The Happiness of the Historian
“The happiness of the historian. When we hear the hair-splitting metaphysicians and prophets of the after-world speak, we others feel indeed that we are the ‘poor in spirit’, but that ours is the heavenly kingdom of change, with spring and autumn, summer and winter, and theirs the afterworld, with its grey, everlasting frosts and shadows.” Thus soliloquised a man as he walked in the morning sunshine, a man who in his pursuit of history has constantly changed not only his mind but his heart. In contrast to the metaphysicians, he is happy to harbour in himself not an ‘immortal soul’ but many mortal souls.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The Morning, the Frost, and the Poor in Spirit
This aphorism is not a mere irony; it is a confession. A man walks in the morning sunshine and speaks with himself, and in that speech he utters his happiness: not the happiness of having found the truth once and for all, but of never having remained the same. Whoever has traversed history not only with the eyes but with the heart — who has entered centuries and men until he thought with their thoughts and felt with their feelings — knows that he has been, one after another, many. Nietzsche calls this happiness, and sets it face to face with what he calls “the afterworld”: a frozen world without seasons, where the soul stands immortal like a crystal in a frost that never ends.
Orthodox dogma has nothing to defend before this afterworld, because it is not its world. The Creed does not confess the flight of a soul loosed from the body toward a heaven of ideas, but “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.” Not the immortality of the soul as a school thesis, but the resurrection of the whole man, in the body which the Word assumed and raised from the tomb, so that no one may ever say that matter is a prison. The Platonism that Nietzsche called, in a famous phrase, “Christianity for the people,” is precisely what the Fathers, using the philosophers’ own language, corrected at the root: the Church rejected the pre-existence of souls and their so-called return into bodies, and St. John of Damascus teaches that soul and body were created together, neither before the other.
More: the frost and the grey shadows do exist in Scripture, but not as heaven; as the dwelling of death. “For in death there is no remembrance of Thee” (Ps. 6:5); “the dead shall not praise Thee, O Lord” (Ps. 113:25 LXX). Here is Nietzsche’s afterworld: Sheol, the land of shadows. And the Church does not defend it; she sings it shattered: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” What the historian despises as the frost of eternity is exactly what Christ emptied by descending into it.
Yet the irony turns on us as well, and it would be unworthy to evade it. The “hair-splitting metaphysicians” are no invention: there have been, and there are, even in the Church, men who made the word about God a trade rather than a worship. St. Gregory the Theologian complained of those who speak of God as casually as of chariot races and spectacles; the Apostle warns against strife over words (1 Tim. 6:4; 2 Tim. 2:14); and Evagrius gives the rule for all: a theologian is one who truly prays, and one who truly prays is a theologian. A metaphysics without prayer is indeed a frost. Here Nietzsche is right, and his rightness is a whip.
But the heaviest word of the aphorism is not “metaphysicians” but “the poor in spirit.” The first Beatitude (Mt. 5:3) is taken here with a smile and moved: the poor in spirit — those who think little; we others — those to whom belongs the kingdom of change. The Fathers read it otherwise. For St. John Chrysostom, the poor in spirit is the humble and contrite of heart, the one who knows he is not his own beginning. And the Gospel says: “theirs is the kingdom” — in the present tense. Not “will be.” The kingdom does not begin beyond the frost; it begins in the one who has ceased to hold on to himself as to a possession. The happy historian thus takes his happiness from the Beatitudes, but moves it from the place where it is received to the place where it is earned. The parting begins here, and from here we will follow it.
What Is True in the Historian’s Happiness
The kingdom of change. The world is, in the Fathers’ teaching, truly a kingdom of change, and this is not its shame but the sign that it is created. God set the luminaries “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14); Ecclesiastes does not lament the seasons but numbers them as orderings: “to everything there is a season” (Eccl. 3:1). St. Basil the Great makes of the six days a school of the soul, where man learns to read the world as a book. St. John of Damascus says, with his customary sobriety, that whatever has been brought from non-being into being is changeable, for only the Uncreated has no need of motion in order to be. To change is therefore neither a fall nor a property of sin: it is the creature’s way of being. St. Maximus the Confessor goes further and corrects the Origenist error. For Origen, souls began in a primordial rest and fell into motion; for Maximus the order is different — creation, motion, rest — and motion is not a punishment for anything, but the road given to the creature toward the One in whom alone it rests. “The kingdom of change” is thus, without shame, a patristic phrase. But it is change toward, not change around.
Metanoia. The word the aphorism touches without uttering is the Greek metanoia: the changing of the mind — meta-noia. “He has constantly changed not only his mind but his heart”: here is, almost literally, the definition of repentance. The first sentence of the Saviour’s preaching — “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt. 4:17) — is, stripped of its moralizing wrapping, a summons to change of mind. St. John Climacus calls repentance the renewal of baptism and a covenant with God for a second life; St. Isaac the Syrian calls it a second grace, born in the heart of faith and fear. A Christian who has not changed constantly has not yet begun. The man who remains today what he was yesterday, with the same thoughts and the same desires, is not “steadfast”: he is dead before the tomb. Nietzsche’s contempt for the one who can no longer budge is recognized by every Father of the desert.
Epektasis. St. Gregory of Nyssa carries the thought to its end in the Life of Moses: if God is without limit, the only limit of virtue is the absence of limit. The soul that has arrived is not the soul that has stopped, but the one that, the nearer it draws, sees the more clearly how much remains to be crossed, “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead” (Phil. 3:13). The perfection of man, says Nyssa, is his very growth in the good, without end. Here are the seasons of eternity: spring does not halt at the gates of heaven; heaven is not a frost but a spring without autumn. What Nietzsche calls the “frozen world” is not the world of the saved but the world without Christ, where nothing grows any more.
What Is False: Three Things Confused
Where the aphorism seems to be reconciled with the Fathers, it parts from them most deeply: “many mortal souls” in place of “an immortal soul.” Three things are confused here, and each asks to be separated from the others.
First: not many souls, but one soul with many movements. The Fathers, from Evagrius to the Damascene, describe in the soul powers — the rational, the irascible, the desiring — and a multitude of movements (logismoi: thoughts, imaginations, passions) that pass through it as winds across the same field. A man can be, in a single day, three men; but he is one who, that day, is three. Psychology has rediscovered the same thing in various idioms: William James observed that a man has as many social selves as there are persons who recognize him and carry an image of him in mind; Hubert Hermans described the “dialogical self,” an assembly of I-positions in conversation; internal-systems therapies speak of “parts” of the self; Jung, of complexes that “have us.” All these descriptions are accurate, and all stop at the same threshold: who holds the parts together? Without an answer to that question, what seemed wealth is revealed as sickness: disintegration.
Second: immortality as gift, not as possession. “Immortal soul” as a property of one’s own, a diamond hidden in man, is not the patristic formula. “Who only hath immortality” is God (1 Tim. 6:16); man was made “for incorruption” (Wis. 2:23), that is, his immortality is gift and sustaining in being by the Maker, not his own lordship. The soul does not cease to be — but not because it is indestructible by itself, rather because the One who called it into being does not withdraw His word. This changes everything: if immortality is gift, it is not a metaphysical property but a relationship. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him” (Lk. 20:38). The metaphysician whom Nietzsche mocks kept his immortality in his pocket; the Fathers place it in Another’s hand.
Third: the subject. The grammar of the aphorism betrays its author: “to harbour in himself” — who harbours? A harbour has ships; but the harbour is not any of the ships. Hume looked for his “self” and found only bundles of impressions; Kant saw that for impressions to be someone’s, an “I think” must be able to accompany them all; Paul Ricoeur distinguished identity as idem — the same, unchanged — from identity as ipse — the one who holds himself, by word and by promise, amid his own change. Nietzsche’s historian has an ipse: otherwise he could neither tell his happiness nor keep to his morning road. The Fathers have a name for what remains when nothing visible remains: the hypostasis, the person — not a bundle of properties, nor a finer substance than the others, but the one who receives, who answers when called. Man is made after the image of the One in whom unity does not abolish distinction, nor distinction break unity; therefore the manifold in him is neither curse nor last word: he is called to become communion, not multitude. (Likeness is not identification: the Trinity is not a model for the soul’s divisions, but the ground why the soul need not fear the manifold, if it has a Center.)
Legion, and the One Seated at the Lord’s Feet
The Gospel set “the many souls” face to face with one particular man. In the country of the Gadarenes a man dwelt among the tombs — here is the frost and the grey shadow — and cut himself with stones, and no one could bind him. Jesus asks: “What is your name?” And the answer comes in two numbers at once: “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mk. 5:9). Singular and plural mingle in the same mouth: I, we, I. It is the exact portrait of the soul that harbours many without having a Host: not freedom but torment; not wealth but wound.
The healing is not the annihilation of the manifold but the restoration of a center. When the people come to see what has happened, they find him “sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind” (Mk. 5:15): sitting — settled, no longer fleeing among the tombs; clothed — covered, no longer exposed and wounded; in his right mind — sophronounta, sound-minded, the word by which the Fathers name the wisdom that keeps things to their measure. And there is one more detail: the man wants to remain with Jesus, but is told, “Go home to your own, and tell them how great things the Lord has done for you”; and he begins to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him (Mk. 5:19-20). Here, at last, is a true historian: the man who from many became one, and from one tells his history as the deed of Another.
The Apostle James has a cutting word for the same condition: dipsychos, the man “of two souls,” “unstable in all his ways” (Jas. 1:8). And the Saviour Himself speaks of the house swept and garnished but empty, to which the expelled spirit returns with seven others worse than itself (Mt. 12:43-45). To be a house open to all and without a Master is not happiness; it is a state of siege. That is why Christ promised the mind not a “shelter for many” but: “We will come to him and make Our home with him” (Jn. 14:23). The many guests need a Host.
Modern man is, in an unusual way, a historian of more souls than Nietzsche ever dreamed of: he carries in his pocket the archive of all lives, enters hundreds of foreign lives daily without staying in any. Gergen called this “the saturated self,” Lifton “the protean self”; Erikson would say: identity diffusion; research on self-concept clarity (Campbell) links an unclear self to anxiety and indecision. The historian’s happiness, lived without a Center, very quickly becomes the misery of Legion — only without visible tombs.
The Historian’s Empathy and the Apostle’s Compassion
The historian’s art is understanding from within. Dilthey called it Verstehen; Collingwood, the re-thinking in the historian’s mind of the thought of the past; Ranke wished to show things “as they really were.” It is a real gift: the historian widens his soul until another century fits inside it, and that is not little. But it is also a temptation. Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, described the aesthetic stage: the man who, in order not to be bored, changes not the soil but the crop — the “rotation of crops”; he tastes lives, but no life binds him. One who can fit into any soul without being obliged by any resembles the guest who lodges in every house and pays rent in none.
The Apostle Paul, too, harbours many souls: “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22); “who is weak, and I am not weak?” (2 Cor. 11:29). But he harbours them as a burden, not as a spectacle. The difference between empathy as gaze and compassion as bearing is the difference between the “happy” historian and the suffering Apostle: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2); “we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). And the condition for holding the many is self-emptying: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). A room can receive many only to the extent that it is not full of furniture. One who has emptied his self-love (philautia, says St. Maximus, the mother of the passions) has room for anyone without losing himself.
Contemporary psychology has reached part of this wisdom experimentally. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross named “Solomon’s paradox” the fact that people judge others’ dilemmas more wisely than their own, and that the habit of viewing one’s own life “from a distance,” as a history, brings wisdom. The Fathers have known this method long since and call it nepsis: the watchfulness of the sentinel (Hab. 2:1), who keeps watch from above and sees the thought coming before it masters him. But they add what the laboratory cannot add: the sentinel does not merely watch, but calls on the Name and strikes the thought while it is still small (antirrhesis). Watching without calling can become the subtlest vainglory (kenodoxia, the finest of the passions, which feeds even on victories, says Evagrius): to be the spectator of one’s own soul and applaud one’s own lucidity.
Recapitulation and Eternal Memory
Beneath the historian’s happiness lies a sorrow he does not name: all the souls he enters have passed. His understanding is a partial resurrection, made with the human means of sympathy and yellowed paper. The Church tells him something far greater: no one has passed. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living”; and the Lord says through the Prophet: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands” (Is. 49:16). History, for the Fathers, is not a series of mortal souls succeeding one another, but an economy — a household ordered — which Christ recapitulates: St. Irenaeus says that the Son recapitulated in Himself the long history of men, and the Apostle that God was pleased “to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth” (Eph. 1:10). The Greek word is anakephalaiosis: the restoring of a head to what had been scattered into members.
The historian wants to gather souls; the Church is the place where this truly happens. In the Liturgy, anamnesis is not remembrance in the merely pious sense, but a remembering that makes present: the Church recalls the cross, the tomb, the resurrection — and, with a boldness unique in the history of the word “memory,” the second and glorious coming, which has not yet happened. Here memory is turned toward the future. And in the Proskomedia, for every name — living and departed — a particle is taken out and set around the Lamb: all the souls the historian seeks in archives are gathered, name by name, around Him in whom all are alive. The “cloud of witnesses” of the Epistle to the Hebrews (12:1) is not a cloud of shadows; it is a multitude of persons. And the Church’s last song for the departed is precisely the fulfillment of the historian’s desire: “Eternal memory.”
What then becomes of the “many mortal souls” of which each life is made? The Fathers say: some of them indeed must die. “The old man” (Eph. 4:22), with his deeds and designs, must be put off; “I die daily” (1 Cor. 15:31). The historian is right that we do not remain the same, and the Fathers are right that we must not. But they die in repentance, not in oblivion: what is confessed is healed, and the fruit remains, as with the tree that “brings forth its fruit in its season” (Ps. 1:3). Oblivion is not the death of these souls; forgiveness is. And beneath all this stands a single word: “your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). The true self is neither the one of yesterday, nor of today, nor their sum: it is the hidden one, whom I do not know, but only the One who named me. That is why the Apocalypse promises the one who overcomes “a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it” (Rev. 2:17). The new name is not discovered by researching history, but by receiving it. The historian seeks it in the past; Christ gives it in the present.
How to Be a Historian Without Becoming Legion
A single Name. The philokalic Fathers did not counsel silencing the many voices of the soul, but descending with the mind into the heart and teaching them all one Name. The Jesus Prayer, says St. Nikephoros the Solitary, gathers the scattered mind and holds it in the depth of the heart. All the ages of the soul — the child, the youth, the weary man, the repentant man — can say the same Name. Their voice is not cut; it is tuned. What Ricoeur sought as ipse in promise finds here its ground: the promise is no longer made toward one’s own future but toward the One who does not change, and in Him all things change without being lost.
A true memory, neither cult nor oblivion. “My sin is ever before me” (Ps. 50:3 LXX). Christian memory is neither the nostalgia that builds an altar from what was, nor the forgetting that calls itself freedom. St. John Climacus distinguishes the remembrance of wrongs as grudge (mnesikakia) from the remembrance of wrongs as confession; the first poisons, the second heals. One whose memory is purified can look upon all his former souls without being ashamed of them and without being their slave any longer.
The seasons of a single tree. If the aphorism wants seasons, Psalm 1 gives them: the tree “planted by the rivers of water” brings forth its fruit “in its season,” and its leaf does not wither. Each year leaves a ring in the trunk; yesterday’s rings are dead, yet they hold up today’s tree. This is perhaps the truest image for the “many mortal souls” of one man: not a series of men, but the layers of one trunk, all bound to the same root.
Right measure. The gift of entering any soul needs discernment (diakrisis). Not every epoch, nor every thought, is to be inhabited; some are to be known as one knows a wound: from outside and with gloves. “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable” (1 Cor. 6:12). One who sees every side of everything risks no longer being able to choose: a mind that embraces many things often finds itself more entangled, not more clear, and decides worst precisely because it has seen too much. The Fathers did not believe in subtlety as a virtue. Discernment is not the sum of viewpoints but “the lamp of the body” (Mt. 6:22), which St. Anthony the Great called the greatest of the virtues and which the Ladder places near the summit: the capacity to cut, in time, from the many that which is of God.
The Road to Emmaus
Let us return to the man who walks in the morning sunshine and speaks to himself. The Gospel has preserved, on another spring day, another pair of walkers, who were talking “of all these things which had happened” (Lk. 24:14) — historians, then, of what had occurred, with sad faces. A Stranger joins them, asks what they are discussing, and listens. Then, “beginning at Moses and all the Prophets,” He expounds to them “in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Lk. 24:27): the whole of history, with all its ages, read as one Person. And they, who had changed their minds from sorrow to bewilderment, now change mind and heart: “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” (Lk. 24:32); and later, “He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures” (Lk. 24:45). Metanoia, given on the road.
This is the historian’s happiness that Nietzsche did not know, though he walked so near to it: not the happiness of one who harbours as many souls as he can, but of one who is harboured; not the joy of being many, but of being named; not a spring without frost, but the Sun of Righteousness (Mal. 4:2) who rises upon all the seasons and makes them bear fruit. The two on the road changed no less than the historian of the aphorism; but their change had a Word in its midst. And when, at table, the Stranger broke the bread, their eyes were opened and they knew Him (Lk. 24:31). Here the search for souls ends, and there begins what no historian will ever be able to write: to be known.
“Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road?”
