Helpful thought from Chekhov's phsyc ward

This is one of my all-time favorite dialogues (from Ward Six by Chekhov). It is between a doctor and a mad man (who lives in Ward six). The doctor sees him to be the only intelligent man in the town so he finds himself going down for a visit more and more often.

Doctor: Peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but within him.

Madman: What do you mean?

Doctor: The ordinary man looks for good or evil in external things: an open carriage, a study, while the thinking man looks for them within himself.

Madman: Go preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's warm and smells of oranges; it's not suited to the climate here. Who was it I was talking to about Diogenes? Was it you?

Doctor: Yes, it was I ... yesterday.

Madman: Diogenes didn't need a study or a warm room, it was hot there anyhow. He could sleep in a barrel and eat olives and oranges. But you bring him to Russia to live and he'd be begging for a room, and not just in December, but in May. He'd be doubled up with cold.

Doctor: No. One can be impervious to the cold, as to any other pain. ... The wise man, or even the merely rational, thinking man, is distinguished precisely by his disdain for suffering; he is always content, and nothing ever surprises him.

Madman: Then I must be an idot, for I suffer, am discontented, and continually surprised by human baseness. ... All I know is that God created me out of warm blood and nerves--yes! And organic tissues, if it is viable, must react to every irritation. And I do react! To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to vileness with disgust. In my opinion this is exactly what is known as life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feeble its response to irritation; the higher it is, the more receptive, and the more energetic its reactions to reality. ... You must excuse me, I am neither a sage nor a philosopher."

He then breaks into a massive critique of Stoicism saying that it congealed 2000 years ago and has not progressed one particle and that it was always for the minority because it never took into account the majority of people who are in need and want of human things like food and shelter. It is for the wealthy academic and no one else. That's not even the best part ... its just so long I can't type more. He finishes by saying that all of the Doctors philosophy is really just convenience allowing him to lift no finger for other human beings ... "you have nothing to do, your conscience is clear, and you feel you're a sage ... No sir, this is not philosophy, not thought, not breadth of vision, but laziness, pretense, mental torpor ... "

The sad thing is that this danger of splitting mental thoughts and ideas from flesh and blood is a danger of all academic work, all rational, all philosophy and even theology. The Incarnation and the prophets before him remind us that we are to respond to irritants and outcries and that our minds must be alive and human.