istianity. In me Christianity ... devours itself."

In truth, the present philippic is as necessary to the completeness of
the whole of Nietzsche's system as the keystone is to the arch. All the
curves of his speculation lead up to it. What he flung himself against,
from beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last
analysis, Christianity in some form or other--Christianity as a system
of practical ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as
metaphysics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth. It would be
difficult to think of any intellectual enterprise on his long list that
did not, more or less directly and clearly, relate itself to this master
enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostasy from the
faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert,
and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every
other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man. The will
to power was his answer to Christianity's affectation of humility and
self-sacrifice; eternal recurrence was his mocking criticism of
Christian optimism and millennialism; the superman was his candidate for
the place of the Christian ideal of the "good" man, prudently abased
before the throne of God. The things he chiefly argued for were
anti-Christian things--the abandonment of the purely moral view of life,
the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and
timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of
dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the
priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the
healthy, lordly "innocence" that was Greek. If he was anything in a
word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His
dreams were thoroughly Hellenic; his whole manner of thinking was
Hellenic; his peculiar errors were Hellenic no less. But his Hellenism,
I need not add, was anything but the pale neo-Platonism that has run
like a thread through the thinking of the Western world since the days
of the Christian Fathers. From Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us
must get, but his real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus
that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe--a view, to
wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic
representation. The God that Nietzsche imagined, in the end, was not far
from the God that such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines--a suprem