On November 20, 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a letter to the Danish historian of literature Georg Brandes: “I have now revealed myself, and I have done it with a cynicism that will have its effects on the course of history. The name of my book is Ecce Homo, and it represents a sort of assassination, without any mercy, for the Crucified one; it ends with thunder and lightning against anything which is Christian or in any way contaminated by Christianity. Now, at last, I have become the first psychologist of Christianity. I am an old artillery man, and I draw up heavy guns of whose existence no enemy of Christianity would ever have dreamed. The whole thing is a prelude to The Revaluation of All Values, a work that I have already finished. I tell you that within two years I’ll have the whole earth in convulsions.”

About the same day on which Nietzsche wrote, an unknown lady of the French provincial middle class, Madame Guérin, received a letter (dated November 18) from her niece, Thérèse Martin, a fifteen-year-old postulant in the Carmelite convent at Lisieux:

This morning, at Communion, I prayed hard to Jesus to fill you to the full with his joys…. Alas, joys are not what he has been sending us for some time, it is the cross and only the cross that he gives us to rest upon…. Oh, my dearest aunt, if it were only I that must suffer, I would not mind, but I know the great part you take in our trial. I should like to take every sorrow from you for your feast, to take all your burdens to myself. That is what a moment ago I was asking of him whose heart was beating in unison with mine. I felt then that suffering was the very best gift he had to give us, that he gave it only to his chosen friends; this answer made clear to me that my prayer was not granted, for I saw that Jesus loved my dear aunt too much to take away her cross!

The two letters are, as the saying goes, poles apart. It is not difficult to see that everything that has occurred in the history of the world since that November 1888 has occurred between these two poles.

To be sure, it is quite unfair to Nietzsche to quote him in such a manner. That letter was written shortly before the outbreak of his mental illness. Hence the extravagance of phrase, although the content reflects a good deal of the thought of the writer’s creative years. Moreover, it reveals only one side of this remarkable thinker. He had, on other occasions, written on Christ and Christianity in a way nearly the opposite of our quotation. There were virtuous sides to his life, and he was anything but the nihilist or immoralist that the uninitiated reader might surmise from those lines. He was a truly modern man. He was not only complex, he allowed his complexity to get the better of him. He finally broke under the weight of a paradox. This is the reason why any quotation, no matter from which one of his works, would contradict another quotation. In a way, one always quotes him out of context.

Not so Thérèse Martin. Our quotation is a fair sample. It is quite impossible to be unfair to her by quoting her out of context because, in a sense, one is always in context. She said at one time that she began to accept the love of Christ and his cross at the age of three. She died at the age of twenty-four after incredible suffering, with the words: “My God, I love you!”

In other words, the writer of the first letter is typical of all of us “modern” people by the many facets of his personality, the multiple roots of his thought, and his glittering complexity. The writer of the second showed, in contrast to this, a remarkable single-mindedness. This single-mindedness becomes more startling the more one gets acquainted with Thérèse….

We see that a curious incongruity exists between the political and the spiritual history of humankind. It seems almost as if a thing to be world-shaking in spiritual terms had to be inconspicuous and unknown in temporal terms. Those who are familiar with Saint Thérèse’s life remember the incident when she was on her sickbed and overheard the remarks of young novices outside her window. It is customary that after the death of a nun the superior should send a death notice with a biographical note to other communities. Referring to this, one of the novices said, “I really wonder sometimes what our mother prioress will find to say about Sister Thérèse when she dies. She has certainly never done anything worth speaking of.” Sister Thérèse was happy overhearing this. Complete and utter anonymity was one of the essential features of her “way.” It is one of the elements of “littleness,” that concept of hers which often leads to so much misunderstanding. The idea was precious to her “that no one may think of me, that I may be forgotten and trodden under foot as a grain of salt.”

In the face of these two conflicting totalitarian demands, that of Christ and that of the world in which we live, what are we to do? To be totalitarian is a great thing. Nietzsche’s insane prediction that no enemy of Christianity would ever have dreamed of the existence of such heavy guns came true to an uncanny degree, even if it came true in a way in which he did not mean it at all. The earth is in convulsions. It is Big Stuff all right. Where in the world is the Big Stuff that we can use in the face of all this?

We have to come back to Thérèse’s plan. She would say right now, don’t use any Big Stuff, use Little Stuff. An all-out surrender does not have to be spectacular in worldly terms. Not everybody can be a Saint Paul or a Saint Joan of Arc. Only a few people are meant to be stoned, suffer shipwreck, spend a night and a day in the depth of the sea, or don armor and ride at the head of a regiment. As a matter of fact, with the world becoming more and more totalitarian, a Christian should think twice before he goes in for the Big Stuff. There is in everybody’s life, in every place and at every moment, a lot of Small Stuff around that would provide excellent material for sanctity if one only exploited it.

Thérèse’s sister Céline said about her that she revealed her strength “in a multitude of slight, almost microscopic acts.” At first you are disappointed…. To understand the real meaning, you have to study her biographies. It would go beyond the scope of this essay to relate those “microscopic acts” in detail; no single incident illustrates sufficiently all that is meant by this. There is the story of the sister toward whom she felt an instinctive antipathy. There is the story of the old sister whom she looked after and who found fault with her endlessly. There is the series of events during the influenza epidemic in the convent. And there are many more stories. With them go the misinterpretations and rebuffs to which she was subjected every day, the coldness, both emotional and physical, of the atmosphere, and those endless nights without sleep, with physical and mental torture, with torments of doubt and the withdrawal of all natural and supernatural consolation. “When my heart, weary of the enveloping darkness, tries to find some rest and strength in the thought of an everlasting life to come, my anguish only increases. It seems that the darkness itself, borrowing the voice of the unbeliever, cries mockingly: ‘You dream of a land of light and fragrance, you believe that the Creator of these wonders will be forever yours, you think to escape one day from the mists in which you now languish. Hope on! Hope on! Look forward to death! It will give you not what you hope for, but a night darker still, the night of utter nothingness.’” This was the raw material out of which, miraculously, she made her “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This is the same Thérèse of whom one of the sisters said when she did not show up for recreation, “There will be no laughing today. Sister Thérèse is not here.”

Ivan Karamazov, that fictitious and very real contemporary of Saint Thérèse, says:

I could never understand how one could love one’s neighbor. It is precisely the neighbor (the one who is physically close to us), whom one cannot possibly love, in my opinion; at best one can love those who are far away…. The love of Christ for human beings is, in my opinion, a miracle which cannot be realized on this earth. All right, he was God. But we are no gods. Let us assume, for instance, that I suffer deeply, and that another one never realizes how much I suffer – well, he just is another one and not I; moreover, a human being will only rarely admit the suffering of another one – as if there were something like a rank involved. Why does he not admit it, what do you think? Well, perhaps because I have a bad smell, or a stupid face, or because I stepped on his toe. And with all this, there is a difference between suffering and suffering: ordinary suffering which humiliates me, let us say hunger, might still be acknowledged by my benefactor. But very rarely will he acknowledge in me a higher form of suffering, for example, suffering for an idea. The moment he sees me he’ll find that my face does not at all resemble the face he had imagined a man who suffers for an idea ought to have. He’ll withdraw all his good deeds, and, mind you, he won’t do it out of a bad heart…. One can love one’s neighbor in an abstract way, occasionally, perhaps, even from afar, but in close contact almost never.

Here Dostoyevsky has stated the problem very neatly. The obstacles to a Christlike life are trivial, almost ridiculous, often in the nature of psychological subtleties. Therefore the method, too, has to be one of trivialities and psychological subtleties. Thérèse’s so-called Little Way is the exact complement to Ivan’s remarks. He had a clear notion of what seemed to him a hopeless position, and she evolved a strategy.

The fact that the fictitious Ivan and the historical Thérèse are contemporaries is perhaps not as accidental as it looks. Ivan says it is easy to love human beings in a faraway abstract manner. There are, as everybody can see, great possibilities for self-deception. And the general cultural atmosphere of the nineteenth century as of the twentieth lends itself particularly to this kind of thing. If the gospel appeals to you, it is easy to come out against general social injustice, against the exploitation of the poor, in favor of pacifism, ethical vegetarianism, or other “isms.” But it is a thousand times harder to tackle problems of hostility, or coldness, or injustice in the relationship with those with whom you are in everyday contact. It is also much less spectacular.

There is in our relationship to the saints a limitless possibility for fooling ourselves. We all admire Saint Francis of Assisi. When we come to analyze what attracts us to him we may come to find that he represents a fantasy of escape rather than a true hero. He may actually appeal to the Rousseauist who is still alive in every one of us. In the mind of many people he has become a kind of nature boy who lives as a friend of birds and squirrels and does not have to pay any income tax. The fact that he experienced the agony of Our Lord is a small-print footnote. Moreover there is no need to do anything about it because our station in life is such that we could not possibly all try to be Saint Francises….

With Thérèse it is different. With her no excuse is possible. Pope Benedict XV says: “There is a call to the faithful of every nation, no matter what may be their age, sex, or state of life, to enter wholeheartedly into the Little Way that led Sister Thérèse to the summit of heroic virtue.” It sounds easy. Depend on God like a little child. Trust him blindly no matter what happens. Use the inconspicuous events and situations of everyday life as material for sanctification. Do it in obscurity….

It is just about the most difficult thing to do. Littleness, as she understood it, and mediocrity as we live it – I could not conceive of two more contrary ways of life. It often occurred to me that poor tortured Nietzsche with his violent cry of “No, no!” was in the eyes of God closer to her “Yes, yes!” than we are. But then there is that terrible phrase, by their fruits you shall know them….

Thérèse of Lisieux’s death occurred in complete obscurity on September 30, 1897. Two days later, Tolstoy, in faraway Yasnaya Polyana, made the following entry in his diary: “I imagined vividly what a joyful, peaceful, and completely free life this would be: to be able to dedicate oneself entirely to God, i.e., if one intended in all situations which life presents only to accept his will – during illness, when one has been insulted, in humiliation, in suffering, in all temptations, and in death. In that case death would be nothing but the taking on of a new task.” There he was, that great and tragic genius of our time, struggling for a goal to which he had come so much closer than most of us. And Sister Thérèse had made it.

From Karl Stern, Love and Success (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 273–287. Used by permission of the literary executor of Karl Stern’s Estate.