Of the ‘nation of thinkers’ (or Of bad thinking). The vague, vacill. ating, premonitory, elementary, intuitive elements – to choose obscure names for obscure things – that are attributed to the German nature would be, if they really still existed, a proof that our culture has remained several stages behind and is still surrounded by the spell and atmosphere of the Middle Ages. It is true that in this backwardness there are certain advantages: by these qualities the Germans (if, as has been said before, they still possess them) would possess the capacity, which other nations have now lost, for doing certain things and particularly for understanding certain things. Much undoubtedly is lost if the lack of sense – which is just the common factor in all those qualities – is lost. Here too, however, there are no losses without the highest compensatory gains, so that no reason is left for lamenting, granting that we do not, like children and gourmands, wish to enjoy at once the fruits of all seasons of the year. Nietzsche
Here Nietzsche names those qualities — vague, wavering, intuitive, premonitory — that his century attributed to “the German nature” as a medieval remnant, a sign of cultural backwardness. And yet he himself admits the paradox: this very “lack of clarity” conceals a capacity that other, clearer-minded nations have already lost — the capacity to understand certain things that escape ordered reason. Losing this vagueness would be a real loss, he says, but also a gain — for no one can taste, like a child or a glutton, the fruits of every season at once.
It is an honest observation from a thinker rarely honest toward Christianity: that there is a kind of knowledge which does not come by the path of syllogism, and that losing it — even through the advance of clarity — is not simply pure profit.
Here the Holy Fathers went far beyond what Nietzsche suspected. They always distinguished two kinds of “unclarity”: one fallen, a fog of the mind darkened by passions and sloth (the acedia Evagrius Ponticus writes of), and another — holy, the “cloud” into which Moses entered to see God (Exodus 20:21), the “darkness beyond light” of which Dionysius the Areopagite writes in the Mystical Theology. The first is poverty; the second is a richness the discursive mind (dianoia) cannot contain, but which the noetic power of the soul (nous) touches through purity and prayer.
Saint Isaac the Syrian says that when the mind passes beyond ordinary reasoning, it does not become more confused but simpler — and this simplicity appears “vague” only to one who judges everything by the rigor of fallen logic. Saint Gregory Palamas would later defend the same truth against Barlaam: that the uncreated light is not an illusion of darkened minds, but a vision that surpasses the categories of logic without contradicting them.
Nietzsche is right that one cannot have the fruits of every season at once — but Ecclesiastes had already said this long before: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). The impatience to possess everything at once — whether modern rational clarity or intuitive ecstasy — is itself a form of spiritual gluttony. The patient man receives the gifts in their order: first the purification of the mind through obedience to the commandment, then its clearing through humility, and only afterward — if God wills — the vision that surpasses every word.
Blessedness belongs not to the clearest mind, but to the pure heart: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). This is the only “clarity” that no age can ever surpass.
