To Gain One’s Soul in Patience
TO GAIN ONE’S SOUL IN PATIENCE [IV 54]
LUKE 21:19
In your patience you will gain your souls.336
The rich bird comes swishing, comes flaunting; the poor bird337—and patience is a poor bird, which does not come parading and posturing but comes like a soft breeze and the incorruptible essence of a quiet spirit.338 Patience is a poor art, and yet it is very long.339 Who learned it properly from life—who had the patience for that? Who taught it to another person in the right way—ah, perhaps there was someone who taught another patience very well by being very impatient himself! Who spoke fittingly about it, so that he did not rush into impatience of expression and hastiness of phrase? Who listened to the discourse about it in the right way, so that he did not understand it and then impatiently demanded a new discourse and thus certainly comprehended patience and the discourse about it but did not comprehend that it was not to be understood in that way!
To gain one’s soul in patience—are not these words, which no doubt have always come inopportunely, capable of simultaneously killing every bold expectancy that longs for renowned deeds, for inspired achievements, for strife and conflict in which the reward is admittedly uncertain but also glorious? Are not these words to the adult what a father’s voice is to the child when he calls him from his noisy play, in [IV 55] which he was king and emperor, to the quiet task of patience? Yes, are they not even more alarming since they want to embrace all life and thus do not let themselves be made a laughing matter, as if they were only a sometime earnestness? But if the one who said these words knew what is beneficial for a person, if he said them while at the same time he brought to mind, which is indeed the case, that the abomination of desolation340 would convulse life radically and totally and consequently provide occasion for great deeds and renowned exploits, then let us at least have the patience to believe (if we are convinced that the words do not benefit but rather hamper the soul) that the fault is in our not properly understanding the words and that it is our own fault that the effect of the words seems so narrow that, instead of giving every human being his soul and the whole world in exchange for its aspiring and striving, it takes away from him the whole world and its glory as something he will never grasp—indeed, even takes his soul away from him in order to let him gain it in patience.
Then let us at least have the patience to believe the words, the patience not to postpone the deliberation until a more opportune time and, lacking this quality ourselves, the patience not to beg the words to have patience, the patience to separate what is inseparably joined in order to put it together again.
“To gain one’s soul.” Does, then, a person not possess his soul, and can this be the true direction to blessedness, one that instead of teaching a person to gain the whole world341 by means of his soul teaches him to use his life to gain his soul? A human being is born naked342 and brings nothing with him into the world,343 and whether the conditions of life are like friendly forms with everything in readiness or he himself must laboriously find them, everyone must nevertheless acquire the conditions of his life in one way or another. Even if this observation makes an individual impatient and thereby totally incompetent, yet the better people know how to comprehend this and how to conform to the idea that life must be gained and that it must be gained in patience, to which they admonish themselves and others, because patience is a soul-strength that everyone needs to attain what he desires in life. That the hiker en route to his distant destination does not make undue haste at the beginning but at dusk each day patiently relaxes and rests so that he can continue his walking tour the next day—that someone carrying a heavy burden does not overstrain at the beginning but at times sets his burden down and sits down alongside it until he has new strength to carry it—that someone who patiently cultivates his ground [IV 56] patiently waits for rain early and late until harvest time comes344—that someone who earns his living by trading sits by his wares and waits patiently until a buyer comes and until he comes with the payment—that someone who stretches his net for birds waits through the day until evening and sits patiently near his net without moving until the birds come—that someone who obtains his sustenance from the sea sits patiently all day long with his lines—that the mother who wants to have the joy of her child does not wish it to grow up in a hurry but waits patiently through sleepless nights and troubled days—that someone who wants to win favor with people works early and late and does not spoil everything by impatience—that someone who wants to speak to people about what seems unimportant to them does not rush at the beginning and then cease but continues to speak and waits patiently—this people do understand. They understand that for better or for worse this is the way it is, and they submit to it; they understand that it is good and beneficial that it is this way, and they let themselves be formed by it, and in their view of life they give to this behavior preference over the wild, undisciplined outbursts that achieve nothing but only give rise to confusion and harm. The condition of which they speak is outside the individual, and the condition for attaining what is desired is patience—therefore he is not really gaining patience but gaining what is coveted. Thus there are very many and very different conditions, but is the soul, then, such a condition? Then is it saying too little to say that a person comes naked into the world and possesses nothing in the world if he does not even possess his own soul? If the preceding observation was able to make an individual impatient and unfit for living, well, why should not this observation also make everyone basically impatient? What is there to live for if a person has to spend his whole life gaining the presupposition that on the deepest level is life’s presupposition—yes, what does that mean?
Patience has helped us to the point where the words that in their brevity seemed so forbidding, so insignificant, hardly worth paying attention to, now in their brevity prove to be so significant that they tempt us instead in another way, as if they were unfathomable. And is it not alarming to tread this path where one immediately and at every moment admittedly sees the goal but never reaches it, unlike the hiker who indeed arrives at his goal, unlike [IV 57] the burden-bearer who arrives at his destination; where one almost never moves from the spot, unlike the hiker who now sees one setting, now another, unlike the burden-bearer who loses sight of one view, now another; where one sees no change, unlike the trader who sees now one person, now another, unlike the bird and fish catcher who catches now one, now another—but one continually sees only oneself. [Is it not alarming to tread this path] where, unlike the person who, out to win favor with people, at times hears cheering and at times booing, sometimes many voices, sometimes single voices, one hears just one lone voice, speaking truth that almost makes one shudder, because it seems that if a person has once heard it he can never escape from it either in time or in eternity; where one almost never gains anything: not the attainment of the goal, not the laying down of the burden, not the rich harvest, not wealth, not a wonderful catch, not the happiness of a child, not people’s favor, has not benefited others but gains only himself, a reward so small that even the little infant that dies at birth apparently possesses the same thing. [Is it not alarming to tread this path] where one wins nothing that can invite people to happy participation, because one wins only oneself—that is, is deceived, just like the merchant if no one came into his shop the whole day and we would tell him, “Now you have learned patience,” or just like the fisherman who had fished all day and caught nothing.345 Or would not such an overturning of thought and speech be even more strange than the oddity that a man’s life can so change that the tangible things, which to him were the most certain of all, become dubious and the things of the spirit, which disappointed him because of their remoteness, become the most certain of all, infinitely more certain than the tangible things?
But if a person possesses his soul, he certainly does not need to gain it, and if he does not possess it, how then can he gain it, since the soul itself is the ultimate condition that is presupposed in every acquiring, consequently also in gaining the soul. Could there be a possession of that sort, which signifies precisely the condition for being able to gain the same possession? In the external sense, there is no such possession. The person who possesses the external does not need to gain it—in fact, he is even unable to do that. He can give away what he possesses and then see whether he can gain the same thing again; he can use what he possesses to gain something new, but he cannot simultaneously possess and gain the very same thing.
If there is any question of such a possession, then it must be found in the internal. If it is not to be found in the external as such, then it is not to be found in the temporal as such either, since, more closely defined, it was actually temporality that made it impossible to possess and to gain the external simultaneously, because that which is in the moment either is or is not, and if it is, then it is not gained, and if it is gained, then it [IV 58] is not. A self-contradiction—which enunciation of both these statements would be—temporality does not understand this either as a riddle or as the solution of the riddle. In the eternal, there is no such self-contradiction, but not because it, like the temporal, either is or is not, but because it is. The eternal is not either a something possessed or a something gained but is only a something possessed that cannot be gained any more than it can be lost. Then this self-contradiction must be sought, if anywhere, in the internal, but the internal is, after all, in its most universal expression, the soul.
It is in the soul, then, that we must seek what we set out to find in connection with these words: to gain one’s soul. The soul is the contradiction of the temporal and the eternal, and here, therefore, the same thing can be possessed and the same thing gained and at the same time. Indeed, what is more, if the soul is this contradiction, it can be possessed only in such a way that it is gained and gained in such a way that it is possessed. The same contradiction can also be expressed in another way. One who comes naked into the world possesses nothing, but the one who comes into the world in the nakedness of his soul does nevertheless possess his soul, that is, as something that is to be gained, does not have it outside himself as something new that is to be possessed. If this were not the case, if the seemingly empty thought or this expression for emptiness—nakedness of soul—were not still the soul, then it could not be possessed and could not be gained except as the external is possessed and gained, both of which in the deeper sense are an illusion, for that which is gained can be lost because it was not possessed and that which is possessed can be lost because it was not gained. However, that which safeguards the possession of the soul from being an illusion is precisely the gaining of it, and that which guarantees that the gaining of it is not an illusion is precisely that it is possessed beforehand.
Insofar, then, as a person is to gain his soul, he does not possess it. Who, then, is the one who possesses it? Insofar as it exists, as it certainly does, since it is to be gained, it must certainly belong to someone, although in such a way that it can be gained, not as the external is gained but in such a way that one who gains it gains his possession. One who is to gain the world is, of course, assumed to possess his soul—should not the reverse also be so, that one who is to gain his soul possesses the whole world; and just as one who wants to gain the world gradually gives away his soul in exchange for the world, so one who gains his soul must have something to give instead, and what else can this be but the world? What people aspire to—to possess the world—a person was closest to it in [IV 59] the first moment of life, because his soul was lost in it and possessed the world in itself, just as the undulation of the waves possesses in itself the restlessness of the sea and its depths and knows no other heartbeat than this, the infinite heartbeat of the sea. Admittedly people think that what they speak of as the possession of the world is something entirely different. But this is just a deception. The world can be possessed only by its possessing me, and this in turn is the way it possesses the person who has won the world, since one who possesses the world in any other way possesses it as the accidental, as something that can be diminished, increased, lost, won, without his possession being essentially changed. If, however, he possesses the world in such a way that the loss of it can diminish his possession, then he is possessed by the world. Or does this seem to be quibbling? May it not rather be that the person who could not or would not understand this became a hair-splitter in the service of the world? May it not be the world’s stratagem to lead a person to think that if he possesses the world this does not mean that he is possessed by it? Would the world be less shrewd than he, would it offer itself to a person, as it indeed does, without knowing that it would win most when a person won it? The imperfect cannot be possessed by a person as his sole possession without his coming to be possessed by it, for when a person only wants to be external, secular, temporal, then are the world and temporality unconditionally more powerful than he? Therefore, a person can truly possess the imperfect only by surrendering it, which, of course, signifies that he does not possess it even though he possesses it. A person is able to possess the perfect when he also possesses himself, but his possessing it does not mean surrendering, since on the contrary it is a deepening in it.
In the first moment, then, a person is in a position that people later crave as something glorious; he is lost in the life of the world; he possesses the world, that is, he is possessed by it. But in the same moment he is different from the whole world, and he senses a resistance that does not follow the movements of the world’s life. If he now wants to gain the world, he must overcome this disquiet until once again, like the undulation of the waves, he vanishes in the life of the world—then he has won the world. However, if he wants to gain his soul, he must let this resistance become more and more pronounced and in so doing gain his soul, for his soul was this very difference: it was the infinity in the life of the world in its difference from itself.346
Insofar as he then gains his soul, the world possesses it. But the world possesses it unjustly, since it is his possession. In its deceitfulness, the world expresses this contradiction thus, that he possesses the world. His gain, then, is a legitimate gain, insofar as he gains his possession. But whose possession, then, [IV 60] is his soul? It is not the world’s, since illegitimate possession is no possession; it is not his, for he of course must gain it. Consequently, there must still be a possessor. This possessor must possess his soul as legitimate property but nevertheless must not possess it in such a way that the person himself cannot gain it as his legitimate possession. Therefore, this possessor can be none other than the eternal being, than God himself. Here emerges the same self-contradiction as the one between possessing and gaining the same thing in the same moment. This cannot be done with the temporal and the external. For example, no external and temporal thing can be fully possessed by several people at the same time but is always possessed by only one. If it is said that the world possesses it, then no one else possesses it; if a person thinks that he possesses it, he is possessed by it; if he really does possess it, he possesses it as something surrendered and consequently does not possess it, and yet the world does not possess it either; therefore the external and temporal becomes what it is supposed to be only when no one at all possesses it or when it has become a matter of indifference. The eternal cannot be possessed by several people, either; it can be possessed only by one for the same reason that it cannot be both possessed and gained.
What people foolishly and impatiently crave as the highest without really knowing what they want, what is horrifying to see when someone succeeds in doing it—namely, to win the world and to have won it—this is what a person begins with, and it is so far from being the goal that it is the very thing he should abandon. His soul is a self-contradiction between the external and the internal, the temporal and the eternal.347 It is a self-contradiction, because wanting to express the contradiction within itself is precisely what makes it what it is. Therefore, his soul is in contradiction and is self-contradiction. If it were not in contradiction, it would be lost in the life of the world; if it were not self-contradiction, movement would be impossible. It is to be possessed and gained at the same time; it belongs to the world as its illegitimate possession; it belongs to God as his legitimate possession; it belongs to the person himself as his possession, that is, as a possession that is to be gained. Consequently he gains—if he actually does gain—his soul from God, away from the world, through himself.
Therefore, it was foolishness and impatience to want to gain the world, a striving to become the imperfect that one already was, a desperate aspiration to secure what one already was, in such a way that it became more and more difficult ever to be rescued from it. Therefore, to gain his soul was a task that announced a struggle with the whole world, since it began [IV 61] with letting a person be at the goal of that earthly craving, possessing the whole world in order to give it away. This was a struggle that brought a person into the most intimate relation with God, a struggle that promised him himself in eternal understanding with God, promised him the gain not of the external, which cannot be possessed essentially by anyone and which because of and in spite of this imperfection in one way or another makes a debtor of anyone who actually comes to possess it. This struggle, however, promised him the gain of that which can be possessed essentially, which does not belong to any other soul in the world, which by being gained does not make him a debtor to fortune or fate or chance or people or friends or enemies or the world, since on the contrary through this gain he extricates himself from debt to the world by giving to the world what is the world’s348 and becomes a debtor only to God, which is not to be a debtor, since God is the only good and himself gives the possibility of becoming his debtor. Can there be anyone impatient enough to refuse to comprehend this gloriousness, even though he did not have the patience to gain it?
“In patience.” The words do not say “through” or “by means of” patience, but “in” patience, and thereby suggest that the condition stands in a special relation to the conditioned. Of course, the merchant also needed patience, as did the fisherman, but in addition needed various other things—needed insight and experience, tools and merchandise. If, without these or without knowing about them, he sits in patience and waits, if he thinks that knowing about patience is adequate for gaining his living and his catch, then he will soon find himself deceived. But if the person who wants to gain his soul does not want to understand that when he has won patience he has won what he needed, what was of more value than any other winning, then he will never gain it. It is already obvious here how secure this gain is, since in a profound sense it is so cunning that the more the world deceives, the more patience wins. In this gain, the very condition is also the object and is independent of anything external. The condition, therefore, after it has served the gaining, remains as that which is gained; this is different from what happens when the merchant has sold his merchandise and the fisherman has caught his fish—they lay aside patience and also their tools so that they may enjoy what has been gained.
In the external, patience is some third element that must be added, and, humanly speaking, it would be better if it were not needed; some days it is needed more, some days less, all [IV 62] according to fortune, whose debtor a person becomes, even though he gained ever so little, because only when he wants to gain patience does he become no one’s debtor. Therefore, even though patience is praised in external life, it nevertheless is and remains a burden. For example, the hiker carries a walking stick. He does not deny that it has weight and that to that extent he has to carry more than he would otherwise, but he reckons that the walking stick will aid him so much in his hiking that the gain will be greater and his walking made less burdensome. If he could be convinced that this was not so, he would not take along a walking stick, just as he now lays it aside upon reaching his goal. If the likelihood that the condition would drop away from the conditioned prevailed also for the person who wants to gain his soul, then no one would be so deceived as he, because the condition that made possible the gaining of the soul was precisely the possession of the soul. Consequently, if it were possible that when he had gained his soul he could lose the condition, then he would also have lost what had been gained.
In the external, patience is a condition that is praised, since the world is as it is and since experience has taught that accordingly patience is necessary. But it cannot be endorsed with full certainty as the one thing needful349 in the external; perhaps at times impatience would be more profitable and would hasten the gain of what is coveted. In other words, since the external is a dubious good, any condition for gaining it can also be only a dubious good, and the ultimate consequence of imperfection is that there is no certainty that can assure it with full certainty. The perfect, however, can be gained with full certainty, because it can be gained only by coming into existence within its own presupposition. Perhaps there was a merchant who through his impatient plans quickly became rich, whereas another patiently waited in vain, for the bad seed also grows in impatience, but the good seed grows only in patience.350 But this certainty that no doubt or experience can attain also grows in patience. “It grows in patience.” In these words, the condition and the conditioned are again inseparable, and the words themselves suggest duplexity and unity. The person who grows in patience does indeed grow and develop. What is it that grows in him? It is patience. Consequently, patience grows in him, and how does it grow? Through patience. If the person who gains himself will just be [IV 63] patient, he will surely grow in patience. In the one case, the word means that in which a person grows, as if one were to say he grows in favor, in wealth; in the other case, it means that whereby he grows, as if one were to say through sagacity, through the counsel and help of friends.
“To gain his soul in patience.” When we put the words together and consider how a person will be able to comply with them, the first requirement is that he have the patience to understand that he does not possess himself, that he have the patience to understand that a gaining of his own soul in patience is a work of patience, and that he therefore ought not to pay attention to the passion that rightly thinks that it can grow only in impatience. The words inculcate this in a twofold way by containing in their brevity a redoubling [fordoblende]351 repetition.352 They admonish one to gain one’s soul “in patience,” and they admonish one to “gain” it. This word alone contains an admonition to patience. It does not say, “Seize your soul,” as if it were a matter of a moment, as if the soul rushed by and it were a matter of seizing the moment and the soul, but thereby all would also be either lost or won. Nor does it say, “Save your soul,” a phrase that Scripture in other respects frequently uses353 with its devout earnestness. And it is indeed also certain that the person who gains his soul also saves it. But the phrase “to save one’s soul” does not focus the mind on patience in the same way and could easily suggest a precipitousness with which everything would have to be decided. “To gain one’s soul,” however, immediately turns the mind to quiet but unflagging activity. This manifests itself even more clearly and by the contrast even more earnestly when we consider that these words are said in connection with and in the process of describing in shocking imagery the horror that would befall Jerusalem, as if it were the destruction of the entire world, when there would be signs in sun and moon and stars, and the sea and the waves would roar, and the powers of heaven would be in tumult354—then, if ever, would be the moment to admonish everyone to save his soul. Yet the words used are: “gain your soul in patience.” Can a more sublime contrast be imagined, or is this not the hour in which the admonition is transfigured in heavenly glory? The elements disintegrate,355 the sky is rolled up like a garment,356 the abyss of annihilation opens its throat and roars for its prey, the shriek of despair sounds from every direction, even inanimate nature groans in anxiety—yet the believer does not press forward battling in order to find rescue, but while nothing has continuance, while even the mountain, tottering, abandons the site [IV 64] where it has stood without moving for thousands of years, he remains quiet and gains his soul in patience, while people are about to die of fright and the expectation of things to come.357
The emphasis that is already given by the phrase “to gain” is inculcated even more penetratingly by the added phrase “in patience”; indeed, the words in their entirety are a kind of picture of the whole process of gaining, that it takes place much as the words proceed with their communication—that is, it is all a repetition. It is a question not of making a conquest, of hunting and seizing something, but of becoming more and more quiet, because that which is to be gained is there within a person, and the trouble is that one is outside oneself, because that which is to be gained is in the patience, is not concealed in it so that the person who patiently stripped off its leaves, so to speak, would finally find it deep inside but is in it so that it is patience itself in which the soul in patience inclosingly spins itself and thereby gains patience and itself.
If a person wants to embark upon this gaining, he is required to have the patience to begin in such a way that he truthfully confesses to himself that it is a work of patience. If he does not begin in such a way, he will never gain, since this gaining is not like an earthly gaining that may for some time seem to net no gain, but on the contrary it is a loss, at least apparently, and therefore it takes patience to want to begin it, since the very thing that is inflammatory and provocative to impatience nevertheless declares itself to be a gaining. What is all this winning of which we speak? It is to acquire one’s soul as it is, but it does indeed seem that one has it from the start. Here it is a question not of adding something to the soul but of subtracting something from it, that is to say, something it apparently possessed.
But is there, then, no other way in which a person can grasp his soul? Can he not wrest it away from the power that illegitimately possessed it? With what is the soul to do this except itself? But since it wants to grasp itself, it does not possess itself. Moreover, is not that power stronger than he, since it has been able to take possession of his soul? What is always the weapon of the weaker? It is patience. But then must he not possess his soul in order to have the patience in which he gains his soul? Not at all, for patience comes into existence during the gaining, and in this gaining he does not become stronger and stronger, which must be assumed if he were to use force, but he seemingly becomes weaker and weaker. Precisely because the world possessed his soul illegitimately, the ultimate [IV 65] consequence of this, also because the world actually is the stronger, is that he becomes weaker and weaker in regard to the life of the world. If the soul were not heterogeneous to the life of the world, it could never be gained, but since it still belongs to the world, the gaining can have no other presupposition than this insignificant “patience,” and this again in such a way that it is not, but becomes.
In patience, the soul comes to terms with all its possessors, with the life of the world in that it sufferingly gains itself from it, with God in that it sufferingly accepts itself from him, with itself in that it itself retains what it simultaneously gives to both without anyone’s being able to deprive the soul of it—patience. The soul can obtain nothing through power; it is in the hands of an alien power. If the soul were free in some other way, it would not be the self-contradiction in the contradiction between the external and the internal, the temporal and the eternal. This self-contradiction is again expressed in the soul’s being stronger than the world through its weakness, in its being weaker than God through its strength, in its inability to gain anything but itself unless it wants to be deceived, and in its being able to gain itself only by losing itself.
“But what, then, is a human soul?” If you impatiently ask someone else this question, you will scarcely find the answer, nor are you, as it seems, on the right road. Or is it not a manifestation of impatience that one person hurries forward to explain to everyone else what the soul is and that a second person waits impatiently for him to explain it, that the hearer impatiently expedites the speaker’s explanation and then in turn becomes impatient because he finds it inadequate? Or was it with this that he ought to be impatient, or was it not as it should be, and a stroke of good luck that it was as it should be, that what the speaker said did not bar him from gaining his soul in patience? Or should he not rather have become impatient with his having been so impatient and then do his best, as a fruit of impatience, to learn to be willing to begin with patience?
To know what a human soul is, what this means, is still a long way from beginning to gain one’s soul in patience, and it is a knowledge that exhibits its difference from that gaining inasmuch as it does indeed grow in impatience. And even though this knowledge may have its significance, it often deceived a person the very same way the world does, in that he thought that he possessed it, whereas it was his knowledge that possessed him.
“But if a person is to gain his own soul, then he certainly [IV 66] must know it before he begins.” This, of course, is true, precisely because the person who knows his soul has still not therefore gained it, but it is precisely therefore also true that if he does not begin to gain it, he does not know it. Even if he could know it completely before he gained it in patience, this knowing would still be only a possessing just like that first possessing—the condition for his being able to gain his soul in patience. This is why all knowing that is unrelated to a gaining is incomplete and deficient, inasmuch as a person still does not know how he becomes, since he becomes through the gaining, and even in association with the gaining he remains deficient, for “we still do not know what we shall become.”358
The person who knows his soul sees himself in a mirror, but he can forget what he looks like, as the Apostle James says, and therefore what he goes on to say is pertinent here: “that the one who hears the Word properly is the one who does it.”359 As long as he merely hears the Word, he is outside it, and when the proclaimer is silent, he hears nothing; but when he does the Word, he continually hears what he himself is proclaiming to himself. And any mere hearing of the Word is infinitely more imperfect than the doing, not only because the doing is superior but because in comparison with the exactitude of the doing any oral communication is very imperfect, both in its brevity and in its prolixity. Therefore knowledge of one’s own soul, if one wants to regard it as a gaining, is a self-deception, because even in its greatest completeness it still is but a hint of what manifests itself in its definiteness during the gaining.
Therefore a person certainly must know his soul in order to gain it, but this knowing is not the gaining, inasmuch as in this knowing he ascertains that he is in the hands of an alien power and that consequently he does not possess himself or, to define it more closely, he has not gained himself. When the devil believes and yet trembles,360 there is a self-knowing in this believing, and the more perfect it is, the more he will tremble, precisely because he does not will to gain himself.
A person knows his soul, then, if he truly knows it as something [IV 67] that he may even be able to describe accurately but that is in the possession of another and that he probably desires to possess, but knowledge as such does not help him in this. Even though patience is required for this knowing, as for any other, this nevertheless is not what the words speak about, as is shown by this—that in knowledge patience is not simultaneously the condition and the conditioned. The knower is again deceived, just as the merchant would be if instead of winning knowledge he won patience. The knower does just what the hiker does—he puts aside his patience when he has won knowledge. The person who wants to be patient only in order to know his soul will not gain his soul in patience.
The person who wants to gain his soul in patience knows that his soul does not belong to him, that there is a power from which he must gain it, a power by whom he must gain it, and that he must gain it himself. He never abandons patience, not when he has gained it, since it was indeed patience that he gained, and as soon as he gives up patience, he gives up the acquisition again; neither does he abandon patience when it seems that his efforts are frustrated, because insofar as that is the case, he knows that it must be because of a wrong kind of patience or because of impatience. Therefore, whether he gains patience in the terrible moment of decision or gains it slowly, he gains his soul in patience, whether he is immediately transferred into eternity or from that moment on he is transferring himself at every moment into eternity.
When the impatience of feelings dangles the gain before him, he knows that it is deceiving him, for it wants to render patience superfluous to him, and the gain is only in patience. When the impatience of knowledge wants to safeguard the gain for him, indeed, the gain in all its multiplicity, he knows that it deceives, for it wants to dismiss patience, and the gain is only in patience, and patience is not the multifarious but the single and the simple. When the intention wants to take the gain by force,361 he knows that it is deceiving him, because it also takes patience by force. When the past wants to shock him with its horrors, the future with its anxious expectancy, when the whole world threatens him with its atrocities, when time enters the world’s service to prolong the pain and the agony inordinately, or when time does not threaten in this way but cunningly lets him understand that it never shuts its eyes while [IV 68] he is sleeping—then he knows that all this is a deception—not its threats, not whether it has the power to carry them out, but that it is a deception that this will render patience superfluous to him and, if he ever did begin on it, make him regret it as one who was not able to endure, that this will separate for him the patience from the gain that remains in patience when everyone has taken his own down to the last penny.
Should we now ask, “Who described this conflict properly?” As if the proclamation were not always imperfect, and as if the proclamation were not always something other than the gain? As if the description would not tempt the speaker to impatience in the expression of passion and the listener to impatience in listening and to impatience in demanding a new discourse, whether he found the one heard to be too elaborate (and then the speaker should praise him if it did not mean that his soul was utterly thoughtless) or too simple, which certainly should not be praised (for the person who thinks that multiplicity and multitudinousness assist him in the gain is like the person who believes that simplicity stops him), since only the simple is an assistance. Or was not the description itself something that the world and time were capable of taking away without taking away the patience and the gain that is in patience, which even in the moment of death gains a person his soul for the eternal if he dies in patience!