Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

‘Above the statue of the Madonna,’ I said, ‘before which hundreds of people pray every day, they have placed the phrase: Religion is the opium of the people. What a saying!’

‘A lying and a stupid saying,’ said the righteous man. ‘However, is it worse than the motto that escapes from the mouths of our priests: Faith is honey for the people? It is the lying echo to this lying saying. People can’t shout lies into the world and expect the echo to shout back the truth.

‘So it is, my friend! The rotten fruit falls from the tree, the dry leaf withers, the dead spring dries up, the empty cloud delivers no rain, the gentle wind brings no storm, the empty heart is devoid of goodness, and a liar never speaks the truth. A steady throne won’t hold a weak emperor, the ruler who has become a slave of the Devil can no longer be a master, and the subject of this ruler is no longer a subject. A slave of the Devil can no longer rule. It is the lying mediator of God who denies Him and not the defrauded believer. It was God’s mediators whom the Antichrist first seduced. Then the godless ones came as a matter of course.

‘Even one who calls himself godless is not really without God. One who denies God by enveloping Him in lies is worse than one who simply calls himself godless. So if a man tells me that he does not believe in God, then I am sad for him. But if someone tells me that he believes in God but that injustice is justice, then I curse him.

‘Our people in this country,’ continued the righteous man, ‘deny the existence of God, but they don’t tell lies about Him. And it is, in truth, sinful to say that God doesn’t exist. It is more sinful — for sin, like hell, has countless gradations — to falsify God and defraud men with His falsified image. Therein lies the sin.’

I took leave of the righteous man and journeyed through the country.

And I saw that there had been built new houses, new monuments, new factories, new hospitals, new playhouses, new cinemas, new schools, high schools and colleges for older people who could not read or write.

People were working in the factories, people were living in the houses, people were healing and dying in the hospitals, people were acting in the theatres, people were teaching and learning in the schools.

Everywhere, even when it wasn’t in writing, I sensed the phrase that is just as foolish as the one that says religion is opium — namely, the saying: Education is power.

In this saying, too, the words do not have their original meaning but rather an applied one. One could say, if one desired: Power is education; or perhaps: Education is weakness; or, if one preferred: Power makes weak — or strong, depending on the situation.

After I had visited the righteous man I tried to see a little with his righteous eyes, and I realized that such foolish sayings were bound to come into being because those who had been powerful and also uneducated for so long believed that education, or this or that thing of which they had been deprived for that long, created and maintained the might of the mighty.

Whereas this phrase was actually false, if only because those in power are by no means educated; on the contrary, they are uneducated.

It is also childish for people to make education palatable by saying that it lends power.

It is similar to how children are foolishly promised sweets if they will be obedient and hardworking. They are led astray by the suggestion that obedience and hard work are not rewards in themselves but produce a reward for the tongue and palate, which have nothing to do with dutifulness and work.

Thus, because of this stupid motto, the people who were powerless for so long were led like children to believe that learning brings something other than the true reward, namely, an education.

It might, by the way, have been merely an idea of the Antichrist to persuade the people that they would obtain power.

Were it not an idea of the Antichrist the phrase would have gone something like this: Education makes us more just than we had been. For the world is built upon justice and not upon power. When the people, as if they were children, were promised the sweet poison of power, they began, with all the boundless enthusiasm that is only common to children, to absorb education. Since, however, the stuff of teaching and knowledge, which they call education, does not always contain the ultimate truth but only a temporary truth that may be contradicted or rendered obsolete at any second, the good people learned a mixture of truth and lies — and what they learned the most rapidly was to confuse one with the other.

For human knowledge is not divine truths but rather the pathways to reach these truths. Some are crooked, others are straight; some lead to the goal, others lead astray. When the real goal, namely truth and justice, is not expressly named but is alleged to be power, one cannot know whether he is travelling a straight path or a crooked one.

Therefore, the people in this country are going astray despite their diligent learning.

Those who could not read or write now read and write enthusiastically, day and night. Now it hardly matters whether a man can decipher or write letters, only what letters he deciphers or writes, and what meaning results. And if this yields a false or petty result, it is worse than if the people had not learned their letters at all. For in that case education is indeed not power (not even power) but only weakness and slavery. And the Antichrist leads people to learn their letters and promises them power only that the people grow even more powerless.

The people in this country are, however, very proud of all the knowledge that the human world has acquired so far. In this knowledge they see truth. And although they have learned that yesterday’s knowledge is contradicted by today’s, they still firmly believe in the knowledge of today — as though there were no tomorrow and no day after tomorrow. Therefore they have more respect for one of yesterday’s machines than for a truth that might emerge tomorrow or the next day.

Just as some peoples worship idols, knowing full well that these have been made of gold or wood by human hands, the people in this land worship machines, thus they too worship idols.

The people worship both the machine builders and the machines — just as the Children of Israel worshipped Aaron and yet danced around the golden calf that they had seen him create with their very eyes.

When people are taught that God does not exist, they will make themselves idols.

It is the same today as it was five thousand years ago. When Moses, who announced the God of the burning bush, disappeared for a forty-day period on the peak of Mount Sinai the Children of Israel demanded the golden calf.

If their St Elijah is taken away, they dance around a piece of scientific equipment.

And if they can no longer go about in processions, they will dance around a tractor.

I am far from wishing to disparage the tractor and praise the ox.

For, as I have already said at the beginning, the curse of God that we should plough the earth in the sweat of our brows was alleviated by the grace of reason, which allowed us to invent the tractor with which to plough the earth.

But we have as little reason to be proud of the tractor as we have to be proud of the ox. Perhaps there was a time in which fools worshipped the plough and its inventor. God gave us the ox and the plough as well as the tractor. He alone must we worship.

If, however, we regard His gifts and mercies as human merits and, worse still, as proofs against His existence, then this happens at the command of the Antichrist.

The scientific apparatus with which we can recreate thunder and lightning was also given to us by God, just as he gave us the actual thunder and lightning. For he gave us the power of reason through which the machine was invented.