Nietzsche - Letters Towards the End

Turin, November 1888

to Georg Brandes


I've now told my own story with a cynicism that will become a part of world history.  The book is called Ecce Homo and is a completely ruthless attack on the Crucified One.  It ends with a stupefying burst of thunder and lightning against everything with the least taint of Christianity in it.  I am the foremost psychologist of Christianity and, as an old artillery man, can mount heavy cannon which none of its opponents even dreamed existed.  The whole thing is a prologue to the Revaluation of All Values, the work which lies finished before me.  I promise you that within two years we'll have the whole world quaking.  I am its undoing.

Can you guess who gets the worst of it in Ecce Homo?  Our friends the Germans!  I've told them terrible things.  It is on their conscience, for example, that they robbed the Renaissance, the last great period of western history, of its meaning.  They did this at a moment when Christian values (the values of decadence) had succumbed, when even in their greatest Churchmen certain rival instincts, life instincts, had prevailed.  To attack the Church, after all, meant trying to restore Christianity.  (Cesare Borgia as Pope - this would have been the true meaning of the Renaissance, its proper symbol.)

And you mustn't be angry to find yourself appearing in a decisive passage in the book (I've just written it) where I condemn my German friends' behavior toward me, the way they leave me completely in the lurch, whether it's my reputation or the meaning of my philosophy that's at stake.  You appear quite suddenly, enveloped in a nice little cloud of glory.

I believe every word you say about Dostoevsky, and yet he has given me my most precious psychological material.  I'm grateful to him in a very special way, much as he constantly offends my most basic instincts.  It's rather like how I feel about Pascal, whom I almost love for the countless things he has taught me.  He is the only logical Christian...



catalog