The Antichrist Read Online Free

something big small, something small big, the black white and the white black; shadows light and light shadows; the bright dull and the dull bright. Thus names and terms are devoid of content and meaning. It is worse than at the time of the Tower of Babel. Then, only tongues were confused and one man could not understand another, for each had different names for the same things. Now we all speak the same but false language, and all things have the same but false terms. It is as if we are building a horizontal Tower of Babel, but the blind, who are unable to recognize dimensions, believe it is vertical and growing ever higher; and they believe that everything is in order because they understand each other perfectly … whereas their comprehension of the proportion, form and colour of things is only that of the blind. That is to say, they apply terms that were originally applied correctly, and which fit the phenomena of this world, in a false and inverted sense; the towering is flat and the flat towering. For a blind man cannot distinguish between what is high and what is low. At the time of the Tower of Babel it wasonly people’s tongues and ears that were confused. A few of the builders could still understand each other by the language of the eyes, the mirrors of the soul, as they say. But now, people’s eyes are blinded (and tongues are just servants, while eyes are masters in the hierarchy of the human senses). How can people still hope that the Antichrist has not yet come? This faith and this hope are further evidence of our blindness. For just as one can convince a blind man that night is day and day is night, so can we, who have been blinded, make ourselves believe that the Antichrist is not in the world, that we are not burning in the fire of his eyes, that we are not standing in the shadow of his wings.
    But our blindness is worse than mere physical blindness of the type I have already described. For our blindness is one that can only be struck by the Antichrist, and that, as I said at the beginning, will be our doom before the end of time. It is a hellish blindness, for although we were blinded we think we can see. In truth, we are ‘blinded’ rather than ‘blind’. We do not recognize the Antichrist because he comes dressed as an average citizen, in the garb of a commoner in every land. According to the legendary image we have of him, he should have come with all the hellish accessories, with his traditional attributes: horn, tail and cloven hoof, stinking of pitch and sulphur, enveloped by all the theatrical traits our childish fantasies demand from a creature of his nature and origins. People do not like to think that someone who looks just like them can bring them to ruin. Our egotism requires certain formalities at the hour of our ultimate death. But the Antichrist tries to outsmart us. He comes in the everyday dress of a commoner, yes, equipped even with all the signs of the base piety of the middle class, his innocent-seeming greed and what he imagines to be sublime lovefor certain human ideals – for example, faithfulness until death, love for the fatherland, heroic readiness to sacrifice himself for the whole, chastity and virtue, reverence for the tradition of his fathers and of the past, dependence on the future and respect for the high-sounding parade of phrases with which the average European is accustomed, even bound, to live. In this innocent-seeming masquerade has the Antichrist recently arrived into the world. For centuries we had been expecting his appearance in a spectacular theatrical entrance. Now that he has come, however, not as a destroyer stinking of sulphur but sometimes even as a pious man cloaked in incense, crossing himself while greeting us, murmuring the Lord’s Prayer as he plays the stock exchange, praising human virtue (lowered to ‘bourgeois’ virtue) so he can destroy us, pretending to defend European culture with the very weapons with which