The Antichrist Read Online Free PDF Page B

distinguished from ancient people mainly by the fact that they have already introduced Hades, the realm of shadows, into the world. The Hades of modern man is Hollywood.

THUS INVENTION, A GIFT OF THE MIND, BECAME AN ELEMENT OF THE ANTICHRIST
    But it would be easy and foolish, as I have already clearly stated, to curse invention and the reason from which it is born. For the inventor has done nothing other than apply God’s gift of sense. If, however, one makes use of a divine gift and it then acquires an evil purpose, the evil element must have injected itself between the moment of invention and that of its application in real life. And just as gold, for example, should have been a gift of nature, a blessing of the earth, but has become an element of the Devil so, too, invention, a gift of reason, has become an element of the Antichrist. For the Antichrist becomes most clearly recognizable by the fact that he transforms what is essentially noble into something lowly. It is truly the nature of his existence and activity to desecrate the holy, to degrade the sublime, to pervert the true and to scar the beautiful. Not satisfied with his reign over what is in essence vulgar – for this is admittedly also a component of the earthly world – he seeks to extend his dominion over the noble. However, it could never fall under his power if it remained noble, so he first transforms it into something evil. He is like a dictator whose own land is a desert and who, in order to vanquish his flourishing neighbours, first turns those thriving places into wastes so that they are like his own. If he did not make them like his own, they
could not
be subservient to him.
    But he, the Antichrist, is therefore worse than such a tyrannical ruler because a dictator can be seen, heard, felt and hated, whereasthe Antichrist has the power to transform a thriving country into waste land and, in doing so, to dupe us into believing that the waste land is flourishing. And, when he destroys, we think he is creating. When he gives us a stone we believe he has given us bread. The poison from his glass tastes like the elixir of life. We think that he himself, the Prince of Darkness, is a son of both Heaven and earth; so long as we live, this seems to us more than being the son of Heaven alone. He enters thusly; he speaks thusly: ‘You were promised Heaven, but I give you the earth. You were supposed to believe in an unfathomable God, but I turn you yourselves into gods. You thought that Heaven was more than earth, but earth itself is really a heaven!’
    And since it is in our innate nature to yearn eternally to become God – because we never forget our origins and are reflections that are always searching for their prototype – we are seduced by the Antichrist. He can easily transform our most noble longings into lowly envy. For longing and jealousy are twin sisters, the one beautiful and the other ugly, who can nevertheless be mistaken for one another. It is inherent in our nature to want to be gods. The Antichrist, however, tells us we are already gods. And, as it is inherent in our imperfect nature that we grow tired and permit our senses to be tricked, he exploits our weaknesses and changes the milestones on our long path into goals. And we believe him. We are always searching, as long as we live, for our eternal home. But long before we have reached it we think that we are already there, thanks to the tricks of the Antichrist. And because our feet become weary, we believe him. Our home is still infinitely far away. But by no means do we go towards it. We halt by the wayside. We remain in the desert and imagine that we have reached our eternal home.
    When a poor man tires of his poverty, how soon he stops fighting it and begins to see it as wealth! A prisoner who is serving outa life sentence in gaol believes after ten years of solitary confinement that the prison yard is actually freedom. And thus we, who can separate our shadows