A reply to Friedrich Nietzsche, “Human, All Too Human”
The passage
Against the disparagers of brevity. A brief dictum may be the fruit and harvest of long reflection. The reader, however, who is a novice in this field and has never considered the case in point, sees something embryonic in all brief dicta, not without a reproachful hint to the author, requesting him not to serve up such raw and ill-prepared food.
— Nietzsche
The answer
Nietzsche is right up to the halfway point, and the half he gets right is hard and true: the brief word is often the harvest of a whole life. A grain of wheat is not made in a day. It must fall, it must die in the ground, it must endure winter and summer, and only then comes the ear. Whoever takes the grains from the granary and calls them “embryonic” because they are small has never seen the field.
But Nietzsche does not tell the whole story, because he speaks as a writer defending himself, and we must speak as eaters who want to live.
First, brevity is not an invention of philosophers; it is the way God chose to speak to us. Saint Paul, reading Isaiah, says: “For the Lord will make a short word upon the earth” (Romans 9:28; Isaiah 10:23). The whole wisdom of the Fathers sees the Incarnation in this way: the Word without limits fitted into an Infant, and He whom the heavens cannot contain let Himself be carried in arms. What word is shorter than this, and what food less “raw”? And yet how many passed by that manger and saw only a child.
Here is the first lesson: it is not the word that is embryonic, but the eye. The embryo is not a lack of fullness but a hidden fullness. The novice eye sees little because it has not yet learned to look deep.
Second, the Desert Fathers knew something the modern reader has forgotten: the brief word is not served as cooked food, but as rusk. The desert rusk is not raw food; it is dried, baked, concentrated, made to last for years. But it is not eaten as it is. It is soaked. And the water in which it is soaked is not supplied by the elder but by the disciple: his labors, his falls, his tears. Whoever asks the elder to hand him the word already softened is in fact asking him to live in his place. That is why the formula in the Paterikon is always the same: “Father, give me a word, that I may be saved.” One word. And the disciple carries it for years, and does not complain of hunger, because he is chewing.
Saint Paul rebukes the Corinthians and the Hebrews for exactly the reason Nietzsche’s novice has: “I fed you with milk, not with solid food” (1 Corinthians 3:2), and “solid food belongs to those who are mature, who by constant use have trained their senses to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). Notice the words: by constant use. Not by talent, not by culture, but by exercise. The silent reproach of the reader toward the author is, in the Apostle’s language, the reproach of the infant toward the table of the grown.
Third, we must be honest in the other direction too. There is also empty brevity. There are short sayings that sound like stones but are made of sponge: phrases polished for effect and not for truth, aphorisms that have never seen a winter. Those really are raw food, and the reader who rejects them does not always have an untrained eye; sometimes he has a good nose. Christ gave us the one test that does not fail: “By their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:16). A true brief word is known by what it does in the one who carries it, not by how brilliantly it sounds. If after a year of carrying it you have not been changed, either it was empty, or you kept it in your pocket and not in your heart.
Finally, an observation about discernment and the wish to understand everything. The reader who demands everything explained, argued and laid out on the table believes he is asking for clarity. Often he is asking to be excused from discerning. And a mind that keeps weighing and no longer chooses stays hungry in the middle of the feast. The Fathers teach us to discern, not to accumulate. And discernment is born, most often, of a short word received at the right hour, an hour we do not choose. Whoever has lived a little is amazed that a sentence heard long ago and not understood suddenly opens on some ordinary morning. It is not luck. It is Providence: the word lay in the ground until the ground was ready.
The question at the end of this page is therefore not whether the brief dictum is ripe or unripe. The question is whether the reader has anything to soak it in.
Apophthegm
A brother came to an elder and said, “Father, give me a word.” The elder gave him a single one, the size of a grain.
The next day the brother came back, dissatisfied: “Father, your word is too short, I am still hungry.”
The elder said, “Did you eat it, brother, or only weigh it?”
And the brother fell silent, and understood that all of yesterday he had done nothing but measure its edges.
