Zarathustra answered: “I love men.”
“Why,” said the saint, “did I go to the forest and desert? Was it not because I loved men greatly over-much? Now I love God: men I love not. Man is a thing far too imperfect for me. Love of men would kill me.”
Zarathustra answered: “What did I say of love! I am bringing gifts to men.”
“Do not give them anything,” said the saint. “Rather take something from them and bear their burdens along with them—that will serve them best; if it only serve thyself well! And if thou art going to give them aught, give them no more than an alms, and let them beg even for that.”
“No,” said Zarathustra, “I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for that.”
I am not poor enough for that. Priceless words! You read these words and you think of truly kindhearted men who sigh: If I were only rich so I could do good! They envy the rich their possessions, not for the sake of the pleasures and comforts which possessions permit their possessors to provide, but in the wholly honest feeling of the blessings which they could scatter with their wealth. Then comes Nietzsche, and says to these kindhearted men, You are only poor noodles, if you have nothing better to bring the world and men than this blessing of wealth. Then he points them to gifts the least of which outweighs a million donations.
Now, Nietzsche had no contempt of wealth with which to insult his fellowmen’s intelligence. Nor was he a socialistic indicter of beneficence. Nor was he even a rigorous critic of the doubtful disposition, so often manifest in such benevolent activities. But perhaps his plain words on the poverty of almsgiving seem so weighty precisely because he must be acquitted without further ado of speaking from contempt, from the standpoint of Christianity, or from the milieu of poor folk. And yet it was this most soaring spirit of the nineteenth century, this aristocrat from top to toe, compared with whom even a Goethe seems like a plebeian, it was precisely he who—as from an aerie up among the eagles—looked down with such abysmal contempt upon the highest and noblest triumph of riches—namely, the ability to bestow benefits—that he detected, even in this triumph, only testimony to the poverty of riches. Along with this, at all events, Nietzsche passed damnatory judgment upon a Kultur which estimates the distances among men, the measure of their greatness according to the distinctions of possession, and therefore derives the right of the influence which it accords the individual from the sums which he donates by way of alms. Then, too, what has the man to do with his possession! It is not his personality which has assigned him a place in life where a confluence of industrial goods crystallize around him! What does it signify as to the worth of a man that he has cast his baited hook into the stream of life just where a big hungry fish swims by and bites! And if, now, this most contingent of all contingencies, that a man should get rich, is considered by his generation as the peculiar deed of a hero, the deed which he was in a position to compass in life,—if the mere fact that a man releases, in the shape of benefits and alms, a part of this wealth which he could not spend upon himself if he would is a phenomenon around which the conversation of the day revolves, of which newspapers in special articles and telegraphic dispatches have so much to say, then this is a sign of the decay of our moral culture, and we cannot be thankful enough to the man who has jolted us out of such aberration of ideas and made us see with eyes no longer blinded by the glitter of gold!
Aye, wealth a man does need who wants to give. Wealth he needs for the sake of his giving love. But he must create this wealth himself. He must wrest wealth from all values. He must coerce all things to himself and into himself. All these things must stream back from the well of living water within him as the gifts of his love. Insatiably does the soul seek after treasures and gems because her virtue is insatiable in her will to give. This is the soul’s thirst to be an offering and a gift, and hence she thirsts to house all wealth in herself.
Vulgar souls give what they have, noble souls what they are—this is the well known saying that mirrors the meaning of Nietzsche. Love’s highest labor is to create something great out of its ownself, that it may be able to give unceasingly out of its own fulness and yet never be exhausted! No mountain is too steep and no valley too deep for love, because love herself must know heights and depths that she may give to others what she has seen and known there. Do we fear lest we succumb to a weakness? Then we must force the weakness underneath our feet because we need our strength to give strength to others. Would we say to virtue: Thou art too hard for us; take thy laurel and let us sin? Now, the hardest is spur to our love, to steel our wills, our courage, so that courage may gush into the souls of others also. What we have made out of our own selves, this, this alone, is our wealth, this is the gift by whose bestowal men can become rich. A thought of our own which we have acquired; a light of our own, which we have kindled in our innermost being; a lofty enthusiasm for what is great; an energetic aversion to all that is common and base,—this is our true wealth, the gift that enriches us while it is given to others. Poor indeed are the people who can give only alms; rich indeed are those who give themselves to men, who proffer their most intimate gifts to men, who say to men’s hidden hearts and hopes: Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, I give unto thee!
Why are we so deeply involved in hard necessity that our life can not dispense with alms and therefore with the people who make a virtue out of this giving of alms! Simply because we have so few such truly rich men who thirst to become offerings and gifts for man! These men can we have, can we become ourselves, only when duty and righteousness, and not benevolence and inclination, shall decide in an ordering and helpful way, as to the requirement of life. Behind every benefit which is necessary there is concealed an unrighteousness of life which makes the benefit necessary. All alms with which the world cannot dispense today is an accusation against our culture, a confession of how poor we are in the midst of all our wealth. It will be the first great step towards a new culture when we first learn to measure the unworth of these benefits by the eternal worths which alone are worthy of man, which man forms in himself as new fructifying deeds, as the lightning of thought which detonates from his soul, as living beauty to which he gives shape in his own being.