Moreover, the methodical search for truth is itself the outcome of those ages in which convictions were at war with each other. If the individual had not cared about his “truth”, that is to say, about carrying his point, there would have been no method of investigation; thus, however, by the eternal struggle of the claims of different individuals to absolute truth, people went on step by step to find irrefragable principles according to which the rights of the claims could be tested and the dispute settled. At first people decided according to authorities; later on they criticised one another’s ways and means of finding the presumed truth; in the interval there was a period when people deduced the consequences of the adverse theory, and perhaps found them to be productive of injury and unhappiness; from which it was then to be inferred by every one that the conviction of the adversary involved an error. The personal struggle of the thinker at last so sharpened his methods that real truths could be discovered, and the mistakes of former methods exposed before the eyes of all. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The aphorism says something few minds see clearly: that truth was not first sought with method and then defended with passion, but the reverse — the passion to be right gave birth to method. Man wanted to carry his point, and the inability to carry it by sheer force compelled him to find ways of proof that would hold before another as well. Nietzsche describes four stages: authority, the criticism of ways, the weighing of consequences, the sharpening of methods. Whoever knows the history of the Church recognizes the same ladder at once. Only it is not the ladder by which truth ascends, but the ladder by which the seeker is purified.
The Heresy That Gave a Boundary
“For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you” (1 Corinthians 11:19). The Apostle does not praise heresy; he shows only that its work, willing or not, brings to light what had until then been believed in silence. The Creed was not drafted by a circle of dispassionate thinkers: every word of it bears the scar of a battle. “Of one essence with the Father” was written because Arius asked; “Theotokos” was confessed because Nestorius denied; “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” was spoken because some confused and others divided. The faith was not otherwise before; but before, it had not been forced to find its boundaries.
The four stages of the aphorism can be found there one by one. First, authority: “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all,” in the words of St. Vincent of Lérins — Scripture and Tradition as the measure standing before every individual. Then the criticism of ways: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) and “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1) — not only what someone says, but by what road he arrived at what he says. Then the deduction of the consequences of the adverse theory, which Nietzsche names as a stage of the dispute, and which the Holy Fathers practiced with unsurpassed rigor. St. Athanasius asks: if the Son were a creature, how could He deify the creature? St. Gregory the Theologian, against Apollinarius, who took from Christ a human mind: “what is not assumed is not healed.” This is precisely the “injury” of the aphorism, only its root is salvation, not happiness: a teaching is shown false when, carried to its end, it leaves some part of man unsaved. And “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16) supplies the everyday measure of the test.
Here, however, the aphorism divides in two. Nietzsche sees in the midst of this long war only the individual, with his “truth” in quotation marks: the man who cares about his point. The Eastern tradition recognizes the passion — philonikia, the love of victory, a branch of philautia, the self-love that St. Maximus the Confessor finds to be the mother of the passions, and of vainglory, which Evagrius places before pride. The history of the Church often shows, beneath a heresy, not only an error of the mind but a wound of self-love. Yet God draws a work even out of passion: “What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice” (Philippians 1:18). The war of men does not make the truth; it brings it to light, as a storm brings to light the rock beneath the sand. And the word of the council is not “we have prevailed” but “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (Acts 15:28): he who fought receives the revelation as a gift; he does not win it as a prize.
That is why St. Gregory the Theologian, himself one of the greatest combatants of the dispute, raises in his first theological oration a wall of measure around it: not to everyone, nor at all times, nor on every subject is it fitting to philosophize about God — but to the tested, to those who have been purified, and only so far as is possible. And “the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men” (2 Timothy 2:24). The method needs passion in order to be born, and purification so as not to kill itself.
War and the Measure Outside It
Heraclitus said that war is the father of all things and that strife is justice; but the same Heraclitus said that the Logos is common, and that the many live as though they had an understanding of their own, private. The two sayings belong together: struggles are fruitful only if there is something common by which they are judged. Socrates invented no doctrine; he invented a method — the elenchus, inquiry by question — and made it out of the very clash of opinions. Plato, in the Seventh Letter, says that knowledge cannot be put into words like other teachings, but, after long life lived together and the rubbing of names, definitions and images against one another, it is kindled suddenly in the soul, like light from a leaping fire. And John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, shows that he who knows only his own side of a case knows little even of that.
Here the weakness of the aphorism shows itself. If the irrefragable principles are only the outcome of the war of convictions, what makes them “irrefragable,” and not merely “the victor’s”? Victory proves nothing except that one side was stronger. For war to yield truth, there must exist, above the combatants, a truth that lets itself be reached; otherwise what follows is only a change of master. The method presupposes the very thing it claims to have produced.
Likewise, the criterion of “injury and unhappiness,” which Nietzsche takes as the sign of the adversary’s error, is only half the truth. The Gospel brought persecution, and the Cross brought pain; the Fathers distinguish “godly sorrow,” which works repentance unto salvation, from “the sorrow of the world,” which works death (2 Corinthians 7:10). Not every pain condemns a teaching, nor does every contentment prove one. The consequence that judges is the salvation of the whole man, not the quiet of the wounded man.
The Eye That Sees More Clearly in the Other’s Eye
Today’s research says what the aphorism intuited, with an uncomfortable precision. The psychology of motivated reasoning (Ziva Kunda, 1990) shows that the mind, when it holds to a conclusion, does not look for evidence but for lawyers — and is skilled enough to find them. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber went further (2011): human reason did not develop to find the truth alone, but to persuade and to weigh the arguments of others; alone, it is biased toward its own ideas and unforgiving toward another’s; in a group, where differing views confront one another, it reaches good results. This is, almost word for word, Nietzsche’s thesis: the desire to carry one’s point — not a disinterested love of truth — brings forth the method.
Solomon Asch’s experiments on conformity show how a single person who disagrees with the group, even if he too is wrong, sharply reduces the pressure to yield. And Daniel Kahneman, in his dispute with Gary Klein over expert intuition, attempted what is called “adversarial collaboration”: the fight organized so that it does not remain only a fight — the two agree beforehand on the criterion by which they will be judged, before knowing who will be right.
The same psychology, however, also shows the price. Cognitive dissonance (Festinger) says that one who has invested in a conviction defends it the more fiercely the stronger the contrary evidence; and when the ego is caught up in the idea, criticism of the idea is felt as a wound to the person. This is the care for “his truth” that the aphorism takes as the engine: it can be both engine and brake. The unceasing war of convictions feeds both the method and the wall of defense.
The War Within
This war is not waged only between men. In the soul, convictions war as thoughts — logismoi — and each comes with its own “truth.” In the writings of Evagrius the same ladder is recognized: first authority (the word of Scripture and of the father), then the examination of the road by which the thought came (who sent it? where does it lead?), then its consequences (what fruit it leaves in the soul: peace or turmoil, humility or exaltation). And in the Antirrhetikos he gave the method as well: the word of Scripture against each thought, as the Lord answered the tempter in the wilderness with “It is written.” The method was not born of a quiet curiosity, but of the struggle with thoughts; and it was sharpened in labor, not in theory.
But in the same way, he who struggles with thoughts in order to be right before himself — not in order to repent — has done nothing but put a new vainglory in the place of the old.
He Who No Longer Holds to His Own Truth
The aphorism does not state its ending, but presupposes it: the individual, who began by caring for his “truth,” comes to prize the method more than the victory. Here lies the passage. He who lets himself be rebuked by a principle above him has ceased to be merely an individual at war. “Reprove a wise man, and he will love thee” (Proverbs 9:8); and the psalmist: “The righteous shall chasten me in mercy, and reprove me” (Psalm 140:5) — the blow received as oil, not as insult.
This is the final fruit of the war of convictions: not a victor who is at last right, but a man who rejoices to be set right. Truth is not a point to be carried; it is a Face to be reached. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) — not a thesis that came out victorious from the dispute, but He who stands before the dispute, in the midst of it, and after it. To Him belong the method, the labor and the victory; and to the one who sought Him, only the joy of having been found.
