always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--_but
well paid_.... Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German
swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry
through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this
point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German
nobility stands _outside_ the history of the higher civilization: the
reason is obvious.... Christianity, alcohol--the two _great_ means of
corruption.... Intrinsically there should be no more choice between
Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The
decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here.
Either a man is a Chandala or he is not.... "War to the knife with Rome!
Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the
_act_, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors,
Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit,
before he can feel _decently_? I can't make out how a German could ever
feel _Christian_....

61.

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--it is _my_ question too--; 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 i