Accordingly, Christianity does not only preach Justice, but the _Love of
Mankind, Compassion, Charity, Reconciliation, Love of one's Enemies,
Patience, Humility, Renunciation, Faith, and Hope_. Indeed, it went even
further: it taught that the world was of evil and that we needed
deliverance; consequently it preached contempt of the world,
self-denial, chastity, the giving up of one's own will, that is to say,
turning away from life and its phantom-like pleasures; it taught further
the healing power of suffering, and that an instrument of torture is the
symbol of Christianity, I willingly admit that this serious and only
correct view of life had spread in other forms throughout Asia thousands
of years previously, independently of Christianity as it is still; but
this view of life was a new and tremendous revelation to European
humanity. For it is well known that the population of Europe consists of
Asiatic races who, driven out from their own country, wandered away, and
by degrees hit upon Europe: on their long wanderings they lost the
original religion of their homes, and with it the correct view of life;
and this is why they formed in another climate religions for themselves
which were somewhat crude; especially the worship of Odin, the Druidic
and the Greek religions, the metaphysical contents of which were small
and shallow. Meanwhile there developed among the Greeks a quite special,
one might say an instinctive, sense of beauty, possessed by them alone
of all the nations of the earth that have ever existed--a peculiar,
fine, and correct sense of beauty, so that in the mouths of their poets
and in the hands of their artists, their mythology took an exceptionally
beautiful and delightful form. On the other hand, the earnest, true, and
profound import of life was lost to the Greeks and Romans; they lived
like big children until Christianity came and brought them back to the
serious side of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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