. 5, 1923, pp. 647–48

A
SK A
professional critic to write about himself and you simply ask him to do what he does every day in the practise of his art and mystery. There is, indeed, no criticism that is not a confidence, and there is no confidence that is not self-revelation. When I denounce a book with mocking and contumely, and fall upon the poor author in the brutal, Asiatic manner of a drunken longshoreman, a Ku Kluxer, or a midshipman at Annapolis, I am only saying, in the trade cant, that the fellow disgusts me—that his ideas and his manner are somehow obnoxious to me, as those of a Methodist, a golf player, or a clog dancer are obnoxious to me—in brief, that I hold myself to be a great deal better than he is and am eager to say so. And when, on the other hand, I praise a book in high, astounding terms, and speak of the author as if his life and sufferings were of capital importance to the world, then I am merely saying that I detect something in him, of prejudice, tradition, habit of mind, that is much like something within myself, and that my own life and sufferings are of the utmost importance to me. That is all there ever is in criticism, once it gets beyond cataloguing. No matter how artfully the critic may try to be impersonal and scientific, he is bound to give himself away.