Free The Antichrist by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk Page A

names. The one was called Revolution, and the other was called Human Reason.
    Yet there were many in this land who did not approve of one or the other or even both of these brooms.
    Some of these people could truly believe that the earth was now clean because they could see the earth.
    But as they could not see Heaven they mistrusted the broom that was called Human Reason.
    â€˜If you mistrust your own reason,’ the sweepers informed them, ‘it’s because you don’t have enough of it.’
    â€˜But maybe,’ replied the others, ‘you trust reason so much because you yourselves possess so little of it. And perhaps you have more than us, but it’s possible there exists something other than human reason, namely a divine reason. And your own superior reason is no better than our poor reason at recognizing this divine reason. You think you know, but we believe.’
    â€˜And even if you are right,’ replied the sweepers, ‘and even if there is really a divine reason that is superior to ours, we still cannot let it prevail any longer. For you must remember that our last oppressors appealed to this unknowable divine reason and that they oppressed us in its name.’
    â€˜We don’t deny that,’ answered the wiser among the faithful. ‘It was the sin of the oppressors that they brazenly proclaimed that they alone (and not us) could know the intentions of the divine will. And if they could really do so then it was a double sin tooppress us by appealing to this knowledge. For, as minimal as our knowledge is, yet all the faithful know this one thing, that God doesn’t want oppression. And we were also foolish when we believed that the powerful knew more about divine purposes than did we. That was our fault. We admit it.
    â€˜But at the very least you are guilty of denying something about which you are uncertain – is it there, or isn’t it there? Do you know, for example, from whence man comes and to whence he goes? Do you know what happened before your birth and what will happen after your death? Have you already spoken with someone who is dead or with someone not yet born?’
    The sweepers said: ‘Even if we could talk with those who aren’t yet born or those who have died, we wouldn’t do so. We have too much concern about the misery of the living. We don’t have as much time as you do. We follow the maxim:
Religion is the opium of the people.’
    â€˜Now,’ said the wiser among the faithful, ‘although you have no time we can wait. For we have time. We have until the end of time.’
    And the faithful went to pray.
    But they were not left in peace. It was remarkable that exactly those people who had said they had no time to speak with the dead, even if they could do so, still found time to disturb the faithful. They wrote above the image of the Madonna, which was set up before one of the gates of the broom-master’s palace, the phrase of their prophet:
Religion is the opium of the people.
    What a saying. Foolish like all sayings that have the strength to wheedle their way into the ears of men, as a popular song might. They are as far removed from wisdom as popular tunes are from real music. One could even turn this saying around, just as the verses of a hit song can be sung backwards without changing the musical sense. In this saying the words do not possess their originalmeaning but rather an applied one. It is the same with the sound of a popular song. One could turn the sense of the song into its opposite and it would sound just as flattering to the frivolous ear. One could, for example, say
Unbelief is the opium of the people;
or, if one wished,
Opium is the religion of the rich;
or perhaps
The rich are the opium of religion;
or maybe
Those in power are the opium of the people;
or, if one preferred,
The powerful
– and actually the powerful at any particular time and not religion –
are the opium of the