The wooers of reality. He who realises at last how long and how thoroughly he has been befooled, embraces out of spite even the ugliest reality. So that in the long run of the world’s history the best men have always been wooers of reality, for the best have always been longest and most thoroughly deceived. Nietzsche
Nietzsche describes a movement many of us know from within: disappointment turning into a thirst for truth — but a thirst born of wound, not of love. The long-deceived man finally sees clearly the lie he lived in, and, wounded in his pride, embraces reality not because he loves it, but because he never wants to be fooled again. It is an embrace out of spite, not out of humility.
Here lies the difference from the patristic spirit. The Holy Fathers do not reject illusion out of a spirit of revenge, but out of humility and repentance. St. Isaac the Syrian teaches that God reveals to man the truth about himself gradually, with measure, like a physician who does not give the whole remedy at once, lest the sight of his own wretchedness cast him into despair. Truth, for the Fathers, is not a weapon against the world that deceived us, but a gentle light that heals us from within.
This is why “the best” in Nietzsche’s saying — the most deceived, and therefore the most awake to reality — are not necessarily the best in a spiritual sense. St. John Climacus teaches that true self-knowledge does not come from disillusionment, but from humble watchfulness over one’s own heart, day by day, without waiting for some betrayal to open one’s eyes. The one who knows himself through grace does not need to be fooled first in order to seek truth — he seeks it because he loves Christ, Who is the Truth (John 14:6), not because he is avenging himself on a lie.
And yet, in His mercy, God sometimes makes use of even our disappointments. The Preacher, having tasted all the vanity of the world, arrives at the same conclusion as Nietzsche’s man — that all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2) — but he does not stop there out of spite; he arrives at the fear of God and the keeping of His commandments (Eccl. 12:13). The difference is precisely this: where spite stops at the ugly reality and embraces it as revenge, humility passes beyond it, toward God, Who alone can turn even the ugliest reality into an occasion of salvation.
