The communism of antiquity, 1
by Alain de Benoist
In The Antichrist, Nietzsche does not hesitate to affirm that:
What stood as aere perennius,[1] 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…
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 [2] – 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[3] in the drinking of blood, above all the slowly fanned flames of revenge, of Chandala revenge – that is what gained control over Rome, the same type of religion that Epicurus had already waged war against in its pre-existent form. You should read Lucretius to see what Epicurus had fought, not paganism but ‘Christianity’, I mean the corruption of the soul through the ideas of guilt, punishment, and immortality. – He fought the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity, – at that time, to deny immortality was nothing less than salvation.
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[1] A line from Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities.
[2] From the standpoint of eternity.
[3] Mystical union.