Earthly infirmities and their main cause. If we look about us, we are always coming across men who have eaten eggs all their lives without observing that the oblong-shaped taste the best; who do not know that a thunder-storm is beneficial to the stomach; that perfumes are most fragrant in cold, clear air; that our sense of taste varies in different parts of our mouths; that every meal at which we talk well or listen well does harm to the digestion. If we are not satisfied with these examples of defective powers of observation, we shall concede all the more readily that the everyday matters are very imperfectly seen and rarely observed by the majority. Is this a matter of indifference? – Let us remember, after all, that from this defect are derived nearly all the bodily and spiritual infirmities of the individual. Ignorance of what is good and bad for us, in the arrangement of our mode of life, the division of our day, the selection of our friends and the time we devote to them, in business and leisure, commanding and obeying, our feeling for nature and for art, our eating, sleeping, and meditation; ignorance and lack of keen perceptions in the smallest and most ordinary details – this it is that makes the world ‘a vale of tears’ for so many. Let us not say that here as everywhere the fault lies with human unreason. Of reason there is enough and to spare, but it is wrongly directed and artificially diverted from these little intimate things. Priests and teachers, and the sublime ambition of all idealists, coarser and subtler, din it even into the child’s ears that the means of serving mankind at large depend upon altogether different things – upon the salvation of the soul, the service of the State, the advancement of science, or even upon social position and property; whereas the needs of the individual, his requirements great and small during the twenty-four hours of the day, are quite paltry or indifferent.
Even Socrates attacked with all his might this arrogant neglect of the human for the benefit of humanity, and loved to indicate by a quotation from Homer the true sphere and conception of all anxiety and reflection: ‘All that really matters,’ he said, ‘is the good and evil hap I find at home.’ Nietzsche
Nietzsche calls the world „a vale of tears” for those with a keen eye for small things, and lays the blame not on unreason but on a reason artificially diverted from these little intimate matters toward something else — the soul’s salvation, the service of the State, science, even wealth. There is a true kernel here that can’t be dismissed simply because it comes from him: the Fathers said the same about virtue — that it is not won in the grand gesture but in faithfulness to the small („he who is faithful in very little is faithful also in much,” Luke 16:10). An elder is judged not by his sermons but by how he washes a dish.
But this is exactly where the roads part. Nietzsche’s „home” — the one Socrates quotes from Homer, „all that really matters is the good and evil hap I find at home” — remains a horizontal, self-enclosed home: the individual’s contentment, with no orientation beyond itself. It is a vale of tears the person endures alone, eyes turned downward toward his own small things.
The Psalmist knows the same valley but says something else about it: „Blessed is the man… passing through the vale of weeping, he shall make it a well” (Ps. 83:6-7 LXX). The small things are not the problem, nor is attention given to them — the problem is the direction of the heart that crosses them. The one who has „ascents in his heart” (same verse) turns the valley into a spring not by avoiding it, nor by sinking deeper into it for himself, but by climbing through it. This is exactly the distinction Nietzsche cannot make, because he has already excluded any „ascent” as a suspect „sublime ambition.”
The prodigal son offers the same image, turned inside out: „coming to himself” (Luke 15:17) — the Homeric nostos, the return home, but not to the satisfaction of his hunger (which he could have found even among the swine), but to repentance. The patristic „home” is not the domestic sphere of needs, but the heart — the place where, the Lord says, „the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Attention to the small thing is not wrong in Nietzsche; it simply stops halfway, because it has nowhere to ascend to.
Aristotle offers a philosophical bridge to the same place: phronesis, practical wisdom, is exercised not upon universals but upon the particular (kath’ hekaston) — exactly the terrain Nietzsche says idealists despise. But in Aristotle the particular is seen in the light of the good toward which all life tends (eudaimonia), not in isolation from it. Nietzsche wants the particular without télos; from this, inevitably, follows a valley without a spring.
Contemporary psychology has rediscovered, on its own, half of Nietzsche’s intuition: research on „micro-moments” (Fredrickson) shows that well-being comes not from great achievements but from the density of small, daily experiences. His insight is partly confirmed empirically. But Evagrius already demanded much more than hedonic attention to the small thing: he demanded nepsis — watchfulness over the smallest thought (logismos) — not so that the small thing would bring pleasure, but so that nothing, however small, would go unseen by God.
This is why, in the Gospel, Nietzsche’s distinction — small-intimate versus sublime-abstract — simply does not hold: a cup of cold water given „to one of these little ones” (Matt. 10:42) carries the same weight as the kingdom; a sparrow sold for nothing does not fall without the Father’s will (Matt. 10:29); a widow’s two mites outweigh all the offerings of the rich (Luke 21:1-4). There is no need to choose between attending to what is small and reaching toward what is great, because in Christ the small is the place of the great — not its opposite.
The vale of tears remains the same valley for both Nietzsche and the Psalmist. What differs is only what you do with your keen eye as you cross it: lower it toward yourself, or lift it — and only then, without ceasing to be small, does the valley become a spring.
