To understand the deception of faith, it is necessary to go to its beginning and source.
We speak of what we know of Christianity. Turning to the beginning of the Christian teaching in the gospels, we find that the teaching directly excludes external divine worship, condemns it, and in particular clearly and positively denies authoritarianism. But since Christ’s time and nearer to our own times, we find a departure of the doctrine from these foundations, as laid down by Christ.
This departure began with the times of the apostles and especially with Paul, the lover of the authoritarian teaching, and the farther Christianity spread, the more and more it deviated, adopted those very methods of external divine worship, and became authoritarian, the negation of which is so positively expressed by Christ. But in the first times of Christianity, the conception of the church was used only as a representation of all those who shared the belief which I regard as the true one. The conception is quite correct, so long as it does not include the expression of belief in words, but means the expression of it in one’s whole life, since a belief cannot be expressed in words.
The concept of the true church was also used as an argument against dissenters. But previous to Emperor Constantine and the Nicene Council the church was only a concept. Since the time of Emperor Constantine and the Nicene Council the church has become an act – an act of deception. That deceptions of the archbishop with the relics, of the popes with the Eucharist, of the Iberian Virgin, of the Synods, and so forth, deceptions which, for their monstrousness, startle and frighten us so, began in nothing but the advantage of these persons. It is an old deception, and it did not begin with the advantages to individual persons merely.
There does not exist a man so execrable as to have the courage to do so, if he were the first and if there were no other causes. The causes that led to it were bad. “By their fruit you shall know them.” The beginning was evil: hatred, human pride, enmity against Arius and others. Another, a still greater evil, was the union of the Christians with the temporal power. The temporal power, Emperor Constantine, who according to the pagan conceptions stood upon the height of human greatness (he was counted among the gods), accepted Christianity, gave the whole nation an example, converted the people, and lent a helping hand against the heretics and by means of an ecumenical council established the one true Christian faith.
The Christian Catholic faith was established forever [when it was embraced by Constantine]. So natural it is to submit to this deception, and up to now people believe in the saving power of this event, whereas it was an event when the majority of Christians renounced their faith. Those were the crossroads, where the vast majority of Christians took the pagan road on which they continue to travel until the present time. Charlemagne and Vladimir did the same.
And the deception of the church is continued until the present, a deception that consists in thinking that the acceptance of Christianity by the temporal power is necessary for those who understand the letter and not the spirit of Christianity, because the acceptance of Christianity without the renunciation of power is a scoffing at Christianity and a corruption of it.
The sanctification of the power of the state by Christianity is a blasphemy, a ruin of Christianity. Having for fifteen hundred years lived under this blasphemous union of putative Christianity and the state, we have to make a great effort in order to forget all the complex sophisms by means of which the whole teaching of Christ has been everywhere distorted so as to please the temporal power and to make its peace with the state by trying to explain the sanctity of the state and its possibility of being Christian.
In reality, the words “Christian state” have the same logic as the words “warm, hot ice.” Either there is no state, or there is no Christianity. To understand this clearly, it is necessary to forget all those fancies in which we are carefully educated, and to ask directly for the meaning of those historical and juridical sciences that we are taught. These sciences have no foundations at all; they are all nothing but an apology for violence.
We shall pass by the histories of the Persians, Medes, and so forth, and shall take the history of the state that was the first to form a union with Christianity. There was a robbers’ den in Rome. It grew through rapine, violence, and murder, and it conquered the nations. The robbers and their descendants, with leaders such as Caesar Augustus at their head, robbed and tortured the nations for the gratification of their lusts.
One of the heirs of these robber leaders, Constantine, who had read a lot of books and had grown weary of his lustful life, preferred certain dogmas of Christianity to his former beliefs. He preferred the mass to the sacrificing of human victims, and the worship of the one God, with his Son Christ, to that of Apollo, Venus, and Zeus, and ordered this faith to be introduced among those whom he kept under his power.
“Kings rule over the nations, but it should not be thus among you. You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not have riches, you shall not judge, you shall not condemn, you shall suffer evil” – nobody told him all that. All he was told was, “Do you want to be called a Christian and to remain a leader of robbers – to beat, burn, wage war, fornicate, execute, and live in luxury? You may.”
And they arranged a counterfeit Christianity for him, and they arranged it pleasantly, better than could have been expected. They foresaw that, if he read the Gospel, he might come to see that all that was demanded in it was a Christian life, and not the building of temples and attendance in them. They foresaw this, and carefully arranged for him such a Christianity that he was able, without putting himself out, to live as of old, in pagan fashion. Indeed, Christ, the Son of God, came for the very purpose of redeeming him and everybody else. It was because Christ died that Constantine could live as he pleased. More than that, he could say words of repentance, swallow a piece of bread soaked in wine, that would be his salvation, and everything would be forgiven.
More than that, they even sanctified his robber’s power and said that it was from God, and anointed him with oil.
For this he, at their wish, arranged an assembly of the priests, commanded them to say what man’s relation to God should be, and commanded that every man should repeat this. They did repeat it and were satisfied, and so this faith has existed for fifteen hundred years. Other leaders of robber bands introduced it, and they were all anointed, and everything is from God. (In our country a murderess of her husband, a harlot, was from God, and in France Napoleon was from God.) And for this the priests are not only from God, but almost Gods themselves, because in them sits the Holy Ghost. And He sits also in the Pope, and in our Synod with its commanders, the officials.
When an anointed person, that is, the leader of a band of robbers, wants to strike down his own people or a foreign nation, the priests hurry to make some holy water for him, sprinkle the cross with it (the one on which Christ, having carried it, died for having denied these very robbers), and bless him in his killing, hanging, and chopping off of heads.
All would have been well, but they could not agree, and the anointed persons began to call one another robbers – which they really are. The people began to listen, stopped believing in the anointed persons and the guardians of the Holy Ghost, and learned from them to call them, as is proper and as they call themselves, robbers and cheats.
But I only mention the robbers in passing, because they have corrupted the cheats. What I have been speaking about is the cheats, the so-called Christians. They became such through their union with the robbers; nor could it have been otherwise. They lost the road the moment they sanctified the first king and assured him that he was able to aid the faith with his violence – the faith having to do with meekness, self-renunciation, and endurance of insults. The whole history of the church as we know it today, the history of the hierarchy under the power of the kings, is a series of vain endeavors on the part of this unfortunate hierarchy to preserve the truth of the teaching by preaching it through lies and departing from it in deeds. The meaning conveyed by the hierarchy is based
