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.
Thunder and lightning, the blessings of rain and corn and fruit on the tree, the terror of hail, in short, life and death — these are given to us by the power that we call the Lord.
He also gives us understanding of how we may perfect His blessing and lighten His curse.
Instead of praising Him, we think that we see in the consequences of His mercy proof that He does not exist.
Thus, we are like the beggar and scrounger who was once given alms by a rich man, alms that later bore fruit so that he himself became rich. Then, however, he said: ‘The rich man didn’t give me anything. I alone have made myself rich.’
I know of no other kind of rich man.
In this country they strive to re-establish the worth of all people, without distinction. By this I recognized the reign of the Antichrist, even in this place where they value all people equally.
The worth of man, who was created in God’s image, cannot be established where it is regarded as strictly his own worth and not as a divine grace. They may build houses in this country as tall as those in America, and set up a new Hollywood, an Unholywood, where the salvation of actors is located, and a thousand new factories, and a thousand hospitals, a thousand schools small and large, yet they will not dwell easily in the houses, no shadows will find salvation, the products of the factories will have no excellence, those dying in the hospitals will not be cured and in the schools no scholars will become wise … without grace, without that which we call ‘grace’.
THE HOME OF THE SHADOWS
In the human face of today, nothing has grown; everything within has been drawn out or thrust out of the surface — and wonders that it still exists …
The transference to the mechanical sphere of that which is mobile, hurried, provisional, fleeting in the modern face — this is the cinematic face. The cinema could only be invented because of the modern face. Confronted with the monumentality of the human face as it used to be, the movements on the cinema screen would never have dared to combine together into a picture resembling a face. They would have separated and become dispersed before this monumentality.
I went to the country where the houses are built so high that they scrape the sky. They are, therefore, called skyscrapers.
The land is large and spacious but expensive. Because of this, they did not build one house next to another but one house over the other, for the air is still free there.
Thus the people prefer to scrape the sky rather than nestle close to the earth.
And through this their arrogance continues to grow.
In this country, when one has a yellow or black skin colour, he may not sit in the same room with a man whose colour is white.
In this country there are thousands of churches. But in these churches money is collected with the help of devotions. The people carry God in the mouth and speak of God as if he were a rich and distinguished uncle who raises one’s worth when one mentions that one is His nephew
Many people in this country are, in fact, not the Children of God but nephews of God — the nephew heirs of God.
The poor ask Him for money, and the rich ask Him for even more money.
And in this country God often acts as though He really were a wealthy uncle. To many of the poor He gives money, and to many of the rich He gives even more money.
He enlarges the chimneys of the factories and increases the alms of the beggars; and He often hardens hearts that are already hard and breaks those hearts that are soft; He gives to those who have while taking away from those who have not.
These are His special laws in this country. People’s worth is grounded in power. Liberty stands as a statue outside the gates; they have ejected her. And she has turned to stone.
I went to Hollywood, to Unholywood, to the place where hell rages, that is to say, where people are the doppelgänger of their own shadows. This is the source of all the shadows in the world, the Hades that sells its shadows for money, the shadows of both the living and of the dead who appear on all the screens of the world. The owners of usable shadows assemble here and sell them for money and are treated as holy ones or saints, as befits the importance of their shadows.