_Self-renunciation and Megalomania_
We are obliged to think that nothing certain can be said either of
self-renunciation or of megalomania, though each one of us in his own
experience knows something of the former as well as of the latter. But
it is well known that the impossibility of solving a question never yet
kept people from reflecting. On the contrary: to us the most alluring
questions are those to which there is no actual, no universally valid,
answer. I hope that sooner or later, philosophy will be thus defined,
in contrast to science:--philosophy is the teaching of truths which
are binding on none. Thereby the accusation so often made against
philosophy will be removed, that philosophy properly consists of a
series of mutually exclusive opinions. This is true, but she must be
praised for it, not blamed: there is nothing bad in it, but good, a
very great deal of good. On the other hand, it is bad, extremely bad,
that science should consist of truths universally binding. For every
obligation is a constraint. Temporarily, one can submit to a restraint,
put on a corset, fetters; one can agree to anything temporarily. Rut
who will voluntarily admit the mastery over himself of an eternal law?
Even from the quiet and clear Spinoza I sometimes hear a deep sigh, and
I think that he is longing for freedom--he who wasted all his life,
all his genius in the glorification of necessity.... With such an
introduction one may say what he pleases.
It seems to me that self-renunciation and megalomania, however little
they resemble one another apparently, may be observed successively,
even simultaneously, in one and the same person. The ascetic, who
has denied life and humbles himself before everybody, and the madman
(like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky), who affirms that he is the light, the
salt of the earth, the first in the whole world or even in the whole
universe--both reach their madness--I hope there is no necessity to
demonstrate that self-renunciation as well as megalomania is a kind of
madness--under conditions for the most part identical. The world does
not satisfy the man and he begins to seek for a better. All serious
seeking brings a man to lonely paths, and lonely paths, it is well
known, end in a great wall which sets a fatal bound to man's curiosity.
Then arises the question, how shall a man pass beyond the wall, by
overcoming either the law of impenetrability or the equally invincible
law of gravity, in other words, how shall a man become infinitely small
or infinitely great? The first way is that of self-renunciation: I want
nothing, I myself am nothing, I am infinitely small, and therefore I
can pass through the infinitely small pores of the wall.
The other way is megalomania. I am infinitely strong, infinitely
great, I can do all things, I can shatter the wall, I can step over
it, though it be higher than all the mountains of the earth and though
it has hitherto dismayed the strongest and the bravest. This is
probably the origin of the two most mysterious and mighty spiritual
transformations. There is no single religion upon which are not more or
less clearly impressed the traces of these methods of man's struggle
with the poverty of his powers. In ascetic religions the tendency to
self-renunciation predominates: Buddhism glorifies the suppression
of the individual and has for its ideal Nirvana. The Greeks dreamed
of Titans and heroes. The Jews consider themselves the chosen people
and await the Messiah. As for the Gospel, it is hard to say to which
method of struggle it gives the preference. On the one hand are the
great miracles, the raising from the dead, the healing of the sick, the
power over the winds and the sea; on the other: 'Blessed are the poor
in spirit.' The Son of God who will sit on the right hand of power now
lives in the company of publicans, beggars, and harlots, and serves
them. 'Who is not for us, is against us'; the promise to thrust down
his enemies into the fiery hell; eternal torment for blasphemy against
the Holy Spirit, and equal with these the exhortation to the extreme
of humility and love to the enemy: 'Turn to him the other cheek also.'
Throughout, the Gospel is permeated with contradictions, which are
not extraneous and historical, concerned with facts, but intrinsic,
contradictions of mood, of 'ideals,' as the modern man would say.
What is in one chapter praised as the noblest task is in the next
degraded to an unworthy labour. It is in no way strange that the most
opposite teachings should find justification in this little book,
which is half composed of repetitions. The Inquisitors, the Jesuits,
and the old ascetics called themselves. Christians; so do the modern
Protestants and our Russian sectaries. To a greater or less degree
they all are right, even the Protestants. Such contradictory elements
are intertwined in the Gospel, that men, above all those who travel
the high road, who can move in one direction only, and under one
conspicuous flag, who have become accustomed to believe in the unity
of reason and the infallibility of logical laws, could never fully
grasp the teaching of the Gospel, and always aspired to give to the
words and deeds of Christ a uniform explanation which should exclude
contradictions, and more or less correspond to the common conceptions
of the work and problems of life. They read in the mysterious book,
'Have faith and thou shalt say to this mountain: be thou removed,' and
understood it to mean that always, every hour and every minute, one
must think and desire the self-same thing, prescribed beforehand and
fully denned; whereas in these words the Gospel allows and commends the
maddest and most perilous experiments. That which is, did not exist for
Christ; and only that existed, which is not.
The old Roman, Pilate, who was apparently an educated man, clever and
not bad at heart, though weak in character, could neither understand
nor elucidate the cause of the strange struggle which took place
before him. With his whole heart he pitied the pale Jew before him,
who was guilty of nothing. 'What is truth?' he asked Christ. Christ
did not answer him, nor could He answer, not through ignorance, as
the heathen desired to believe, but because that question cannot be
answered in words. It would have been necessary to take Pilate's head,
and turn it towards the other side, in order that he might see what
he had never seen before. Or, still better; to have used the method
to which the hunch-backed pony turns in the fairy tale, in order to
change sleepy Ivanushka into a wizard and a beauty: first, to plunge
him into a cauldron of boiling milk, then into another of boiling
water, then a third of ice-cold water. There is every reason to suppose
that with this preliminary preparation Pilate would have begun to
act differently, and I think the hunch-backed pony would agree that
self-renunciation and megalomania would be a fair substitute for the
cauldrons of the tale.
Great privations and great illusions so change the nature of man
that things which seemed before impossible, become possible, and the
unattainable, attainable.