Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

‘I’m older than you,’ said he. ‘I offer you this advice: never again speak as you did just now. In reality, there are other cares in your country, in mine, in all the countries where people live. There is a great outcry of the tormented of all races and within each race. To those who are poor and downtrodden, the colour of people’s skin is immaterial. He who has nothing to eat feels hungry. He who is beaten bleeds. The educated folk who say “We want to be masters in our own country” are actually already masters in their own countries. All they want to do is drive out of their countries those people who share the mastery with them. It is only the masters who come to these conferences; and we, who are sent here by the masters. There’s no point in getting too excited. Look at what happened to me. I was a soothsayer. I was never able to tell a lie. Only since I have been hired and paid to report the truth do I lie. And one day you also will act just as I do. Even if you refuse to lie, you will find your truths so disfigured that you would rather have lied yourself. Fare thee well!’ This he said and left me.

Then I went to the country where, so I had been told, there was no longer an outcry from the poor and downtrodden; people were concerned to let truth, justice and reason shine forth; gold, the metal of the Antichrist, had been conquered; and people had a natural respect for every single human life, and each was sacred.

So I came to the capital city of this land. It is an old town, a pretty, expansive city with many hundreds of old churches. If one looks down upon this city from a high vantage point one sees the green arches and cupolas scattered like giant jewels between flat and pointed roofs. Each century seems to have contributed to the making of this city’s jewels.

I visited many of these cupolas and the churches over which they vault their arches, and I saw that in many of the churches people no longer prayed and that the bells had been removed from the belfries and the crosses from the cupolas and from the walls inside.

‘We have placed God at a distance,’ I was told by a number of people. ‘Let others copy us if they please! We have, as you can see for yourself, not only abolished wealth, gold, the emperor and the executioner but swept Heaven clean of all the filth that had collected there during the course of history. Now the earth is clean and the sky is empty.’

And so the deed was done. They had taken up two brooms in their hands, one for sweeping the earth and one for sweeping the heavens. And they had even given the brooms names. The one was called Revolution, and the other was called Human Reason.

Yet there were many in this land who did not approve of one or the other or even both of these brooms.

Some of these people could truly believe that the earth was now clean because they could see the earth.

But as they could not see Heaven they mistrusted the broom that was called Human Reason.

‘If you mistrust your own reason,’ the sweepers informed them, ‘it’s because you don’t have enough of it.’

‘But maybe,’ replied the others, ‘you trust reason so much because you yourselves possess so little of it. And perhaps you have more than us, but it’s possible there exists something other than human reason, namely a divine reason. And your own superior reason is no better than our poor reason at recognizing this divine reason. You think you know, but we believe.’

‘And even if you are right,’ replied the sweepers, ‘and even if there is really a divine reason that is superior to ours, we still cannot let it prevail any longer. For you must remember that our last oppressors appealed to this unknowable divine reason and that they oppressed us in its name.’

‘We don’t deny that,’ answered the wiser among the faithful. ‘It was the sin of the oppressors that they brazenly proclaimed that they alone (and not us) could know the intentions of the divine will. And if they could really do so then it was a double sin to oppress us by appealing to this knowledge. For, as minimal as our knowledge is, yet all the faithful know this one thing, that God doesn’t want oppression. And we were also foolish when we believed that the powerful knew more about divine purposes than did we. That was our fault. We admit it.

‘But at the very least you are guilty of denying something about which you are uncertain — is it there, or isn’t it there? Do you know, for example, from whence man comes and to whence he goes? Do you know what happened before your birth and what will happen after your death? Have you already spoken with someone who is dead or with someone not yet born?’

The sweepers said: ‘Even if we could talk with those who aren’t yet born or those who have died, we wouldn’t do so. We have too much concern about the misery of the living. We don’t have as much time as you do. We follow the maxim: Religion is the opium of the people.’

‘Now,’ said the wiser among the faithful, ‘although you have no time we can wait. For we have time. We have until the end of time.’

And the faithful went to pray.

But they were not left in peace. It was remarkable that exactly those people who had said they had no time to speak with the dead, even if they could do so, still found time to disturb the faithful. They wrote above the image of the Madonna, which was set up before one of the gates of the broom-master’s palace, the phrase of their prophet: Religion is the opium of the people.

What a saying. Foolish like all sayings that have the strength to wheedle their way into the ears of men, as a popular song might. They are as far removed from wisdom as popular tunes are from real music. One could even turn this saying around, just as the verses of a hit song can be sung backwards without changing the musical sense. In this saying the words do not possess their original meaning but rather an applied one. It is the same with the sound of a popular song. One could turn the sense of the song into its opposite and it would sound just as flattering to the frivolous ear. One could, for example, say Unbelief is the opium of the people; or, if one wished, Opium is the religion of the rich; or perhaps The rich are the opium of religion; or maybe Those in power are the opium of the people; or, if one preferred, The powerful — and actually the powerful at any particular time and not religion — are the opium of the people. The words of a philosopher? Not a chance! It is the slogan of a parliamentarian!

This slogan was written above an image of the Madonna. But, regardless, many people prayed before this image each day. And it was as though they were asking the Mother of God for forgiveness for the slogan that had been placed over her image. And as there were no more rich people left in this country, those who came to kneel and pray before the Mother of God were poor. Poor by birth or had become so — whatever the reason, they were poor. And therefore — the people. The Mother of God was dignified in her apparent helplessness against the power of the catchphrase because she was visibly weak, and all that was left to her was the seemingly insignificant ability to attract those who were poor and mocked, in other words — the people! She promised nothing, she performed no miracles, she gave no speeches, she was mocked, and yet there were people who clung to her and allowed themselves to be persecuted for her sake.