„The most unskilful teacher. In one man all his real virtues are implanted on the soil of his spirit of contradiction, in another on his incapacity to say ‘no’ – in other words, on his spirit of acquiescence. A third has made all his morality grow out of his pride as a solitary, a fourth from his strong social instinct. Now, supposing that the seeds of the virtues in these four cases, owing to mischance or unskilful teachers, were not sown on the soil of their nature, which provides them with the richest and most abundant mould, they would become weak, unsatisfactory men (devoid of morality. And who would have been the most unskilful of teachers, the evil genius of these men? The moral fanatic, who thinks that the good can only grow out of the good and on the soil of the good. Nietzsche”
In this fragment from Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche describes four kinds of men and four different soils out of which their virtues grow: one man builds all his good on the spirit of contradiction, another on his inability to say „no,” a third on the pride of solitude, a fourth on a strong social instinct. Had these seeds not been sown on each man’s own natural ground — the only soil able to truly nourish them — these men would have remained weak and unfinished. And the most unskilful of teachers, he says, is the moral fanatic: the one who believes the good can grow only out of the good, on a ground already recognized as such.
The observation is not new to anyone who has read the Parable of the Sower, yet it says something different. The Lord speaks of one kind of seed falling on different soils, some of which receive it and some of which do not (Matthew 13:3-8). Nietzsche speaks of something else: each man is himself a particular soil, and the same virtue must be sown differently in each, according to what is already there — or it will not take root. It is not an observation about the reception of the good, but about the very matter out of which the good grows. And here the Fathers had already gone deeper than the philosopher, many centuries before him.
Saint Maximus the Confessor distinguishes the working of nature according to nature (κατὰ φύσιν), against nature (παρὰ φύσιν), and above nature (ὑπὲρ φύσιν) — not as three different natures, but as three possible states of the same power of the soul. The irascible power (θυμός), for instance, is not evil in itself; only its use against nature is. The same force that in one man becomes sterile stubbornness can become, through grace, the confessor’s firmness before falsehood — the same power, its aim redirected. The man who cannot say „no” to anyone, left unguided, loses himself in the pleasure of pleasing everyone; but the same softness, sown rightly, becomes perfect obedience. The pride of being alone, untried in the furnace, remains the barren self-satisfaction of the ascetic puffed up by his own effort; sown rightly, it becomes the same ascetic’s silence that no longer seeks a witness. And the strong social instinct, left to itself, turns into flattery or the loss of self in the crowd; rightly directed, it becomes the mystery of the community, or the mystery of marriage as a „monastery of two,” which modern men have forgotten how to call by that name.
It is not, then, that grace despises nature and replaces it with another, but — after the old formula of the Fathers — that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. Each man carries his own logos, given by the Creator, and there is no single mold of virtue poured over all alike. Saint John Climacus states this plainly about spiritual guidance: a good physician does not give the same remedy to every patient, but according to each one’s constitution and illness; whoever applies a single prescription to every soul does not heal but kills under the guise of healing. This is the exact portrait of Nietzsche’s „moral fanatic” — the teacher who does not see the root before him, only the mold he wishes to impose, and who uproots as a weed the very thread from which, sown otherwise, virtue would have grown.
The Gospel is full of this „unfit” soil that the fanatic would have despised, and out of which Christ drew fruit a hundredfold. Zacchaeus’s cunning, once bent toward gain, becomes — unchanged in force, changed in aim — the zeal to repay fourfold whatever he had wrongly taken (Luke 19:8). The Samaritan woman’s thirst, accustomed to seeking someone else at every well, becomes thirst for the living water, and then the voice that calls an entire town (John 4). And Saul, whose murderous zeal was the very same power he would later carry as an apostle to the ends of the earth — Saint John Chrysostom says it plainly: he was not given another nature, only the same ardor, its face turned toward Christ. The most unskilful teacher would have rejected each of these as unusable material. The most skilful Teacher received them exactly as they were.
Modern psychology touches, from a poorer vantage, the same wound. A trait treated only as a defect and suppressed through moralizing does not vanish but hides and poisons itself from within — the same shadow already written of elsewhere. Contemporary character research often observes that vice and virtue are, most often, not different traits at all, but the same inclination seen at different degrees and with different orientation: unchecked stubbornness, measured, becomes steadfastness; withdrawal, called „unsociability,” received, becomes depth; compliance, despised as weakness, rightly directed, becomes true service. And the educator who does not receive the child as he is, but demands from the start that he resemble an abstract mold of the „good child,” does not grow a virtue but grows a mask — the false self already written of elsewhere, in place of the true one no one troubled to see and call by name.
Philosophy, too, is no stranger to Nietzsche’s observation, even where he carries it further than he should. Aristotle shows that virtue is built through habituation upon a given nature, and that its right measure (μεσότης) is not an abstract point but one calculated relative to ourselves — not the same weight for every scale. This is exactly what the moral fanatic Nietzsche has in view refuses to understand: for him the good has one single shape, and each man’s concrete nature is only an obstacle to be cleared away. But here the roads part. Nietzsche will go on, in his later writings, to say that good and evil themselves are nothing but masks of perspective, to be overcome. Patristic thought does not go there: each man’s unique nature is precisely the unrepeatable face through which the one Good — God Himself — chooses to show Himself differently in each, not proof that the Good is not one. Many roots, the same Light.
It is no accident that Saint Paul, the most skilful of teachers, confesses that he became all things to all men, that by all means he might save some (1 Corinthians 9:22) — not imposing one single form, but discerning, like a watchful sower, the soil of each. And the Lord Himself, who did not speak the same word in the same way to Zacchaeus and to the Samaritan woman, to Saul and to the thief on the cross, remains the most skilful of all teachers precisely because He never despises the field He finds, however crooked it may seem, but waits from it for the fruit a hundredfold (Matthew 13:23).
