‘It is therefore false for the people of the world to say that the Antichrist leads the rebels. On the contrary; he leads those who wish for the status quo. Because his nature prevents it he cannot approach the sufferers as easily as he can approach the powerful. He who suffers is better equipped against evil than he who rules, gives orders and enjoys. The world is founded upon justice. This is the special cunning of the Antichrist, that he disguises himself in the mask of a rebel to prevent immediate recognition by his opponents, so that they seek him in the ranks of the rebels while he is actually raging and wreaking havoc among the ranks of the masters.
‘It is written that the righteous must suffer. It is true that all those who suffer are not necessarily righteous, but if one day I were given the mission of finding righteous men I would search for them in the endless ranks of the suffering. It is they who are first tasked with restoring justice in this world. And while they are striving to re-establish the justice that has been distorted by the Antichrist and his slaves, the tyrants, they must be placed under the suspicion that they are driven by the Antichrist. It is precisely by this that I recognize them as righteous. For their suffering is twofold. They suffer under the violence of the unjust and under the reproach of the just.’
‘But they won’t recognize God,’ I said, ‘and they claim that they themselves are gods.’
‘They must never have known God,’ replied the righteous man. ‘A human power had intervened between God and themselves, and just as the Antichrist first made tyrants of the masters before he led their victims to revolt, so he first made liars of the priests before he compelled the believers to deny God. Since the priests had blanketed God with lies, those who deny Him — or, as they call themselves, the godless ones — aren’t denying God but actually the false image that has been handed down to them.
‘Weren’t they told that God wanted murder, injustice, tyranny, gold and the whip? And, what is still worse, that he was, nevertheless, the God of Love? And didn’t the mediators of God cause the bells, the golden tongues of faith, to be rung to celebrate the hour at which the black jaws of cannon, the mouths of death, were opened?’
‘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.