We are speaking about what we know of Christianity. Turn to the commencement of Christian doctrine in the Gospels and we find a teaching which plainly excludes the external worship of God, condemning it; and which, with special clearness, positively repudiates mastership. But from the time of Christ onward we find a deviation from these principles laid down by Christ. This deviation begins from the times of the Apostles and especially from that hankerer after mastership Paul.
And the farther Christianity goes the more it deviates, and the more it adopts the methods of external worship and mastership which Christ had so definitely condemned. But in the early times of Christianity the conception of a Church was only employed to refer to all those who shared the beliefs which I consider true.
That conception of the Church is quite correct if it does not include those that make a verbal expression of religion instead of its expression in the whole of life for religion cannot be expressed in words.
The idea of a true Church was also used as an argument against dissenters. But till the time of the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, the Church was only an idea.
Since the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea the Church becomes a reality, and a fraudulent reality, that fraud of metropolitans with
relics, and priests with the eucharist, Iberian Mothers of God, [2] synods, etc., which so astonish and horrify us, and which are so odious that they cannot be explained merely by the avarice of those that perpetuate them. The fraud is ancient, and was not begun merely for the profit of private individuals. No one would be such a monster of iniquity as to be the first to perpetrate it, if that were the only reason.
The reasons which caused the thing to be done were evil: ” By their fruits ye shall know them.” The root was evil hatred, pride, enmity against Arius and others; and another yet greater evil, the alliance of Christianity with power.
Power, personified in the Emperor Constantine, who, in the heathen conception of things, stood at the summit of human greatness (he was enrolled among the gods), accepts Christianity, gives an example to all the people, converts the people, lends a helping hand against the heretics, and by means of the Ecumenical Council establishes the one true Christian religion.
The Catholic Christian religion was established for all time. It was so natural to yield to this deception that, to the present day, there are people who believe in the saving efficacy of that assembly. Yet that was the moment when a majority of Christians abandoned their religion. At that turning the great majority of Christians entered the heathen path, which they have followed ever since. Charlemagne and Vladimir [3] continued in the same direction.
And the Church fraud continues till now. The fraud consists in this : that the conversion of the powers-that-be to Christianity is necessary for those that understand the letter, but not the spirit, of Christianity; but the acceptance of Christianity without the abandonment of power is a satire on, and a perversion of, Christianity.
The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.
After fifteen hundred years of this blasphemous alliance of pseudo-Christianity with the State, it needs a strong effort to free oneself from all the complex sophistries by which, always and everywhere (to please the authorities), the sanctity and righteousness of State-power, and the possibility of its being Christian, has been pleaded.
In truth, the words a ” Christian State ” resemble the words ” hot ice.” The thing is either not a State using violence, or it is not Christian.
In order to understand this clearly we must forget all those fantastic notions in which we have been carefully brought up, and must ask plainly, what is the purpose of such historical and juridical science as has been taught us ? Such sciences have no sound basis; their purpose is merely to supply a vindication for the use of violence.
Omitting the history of the Persians, the Medes, etc., let us take the history of
that government which first formed an alliance with Christianity.
A robbers’ nest existed at Rome. It grew by robbery, violence, murders, and it subdued nations. These robbers and their descendants, led by their chieftains (whom they sometimes called Caesar, sometimes Augustus), robbed and tormented nations to satisfy their desires. One of the descendants of these robber-chiefs, Constantine (a reader of books and a man satiated by an evil life), preferred certain Christian dogmas to those of the old creeds : instead of offering human sacrifices he preferred the mass; instead of the worship of Apollo, Venus, and Zeus, he preferred that of a single God with a son Christ. So he decreed that this religion should be introduced among those that were under his power.
No one said to him : ” The kings exercise authority among the nations, but among you it shall not be so. Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not lay up riches, judge not, condemn not, resist not him that is evil.”
But they said to him : ” You wish to be called a Christian and to continue to be the chieftain of the robbers, to kill, burn, fight, lust, execute, and live in luxury ? That can all be arranged.”
And they arranged a Christianity for him, and arranged it very smoothly, better even than could have been expected. They foresaw that, reading the Gospels, it might occur to him that all this (i.e. a Christian life) is demanded and not the building of temples or worshiping in them.
This they foresaw, and they carefully devised such a Christianity for him as would let him continue to live his old heathen life unembarrassed. On the one hand Christ, God’s Son, only came to bring salvation to him and to everybody. Christ having died, Constantine can live as he likes. More even than that, one may repent and swallow a little bit of bread and some wine, and that will bring salvation, and all will be forgiven.
But more even than that : they sanctify his robber-chieftainship, and say that it proceeds from God, and they anoint him with holy oil. And he, on his side, arranges for them the congress of priests that they wish for, and orders them to say what each man’s relation to God should be, and orders every one to repeat what they say.
And they all started repeating it, and were contented, and now this same religion has existed for fifteen hundred years, and other robber-chiefs have adopted it, and they have all been lubricated with holy oil, and they were all, all ordained by God. If any scoundrel robs every one and slays many people, they will oil him, and he will then be from God. In Russia, Catharine II., the adulteress who killed her husband, was from God; so, in France, was Napoleon.
To balance matters the priests are not only from God, but are almost gods, because the Holy Ghost sits inside them as well as inside the Pope, and in our
Synod with its commandant-officials.
And as soon as one of the anointed robber-chiefs wishes his own and another folk to begin slaying each other, the priests immediately prepare some holy water, sprinkle a cross (which Christ bore and on which he died because he repudiated such robbers), take the cross and bless the robber-chief in his work of slaughterng, hanging, and destroying. [4]
And it all might have been well if only they had been able to agree about it, and the anointed had not begun to call each other robbers, which is what they really are, and the people had not begun to listen to them and to cease to believe either in anointed people or in depositaries of the Holy Ghost, and had not learned from them to call them as they call each other, by their right names, i.e. robbers and deceivers.
But we have only spoken of the robbers incidentally, because it was they who led the deceivers astray. It is the deceivers, the pseudo-Christians, that we have to consider. They became such by their alliance with the robbers.
It could not be otherwise. They turned from the road when they consecrated the first ruler and assured him that he, by his power, could help religion the religion of humility, self-sacrifice, and the endurance of evil. All the history, not of the imaginary, but of the real, Church, i.e. of the priests under the sway of kings, is a series of useless efforts of these unfortunate priests to preserve the truth of the teaching while preaching it by falsehood, and while abandoning it in practice. The importance of the priesthood depends entirely on the teaching it wishes to spread; that teaching speaks of humility, self-sacrifice, love, poverty; but it is preached by violence and wrongdoing.
In order that the priesthood should have something to teach and that they should have disciples, they cannot get rid of the teaching. But in order to whitewash themselves and justify their immoral alliance with power, they have, by all the cunningest devices possible, to conceal the essence of the teaching, and for this purpose they have to shift the center of gravity from what is essential in the teaching to what is external. And this is what is done by the priesthood this is the source of the sham religion taught by the Church.
The source is the alliance of the priests (calling themselves the Church) with the powers-that-be, i.e. with violence. The source of their desire
