n 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!--Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us!
_Futility_--that has always been the work of the Germans.--The
Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war
of "liberation"; the empire--every time a futile substitute for
something that once existed, for something _irrecoverable_.... These
Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness
in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea
and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused
everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience
all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that
Europe is sick of,--they also have on their conscience the uncleanest
variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and
indestructible--Protestantism.... If mankind never manages to get rid
of Christianity the _Germans_ will be to blame....

62.

--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