II
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.