If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this that he regarded only inner facts as facts, as “truths,”—that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, material and historical, only as signs, as opportunities for parables. The concept “the Son of Man,” is not a concrete personality belonging to history, anything individual and isolated, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol divorced from the concept of time. The same is true, and in the highest degree, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “Kingdom of God,” of the “Kingdom of Heaven,” and of the “Sonship of God.” Nothing is more un-Christlike than the ecclesiastical crudity of a personal God, of a Kingdom of God that is coming, of a “Kingdom of Heaven” beyond, of a “Son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this, if I may be forgiven the expression, is as fitting as a square peg in a round hole—and oh! what a hole!—the gospels: a world-historic cynicism in the scorn of symbols.... But what is meant by the signs “Father” and “Son,” is of course obvious—not to everybody, I admit: with the word “Son,” entrance into the feeling of the general transfiguration of all things (beatitude) is expressed, with the word “Father,” this feeling itself the feeling of eternity and of perfection.—I blush to have to remind you of what the Church has done with this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of immaculate conception into the bargain?... But by so doing it defiled conception.——
The “Kingdom of Heaven” is a state of the heart—not something which exists “beyond this earth” or comes to you “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is lacking in the gospels. Death is not a bridge, not a means of access: it is absent because it belongs to quite a different and merely apparent world the only use of which is to furnish signs, similes. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—the “hour,” time in general, physical life and its crises do not exist for the messenger of “glad tidings.” ... The “Kingdom of God” is not some thing that is expected; it has no yesterday nor any day after to-morrow, it is not going to come in a “thousand years”—it is an experience of a human heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere....
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This “messenger of glad tidings” died as he lived and as he taught—not in order “to save mankind,” but in order to show how one ought to live. It was a mode of life that he bequeathed to mankind: his behaviour before his judges, his attitude towards his executioners, his accusers, and all kinds of calumny and scorn,—his demeanour on the cross. He offers no resistance; he does not defend his rights; he takes no step to ward off the most extreme consequences, he does more,—he provokes them. And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who treat him ill.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not to hold anyone responsible.... But to refrain from resisting even the evil one,—to love him....
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—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—-
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—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!—