Nietzsche and Rome

It has been years since I engaged with Nietzsche’s argument in The Antichrist that Christianity was the “vampire” of the Roman Empire which I see mindlessly repeated by e-pagans.

“Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum, — overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better, — this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of! — This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things — the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption — against Christians ….

These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality — this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge — all that sort of thing became master of Rome …”

It is a nice rhetorical flourish.

In retrospect, I now see why so many people in the community bought into it because of their addiction to conspiracy theories and reflexive tendency to blame the Jews for everything in history. This is why they selectively borrow from Nietzsche. They love that Nietzsche blamed the Jews for creating Christianity to turn the world upside down because the theory gives them an opportunity to bash Jews and Christians. They are much quieter about the fact that Nietzsche was a degenerate philo-Semite.

Here are ten reasons why you shouldn’t believe this nonsense:

1. First, the Roman Empire was overrun by the same barbarians in the Crisis of the Third Century and nearly collapsed then from the forces which weakened it and ultimately brought it down which included terrible leadership, division, incessant civil wars and the Plague. The Persians were a persistent threat in the East and Rome’s Germanic neighbors were becoming more organized over time. This wouldn’t have changed in an alternate timeline in which Rome remained pagan.

2. Second, it was Diocletian who divided the Roman Empire, created the unstable Tetrarchy and who began the process of shifting power to the East by ruling from Nicomedia. If Constantine had died at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Maxentius had won and Rome had stayed pagan, the Roman Empire would have still retained this unstable structure which fueled usurpers and civil wars. The fall of Britain to the Anglo-Saxons is easy to explain. It happened because the usurper Constantine III left Britain for Gaul with all of his troops only to die on the continent and leave the island defenseless.

3. Third, the major challenges of the 5th and 6th centuries which brought down the Western Empire would have happened anyway. The Plague of Justinian would have still killed millions. The Huns would have still swept across the steppe and pushed more organized Germanic groups to the west.

4. Fourth, the Late Roman Empire still produced excellent generals like Constantine, Stilicho, Flavius Aetius, Majorian and Belisarius. It also produced terrible emperors like Honorius who had Stilicho executed or Valentinian III who murdered Aetius. Rome had produced terrible emperors when it was pagan like Caligula and Nero which would have continued had it not converted to Christianity.

5. Fifth, the Germanic barbarians who overran the Western Roman Empire were also mostly Christians like the Goths, the Vandals, the Franks and the Burgundians. It is also worth nothing that the weak Christian Romans defeated the Huns who were stopped in the East by the Theodosian walls around Constantinople and in the West by Flavius Aetius and Theodoric I at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The Huns had conquered the pagan tribes of Germanic Europe.

6. Sixth, the weakness of wormlike Christian Romans hobbled by Jewish slave morality is wildly overstated. After all, Julian the Apostate’s grievance was that his entire family had been brutally murdered by his uncle Constantius II. Also, it was the poor, un-Christian treatment of the Goths that led to their explosive uprising against the Romans and the death of Valens at the Battle of Adrianople. Oddly enough, both Valens and the Visigoths were Arian Christians.

7. Seventh, the weak Romans succeeded in reconquering the Vandals in Africa, the Ostrogoths in Italy and southern Spain from the Visigoths. It was the Gothic War which destroyed Italy. There was really never a time when the Romans ceased to be warlike or martial because of Christianity. Had it not been for the Plague of Justinian and a global climatic disaster caused by volcanic eruptions, Belisarius would have likely succeeded in reconquering and restoring most of the Western Empire.

8. Eighth, the Eastern Roman Empire survived for another thousand years and never developed into anything like a Western liberal democracy. Quite the opposite. We have already seen how Justinian had tens of thousands of people slaughtered in the Hippodrome. The allegedly weak Byzantines spent centuries torturing people in their dungeons. They were soft only in the sense that they preferred to mutilate their victims by blinding them instead of killing them outright.

9. Ninth, the Great Pagan Hope Julian the Apostate was pro-Jewish and attempted to rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem. He died a strange death fighting the Persians. Julian had consulted his priests who after deciphering the entrails of animals warned him not to engage in battle that day with the Persians. He did it anyway. It is hard to see how paganism could have saved Rome when even Julian, the most pious of pagan emperors, didn’t take it all too seriously.

10. Finally, it was pagan Rome where Caligula had the Roman aristocracy working as prostitutes in the brothel that he established in the Imperial Palace, which as far as I am aware is the lowest it ever sunk in over 2,000 years. Feel free to correct me if anything like that ever happened in Byzantine history.

Note: War and imperialism didn’t spread liberalism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It wasn’t a problem at the time.