An answer to a cry of Nietzsche’s
“I am what I am; how could I ever free myself from myself? I am sick of myself!” — Nietzsche
The Most Honest Cry of Philosophy
Few sentences in the history of thought are so bare of ornament. It is not an argument, not a system, not a drawing-room aphorism. It is a groan. The Fathers would have recognized it at once, because it does not sound like a thesis but like a wound, and a wound speaks more truthfully than a thesis.
The oldest words of the Church have the same sound: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24). The same wound, the same weariness of being oneself. And yet between the two cries lies a distance of a single word: Paul asks who, Nietzsche asks how. “Who” summons a face; “how” demands a method. The whole abyss between the Gospel and the philosophy of the will fits into those two words.
Tautology as a Prison Cell
“I am what I am.” A closed circle: A is A, and nothing more. Man stands before his own evidence as before a wall he did not build and cannot cross.
Yet these words are not foreign to Scripture. “I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14) is the name of God, and there the tautology is not a prison but fullness: He Who Is does not grow weary of Himself, because He is not a prison to Himself but a source, and the love of the Trinity is, from eternity, a going-out of Self toward the Other. The same statement placed in the mouth of a creature becomes a cell. The man who says “I am what I am” puts on the divine name without its power: he wishes to be self-sufficient, a source of himself, after the ancient temptation, “ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5). And he discovers what every god crowned in solitude discovers: that a god with no one before him grows sick of himself. Nietzsche’s nausea is the boredom of the false god that every man carries within.
Who Is Sick of Whom?
The psychological question is this: who exactly says “I am sick”? The one who is sick and the one he is sick of are, apparently, the same. It would be like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair. Yet something does not add up: if I were only what I despise, I could not despise myself, because contempt presupposes a place to look from, a place that is not identical with the object looked at. The very nausea at myself testifies that there is in me something not identical with what disgusts it. Let us keep hold of this; it is the thread of the whole path.
But let us distinguish, with a spiritual father’s scales, self-disgust from humility. St. Maximus the Confessor names philautia, the senseless love of self, the mother of the passions. Very often self-disgust is precisely philautia turned inside out: I wanted a more brilliant self, the real one disappoints me; I do not suffer because I am sinful, but because I am not the one I admired. Pride is shocked at its fall; humility is not shocked, because it expected nothing from dust but dust. Therefore self-disgust is sometimes the last garment of self-admiration: “I cannot forgive myself for not being the one I loved.”
Flight: Socrates and the Hermit
Seneca relates (Letter 28) that Socrates said to a man complaining that even travel did not cure him: “Naturally, for you took yourself along.” Nietzsche was the most faithful pilgrim of a world without a home: Sils-Maria, Genoa, Turin, boarding-houses, heights, thin air, all to escape the head that carried him. Flight from oneself has many roads: travel, work, noise, pleasures, ideas, and sometimes even religion used as spectacle, a kind of journey in which you go far away so as not to arrive at home.
The Fathers gave a counsel that sounds like a sentence and works like a medicine: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (Abba Moses). Evagrius describes the noonday demon, acedia: the day becomes fifty hours long, the monk keeps glancing at the window, hates the place, hates the work, hates his brother, and finally hates himself. Acedia is literally “I am sick of myself” spoken under a midday sun. And the Fathers’ treatment is not escape but hypomonē, the patience to remain: not to flee the place where you are shown what you are.
You Are Not Your Thoughts
The philokalic tradition works here with a distinction of rare finesse: between the nous, the mind as the eye of the soul, and the logismoi, the thoughts that pass through it. Almost everything that has become unbearable in me is in fact a stream: the same resentments chewed again, the same scenarios rehearsed, the same recycled ambitions, the same judgments of others turned back upon myself. The self I am tired of is a noisy chorus I have mistaken for the singer.
Nepsis, watchfulness, begins with a simple and almost incredulous distinction: you are not the thought that accuses you; you are the one who sees it coming. To name it, not to mix yourself with it, not to feed it, and not to wage war on it as though it were you: here is the first freedom. But it is only the first, the clearing of the ground, not the house. The Fathers do not want the observer to dissolve into nothingness; they want him to be placed, and that is why they teach the descent of the mind into the heart, where the one who looks meets Someone.
The Paradox of Liberation
How shall I free myself from myself? By my own means it cannot be done, and this is not a defect of method but a law: the instrument of liberation is the prisoner himself. The hand that should undo the chain is held by the chain. Nietzsche tried to the very end the way out by one’s own strength: self-overcoming, amor fati, the overman, that is, the self leaping over its own shadow. But the shadow leaps with it.
Orthodoxy does not say “stay motionless”; it says synergy. Man brings the cry, the watchfulness, the cell, the patience; grace brings the freedom. The ascetic labors for years not to produce grace but to become empty enough to receive it. St. Isaac the Syrian says that the one who has seen his own sins is greater than the one who raises the dead: to see yourself, without fleeing, without boasting, without despairing condemnation, is a greater work than miracles. And the Gospel gives the formula of the whole: “Whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it” (Mt. 16:25); “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). This is not the annihilation of the person but the dethroning of the ego: the self ceases to be the center and becomes a place of encounter. That is why the saints are the most unmistakable of men, each one unique: not because they occupied themselves with themselves, but because they stopped making themselves the sole object of their care.
You Are Not What You Are
Here, then, is the final blow dealt to the tautology. St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches epektasis: human nature is not a fixed essence but an endless advance, “from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). The perfection of man is never to cease growing. Therefore “I am what I am” is the lie of fallen man. Man is not what he is; he is what he is called to become. Nietzsche sensed it when he repeated, after Pindar, “Become what you are.” But he turned it into self-creation; Orthodoxy turns it into reception. You do not give birth to yourself; you become what you are called to be, and the call comes from outside you, from the One who called you out of nothing.
Judas and Peter
Both were sick of themselves. The Evangelist says of Judas that he “repented himself” (Mt. 27:3) and went and hanged himself; of Peter, that he “wept bitterly.” The self-disgust was equally terrible in both. It was not its intensity that divided them, but what they looked at afterward. Of Peter it is written: “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter” (Lk. 22:61). Peter was looked at. Judas looked only into himself and at the silver. Disgust that stays within its own circle ends in despair; the same disgust, met by a gaze, becomes repentance.
So too the prodigal son: “And when he came to himself…” (Lk. 15:17). Beside the husks and the swine he came to himself, and found there hunger and emptiness. But he did not remain there: “I will arise and go to my father.” Nietzsche stops at “he came to himself”; the Gospel says that is the threshold, not the house. Satiety with oneself is, in secret, a manger of grace: the place where borrowed foods run out. And whoever reaches this place should not remain alone with it; let him tell it to a person, a spiritual father, a friend, for self-disgust is not healed in the silence of its own circle.
The Short Rule
Do not flee, like acedia. Do not fight yourself as an enemy, nor polish yourself as an idol. Name, watch, hand over. And when you have no other word, the little prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Attend to its grammar: there the “I” is no longer the subject of a project but the object of a mercy. It no longer asks “how shall I free myself,” but says “have mercy on me.” From subject to recipient: that is the grammatical liberation, and perhaps the deepest.
Apophthegm
A brother said to an elder: “Father, I am sick of myself.” And the elder said to him: “I am not surprised, child; how long have you been eating from the same bowl?” And he added: “He who has fed long on himself needs a fast, and the fast from self is called obedience. Satiety with oneself is usually healed in another man’s cell, at the washing-up.”
A question for the cell: when you say “I am sick of myself,” who is the one who said it, and toward whom did you look after you said it?
