Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human — “Travellers and their grades”
Travellers and their grades. Among travellers we may distinguish five grades. The first and lowest grade is of those who travel and are seen — they become really travelled and are, as it were, blind. Next come those who really see the world. The third class experience the results of their seeing. The fourth weave their experience into their life and carry it with them henceforth. Lastly, there are some men of the highest strength who, as soon as they have returned home, must finally and necessarily work out in their lives and productions all the things seen that they have experienced and incorporated in themselves. Like these five species of travellers, all mankind goes through the whole pilgrimage of life, the lowest as purely passive, the highest as those who act and live out their lives without keeping back any residue of inner experiences. — Nietzsche
A Pilgrimage Without a Pilgrim
Nietzsche’s thought is beautiful and, like many of his beautiful thoughts, it suffers from one defect: it never says wherethe journey is going. His ladder has five rungs but no roof. The last traveller “works out” his experience, yet we never learn what he brought home, or to whom he offered it. His pilgrimage is a road on which the only thing that matters is how deeply you let yourself be changed, not by whom.
The Fathers would have recognized the ladder at once, because they climbed it themselves; they simply set it somewhere. For them the road is not “life” in general but Abraham’s departure from his own country, “unto a land that I will shew thee” (Genesis 12:1). Abraham sets out without a map. Obedience is the map, and the voice that calls is the destination. Here is the root difference: in Nietzsche the traveller is measured by what he sees; in the Fathers, by Whom he seeks.
The First Rung: The One Who Is Carried
The first traveller does not travel; he is transported. He has luggage, tickets, photographs, but no gaze. Christ knows him well: “Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?” (Mark 8:18). He is not a wicked man; he is a man asleep on the road. He can reach Jerusalem and see only stone, stand at the Holy Sepulchre and feel only the queue at the door.
There is a type of believer who is exactly like this: he has been to every service, every monastery, kissed every icon, and remained untouched. He has “done” the pilgrimage the way one does a tour. St. John Climacus would say he moved his body while his soul stayed home, with the same passions, the same thoughts, in the same shoes.
The Second Rung: The One Who Sees
The second one sees. A great thing, and a rare one. To see the world as it is, with its good and its ruin, is the beginning of wisdom. But seeing alone is still only looking. Spiritually speaking, this is the rung of one who has learned to observe: he sees the leaf fall, the man die, the time pass, and he is amazed.
Solomon’s wisdom often stops here: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). It is true sight, but not yet redeemed. It sees the desert and does not see the Spring.
The Third Rung: The One Who Feels the Consequences
The third no longer stops at what he saw: he feels its weight. What he saw will not leave him in peace. In the evening, in bed, faces come to mind, words, injustices, beauties. This is the rung of compunction, of the “piercing of the heart” the Fathers speak of: “They were pricked in their heart” (Acts 2:37).
Here is a dangerous threshold, and Nietzsche did not name it. Whoever feels the consequences and stops here can be spoiled by his own experiences: he grows sweet on emotion, on melancholy, on “depth.” The desert Fathers have a name for this: weeping without repentance. He feels much and changes nothing. Unworked emotion is a refined form of laziness.
The Fourth Rung: The One Who Weaves
The fourth “weaves” what he has lived into his own life. What he saw becomes thread in his cloth: no longer a memory but a fibre. You recognize him by the way he speaks, keeps silent, looks at people. He carries the whole road with him, unseen.
This is the rung of the habit (hexis) of which the Fathers speak: virtue is not an act but a second nature, won by labour. What he saw has stopped being something outside him. But this is still not everything.
The Fifth Rung: The One Who Keeps No Residue
The last, says Nietzsche, returns home and must let go: he must work out in his life and deeds everything he has incorporated, retaining nothing inside. Here the philosopher arrives, without knowing it, at the gate of the Gospel: “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22). The Apostle James said it in a handful of words.
But here a question mark must be set that Nietzsche would not have set: who is the one who lives out his experience without residue? If it is man himself, alone, by his own will, a strength “of the highest strength,” then this ladder leads to the subtlest pride, that of the man who has become his own work. The Fathers know the danger and call it by name: the vainglory of the perfected. He who has worked his whole life like a monument has no need of anyone, not even God.
The fifth rung, in Christian terms, belongs not to the one who gives himself to the world, but to the one who knows himself given. Paul says it so: “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). Here “without residue” means something other than in Nietzsche: not that man has emptied himself into his deeds, but that he has emptied himself of himself, to make room for Another. That last remnant we all hide, the final oasis of the “I,” is surrendered not by force but by love.
The Sixth Rung, Which No One Counts
Nietzsche’s ladder has five rungs; the Fathers’ ladder (St. John’s has thirty) ends with another oddity: the highest no longer feels himself on the ladder. Abba Anthony once saw the world full of snares and asked, “Who can escape them?” And the answer came: “Humility.” Whoever has climbed and knows he has climbed has not climbed.
So the last traveller, the one truly “of the highest strength,” is often the hardest to recognize. He has no pilgrim’s air, does not narrate the road, shows no photographs. He came home and washes the dishes. With the same face he left with, and a wholly different one within.
And We, on Which Rung?
What makes Nietzsche’s sentence as unsettling as it is beautiful is its last line: “all mankind goes through the whole pilgrimage of life” by these five rungs. Not only travellers with suitcases: everyone. Every day is a small journey. Every person we meet is a new place. We can pass through them like the first (carried, blind), the second (looking), the third (shaken and unchanged), the fourth (formed), or the fifth (doers).
And Providence does not lead us by chance through places: there is no “pointless journey,” only pointless eyes. What we see today was given us to see. What we do not work out today will cost double labour tomorrow.
Apophthegm
A brother asked an old man: “Father, I have been to three monasteries and four holy elders. How is it that I have not changed?” The old man answered: “My son, you went to them. But did they ever enter you?” And the brother fell silent.
And the old man added: “Do not count how many places you have seen. Count how many you have allowed to see you.”
