Laudator Temporis Acti

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ § 58 (tr. Judith Norman):

Christians are perfectly identical with anarchists: their only goal, their only instinct is to destroy. Just look at history: it proves this proposition with gruesome clarity. We just learned about a form of religious legislation whose goal was to 'eternalize' the supreme condition for a thriving life, a great organization of society; Christianity, by contrast, saw its mission as bringing this sort of an organization to an end because it led to a thriving life. In this society, the returns of reason from the long ages of experiment and uncertainty should have been invested for the greatest long-term advantage, and the greatest, richest, most perfect crop possible should have been harvested: but quite the opposite happened here, the harvest was poisoned overnight ... What stood as aere perennius, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization ever to be achieved under difficult conditions, compared to which everything before or after has just been patched together, botched and dilettantish, — those holy anarchists made a 'piety' out of destroying 'the world', which is to say the imperium Romanum, until every stone was overturned, — until even the Germans and other thugs could rule over it ... The Christian and the anarchist: both are decadents, neither one can do anything except dissolve, poison, lay waste, bleed dry, both have instincts of mortal hatred against everything that stands, that stands tall, that has endurance, that promises life a future ... Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum, — overnight, it obliterated the Romans' tremendous deed of laying the ground for a great culture that had time. — You still don't understand? The imperium Romanum that we know, that we are coming to know better through the history of the Roman provinces, this most remarkable artwork in the great style was a beginning, its design was calculated to prove itself over the millennia, —, nothing like it has been built to this day, nobody has even dreamed of building on this scale, sub specie aeterni! — This organization was stable enough to hold up under bad emperors: the accident of personalities cannot make any difference with things like this, — first principle of all great architecture. But it was not stable enough to withstand the most corrupt type of corruption, to withstand Christians ... This secretive worm that crept up to every individual under the cover of night, fog, and ambiguity and sucked the seriousness for true things, the instinct for reality in general right out of every individual, this cowardly, feminine, saccharine group gradually alienated the 'souls' from that tremendous structure, — those valuable, those masculine-noble natures that saw Rome's business as their own business, their own seriousness, their own pride. The priggish creeping around, the conventicle secrecy, dismal ideas like hell, like the sacrifice of the innocent, like the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all the slowly fanned flames of revenge, of Chandala revenge — that is what gained control over Rome....