Lecture XIX (Nr. 0233)
Facs
Transcript
[229] tradition---language, life forms, everything. If a means this, then there are no philosophers any more in the Western world, after the victory of Christianity, who are not Christian philosophers---and I would mention him who perhaps most passionately attacked Christianity, namely b: he is a Christian philosopher in the sense that his attempt to be c doesn't make him pagan at all, but makes him a philosopher of resentment against Christianity. And this is "d" with a negative sign before his name ("---Christian"). But whether anti-Christian or Christian in one's intention---and certainly e was anti-CHristian [sic.] in his intention; one of his important books has the title Anti-Christ---whether this way or that way, he cannot escape the foundation of Christianity. The renewed Greek attitude which he pronounces in the name of fwould never have been expressed by any Greek philosopher or any Greek tragedist or any Greek prophet. It is Greek in terms of anti-Christian polemics, and that means it is dependent on Christianity. And that we can follow through, in the whole modern world, and it is especially easy in the most successful system of anti-Christian atheism--g---which, as Archbishop h once said, is a Christian heresy. i is a relapse, an apostasy, to j, but the paganism of Nazism is equally not genuine at all, as k anti-Christianity is not genuine Greek thinking at all. Communism, however, is based on the Jewish-Christian prophetic tradition of the coming of the kingdom of God in history. And the distortion of it is what Temple called "Christian heresy." The immanentistic distortion of it cannot hide the fact that even