The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

by Matei Calinescu

  Were Zacharias Lichter not leading an exclusively urban existence, his excessive fear of dogs would no doubt extend to other animals: oxen or river buffalos, billy goats, or rams—his hyperbolic imagination would detect signs of a terrifying potential for aggression in all of them. Even so, Lichter’s propensity for fear seems fully justified: various insects—wasps, bumblebees, honeybees, beetles—not to mention moths or bats which, as evening descends on the park, seem to have a predilection for colliding with the philosopher’s brightly bulging forehead—all of these, enlarged tenfold by the diopter of fear in Lichter’s eyes, are transformed into fabulous creatures. Threatening, endowed with Cyclopean eyes and monstrous rattling wings, they seem ready to plunge their venomous stingers into his body or dust him with poisonous pollen.

  “The ridicule I provoke”—Lichter admits—“arises from the huge discrepancy between the elevated spiritual level at which my courage reveals itself and the basic physiological level of my terror. But it is a sublime state of ridicule! I may be afraid of dogs and butterflies, but I would throw myself on the pyre at any time for an idea. I would not hesitate to be a guinea pig for a scientist testing a new drug—against cancer, say. But indiscriminate courage reveals a want of imagination and ultimately a form of imbecility.

  “The senseless bravura of a champion race-car driver, or of a man scaling the terrifying rock face of a mountain against a stopwatch, seem to me forms of spiritual alienation based on the intoxication of risk. For courage involves not simple and gratuitous daring, but responsibility. Modern societies tend to eschew responsibility, at least as a factor in human interaction, and replace it with the manifold and diverse forms of the cult of risk-taking. But in risk only the mechanics of courage, emptied of any content, are retained. The main accent falls on the game, on competition, on a show of skill and strength. Conceived in this way, courage loses all its grandeur: instead of expressing the martyr’s inflexible free will, it displays the dexterity (dangerous, indeed) of a trapeze artist. Acrobats have replaced saints. In fact, fear and courage are only apparently contradictory. Even the most timorous person may display amazing courage, in the noble sense that should be restored to this notion. Fear is but a natural reaction in face of risk (bravery being its opposite); on the other hand, courage means incorporating a categorical imperative and presupposes transcending risk in spiritual terms. Being a Christian during the declining years of the Roman Empire meant courage, not just assuming risks. Even if it was objectively present—as was fear—risk was totally unimportant and utterly risible in comparison with the sublime altitude of courage. My temperament is fearful but my spirit breathes the pure air of courage.”

  ON THE REALM OF STUPIDITY

  IN ORDER to grasp Lichterian thought it is essential to understand his conception of stupidity. He sees it as mimicry, because stupidity apes—at all levels—intelligence, sometimes so faithfully that even astute minds mistake one for the other. Nothing is further from the truth than the belief that stupidity has its own, recognizable stamp: on the contrary, it is astonishingly varied, capable of morphing into the most diverse and unpredictable forms. Its vulgar hypostases aside, one can say—as paradoxical as it sounds—that by assimilating the discoveries of intelligence and by mimicking its manifestations, stupidity contributes to the progress of humanity. The rare and brilliant act of creativity becomes a “fiscal gain,” a source of profit, exploited with patience and deftness. Stupidity is tenacious, accumulative, and applicative, acting as a mode of inertia: it ensures the circulation of ideas and values.

  No wonder then that Lichter sees modern civilization as a vast extension of the Realm of Stupidity. Intelligence is obsessed with that which is fundamental, original, structural, essential. One recognizes intelligent individuals by their fascination with the elementary and the simple. Their efforts within the spiritual order are integrative: they seek the basic principle, or—to put it metaphorically—the ideal key to all the mysteries of the world. Aspiring towards totality and uniqueness is not stupidity’s ambition. Its strength lies in its ability to placidly accept any theory, even an erroneous one, as long as it offers a viable starting point towards practical results. A parasite plagiarizing the pure core of intelligence, sapping its vigor, stupidity forever fortifies and perfects itself, sprawling like a vast and dangerous stain on the consciousness of humanity. For stupidity is vain (the vanity of “efficiency”), sure of itself, economical, has wide-spreading technological tentacles and is shrewdly and ferociously aggressive. Stupidity wills itself to be “universally human.” Since the domain of stupidity is progress itself, Zacharias Lichter naturally concludes that true intelligence evolves within a vicious circle, forever fantasizing escape yet forever falling back into the realization that all efforts at escape are futile.

  BEGGING

  THE ONLY profession Zacharias Lichter practices on occasion—and this should come as no surprise—is begging. One may occasionally see this strange prophet seeking alms—he may well even show up in the city center—his face flushed, his gaze sparkling, his gestures awkward and humble, though secretly ironic. “Help a poor metaphysician,” he says in the tone of voice one generally reserves for some terrible infirmity. Most passersby consider Zacharias Lichter mad and scuttle past in alarm; others rummage nervously through their pockets and hastily drop a coin or two into his outstretched hand, eager to lose sight of this strange figure whose insistence they sense as obscurely threatening. Still others—for Lichter begs from anyone, indiscriminately, without limiting himself to “easy touches”—mock him, or, confronted by such a robust beggar, raise “holy hell” and pelt him with the grossest of insults. (In such cases Lichter wears a saintly smile, and a flicker of beauty floats for a moment across his frightful face.) Begging—Zacharias Lichter assures us—is the profession that brings one closest to God. It is a form of self-preservation through perpetual self-denial; it is asceticism and at the same time the disdain of asceticism. Moreover, Lichter sees begging as one of the most efficacious means of self-knowledge. That is why, to his disciples—some of them young and leading lives devoid of any pecuniary concerns—he recommends begging as a purely spiritual exercise. In order for the circle to close perfectly, money thus gathered must be given to real beggars, to cripples dragging themselves along the street, to old vagabonds, to the blind, to gypsies.

  A person structurally incapable of begging is, in Lichter’s eyes, clearly condemned to mediocrity, spat forth with disgust from God’s mouth, and impelled by the angels of fire and the angels of ice toward the gates of the vast Realm of Stupidity.

  EXISTENCE AND POSSESSION

  ABSORBED as he is with the category of being—by virtue of the one freedom he recognizes as his own, that of embracing one’s fate—Zacharias Lichter belongs to the rare breed that has overcome the spirit of possession, with all its deceptions and insidious tendencies. We can speak of his poverty as a work that can be understood only in relation to its ideal and perfect model, the Platonic idea of poverty. It would thus be mistaken to call Zacharias Lichter a pauper, to place him in a social category that permits relative comparisons. He is instead—excuse the cumbersome and awkward formulation—a bearer of poverty, understood here as an archetype and as a category (as a negation of having, because poverty is a mode of existence, a hypostasis of being); Lichter is not a pauper but an individual who partakes of the essence and genius of poverty, one who must be judged exclusively in terms of that essence.

  From early adolescence on, Zacharias Lichter detached himself quite naturally from all he perceived as sullied by the secretly poisoned tentacles of possession. He started by distancing himself from his haberdasher family. (Moses Lichter, his father, kept a petty dry goods shop on Philanthropy Boulevard, where his family helped by carrying some of the merchandise in portable stalls to various city markets.)

  As a child Zacharias helped in his father’s shop and accompanied his older brothers and sisters as they peddled their motley goods. He even cried out wares in
the street until his thin voice became hoarse and cracked—offering combs, buttons, shoelaces, soaps, or shoe polish. At around thirteen to fourteen years of age, left alone to mind the little stall one evening, Zacharias felt suddenly enveloped by a divine flame and, in a state of near delirium, gave away all the goods left in his care in less than a quarter of an hour. He gave without lifting his eyes, at random, to anyone who would accept his wares: to beggars, to children loitering in the market, even to those vagabonds who haunt crowded places in hope of some modest profit or, failing that, some opportunity for theft. Zacharias’s act seemed so outlandish, so contrary to “nature,” that his parents were unable to find a suitable punishment. Having no other real reason to complain of his son, a brilliant student whose sweet and open character was in total contrast to his ugliness (which made him even more lovable), Domnul Moses Lichter left the child unchastised and spared him any further involvement with the family’s precarious trade. “An angel of fire came, and then, I don’t know what happened . . .” Zacharias tried to explain.

  Zacharias was around nineteen and a student of philosophy at the university when he left home and severed all ties with his family (although he never lost his affection for them). He moved into an abandoned garage on the outskirts of the city and made a living tutoring. He graduated with an outstanding dissertation on the Enneads of Plotinus but immediately withdrew from the circle of intellectual life, in spite of the numerous opportunities that awaited him there. He remained in occasional contact with only one or two of his former colleagues and visited his old professor of metaphysics once or twice a year to borrow books. The break was so complete that he did not even drop by to pick up his licénce diploma.

  Illuminated and scorched by God’s flame, Zacharias Lichter broke free from his past, inaugurating the cycle of his existence as a prophet with the discovery of the condition of the clown and its inherent irony. “I realized”—Lichter would later say—“that the strident trumpets of clowns unleash the apocalypse. I blew vigorously into countless colored-cardboard trumpets, initiating the festival of monsters and causing the great circus of the universe to roar: ta-ra-ra-tara-ra-ta-ra-ra.” At about this same time he discovered the deeper meaning of begging.

  Zacharias Lichter’s refusal to be gainfully employed should not be taken as a rejection of the idea of work itself, but as an expression of protest, a revolt against the possessive mentality that marks every constructive activity in our modern world. For working—Lichter explains—suddenly places you within a hierarchy. The place you hold within that hierarchy becomes your possession, which in turn presupposes accepting, even unwittingly, a system that defines you above all by your degree of participation in the sphere of having and only in a subsidiary sense in that of being, that is, in your own essence. Under such circumstances, work becomes one of the ways by which the category of to have absorbs that of to be. A tragic victim of betrayal and exploitation, the ordinary worker turns his power to work willy-nilly into a possession, which he constantly sells at a loss and rebuys only to sell again. And so it goes, on and on.

  To prove that he was not opposed to the idea of work, but instead upheld it as one of the highest expressions of human nature (ontologically speaking, work is one of the forms of ecstasy), Zacharias Lichter plied several trades over a period of time—he learned masonry, welding, and at one point worked in a shop carving inscriptions on gravestones. Yet he stubbornly refused to accept any wages or other form of payment, and at the same time he continued begging while urging other workers to do the same. Conflicts were soon brewing. Although he was a zealous and productive worker, he quickly ran afoul of employers who took him for a loony, and a dangerous one at that, and gave him the sack. Many of his coworkers looked askance at this ugly, odd fellow who acted on incomprehensible ideas and principles and who refused to join in their practical solidarity by resorting to nebulous arguments couched in an otherworldly language. Others, laughing at Zacharias, though without malice, intuited in him an obscure force of self-denial and warm kindness. Partly for their own amusement and partly out of true empathy, they invited him into their homes. There the prophet (aware of course of how ridiculous he must have seemed) expounded on his grand concept of social utopia: the overthrow of the capitalist system through the conversion of millions of workers to begging and the founding of a new society, religious and anarchic, where ownership, though not banned by law, would become a form of alienation, a shameful illness, the object of revulsion and pity. (“Those infected by the ownership virus”—Zacharias Lichter passionately explained—“will be quarantined in luxurious leper-hospitals of the spirit, and future prophets and saints, as numerous as the workers of whom you are a part today, will work to support and care for them.”) In the dramatic confusion of those years leading up to World War II, the bizarre behavior of Zacharias Lichter ultimately attracted the attention of security agencies, who suspected him of conducting dangerous political activity under the guise of religious mania. But no concrete evidence could be produced to support this suspicion.

  Zacharias Lichter continued living a secluded life in the abandoned garage that had been his home since university years. This dilapidated shack was located in the back of a yard in which ramshackle mud huts sprouted like mushrooms around the unfinished building of the owner (an innkeeper, long bankrupt) whenever the sulky old man was forced to sell another patch of his land cheaply. Lichter had been allowed to sleep rent-free in the garage, which contained an ancient discarded couch. The unsightly figure of the prophet at first frightened the neighbors, especially the female contingent. (A scrawny sixteen-year-old girl, prone to hysterical outbursts, cried out “It’s the devil!” the first time she saw him and took flight shrieking and crossing herself.) But as time went by most got used to his presence. Some would even help—with the direct and authentic simplicity of the humble—by bringing him an old coat of some kind, or sharing lunch or supper leftovers with him. The truth is that Lichter did not spend much time “at home.” Summers he liked to sleep in parks, on the grass or behind a bush, or on a bench when the nights grew cooler. When he suffered from insomnia he would climb up a tree and, leaning back against a strong branch, meditate or pray. (One morning, seeing Zacharias perched in a blossoming linden tree, plunged in a state of semiwithdrawal, a surprised acquaintance called out to him, asking what he was doing up there. “I want to be closer to God,” Lichter answered, closing his eyes and sinking again into silence.) In winter, when his garage was cold and the wind whistled through the cracks, he would sleep in waiting rooms at various railway stations until watchmen spotted him and chased him away. There were no objects of value in his abode except for a few books that he had borrowed. Only the Bible—an old edition with tiny letters printed on cheap, yellowing paper—was his. It had been given to him by a pious, simpleminded old woman, a neighbor to whom Zacharias Lichter spoke at times, in his usual torrential and abstract manner, about the terrifying flame of God.

  In his constant striving toward the ideal, Zacharias Lichter managed little by little to turn his entire material existence into a vessel for the incorruptible essence of poverty. His condition therefore appears not as the result of social or psychological determinism but as a voluntary transcending of all (obvious or hidden) determinisms of possession through a spiritual act that lifts the immediate to the plenitude of being. Fully conscious that poverty is one of his most significant works, he sometimes says, not without a touch of humor: “My poverty is in itself a philosophical system worthy of a treatise.”

  REGARDING THE DEVIL

  “WHAT is the devil?” Zacharias Lichter was once asked. “First of all”—he replied—“the devil is not: he doesn’t even try to be, realizing it’s something he can never achieve. In keeping with a suggestion in Dostoyevsky, the devil strikes me as the symbolic embodiment of a mediocrity conscious of itself, of what we might call ‘a mediocrity complex’—attaching, of course, an ontological sense to the psychological one. The devil illustrates the impossibili
ty of being, as well as the awareness of that impossibility—the source of mediocrity in the universe. Metaphorically speaking, the devil is bathing in stale, lukewarm waters, prey to impotent anger at being forever excluded from the climate of extremes, furious that, even in this, he cannot suffer. Far from both ice and flame, the devil creates and destroys—simultaneously—all contingent rewards. He dreams all those timid and miserable dreams that will never be fulfilled, if only because he himself, by dreaming, mocks them . . .

  “His existential failure fills the devil with a boundless resentment that is the source of the massive proliferating force of banality and mediocrity. To avenge his own nonbeing, the devil has founded the large and prosperous Realm of Stupidity. It is naive to consider the devil as the opposite of God (God can have no opposite but Himself), and it is just as naive to think of the devil as ‘the spirit of negation,’ since he is incapable of denying or affirming anything: all he can do is put into practice. Thus he is more properly identified with the ‘practical spirit,’ the very essence of stupidity. The devil lacks the aptitude to distinguish truth from falsehood. He is able, however, to distinguish with great accuracy between the possible and the impossible. Herein lies the terrible danger he represents, of which we must be constantly aware. In the realm of practical applications, possibilities are at least as rich for the false as for the true. Consequently, diabolical stupidity explores them with equal skill and perfect logic. In fact, the application of a false idea may yield more practical results than the application of a true one (since truth offers more resistance to such endeavors). Aren’t we witnessing nowadays the systematization and spreading of countless modes of lying—in almost all domains of knowledge? Don’t we see—what a disturbing phenomenon!—the fantastic speed at which innocent errors, under the meticulously organized actions of stupidity, turn into lies?”