„At the sight of certain antique sacrificial instruments – The fact of how many feelings are lost to us may be seen, for instance, in the mingling of the droll, even of the obscene, with the religious feeling. The sensation of the possibility of this mixture vanishes, we only comprehend historically that it existed in the feasts of Demeter and Dionysus, in the Christian Easter-plays and Mysteries. But we also know that which is noble in alliance with burlesque and such like, the touching mingled with the laughable, which perhaps a later age will not be able to understand.” — Nietzsche
What Nietzsche calls a loss, the Church has kept alive under another name: foolishness for Christ. St. Simeon of Emesa ate sausages in the public square on a fast day, dragged dogs by the tail through church, kicked out candles with his foot — and in secret healed the possessed and knew men’s thoughts before they spoke them. The mixture the philosopher believes lost forever, the saint carries on purpose, like a garment: the droll and the holy, the apparently obscene and perfect purity, do not alternate in him but coexist in the same instant, under the same face. It is not a curiosity of ancient times that we moderns merely „comprehend historically” — it is an economy the Church repeats in every generation precisely because man needs it. St. Paul had already named it: „we are fools for Christ’s sake” (1 Cor. 4:10), and earlier: „the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Cor. 1:25). The holy fool does not mix sacred and profane out of an inability to tell them apart, but out of perfect humility — refusing apparent dignity precisely so that glory will not cling to his face, guarding the mystery from his own vanity (kenodoxia, as Evagrius calls it, the first and most cunning of the passions, since it alone requires a witness).
Kierkegaard saw this threshold clearly, though from another side of it. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the humorist stands closer to the religious than any other figure of existence — closer than the ethical, closer than the aesthetic — because he alone sees clearly the contradiction at the heart of existence: that man is at once mortal flesh and eternal spirit, dust and the image of God. Genuine humor, Kierkegaard says, is not levity but faith’s incognito — a mask worn precisely because one has seen too deeply to speak of it directly. Whoever cannot laugh at this contradiction has not truly understood it yet; whoever laughs without having seen it has remained at the surface. What Nietzsche believes lost was, at its origin, exactly this incognito: an entire civilization knew how to carry the tear and the grin at once because it knew both were looking into the same abyss.
Why, then, did the sensation of this possible mixture vanish? Here psychology offers a precise name for a mechanism patristics had already described under another one. Melanie Klein described splitting as an archaic position of the psyche: the infant, unable yet to bear ambivalence — that the breast which feeds is the same breast that withholds — splits it into „the good breast” and „the bad breast,” holding them apart in order to survive the contradiction. Maturation means moving toward the depressive position: the capacity to hold love and hate, good and evil, together in the same representation, without tearing one from the other. What Nietzsche describes is exactly a collective regression into splitting: modern man can no longer hold the sacred and the droll within the same representation because he can no longer bear the ambivalence this requires — he has had to seal them into separate compartments, „serious” in one, „comic” in another, so as not to collapse under their combined weight. What the philosopher mourns as an aesthetic loss is, from within patristics, a symptom of philautia: the soul split by the passions no longer has the strength to carry the whole, and defends itself by fragmenting it.
This is why the face remains the answer, not the synthesis. St. Maximus says the passions did not enter man as new natures, but as a disorder of the same natural powers — and that healing is not the amputation of any one of them, but the reordering of all beneath a single center, the nous turned toward God. The holy fool is not an actor alternating masks, but a man whose face has been freed from the need to choose between tear and laughter, because both have been placed once more under the same obedience. Which is why the apostle’s word closes this better than any commentary could — the very thing Nietzsche only suspected had been lost: „as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10).
