Monday, June 26, 2023

Evil and Suffering, by Louis Lavelle

In two essays, first published in book form in 1940, Louis Lavelle dissects Evil and Suffering, tracing their relations to Good and Happiness, Body and Spirit, Matter and Spirit. Evil and Suffering is considered a work of moral philosophy. In it, Lavelle leads us to reflect on suffering and how it is embedded in the internal and external world of being. According to the author, the spirit arises from this experience of experiencing suffering.

The marks that pain causes in us allow us to transcend what we are to the external world, after we come to terms with suffering in the internal world. If suffering is an inherent condition of human life, it remains for us to do our best, face it, and overcome it. According to Lavelle, it is suffering itself that gives meaning to life; but this is only possible if there is an awareness that one is suffering, as it is this awareness that awakens the spirit. Through antitheses, the author also tells us that it is in absence that we find presence, in darkness that we see light, in solitude that we find communion, in an interior deepening where we perceive reality. Therefore, suffering connects beings. Pain shapes us, awakens us, and makes us better beings if we know how to confront it. The reading of this book, with its incredible spiritual richness, generates a dialogue within us about suffering, in order to transcend it.

Notice

If we wanted to explain why these pages appear in the notebooks of “Présences,” it would be enough to read the Epilogue. “The spirit is a Presence always available to which we do not always respond,” one reads there. And further on: “The action that men exert upon each other is also an action of presence.” A double loyalty to ourselves and to others, an effort to serve both within and outside ourselves this force that proceeds from us and infinitely surpasses us, a call to the most living of Presences; the message that this collection wanted to convey has never been different. “Presence to oneself, presence to the world,” said the first of our notebooks; in creating this gathering place where diverse spirits can come together in complete freedom, we knew that Louis Lavelle, the philosopher of Total Presence, the moralist of Self-Consciousness, would one day take his place there.

The meditations that compose this book touch on some essential points of a philosophy of presence. Being is never discovered better than in trials; in the face of suffering and the problems it poses, the terrible distraction to which life leads us ceases; a stripping occurs and our eyes see better. But it is not only in relation to ourselves that the effort towards presence must be accomplished, it is in relation to others as well. What do these two seemingly contradictory conditions bring us: solitude and communion? Does one not take root in the other? Does a mysterious balance not establish itself between them?

Written in times of peace, these meditations appear during the war. They are not connected to our current concerns by anything anecdotal, anything external. They do not rely on recent examples. And yet they belong to the small number of pages that are capable, in such moments, of fulfilling an expectation because they touch upon what our immediate worries have that is eternal and lastingly significant. This problem of evil and suffering, which could be tried to be forgotten or treated by preterition during times of peace, however fragile it may have seemed, now finds itself imperatively posed to our consciousness, because everything is at stake. And this war, which materially confines so many beings to solitude, now also teaches communion. It binds beings who can only find each other through communion and who can only discover this communion by deepening their solitude, facing the same harsh realities.

Such is the relevance of these sober and profound pages. If it seems futile to us, at “Présences,” to comment on the surprising and transitory nature of events, it appears, on the contrary, necessary to grasp, in this ordeal, everything that can contribute to a spiritual fulfillment. War would be nothing more than the most monstrous of historical phenomena if it did not offer, like all great sufferings, an opportunity for inner progress towards the true reality of man, that is, towards Presence.

“PRÉSENCES.”

Foreword: In Times of War

In this volume, two different essays are brought together: “Evil and Suffering, All Beings Separated and United” and “On the Time of Peace,” which were written during a time of peace1 and were thought to provide valuable insights for the time of war. There is a certain sweetness in peace that we only truly appreciate when we have lost it. This is always the case with happiness; it escapes us when we possess it, and we only know its memory. The peace we experienced between the two wars was so intertwined with war, with the war that haunted us and the war that already threatened us, that it was like a suspended balance that could break or establish itself at any moment: it was an unextinguished fire.

No one born in the century we live in has experienced true peace in their adult life, and we must have the courage to acknowledge that they have little chance of ever experiencing it. However, there is not a single person who does not evoke peace as a haven where they will find the end of their tribulations, where they will finally set foot on solid ground and begin to live according to their desires. And even if it is argued that the only true peace is peace of the heart, is there anyone in the world selfish enough or strong enough not to be affected by the great rupture of bodies and souls that is the fate of humanity during war? Is there anyone who does not participate in all the sufferings that war feeds upon, even in its successes or triumphs? Is there anyone who does not question the very Evil to which it seems to deliver us and of which no one is sure they do not bear, to some extent, the responsibility?

We experience evil and suffering during both peace and war. They can be seen as inseparable from our human condition. They are the marks of our misery and explain the long lament that consciousness has always uttered throughout the ages, sometimes considered as its only natural voice. Indeed, consciousness is never more acute than when it suffers; pleasure disperses and numbs it. Suffering is the spur that awakens it, shaking its most sensitive point. But it is also the first revelation of Evil, and Evil is never without a connection to suffering. It is its principle: the evil I do is first a suffering that I impose on others, and it only brings me bitter satisfaction. For the suffering that traces evil is life turning against itself, injuring and mutilating itself.

During peacetime, we could contemplate evil and suffering with more leisure. During war, we are drawn into their whirlwind. In peacetime, evil and suffering were isolated events that we sought to circumscribe and determine the cause of, in order to remedy them. We wanted to see them only as exceptional phenomena, numerous indeed and always recurring, but attributable only to accidents or failures that we had to fight against, hoping to triumph over them. We only had the experience of evil and suffering within and around us, in beings close enough that their pain was also ours, or from whom a wound could come to us. The horizon of our sensitivity was very limited. Beyond that, evil and suffering were more imagined than experienced; they were merely ideas. We sought to forget and avoid them within and outside ourselves. Only a desperate or deeply contemplative consciousness was capable of wondering if Evil and Suffering did not reach to the very root of being and life, if they were not the very elements of our destiny that oblige us, according to some, to succumb, and according to others, to traverse them in order to free ourselves. But during war, evil and suffering acquire a magnitude and intensity that far exceed the sphere of individual existence. They can no longer be explained by the weakness or wickedness of individuals, although both are evident. Regarding the origin of Evil and the accompanying Suffering, we cannot simply blame those we want to hold responsible for the war, as the peoples follow them and even God allows them to execute their designs. As for all those engaged in war with their bodies and souls, suffering affects the strongest as well as the weakest. The harm that a person inflicts on another when they become enemies can be a sign of their valor and exclude any suspicion of wickedness. All those who participate in war feel overwhelmed by it; they undergo it like a cosmic catastrophe that human willpower tries, as best it can, to contain or divert. Thus, they enter the realm of Evil where their actions must henceforth be exercised, exposed on all sides to suffering, for which they willingly accept all risks. During peacetime, I only focused on abolishing them; during war, I cannot entertain such thoughts. I must transform evil itself into good, give suffering itself a meaning that penetrates and transfigures it.

War gives even the calmest life a tragic perspective. It imparts gravity to the most frivolous faces. It confronts each of us with the thought of death and brings it closer to us, to the point of blending it with our very lives, whereas peace allowed us to indefinitely postpone it. It keeps suffering always imminent in our own flesh and in everything we love. It forces us into the terrible apprenticeship of fear and absence. It establishes us, so to speak, in the state of expectation and anguish, which, of all states, are the most difficult to endure, as their essence is to yearn for an end. It creates a kind of equality among men, regardless of the personal advantages they still pursue, which is all the more shocking since the danger is shared, and for each individual, it is a matter of everything: society and humanity without which they are nothing, all the spiritual values to which they are attached, giving meaning to life and which, through countless trials, life’s purpose is always to defend and embody.

However, one should not think that existence changes its face in times of war and times of peace, or that the image we have of the universe suddenly becomes different, or that our behavior obeys new principles, or, as has been said at times, that there is a psychology or a morality of peace and another of war. War neither interrupts nor reverses the course of life; it reveals all the traits that habit had gradually erased, in a kind of stripping that gives them striking clarity. The most beautiful and, undoubtedly, the basest feelings cease to remain hidden. Suffering is always ready to emerge; it resides deep within the soul without the need to burst forth. We no longer think of concealing or appeasing it. It belongs to humanity, no longer to the individual. It appears before us with a naked gravity, without anyone seeking to exaggerate or feign it to attract interest or pity. Likewise, Evil is before us as a power that always opposes what we desire and love. It is not properly seen in the enemy, who is only its embodiment, but in that very force that perpetually opposes us. However, it always demands to be overcome. And in war, there is nothing that is not an effort or a duty for us.

Shall we say that the essence of war is merely to fascinate us, to occupy all our thoughts, and to divert them from their most natural purpose, which can only find its place in the peace we have left behind or the one we hope to regain? But it is impossible for it to be so. We always live in the present; neither regret nor hope suffices to fill it. Far from suspending life, war imbues it with extraordinary tension. Only the circumstances are different, but with their violence, suddenness, and the material power they manifest, which always threatens to annihilate our bodies, they strip us of all security and give us the keenest and most agonizing consciousness of life itself. Beneath the surface of the soul, where all the war images project into a phantasmagoric nightmare, war reveals to us a world that we carried within us without our gaze having penetrated it until now—a spiritual world illuminated by a new light where things lose their reality and become what they truly are: mere appearances. On the contrary, all our internal states and actions acquire significant density and henceforth form the true world for us. It is there that we experience the essential suffering of life, of which all particular sufferings are only the modes or signs, and there we learn to accept and deepen it. Evil, inseparable from willpower, against which we can only fight if we also find it within ourselves, becomes the principle that we must convert into good.

It is fair to say that only those who fight have the experience of war. And in the calmer domain where one is called to live, everyone feels a guilty conscience if they do not aspire to imitate the warrior. They may even wish to share a bit of their misery, their dangers, and that obscure effort in which they always risk succumbing. But war is a profession, the most demanding and perilous of all professions, imposing the greatest fatigue, where matter is the most resistant and rebellious. It is a profession like that of the miner and the sailor, in which all the resources of human industry unite against it, instead of merely serving to dominate it. However, war does not exhaust the warrior’s consciousness. In that isolation it imposes, detached from all the ties that supported them in the midst of the world and suspended, so to speak, between being and nothingness, they suddenly find themselves face to face with themselves as if they were discovering their existence for the first time, now that it is threatened. It has sometimes been observed that war narratives, which seem destined to deeply impact the imagination, always disappoint. They possess an anecdotal character that makes them appear external to us. The impressions of horror and dread quickly reach a limit that cannot be surpassed; the presence of the body is required, and it is futile to try to make it tremble through the mere evocation of an image. Those who are intimately involved in the events of war do not delight in reliving them in their minds; once freed from them, they maintain a sort of modesty regarding everything they have seen and suffered. They do not primarily think of peace but rather of the significance they will give to their lives when peace is restored—a life revealed to their lucid and disinterested gaze during war. They think less of war and more of themselves. They always come to perceive that the essence of war is, through the destructive role it suddenly assigns to their material activity, to compel them to spiritualize their entire lives. And the new world they discover is beyond both peace and war. War, through the great detachment it imposes on us, shows that it is the only thing that resists when everything collapses around us. Suffering and evil become the measure of our trials and duties. They are incorporated into the essence of our destiny and become the instruments of our patience and courage. In the reconquered peace, it will no longer be a question of rejecting or forgetting them, but of understanding and transforming them.

Here, these two great testimonies of human misery, which can be said to have provoked all the curses that have weighed upon existence and without which perhaps existence would be a dream without substance but not a struggle and redemption, have been examined in the light of reflection, independent of their specific forms and all the external remedies sought to abolish them. It is deep within consciousness that we have attempted to grasp this ambiguity between good and evil, which, by forcing us to realize the one and triumph over the other, gives our very life its intensity and depth. This is also the test of our freedom. Although there is evil in the world only so that it may be eliminated, if it were indeed eliminated by any means other than our effort, then good would also be eliminated, and the world would revert to the indifference of a pure spectacle. Likewise, suffering, which gives the feeling of my own life such sharpness and incisiveness, can only acquire value through the use I am capable of making of it. It can reduce me to despair, but it gives incomparable strength and light to the soul that has learned to accept it. War pushes the common experience of life to its utmost extreme. In its pure spiritual essence, this experience tends to shed the images of war; it is for us to make it constant, to carry its uninterrupted presence within us, and to always find and embrace it, without allowing the fleeting visage of happiness to make us forget or lose it.

Evil and Suffering drive man back to himself in a kind of anxiety where he seems to discover a hidden hostility within creation itself, as if its author, repenting of giving him existence at the very moment he gives it to him, mingled a germ in his entire work intended to corrupt and destroy him. At the moment he believes he is coming into contact either with the world or with himself, it is always through a double bruising. And yet, he cannot ignore that if his existence appears to him as separate, left to his own resources in a solitude where no other being can penetrate, in this perfect destitution to which it is reduced, it is nonetheless the same for all men. That is precisely the theme to which we have applied our minds in the second essay: “All separated and united men”; it is, so to speak, the counterpart of the preceding one, at least if it is true that it is in the intimacy of this solitude where all men are brothers that we learn to become aware of the evils that belong to every life coming into this world, and that through this very awareness, we begin to accept them, to take possession of them, and to heal them.

Once again, it can be said that war, instead of being an exceptional situation for us, vividly and distinctly embodies that situation of every moment where the man who feels the most alone is also the one who, having severed all superficial ties with others (which must be said to be marks of diversion and not of closeness), is capable of achieving with another being the purest, most silent, and deepest union. For if it is true that one suffers alone and dies alone, it is also true that war, which imposes itself on all men as a common catastrophe, plunges them immediately into solitude. And many of them discover solitude for the first time as a world they had never known, which for all is initially a world of desolation but which, for a few, transforms into a world of light. This solitude is the breaking of all the ties that supported us in existence. The one who departs is nothing more than a soldier reduced to what he carries within himself, leaving behind all the objects of interest or love on which his entire life depended until then, even more alone as he enters a completely different society, both anonymous and hierarchical, of which he will only know the demands it will impose on him. He learns the greatest solitude, the one of absence, sometimes born from the abolition of a single presence, and which, in an admirable equality, all those he left behind also learn. But the reality of war gives an extraordinary power to the feeling of this solitude: all these similar men, who are ignorant of one another, each possessing a mysterious past for all the others, which emerges in him as soon as his thought has the slightest leisure, all these men confronted with the same dangers, and among whom, however, as if by some kind of election, one will be struck and the other spared, suddenly find themselves face to face with their destiny, the curve of which they still measure as suspended. Thus, the very tragedy of events, the sudden abolition of familiar habits, the conversion of all former possessions into pure memories, force consciousness to seek within itself the principle of its distress or the principle of its consolation.

But these two principles, undoubtedly, are one and the same. The solitude must first appear to us as an abandonment, depriving us of all support, leaving us without recourse, not allowing us to expect anything from an indifferent and hostile world, so that it compels us to discover within ourselves a strength and a light that we have vainly sought from the world and that it is incapable of giving us. In solitude, we learn that all reality is internal and that everything we perceive with our physical eyes is but an expression that reveals it, an opportunity for it to emerge or a test that judges it. Where we deal only with our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, the things that were most familiar to us acquire a relief, a significance, a value that they did not possess when we had their sensible presence. It seems that they are only now beginning to exist. Perhaps one could say that those who have never experienced solitude have never known of the world anything but a theater set where they themselves were mere actors among others. In solitude, the set collapses and the play ceases. What remains of reality is the truth that it often concealed from us instead of showing it: it is reduced for us to its spiritual essence.

Now, from this moment on, can we truly say that solitude is a separation? Is it not more of an opening than a closing? And now that the world denies us access, will it not find in us an access it had never had before? Before we knew solitude, an immense space unfolded before us with a multitude of paths where will and desire engaged. Now, this space narrows around us as if to imprison our movements instead of liberating them. The horizon gradually approaches us and merges with our own limits. There is no longer any atmosphere or light for us. Our separation is consummated. Yet, our gaze gradually opens to a new light. We gradually discover another world that seemed hidden to us until now. Another horizon begins to form within us, which expands as the external world shrinks. Solitude ceases to be a burden that oppresses us and becomes a kind of refuge. There are times when we feel less alone when we are alone than when we are amidst others. This very solitude gradually fills with a spiritual presence that gives a fervent existence to all possible objects of our thought and love, surpassing by far the existence of bodies. All those who have experienced solitude know the greatness of this state, of which Saint Teresa said, “I am alone with God alone.” But, in a kind of paradox, this self towards which I now turn my gaze ceases to give me, as it did a moment ago, concern and worry. It is free from all interest. Nor can it be said that I have withdrawn from the world, for it seems to me that I am discovering this world as if I had never seen it before. Now, it is not properly a new world; it is the world in which I have always lived but which seems illuminated by another light. As it happens with those I have lost, it is in their absence that the secret essence of other beings is always revealed, which is the best part of themselves and which daily relations often intercepted instead of delivering. It is now that I am separated from them that I am truly united to them, and I am already learning how I must act with them when I find them again.

This communion with our neighbor, war already teaches me how to practice it. These men around me are themselves free from any ties to me. They are not united with me by any bond of kinship or friendship. It is through the most fortuitous encounter that they suddenly live beside me, simply men like me, engaged in the same action, exposed to the same peril, with their entire lives before them. They are truly the neighbor and reduced to being nothing more for me, both close to me and unknown to me, immersed in the same solitude, unique individuals like me, and yet in whom the same humanity beats. They are both present and absent to me. Our relationships are stripped of all artifice: they do not carry the weight of yesterday with them, and the image of tomorrow, which may not be given, does not alter them. They exhaust themselves in the pure present, where they receive a current and complete value either from a shared situation that cannot be denied and to which they must respond or from that innocent self-offering that makes, where appearance serves no purpose, being becomes everything it is, in perfect simplicity full of misery and greatness. Thus, it is not by breaking solitude that beings become capable of communion; it is by deepening it. Their communion does not abolish their individuality or their limits; it gives them a vivid and reciprocal feeling of them. But the mutual discovery of their individuality and limits must teach them to support each other instead of colliding. And the point at which men have the most painful consciousness of their separation is also the point at which they truly feel united and brothers to one another.

The entire life of the spirit resides in a mysterious identity of absence and presence. For the spirit only lives folded upon itself. It accomplishes the great separation from everything that was previously given to me and seemed sufficient for me. But this absence is going to become a miraculous presence to myself and to all that is: it is simultaneously a departure from oneself, a penetration into the essence of all things. This can be seen particularly well in the relationships that beings have with one another, which can be said to form for us the very substance of existence, the source of all our sorrows and joys. As if the body were the screen that prevented us from seeing them and distorted all our interactions with them, they acquire, as soon as they are far from us, a kind of pure presence that is so moving that we sometimes have difficulty enduring it. It will be necessary for us to remember this spiritual presence when we are once again among them. May the sensible presence then cease to blind us or satisfy us, which is the same thing. Only the distant can reveal to us our neighbor. Only solitude is deep enough to embrace suffering, pure enough to cleanse us of evil, and vast enough to receive within it the whole reality of another being. Even God Himself, if we have eyes only for the world that is offered to our senses, must be defined as the infinite Solitary, the perfect Separated One, the eternal Absent; but then, it seems to us that evil and suffering invade this world and are now without remedy. Only if it is possible to convert them is it because when attention becomes more lucid and penetrating and goodwill becomes purer and more confident, this Solitary fills our own solitude, this Separated One delivers us from our separation, and in this Absent One, we find absolute presence to ourselves and to the world.

FIRST ESSAY: EVIL AND SUFFERING

I. — EVIL.

1. The scandal of evil.

One may wonder if it is useful for the mind to fix its gaze upon evil, whether to define it, explain it, or avoid it. By considering it too closely, it is given a kind of reality; it then fascinates the conscience, which, through the very fear it has of it, feels drawn to it. Is it not, on the contrary, the thought and will of good alone that should give our soul light and strength, and by occupying the full capacity of our conscience, remove from evil the very possibility of arising? It is only when generous activity begins to falter that an empty space is created in consciousness where evil insinuates itself. And the most virile morality knows only positive precepts: it commands what must be done, it no longer needs to defend us from anything.

However, we cannot hope that merely turning towards good will make evil disappear from our experience. We encounter it everywhere within and outside of ourselves. It is not limited to the fault that depends solely on us. Pain is a felt evil that we are obliged to endure. Regardless of the purity of our will, there are within us wicked tendencies that suddenly cross our thoughts like lightning and fill us with terror due to the profound depths to which we feel they plunge, with an obscure presence that continues to surround and threaten us. There is the suffering of others, their moral misery. Evil involuntarily mingles with our slightest gestures, our most natural actions: it is perhaps an ingredient in our best deeds. To ignore evil in order to give our activity the good as its sole point of application is to willingly blind ourselves, to expose ourselves to dismay when evil presents itself to us despite our intentions, and to lack the courage of the spirit that must face reality face to face, embracing it in its entirety in order to penetrate and rectify it.

Evil is the object of all the protests of conscience: of sensitivity when it concerns suffering, and of judgment when it concerns fault; and it is because we cannot resign our freedom that we have the power, while rejecting it, to commit it. Evil is the scandal of the world. It is the major problem for us; it is what makes the world a problem for us. It imposes its presence upon us without our being able to reject it. No person is spared from it. It demands that we simultaneously seek to explain it and abolish it.

Shall we say that good, too, is a problem? But the very word no longer suits it perfectly, for good, once recognized and accomplished, is instead a solution; it is, by definition, the solution to all problems. In a kind of reversal, it is only a problem for the one who seeks it, whereas evil is a problem for the one who finds it. For there is no will that, in pursuing evil, does not still pursue a shadow of good. But it is through reflecting on the interval that separates the good we desire from the evil we commit that reflection reveals to us the meaning of our destiny, the very heart of our responsibility, and the center of oscillation of our spiritual life.

2. The choice between good and evil.

One cannot think of good or evil in isolation. They exist only in relation to each other, as two opposites, each calling for and excluding the other. No one can imagine evil without also imagining the good to which it makes us unfaithful; and likewise, good can only appear to us as good through the idea of a possible evil that risks seducing us and causing us to succumb.

It is impossible to conceive of a world where only good reigns and where evil is banished. For a consciousness that has no experience of evil, it would also have nothing deserving the name of good. In a perfect equality of value among all forms of being, all value would disappear, just as shadow allows us to perceive light and gives it its worth. The very love I have for good is only possible in the presence of the evil from which I seek liberation and which constantly threatens me. Good gives meaning to the world precisely through the scandal of evil that makes me desire good, compels me to envision it, and imposes on my will the duty to act in order to realize it.

The alternation of good and evil is the very source of our spiritual life. However high it may be, it always contains some Evil that compels it to transcend itself; it is always the peril in which it risks falling. We pray to the Lord to deliver us from evil, and we always hope that our intelligence could become so pure and our will so perfect that we would cease both to know evil and to commit it. But who would think that good could ever exist by virtue of an inexorable necessity? Can we understand that it could one day become a law of nature, something given to us? With the possibility of evil, it is good that is annihilated. We thus arrive at an extraordinary paradox: that good, which gives value, meaning, and beauty to everything that exists, calls forth evil as the condition of its very existence. And yet evil, which negates it, can only justify itself by a negating movement; thus it must exist, but it can only exist in order to be abolished.

The affective life immediately reveals the same law of the spirit, the same rhythm of consciousness between a state we love and a contrary state that sustains it, although we strive with all our might to abolish it. All human beings love pleasure and detest pain, even the saint, even the ascetic; the pain they endure or seek is never anything more than an element or means to a more perfect or purer joy. No being dreams of eliminating all the pain that reigns in the world so that only pleasure may fill it. But it is a contradictory dream; to remove from oneself the capacity to suffer is also to remove the capacity to enjoy. Not that pleasure is merely, as some philosophers believe, a ceasing of pain; but these two states are inseparable, like the two ends of a pendulum; each half-oscillation carries the other with it and beckons it forth. To try to separate the two terms in order to keep only one is to abolish both. One who desires continuous pleasure finds only indifference. And the most intense and profound sensitivities are also those that simultaneously experience the most intense and rich pleasures and pains.

Intelligence, in turn, seeks knowledge, that is, truth. But this truth means nothing to us except as the error from which it delivers us. Truth must be a rectified error, never in itself a stable and assured possession. It is suspended on an act that depends on us, that we can choose not to do or do poorly: then we err, and it is the possibility of error that not only gives truth its value, but also constitutes its very existence. No truth exists for someone who has never experienced error. Like the will in evil and sensitivity in pain, intelligence finds in error a negative term that it seeks to abolish, but which it cannot do without, since without it, the positive term towards which it strives could neither be conceived nor achieved.

3. Evil and pain.

We cannot deny that there is an immediate and primitive intuition of consciousness that identifies evil with pain; as consciousness becomes more refined, however, pain and evil dissociate, although the bond that unites them never breaks.

Pain is imposed upon us despite ourselves, which already shows that it is the mark of our passivity and limitation, a boundary to the expansion of our being. Furthermore, consciousness vehemently rejects it as a present and undeniable evil even before the faculty of judgment begins to exercise itself. Even if pain does not exhaust the totality of evil, even if it is not an evil itself, it is directly or indirectly connected to all forms of evil, even the most subtle and sophisticated. The pessimist who curses life sees it entirely given over to suffering, whether he directs his gaze to the animal world where beings devour one another, or to our civilization which, as it becomes more refined, increases our means of suffering.

Not only is pain always linked to a protest, a revolt of consciousness seeking to banish it, but it is also integral to this protest and revolt. And undoubtedly, one could argue that pain is not an evil in itself, that it is not an absolute and radical evil, and that it can even be the condition for a greater good. At the very least, it must be acknowledged that it is always an integral element of evil, and if pain were to suddenly disappear from the world, it would be difficult to define what could still be understood as evil and in what a wicked will could consist. Thus, pain appears to us as the mark and testimony of the presence of evil. To be in pain is to suffer. The wicked person deliberately produces pain. A good person, to us, is one who suffers from the pain of others and strives with all their might to alleviate it. Finally, to be pessimistic is to view pain as inseparable from consciousness, from the very possibility of its exercise.

However, we cannot be content with equating evil with pain. The existence of pain does not present insurmountable difficulties for intelligence. It is the price we pay for our limitation. It disrupts the harmony with ourselves and the universe that hitherto ensured our inner peace. It shatters that natural and confident impulse, that constant renewal of our pleasures and joys. It signifies a failure, a tearing apart of the unity of our being. It is easily understood that a limited being, caught in a universe that surpasses it, where so many forces pay no heed to it, is exposed to constantly experiencing friction or injury. And sometimes it has been thought that pain has a certain rationality to it, if it is true that it warns us of a danger against which we can still defend ourselves.

Therefore, it is not pain itself that we consider an evil. We may lament the fate of creatures destined for suffering in a blind and indifferent world. This suffering could be the test of their will, the measure of its strength, purity, and beneficence. This harsh, austere, and suffering world would not be an evil world. It would be unjust for us to condemn it. However, if evil resides solely in the will, then the world is only evil if it is the product of an evil will, if the pain that reigns in it is willed, the very end towards which it strives, and not merely the means it requires to produce its most beautiful works. Perhaps there is no evil in the world that has no connection to pain, but evil does not reside within it; it lies in the attitude of the will towards pain, which can either allow itself to be overwhelmed by suffered pain or inflict it on others, or accept it, alleviate it, penetrate it, and transcend it, thus transforming it into good.

4. The use of pain.

If we only focus on the pain that fills the world and which we can never hope will disappear, and if we start to identify this pain with evil, then all is lost, consciousness is blocked, and our constantly exposed and threatened life can only be an object of curse. Pain, in itself, independent of the use that freedom can make of it and of any good it can serve, is both an absurdity and a cruelty. But the essence of freedom is to give meaning to everything it touches, which can become the condition of its exercise and the means of its ascent. Therefore, we must start from freedom, which seeks the good and, if it finds in pain the very means of its moral destiny, will manage to restore to it a spiritual significance.

It cannot be a matter here of condemning all those who are overwhelmed by pain and who let themselves be overcome by it. For many beings, pain has a destructive character, it undermines their energy. It is thus the mark of a supreme danger, it always risks enslaving us, although it can be for us a trial that sets us free. It gives us an extraordinary intimacy with ourselves; it produces a withdrawal into oneself, where the being descends within itself to the very root of life, to the point where it seems that life is about to be torn away from it. It deepens and hollows out consciousness by suddenly emptying it of all the objects of concern or diversion that until then were sufficient to fill it. Some beings acquire a delicacy, a gravity, an inner and personal value that are related to certain pains that have been given to them, while those who have not experienced them retain, in comparison, an indifference that is both impermeable and superficial. The relationship between two beings has all the more acuity and penetration when they have suffered together and even through each other, as when, despite the clashes of nature and character, they pursue, above all wounds and all failures of self-love, a purely spiritual communion.

Perhaps it is through our attitude in the face of pain that we can be judged. In this difficulty that pain opposes to us, in this anguish that it gives us, in this sudden return that it forces us to make to our individual and separate self, it takes away from us any other resource, any other strength than what we can find within ourselves. Therefore, it must be said that the meaning we can attribute to pain will determine the very meaning that the world can receive for us. For the world has no other meaning than the one we are capable of giving it. If it were an object, a pure spectacle, it would have none. It only has one through my will, which prefers being to nothingness, and which, at the price of pain, at the price even of life, intends to realize certain ends that then give pain, when it is not only suffered but accepted, and life, when it is not only lost but sacrificed, their true spiritual significance. And if all value depends on an activity that chooses it and devotes itself to it, one can understand very well that value can withdraw from pain and life when this activity itself is lacking. One can even understand that they can be condemned both by the very use that I make of them; and they must be able to be condemned, so that they can be saved by a will that is the arbiter of good and evil, which can turn into evil all the goods that flatter our nature and into good all the evils that continually prick it.

5. Injustice.

We generally accept that evil does not lie in pain, but in the will to inflict it. However, we then require that there be, in the same consciousness, a sort of coincidence between the evil it wants and the evil that affects it, that what we undergo is in accordance with what we do, that there is always harmony between the active part and the passive part of our being. But it is not generally the case. The one who suffers the most is not necessarily the most guilty. And even evil, in its most serious form, is precisely this close connection that is established between two beings, such that when one does evil, it is another who experiences it. This is where the very principle of injustice lies for us.

The impossibility for us to establish a regular correspondence between sensible evil, which is pain, and moral evil, which is sin, creates an extremely profound disturbance in human consciousness. If this correspondence always existed, evil would cease to surprise us. It would be a sort of compensated disorder. But the examples we have before us show, on the contrary, a strange disparity between happiness and virtue. A disparity that, if it were absolute and definitive, would appear to most people as the very essence of evil, but which has always been attempted to be explained in two ways, always looking either backward or forward: backward, to show how all suffering is the effect of an unknown or distant fault whose effect still persists in the will that needs to be purified; forward, to show that there is in this suffering a trial which, if overcome, will eventually bring about a convergence between sensitivity and will. One could say that the essence of faith is to unite these two explanations and to move from one to the other without ever separating the fall from redemption.

However, no one will accept that within this life there is an irreconcilable conflict between happiness and good, or that pain and evil always remain separate. We will not attribute to chance, through a sort of abdication of judgment, the various relationships that can be established between the decisions of the will and the affections that accompany them. In reality, these relationships are always very complex. The Greeks believed that the wise person is always happy, and even that he alone is; not that he is ignorant of pain, but he alone is capable of accepting it, understanding it, and penetrating it. And one cannot reflect without trembling at the double meaning that can be given in French to the word “misérable,” which designates both the lowest degree of pain and the lowest degree of abjection: there are times when they coincide. To this, two observations can be added: first, no matter how happy a person who has done evil may be, they never separate themselves from their past; indeed, many of our contemporaries consider this past to be, for almost all people, a burden almost impossible to bear, namely the burden of their own remorse, as Baudelaire saw it well; secondly, the good person, by a sort of reversal of the rule that we should treat other people as ourselves, is only a good person because they pursue the good of others and not their own, and it is the good of others to which they have contributed that is the true happiness for them, which prevents us, in the midst of the worst tribulations, from severing all connection between good and happiness, at least to the extent that this happiness is an effect of the very good we have accomplished.

When we see the wicked person happy and the good person unhappy, assuming it can be so, it seems that we are faced with a disorder that could well be the true evil for consciousness. This non-coincidence of happiness and good, evil and suffering, is a scandal that both will and reason revolt against. For we do not accept that the unity of our life can be broken, that the states experienced by our sensitivity are not the faithful echo of the actions performed by our will, that a good action generates affliction in us and a bad action generates joy. Against such consequences, it is not only our virtue that is irritated, but also our logic. The happiness, even apparent, of the wicked person, the unhappiness, even accepted, of the good person, are attacks on both intelligibility and justice: we cannot understand how consciousness can feel an increase, a flourishing, where it pursues a negative and destructive effect, nor how it can feel limited and constrained where its action is itself benevolent and generous. We may certainly agree that the highest good can sometimes be obtained only through pain that we must endure on another level of our consciousness; yet we not only want this pain to be consented to, but also to feel joy in enduring it.

6. Wickedness.

When we distinguish between evil and pain, it is to indicate that pain is merely an affection of sensitivity, therefore a fact that we undergo, whereas evil, which depends on the will, is an act that we perform. But this alone is enough to demonstrate the close connection that always remains between pain and evil: for if pain, insofar as it is suffered, is evil only to the extent that it expresses in us a limitation, evil itself is a pain that we inflict on others, that is, a limitation that we impose on them. Pain is always the mark of a limitation or destruction that can be the means of purification or growth, and the distance between pain and evil is the distance between involuntary limitation or destruction and voluntary limitation or destruction.

Therefore, one might think that it is too narrow to define evil by the mere production of pain, that pain can sometimes be desired for the sake of a greater good, and that perversity seeks not so much to cause suffering as to degrade through the very use of pleasure. What is sufficient, indeed, to show that pain is only evil when it is merely the testimony of a diminution of being that was itself willed; it is this diminution that perversity also aims to achieve. And pleasure can be the step by which it is attained.

But it is undeniable that there is an unbreakable link between pain and evil, as evidenced by the analysis of malice. For the wicked person first aims at the suffering of others; and undoubtedly this suffering is for them a diminution of being in the one they see suffering, a diminution of being of which they are the cause and which heightens in them the sense of the power they possess; but there is also a sort of satisfaction in seeing a being suffer whose consciousness must still testify to the very misery in which it feels reduced. And perhaps it will be said that such malice is rare, but it is not certain that it never flashes like lightning in the most benevolent and purest consciences, so true is it that the human condition obeys common laws from which no individual in the world can consider themselves exempt.

Thus, we see here the line of demarcation and the point of contact between pain and evil. Evil cannot be defined, whatever one may think, by its relation to sensitivity, but by its relation to the will. However, the will and sensitivity are always implicated in each other. Sensitivity is, with respect to the will, the testimony of its power and impotence. Thus, pain itself is evil only in relation to the will: when it is imposed by nature, it is regarded as an evil insofar as it is an obstacle to our own development, paralyzing and annihilating the will; and when it is the effect of another’s will, we then experience a feeling of horror as if, by adding voluntary limitation to a limitation of nature, it were the Spirit itself turning against its own end and contributing to its defeat.

It is not believed that, in malice, the will to cause suffering is ever isolated. It is always associated with some external motive, as seen in the example of revenge where the will to impose suffering on the one who has caused us suffering is always allied with the need to overcome after having been defeated, or even with the idea of restored balance and satisfied justice. But what clearly shows that pain is never more than a sign of evil is that the most subtle and profound malice does not stop at pain: it sees in pain only a means that pleasure itself could replace, with the advantage of deceiving others through false appearances. For what it aims at is the diminution of its own being, a sort of inversion of the development of consciousness, corruption and decline, without it being possible to regard such a state as free from any secret pain, which the wicked person anticipates with a kind of delight.

7. Defining evil.

It is remarkable that we can never define evil in a positive manner. Not only does it exist in a pair where good is the other term, but it is also impossible to name it without evoking the good of which it is precisely the privation.

Furthermore, it appears that there are numerous forms of evil, and we can miss the good in many ways that are nevertheless given the same name. According to an ancient saying, good has a finite character, whereas evil has an infinite character. We recognize here the common conception of all Greeks, which is that the finite is the completed and perfect, that which lacks nothing, while the infinite is the indeterminate, disorder, and chaos, that which lacks everything that could give it meaning and value, namely, the act of thought that would allow it to be organized, circumscribed, and taken possession of. Let us set aside this opposition that could be contested: at least we must acknowledge that all forms of good converge with one another. We can multiply virtues and even oppose them to one another, emphasize the diversity of moral callings: yet, the characteristic of these virtues is to produce agreement among the different faculties of consciousness, and the characteristic of these callings is to produce agreement among different consciences, whereas evil is always defined as a separation, the rupture of harmony, either within the same being or among all beings. This is because every evil will pursues isolated ends that, sacrificing the Whole for the part, always undermine the integrity of the Whole and threaten to annihilate it. It is thus understandable that there are countless forms of evil, even though they all possess this common characteristic of dividing and destroying, which can be observed within the same consciousness where evil generates inner strife, where perversity itself gives us bitter pleasure, and in the relations among consciences that only seek to strike blows and harm one another. The understanding between criminals is not an exception to this law, if it is true that it is always precarious and directed against the rest of humanity. As long as it is a true understanding, it still imitates good and is the embryo of a moral society. Therefore, if solidarity in good continually renders the unity of each being or the union of different beings more complex and closer, solidarity in evil cannot continue indefinitely without quickly producing discord, dissonance, which inevitably opposes us both to ourselves and to the entire universe.

8. The fundamental option.

The essence of the mind is to introduce value into the world. Thus, the word evil only makes sense in relation to our spiritual destiny; and this destiny is nothing if it is not our own work, if it does not depend on the successive steps of our freedom. As for this freedom itself, it is incomprehensible how it could be exercised if the different ends proposed for its choice were juxtaposed with one another on a horizontal plane. To choose means to establish a hierarchical order among our actions, that is, a vertical order such that each of them can be defined as an ascent or a fall.

Therefore, the alternative between good and evil only makes sense for our freedom. And even the experience of freedom is inseparable from that of good and evil. For freedom itself is nothing if it is not the power to choose; and on the other hand, we would not choose if all objects of the will were on the same level for us. Thus, there must be differences of value among them to break the indifference of the will. But these differences themselves would shatter and scatter its unity if they did not all reduce to the difference between good and evil, of which they present an infinite number of degrees, but which itself resides at the heart of our most secret being in that imperceptible oscillation by which we determine our destiny and feel at every moment capable of gaining or losing everything. Therefore, the perfect unity of the Self resides in its possibility of choice: but it chooses only between two options; and its unity is the living unity of the act that posits the alternative and resolves it. Thus, it can be seen that, in a kind of paradox, our freedom can only be decided by distinguishing between good and evil in the world; but in order to avoid becoming immediately enslaved, it must, while recognizing the value of good, still be able to prefer evil in order to assert its independence by making evil itself its own good, provided that it has chosen it.

For life possesses value for us only if there is room in it for a good that we can understand, desire, and love. Evil, on the other hand, is that which we cannot comprehend or love, even if we have willed it; it is that which condemns us when we have committed it and would be the condemnation of being and life if it were their very essence. Good and evil subject reality to the judgment of the mind, for reality can only be justified if it is found to be good: to say that it is bad is to say that nothingness should be preferred to it. Therefore, both good and evil correspond to a right of jurisdiction that the mind arrogates to itself over the universe. For there is no good and evil except for a will that considers reality in relation to a choice it makes, and which reality sometimes confirms and sometimes contradicts. Thus, we agree that the principle of good and evil is within us, but either because will is always associated with nature within us or because it encounters resistances outside of us that it is unable to overcome, good and evil surpass its own act. This obliges it to pose, regarding itself, the problem of responsibility and merit, and regarding the universe, the problem of its reason for being.

Therefore, both good and evil are linked to the essence of the will, which cannot determine itself if the idea of good does not shake it; and if it misses it, due to lack of knowledge or courage, or through a perversion of the impulse that good gives it, it falls into evil. For good is only good for it if it can elude it, either because it has deceived itself about it or because it has turned away from it, yet still allows its shadow to hold it.

The fact that our freedom cannot be exercised without confronting us with two opposing terms between which it never ceases to choose can cause us suffering, because there is an exigency in choice that condemns us if evil prevails. Thus, we prefer to seek in the world a radical evil inseparable from its very essence rather than consider our will, which, through its choice, brings it into existence.

But pessimism is an excuse that we give ourselves. It is a lack of trust and an abdication of our spiritual being that refuses to act and give meaning and value to what is before it, which depend solely on itself. To recognize that there is evil in the world allows our spiritual activity to separate from it and thereby acquire its independence and impetus. It continually creates itself by opposing everything given to it. It thus runs the risk of remaining perpetually buried, of being unrecognized or defeated, but this risk is its very life; it is from this risk that it draws its nourishment, it is this risk that gives it its ardor and purity. That is the essence of the life of the spirit—to be invisible; to always need to be sustained and regenerated, and to always be capable of being denied.

At every moment, we can make materialism true by fixing our gaze outward on objects, inward on instinctive nature. Anyone who seeks the spirit through the world as an actual reality has an easy task to show that they never find it. The world we have before our eyes is by itself devoid of spirituality, but precisely because the spirit is a life that must penetrate the world, give it meaning, and reform it. The spirit is not a thing to be shown but an activity to be exercised, for which one chooses and bets. It exists only for those who will it and, by willing it, bring it into being. It eludes those who deny it. It still testifies to what it is by refusing to be found where it is not. Shall we say that evil is present wherever the spirit is not and where it should be? But the judgment we pass on evil is also a testimony of the spirit that finds in it its limit or its defeat. That evil is known as evil is always by an act of the spirit that establishes a duality between the world and itself and finds in the world its opposite, but must have enough courage and confidence to accept the world as a test, a task, and a duty—as the condition of both its separate essence, the very activity by which it never ceases to create itself, and the victories it never ceases to win.

9. Beyond good and evil.

If evil is a problem, we must seek how it arises within consciousness. This birth is late and contemporary with reflection. We can conceive of a dawn of consciousness where reflection has not yet appeared, and where the distinction between good and evil is still unknown. It is the state of innocence described in Genesis, where the unity of consciousness has not yet suffered any rupture, where its simplicity is untarnished, and where it acts with both natural and spiritual spontaneity. But it is a state that is beyond good and evil, rather than above it; and it is often considered that the only evil for us is to have lost it, and that true good would be to regain it.

However, we must not expose ourselves to any misunderstanding here. Let us look at the innocence of the child: it is a negative innocence, the innocence of nature. The child has not yet begun to direct his life; it is his life that directs him. The child carries within him all the powers that we will one day exercise; he abandons himself to each of them in turn, and the only unity within him is the absence of a restraint that he can oppose to this disorder. But man bends over the cradle of the child to seek, with admiration and anguish, on his face all the spiritual forces that he himself has let escape, that he has wasted, withered, and corrupted. However, he already makes a choice among them. None of those who preach “a return to childhood” would want to be taken literally. The portrait of the child should not be that of an angel who has not yet made contact with the earth; it should include some stricter touches, for the child is also very close to the earth and has not had much time to rise above it. There is in him a painful and miserable being, incapable of self-sufficiency, wholly given over to the needs and distresses of organic life, to the agonies of growth, both moaning and irritable at the same time. Moreover, it is known that the cruel gaze of certain psychologists already discovers in him a bundle of appalling instincts, the place of origin and perpetration of all perversions, from which everyone tries throughout their life to free themselves and purify themselves, but the memory of which never ceases to trouble and haunt them.

But this picture, in turn, needs to be amended. And first of all, the fact that the child comes into the world like a clod of mud should not lead us to diminish, from the very beginning, the value of our life. For it must plunge its roots into the darkest and deepest regions of Being in order to flourish one day in the clearest and brightest regions; it is beautiful that the elevation of its destiny is in proportion to the baseness of its origin and that the narrow necessity in which it is initially confined gives its freedom even more strength and momentum.

However, this nature in which it is, so to speak, buried is neither good nor bad in itself, although it contains the seeds of all the goods and evils that will occur in the world once our freedom begins to act. The adult may rediscover in it all the perversions he can imagine, but only from the moment when his reflection and will, after freeing themselves from the senses, turn back to them to find pleasure and subjugation. The perversity of the child is often the perversity of the adult’s thoughts. As he has a kind of organic innocence before his consciousness is born, he also has a kind of spiritual innocence as soon as his needs are satisfied and his body gives him some leisure. Then he discovers the world with a disinterested gaze, he begins to smile at it. He opens up to it, ready to give and receive, forgetting his body and seeking in things the echoes of that more intimate reality whose mysterious presence he feels within himself. But all innocence is shattered from the moment the body and spirit, no longer pursuing separate paths, intersect. Then the choice must be made: whether the body will eventually show obedience, or if it is the spirit that will be defeated.

Sometimes we dream that, after all our failures and tribulations, wisdom could be a kind of regained innocence. But innocence is not regained. When it is lost, it can only be surpassed. It would be impossible and even dreadful to make it an object of desire. The experience of life makes us incapable of reconquering those primitive states to which we now attribute an inaccessible purity: interest, memory, passion have penetrated, enriched, and altered them. We never go back: we must now progress with all that we have become. Moreover, every person who undertakes to live wants to have self-awareness, responsibility, and freedom at the same time; otherwise, they would be merely an extension of nature, receiving the being they have instead of giving it to themselves, and they would be a thing rather than a being. We do not want to allow within us a spontaneity that we can no longer control. We ask to be able to do evil; there is no possible good for us without it. We do not accept life as a gift that we only have to receive. Would it be a life for us? Could we call it ours?

The union of body and spirit appears as a condition of our freedom. It is through this union that we can become what we are through an act that depends on us. It is because we are initially subject to nature that the life of the spirit must be an incessant liberation. If there is no ready-made freedom, if freedom can only be obtained and maintained through great effort, it is also evident that it can falter and make determinism true. This failure itself is an evil, but the most radical and secret evil lies in the choice of freedom, which must have the possibility to betray good; otherwise, good, by becoming necessary, would annihilate itself. Such is the greatness of the life of the spirit: it only exists if it is ours. It finds beside it a nature that resists it and often scandalizes it. But it cannot do without it; it borrows the forces it needs from it. Its existence lies in how it uses it, in the obedience and ratification it often gives it, in the struggle it wages with it and from which it emerges sometimes defeated, sometimes stronger and purified. It only exists through what it adds to nature, and it can only add to it through reflection.

Therefore, we must now study the origin of reflection, which sometimes has a purely critical, negative, and even destructive aspect, which dampens the inner spontaneity, makes me often unhappy and powerless, but which, in its purest essence, is a return to the very source of our life, questions our activity to allow us to judge it and have control over it: it is on this basis that our personal initiative is founded, and it is in it that the notions of good and evil begin to form.

10. Birth of reflection.

Reflection has a triple origin within us. Firstly, as has often been shown and as the etymology of the word indicates, it can arise when our spontaneity encounters an obstacle that forces it to turn back on itself, to become aware of the end it seeks, and to question its possibility and value: then within me, two characters emerge, one of whom discovers the other with a kind of astonishment, but who already separates from and judges him. Secondly, reflection seems inseparable from our awareness of time: I cease to be absorbed by what is given to me as soon as I am capable of opposing to the present a past and a future that can only be thought of, and with which I begin to compare it, since the past is the object of regret for me and the future is the object of desire. Finally, reflection arises mainly from the encounter I have with other beings, who, through their resemblance or difference from me, compel me to realize the image of what I am: then unfathomable problems arise in me, multiplying as my relationships with others become closer, and as the demands of action sometimes force me to find urgent solutions.

It is a mistake to think that reflection applies first and foremost to the world of things, as the prestige of scientific methods might lead one to believe; those methods only teach me to recognize the relationships between objects in order to make use of them. But the most serious questions I ask myself relate to my conduct towards another person, whose consciousness remains to some extent impermeable to me, who possesses an inviolable freedom that I cannot think of forcing or reducing, and with whom I always seek a kind of agreement and cooperation. As soon as my actions begin to affect not just things, but the beings around me, they become good or bad. Therefore, reflection is naturally oriented towards the search for moral value. If my activity encounters a limitation, my reflection may awaken to overcome it; however, it engages decisively only when it takes as its stakes the fate of the self and the spiritual society it forms with all other “selves.”

Thus, it is through reflection and from the moment it begins to operate that the difference between good and evil takes on real significance. I only acquire the free disposition of myself through reflection. Until then, it was nature acting in and through me. But from the moment reflection is born, making me the author or father of my own actions, obliging me to justify them with reasons I have given to myself, the presence of nature is felt by me as slavery, that is, as a kind of humiliation and shame. Hence the tendency of traditional theology to consider nature itself as evil. It is because nature imposes itself upon us despite ourselves. We are compelled to undergo it. Yet it is not nature that is bad; nature becomes bad or perverse when the spirit subjects itself to it and sets out to serve it. It turns even the simplest and healthiest pleasures into objects of indulgence, degrading them by debasing itself. On the contrary, as soon as it illuminates nature from within and makes it a means of its own progress, it transforms and elevates it to its own level.

The life of the spirit, and even the life of the self, therefore only begins with reflection. We may regret the innocent initiative of the child and its spontaneous grace. We would not want to buy them at the price of its distress and troubles. There is little sincerity and courage in such regret: the paradise of childhood is a primitive and already distorted representation. This regret is a kind of contradictory wish. For us, it is less a matter of returning to that instinctive and nebulous simplicity than of taking possession of all the resources that an adult consciousness can discover within it. Reflection is always there, seeking a kind of lesser effort and wishing to enjoy by ceasing to act. But it is an ambition that is forbidden to it. As soon as it comes into play, it imposes duties on us from which it cannot exempt itself. It creates a division within us, but brings us a light of which we were previously deprived, and it only provides us with a representation of the world because it compels us to transform it and make it better.

11. The knowledge of good and evil.

As soon as action ceases to be spontaneous, it is determined by knowledge. And it is in the relationship between knowledge and action that the origin of evil lies, as recognized by the unanimous tradition of all peoples. Not that knowledge itself is evil, as some have said. How could it be evil rather than nature? It is knowledge that allows us to enter into the life of the spirit; it is through knowledge that the condition of our freedom is born, and consequently the indivisible principle of good and evil at the same time. Certainly, knowledge cannot be self-sufficient, and it is a danger to us to the extent that we seek in it a pure satisfaction of the mind. Sometimes it is still for us a diversion rather than nourishment. Thought always tends to turn every problem into a kind of game in which it exercises its strength and which delights our self-esteem, either through exercise or success. Thus, according to the author of the Imitation, knowledge is difficult to bear. It can serve in us selfishness, malice, the desire to dominate. And, for the oldest myths, there is always a kind of venom in knowledge. The relationship between evil and knowledge is undoubtedly remarkably subtle. We cannot simply think that nature is always good, nor that knowledge, in seeking to uncover its secrets, only gives us the means to do evil. For it is the knowledge of good and evil, and not knowledge of things, that engenders evil. When good is present, there is no need to seek to know it in order to possess and enjoy it: too much light annihilates it, as seen in the adventures of Pandora or Psyche. But in both cases, a very deep secret of spiritual life is found; it is that good is invisible, that it cannot be grasped as an object, and that it mysteriously reveals itself to the one who desires it, but not to the one who looks at it. In the will that does good, the self moves away from itself and forgets itself; as soon as it seeks to know it, it is to seize it and make it its own; it is enough for it to begin to think it to cease doing it. In this sense, it is therefore understood that the knowledge of good and evil is already evil, since it transforms good into evil by the very desire to make it one’s own.

This is because good and evil are not things that can be known. They arise from reflection, but when it questions its intention rather than its end. The end can never be represented, it can never be reached; that is what allows us to isolate in the will its most spiritual and purest movement. The end only testifies to its direction in a given moment: it is merely an image or a milestone that conceals its deepest inflection from us, rather than revealing it to us.

Therefore, it seems that the distinction between good and evil is inseparable from the advent of consciousness. This distinction, which in the popular usage of the word is the proper object of consciousness, and not the indifferent light that gives us a representation of ourselves and the world, as in its philosophical usage; but perhaps it could be shown that the second sense derives from the first and that we need to know ourselves and know the world only to fulfill our spiritual destiny.

The distinction between good and evil causes our thoughts and actions to hesitate, it reveals in our consciousness confusion and anguish. It compels us, instead of letting ourselves be carried by nature, to take responsibility for what we are going to do, for what we are going to be: and already this act judges us.

12. Self-responsibility.

The characteristic of reflection is to divide our spontaneous activity, but in order to create our own interiority. We cease to rely on all the forces that previously carried us. Evil is not yet introduced into us, but only this extraordinarily vivid and constantly reborn emotion of discovering within us not only an unknown and secret life, but a life that depends on us, a power to act that we possess and through which our destiny will be formed and the face of the world will be modified. Reflection always measures the danger to which it exposes us. It separates us from the nature with which our entire being was previously united. It obliges me to assume responsibility for myself; it gives my life an incomparable acuteness. I exist only through it as a center of initiative, as the author of what I am, that is, as consciousness, as freedom, and as a person.

By separating myself from the surrounding nature, I have also separated myself from the nature that constitutes me. There is an individual, a being of instinct and desire within me with whom I no longer identify, although it is involved in each of my actions; it is both the matter and the instrument of them. I now oblige myself to assume responsibility for myself and the world: for the activity of the spirit cannot be divided. And since it does not abolish individual nature, but rather discovers it by surpassing it, it is easy to understand that it can choose between two different courses of action: either to consider the self as the center of the world and turn the world to its use, or to make the self the vehicle of the spirit through which the entire world must be penetrated in order to receive meaning and value. This is the supreme principle from which the opposition of good and evil derives. What is sufficient to prove that evil is always present: it could only disappear if the spirit succeeded in abolishing nature. However, although nature continually retains the spirit and inclines it toward itself, once it has begun to act, the spirit cannot do without nature; it is born by gradually freeing itself from it, it only develops through this obstacle, which is also its support, and it illuminates nature itself and makes it serve its glory.

Therefore, it is understandable that in the problem of evil, one can adopt three different attitudes towards nature: the first, which is optimistic and charming, consists of always praising it, either in the spectacle it presents to us and which possesses an admirable artistic value, or in the instincts it instills in us, which thought only corrupts. However, it is still reflection that judges the beauty of this spectacle, and since it can deviate our instincts, it is also the one that judges their rectitude. The second attitude is the opposite of the previous one: it considers nature with pessimism and always finds it bad. There is a deep Manichaean dualism in many consciences. But the same spirit that condemns it wages a struggle against nature from which it does not always emerge victorious. And one can even think that nature is the real, while the spirit is the ideal, and it always succumbs like what is right when force comes into play. But there is a third attitude that claims that in itself, nature is neither good nor bad. It is only when the spirit appears that it devotes the resources of its invention to arrange it, either to find in it an object of complacency and enjoyment, or the strength and effectiveness it needs and that only nature can give it.

It can be said that, in all cases, those who consider nature as good or bad only judge it retrospectively. It is only when their will has already come into play, when they have already chosen between good and evil, that they can say that nature is good or bad, by considering all the actions that depend on nature as voluntary and distinguishing those that bear the character of goodness and generosity from those that are evidence of selfishness or violence. The characteristic of reflection is to force every being to become a problem for itself, to question the value of its life. Only good brings an answer to this problem, while evil not only leaves it unsolved but also turns it into a scandal against which all the powers of consciousness continue to rebel.

II. — SUFFERING.

1. Describing pain.

Pain is, of all states of consciousness, the one that can become the most intense and acute. It is an inner tearing where the self acquires, in the very affliction it undergoes, an extraordinarily vivid self-awareness. It feels wounded and miserable. It also feels dominated and invaded by a power that surpasses it, to which it is, so to speak, delivered. But that’s not all. Until then, its own existence, inserted into the vast whole of nature, was as if united with it, without manifesting its subjective and separate intimacy. This is revealed to it as soon as it begins to suffer. The deepest bonds that unite it to life are laid bare as soon as they are in peril and on the verge of breaking. Pain is a threat; in its most elementary form, it already contains an evocation of death, the idea of a transition from life to death. It is already in life that death is revealed. Undoubtedly, one could say that for the being who suffers, death is on the contrary a relief, such that it ends the pain instead of being its summit and paroxysm. And we would find here an insoluble contradiction in pain if its role were not to show us the true value we attach to life at the moment when we think it could be taken away from us.

One should not be surprised by the remarkably close relationship between pain and self-awareness. For the essence of knowledge or volition is to apply our activity to an external object, to move away from ourselves and divert ourselves. Even many pessimists may think that the best effect of knowledge and action is to produce self-forgetfulness. The joy we experience in understanding, in creating, is also the joy we experience in leaving ourselves. On the other hand, sensitivity turns us towards ourselves. But there is a great inequality between pleasure and pain in this respect, for pleasure is naturally expansive. There is in it a kind of abandonment to ourselves that is a self-abandonment. We are only conscious of having been happy when we are no longer so. Happiness creates a harmony between the world and us, where consciousness tends to dissolve. But pain sets us apart. We are alone in suffering. When I say “I think, therefore I am,” or even “I act, therefore I am,” I discover with my personal existence a broader existence in which I participate; I exist by communicating with the world. Existence as it appears to me in pain is that of the individual self in its privileged and unique aspect, at the moment when it ceases to communicate with the world that is present to it only to oppress it and compel it to withdraw into itself. But in the very confession that pain compels me to make, what I confess is not only, as one might think, a painful and momentary state that would be a mere mode of my existence and would allow me to rediscover myself as soon as I were liberated from it; what I confess in pain is, at the very point where it reaches me, the presence of my true self, where it takes root in being and life. Therefore, it is not surprising that in children, during primitive and troubled periods when the deepest instincts of nature no longer receive any control, the will to power is always manifested through cruelty; it is when the child makes the animal suffer, or the victor his enemy, that he feels he has penetrated to the very seat of his existence; then he has reduced him to his mercy; he has established a supremacy over him that can well be called metaphysical and that surpasses what he would achieve by killing him, since by producing pain, he compels his own consciousness to bear witness to him.

2. Pain and suffering.

It may be reproached that we are considering here only physical pain. But this question raises a difficult problem, which is that of the connection between pain and the body. Should we think that there is no pain without a certain injury imposed on my body? It is unnecessary to invoke, in defense of such a thesis, the empirical conception according to which states of consciousness are nothing more than the translation of states of the organism. It is enough to observe the character of limitation or passivity that is inseparable from pain, which means that it must always be endured and that it can only be endured, no doubt, through the body. The body would then be intended to ensure the action on us of the external causes that produce it. And thus, it is easily understood that a certain distress of the body could make the life of certain beings a continuous torment.

However, although physical pain can present an acuity and cruelty that make it intolerable at every moment, moral pain surpasses it significantly in meaning and value when we try to embrace the entirety of our destiny. We know very well that physical pain can occupy us entirely, but instead of saying that it absorbs all the powers of consciousness, it should rather be said that it paralyzes them and suspends their course. On the contrary, the original character of moral pain is that it truly fills the capacity of our soul, obliges all our powers to exert themselves, and even gives them extraordinary development. However, it would be more appropriate to use the word suffering rather than pain here. Because pain is something I undergo, but suffering is something I take possession of; I do not seek so much to reject it as to penetrate it. I know it and make it my own. When I say “I suffer,” it is always an act that I perform.

One could seemingly introduce the following distinction between pain and suffering: pain, precisely because it is linked to the body, is also linked to the present moment; even in its continuity, there are always ruptures and resumptions, moments when it wanes and moments when it intensifies, a sort of rhythm, pulsations, each of which is a sort of breakthrough in the continuity of time. When it ceases, relief occurs, an emptiness full of promise, a joy that is still timid and indefinite. There is a certain tremor in our being, but it no longer has the character of pain; in this kind of trembling where it leaves us and where it seems it could always reappear, we no longer manage to find it through imagination.

Suffering, on the other hand, is always linked to time. In itself, it is a present evil, constantly experienced in the present. But it always abandons the instant to fill duration. Instead of being renewed, like pain, through the very blows that ceaselessly come to it from outside, it finds nourishment within ourselves. It feeds on representations. It always turns toward what no longer is or what is not yet, toward memories that it constantly revives in order to justify and sustain itself, toward an uncertain future where it finds, in the possibilities it imagines, a means to increase its torment. It is evident, therefore, that if the essence of consciousness is always to seek to chase away pain, it is not quite the same with suffering. Consciousness undoubtedly does not want to suffer, and yet, through a sort of contradiction, suffering is a burning, an inner fire to which it must bring new nourishment itself. It would not exist if my consciousness could suddenly be reduced to a state of inertia or perfect inner silence. I must constantly consent to it and even deepen it. For the same reason, it can be said that pain only interests a part of myself, whereas in suffering, the self is wholly involved; even when it is appeased, it has modified and permeated my entire life. This is because in reality, suffering, which fills our duration, goes beyond duration itself. It is only apparent that it occupies a place in the history of my life; when it truly deserves its name, it expresses a permanent state of our being, penetrating to its very essence.

3. The act of suffering.

There is an opposition between pain and suffering that is perhaps deeper than the previous one. In pain, the body is foregrounded, and the characteristic of the body is to put me in relation to things. This explains why contemporary philosophers are almost always inclined to consider pain as a sensation that depends on an external stimulation, like visual or auditory sensations. According to this view, we would only experience pain through the stimulation of certain specific nerves that are properly called dolorific nerves.

Suffering, on the contrary, is much more complex. The term is ill-suited for the wounds that things can inflict on us. In reality, we only suffer in our relationships with other beings. The possibility of suffering measures the intimacy and intensity of the bonds that unite us to another consciousness. We do not suffer in our relationships with indifferent beings; indifference even serves as a kind of protection against suffering. As soon as indifference ceases, our capacity to suffer reappears, which is proportional to the interest and affection we feel for another. It manifests itself as soon as the bonds that connected us to them are threatened, testifying at the same time to their existence and depth.

It is easy to understand that this new opposition is not unrelated to the previous one, for we know well that our relationships with things are only of interest in the moment, whereas our relationships with persons concern our entire life, both in its duration and its eternity.

But it is evident that suffering cannot be regarded as a sensation. It is much more internal. It is not just my life that is at stake, to the extent that it depends on the body, but rather my spiritual being that comes into play, commencing an inner dialectic with itself, of which suffering is the effect. Ultimately, one could say that I only feel pain with my body, but I suffer with my entire being. It is impossible for me not to seek the reason for my sufferings, not to undertake to justify them; they vary with the oscillations of knowledge and volition, not with the alternations of intensity or remission of an external action that subjugates me.

Assuming that pain in itself is nothing more than a sensation, it is evident that it is only good or bad depending on the attitude of consciousness toward it, by the act that takes possession of it, and, so to speak, by the way in which we “endure it.”

But if it always corresponded to a diminution of being, if it always expressed, as Spinoza claims, the transition from a greater perfection to a lesser perfection, wouldn’t it always be bad? First of all, it is said to consist in a passage, not a state, so that, no matter how wretched we are, that wretchedness itself can only be painful when it begins to worsen. This definition is admirably simple. But is it sufficient? Because we are told that, in pain, I transition to a lesser perfection; it is inevitable that this transition already concerns my inner activity. We have a sense of what we have just lost: it was undoubtedly something we possessed. But the very feeling of this loss introduces in us, as has always been noticed, an increase in consciousness, which is not itself a loss. As a result, a new being is born within us, completely different from who we were before we began to suffer. It is true that my spontaneity is dried up, but my reflection, my will come into play as if to compensate for what has been taken from me. My activity, which was previously instinctive, has become spiritual. The use I make of it will depend solely on me, and it will be up to me to decide whether this loss cannot be transformed into gain, as seen in certain consciousnesses whose purity and richness seem proportional to the very trials they have gone through.

The problem we pose here goes far beyond the immediate consciousness we have of pain. For we find ourselves facing two different interpretations of life. Many people naturally lean towards materialism: they are convinced that true reality belongs to objects and the body, and that the mind is an illusory reality that testifies to what is without itself possessing existence. In this case, it is understandable that in the face of the hardships of life, it may try to console us as best it can, to bring us some imaginative good when life denies us real goods. But the very nature of pain is precisely that of being a tragic experience that compels us to recognize the essence of reality. Is it in this broken body, gradually losing strength and life, that the essence resides? Or is it in this consciousness that we have of pain itself, which constitutes, both against it and thanks to it, despite it and through its means, our most authentic, profound, and personal reality? The latter, which is our own creation, is grafted onto the other, which must be rejected one day; pain consumes its sacrifice every day.

This does not mean that pain has value in itself, nor that it cannot be put to the worst use. It means that its value lies solely in an operation of our activity upon it, which allows it to be transformed either into good or into evil, depending on the very manner in which we dispose of it. Pain is alternately considered the source of the greatest evils and the greatest goods, and both theses must be true at the same time if it is for us a touchstone that measures the courage of our freedom, without which our freedom itself would be nothing.

4. Negative attitudes: a) discouragement; b) rebellion; c) isolation; d) complacency.

We adopt both a negative and a positive attitude towards pain. However, the negative attitude itself takes on four different forms which can be named: dejection, rebellion, separation, and complacency.

a) Dejection.

When pain becomes too intense, activity loses all its resources and no longer finds enough strength to exert itself. Shouldn’t we then say that pain is an evil, not because of the disposition that freedom makes of it, but because of the powerlessness to which it reduces our freedom? The entire consciousness can enter a state of prostration and almost paralysis simply as a result of pain. Our initiative falters and collapses. There are moments when pain invades and overwhelms us to the point of abolishing the inner dialogue, self-mastery, and self-disposition necessary for thinking and willing. It is understandable, then, that pain itself is considered an evil and that humanity has undertaken a struggle against it that will probably never cease. However, if the evil here does not result from an option but from the impossibility of choosing, it would be easy to cite other states, apart from pain, that also suspend our free activity. Perhaps even all our states, beyond a certain intensity, tend to produce the same effect: the forces of our consciousness that they begin to awaken soon leave no room for our freedom and end up blocking it.

Dejection is a kind of lower limit where painful consciousness is nothing but pure passivity. However, our activity is never completely absent: sometimes it falters, and sometimes it gives in. We can never solve the problem of pain with abstract formulas. Everyone carries their pain in their own way. Nothing is demanded of any being that surpasses their capabilities, but no one can ever say with certainty, when they are overwhelmed by pain, that deep within their being there were no secret resources to which they could still have appealed. If dejection is caused by the extreme intensity of pain, it nevertheless carries with it a kind of compensation, as the pain then becomes less acute; it is rendered somewhat duller and more peaceful, so to speak. It is only important for consciousness to refuse to yield to it. And yet, this does happen through a kind of abandonment where consciousness itself becomes entirely pain, where personality is dissolved as if in its very excess pain found its only remedy.

b) Rebellion.

There is another attitude that, at least superficially, seems the opposite of dejection. It is rebellion. In pain, one feels a stranger penetrating within, despite oneself, occupying one’s entire consciousness against one’s will, dominating and annihilating one’s will, reducing it to slavery, ravaging and destroying everything one has and everything one is. At that moment, there is no difference between suffering and the inner protest we raise against it. To suffer is to protest against suffering. It is to seek to banish it, to expel it from oneself, to want to annihilate the causes that produce it. But rebellion itself knows no limits; it cannot put pain on trial without also putting life and the order of the world on trial. The slightest trace of suffering, even that of a worm, as it has been said, would be enough to condemn the world that allows it.

Yet, this is a negative attitude like the previous one. Because pain captures all the forces of the self that are directed against it. The self succumbs again without managing to take possession of it or dominate it. It passes no judgment on it, it does not inquire whether there is any intelligibility in it, or if it is the condition for a good that can only be obtained through it.

It is important not to confuse rebellion against pain with the natural desire for it to cease, nor with the effort we can make to abolish it. The characteristic of rebellion is to show our powerlessness. And what clearly proves it is that rebellion makes this effective and constructive activity impossible, through which we either make the best use of pain or build a new world in which pain itself would be abolished. Rebellion seeks only to destroy, and failing to have any hold over pain itself, it strikes less against the causes that seem to produce it than against the reality that contains it, against the universe that holds it, and, in a sort of delirium, against myself who suffers. Thus, the evil here resides not in pain itself, but in the activity that is directed towards it, which, instead of seeking to discover its meaning, to find in it a test that must be overcome in order to expand and strengthen oneself, seizes on pain as a pretext to turn against life itself and drive being towards nothingness instead of promoting nothingness towards being.

c) Separation.

But pain can produce a third negative attitude within us: separation. We have seen, in fact, that it gives us a very vivid sense of our individual existence, forcing us to say “I am here,” and that the cruel person takes pleasure in the suffering he inflicts because he is certain of reaching another being within himself, at the point where he cannot deny the impact he undergoes. This is also the reason why intellectualism will always have adversaries who will say of the idea, which it claims to reduce the whole of reality to, that it is always external to us, and why pessimists believe they can triumph by alleging that each of us encounters the profound and undeniable essence of reality only in those privileged moments that lend life such gravity and acuteness, where one is nothing more than a suffering human being. It is at the moment when our life is most intense that it can no longer be tolerated.

Now, this pain that thus penetrates into our most intimate self and, so to speak, into the core of our self, confines us in solitude and tends to separate us from the rest of humanity. It renders us exclusively attentive to ourselves and indifferent to everything around us. It therefore tends to produce a genuine separation among human beings, and one wonders if sympathy or pity will ever succeed in overcoming it. Sometimes they accuse it, and on the day they manage to surmount it, we have the impression that a sort of miracle has just occurred, where divinity itself seems to be present. Not only does the suffering individual always begin by withdrawing into himself and losing, so to speak, contact with others, but he also always feels that there are certain characteristics in the intensity and quality of the pain he experiences that only he has the experience of: “You cannot imagine how much I suffer, or the nature of my suffering.” One can observe that even animals isolate themselves to suffer. And in this separation, there is a new kind of pain, which is nonetheless accepted: it is a flight, both instinctive and voluntary, which is not without a search for oneself. “Leave me alone,” says the suffering individual as soon as he feels solicited either by some obligation or by friendship. Here, as can be seen, pain becomes an evil, not because it folds us back onto ourselves where we can find the source of our deepening, but because it risks making this separation itself a negative use, desiring it, clinging to it, and endlessly exacerbating it. We then sever all our connections with the world to imprison ourselves in a painful selfishness where consciousness still participates in a rebellious attitude and already inclines towards complacency for its own states.

d) Complacency.

Indeed, this complacency in suffering appears to be a kind of paradox. It is the true opposite of rebellion, much more so than dejection, to which we initially opposed it. Here, one no longer seeks to reject pain from oneself, but on the contrary, to maintain it and nourish it deep within. It is from this pain itself that a sort of pleasure is derived. One loves this bitter enjoyment. And yet, rebellion is not as far removed from this complacency as one might think, as all negative attitudes have a kinship among them. Thus, it happens that our rebellion against the world is strengthened by the very feeling of suffering through it and being right against it. We want the injustice we suffer to always appear greater, as if to better justify ourselves.

This complacency in suffering is also a complacency in ourselves: because since suffering belongs to our most personal being, since it is, to some extent, the mark of the sensitivity of our consciousness, it seems to elevate us. It separates us, but it also distinguishes us. The sufferings we have experienced, but that other people have not known, seem to be like a mark of destiny upon us. They always have an exceptional character: we want them to appear unheard of. It is understandable, then, that there can be a kind of cultivation of suffering. It is understandable that certain base and popular forms of curiosity attract attention to suffering, which the mere spectacle of it is enough to give some obscure satisfaction. Pleasure has no history, but the slightest suffering is enough to capture our attention and emotion. One may even wonder if most people are capable of being deeply moved by a sentiment without experiencing some suffering. So much so that it seems our sensitivity is measured much less by our aptitude for pleasure than by our capacity to suffer. This is also what explains why many literary genres, such as tragic drama or lyrical poetry, have suffering as their subject. It is because the person does not surrender themselves, because they do not penetrate to the extreme depth of themselves, because they are not assured of having discovered their point of insertion in the world and the supreme value to which they are attached, except where they are compelled to admit that they suffer. The evil here precisely resides in this suspicion of the universe, mingled with so much tenderness for ourselves, which makes us love our pain too much.

5. Positive attitudes: a) warning; b) refinement and deepening; c) communion; d) purification.

It will readily be recognized that when pain is present, consciousness is always in danger, that the negative attitudes we have just described are always likely to occur, and even that they are always present in us in a more or less veiled form; it is up to us to fight against them and to convert them.

If pain can always lead us to dejection, rebellion, separation, or complacency, it is because we take it as an accomplished reality that we can only expel or suffer. However, pain has a much closer relationship with the very activity of our mind than we believe; it must not only learn to bear it, but also to penetrate it and make it its own. First, pain is not merely a simple deprivation of being or a diminution of being. It contains a positive element that becomes incorporated into our life and changes it. Each of us undoubtedly only thinks of rejecting pain when it assails us; but when we look back on our past life, we realize that it is the pains we have experienced that have had the greatest impact on us; they have marked us: they have given our life its seriousness and depth; it is also from them that we have drawn the most essential teachings about the world in which we are called to live and about the meaning of our destiny. Let us try to satisfy the most ardent wish of every conscience, which is not to suffer: no one would dare to say that they would not lose more than what they think they would gain.

In the problem of the relationship between pain and evil, what matters to us is not so much to seek what pain is worth in itself as what it is capable of giving us when our will applies itself to it properly. We readily agree that in pain there is a tearing apart, a division of oneself with oneself, a conflict, and even a rupture of the inner being. The unity of our consciousness is abolished, since we find in ourselves both a being who suffers and a being who does not want to suffer. But it is precisely this that invites us to ask ourselves whether it is truly, as is commonly thought, “a deprivation of being”. This, it seems, is both true and false: true, since there is no pain where there is no injury; a wound that affects us, and false, since it gives consciousness an extraordinary exaltation, offering a striking psychological contrast compared to the states of peace and tranquility that preceded it; which is why people attribute to it a privileged importance in their personal lives, as if it constituted the most personal part of themselves. It is a wonderful thing that it is through the constraint of pain, which we always refuse, that our life can receive its most beautiful developments thanks to the way our will disposes of it.

When we are asked about the meaning that pain can have for us, that is to say, the meaning that our will is capable of giving it, then we notice that it can be for us alternately a warning, a condition for refinement and deepening, a means of communion with other consciousnesses, and finally an instrument of inner purification.

a) Warning.

That pain is a warning is observed by all psychologists who see it as the precursor sign of a threat that is looming over us. This observation alone is enough to show that pain is not in itself an evil, but a reaction that can be beneficial against an imminent evil. We shudder at the thought of how defenseless and exposed an being would be if they did not suffer and had no resources other than what science offers them to recognize what can harm them. Pain is first and foremost a symptom that, through the protest it elicits in us, must mobilize all our inner powers and turn them towards our defense.

However, things are not so simple. Pain is never proportional to the danger and may even be absent when the danger is extreme, although one can understand that if its role is to awaken consciousness to consider defending life, it ceases to appear when our vitality is so deeply affected that it no longer has the strength to react.

But we cannot defend pain by saying that it is nothing more than a spontaneous reaction of our being in the face of an assailant danger, that it is there precisely to trigger defensive movements in us. That would be giving too much credit, no doubt, to instinct and purpose. It may well be that there is a threat in pain: but we will always have to interpret it. Pain is not a warning in itself; but we can make it one.

On the other hand, the danger is not always outside of us; it is often within us: and even when we suffer, the danger may be absent. However, pain always creates a conflict in our consciousness between what affects us and what we want, and our consciousness cannot dwell in this conflict. It is up to our personal activity to restore this lost inner unity. Pain invites even the most carefree beings to reflect, not only to find ways to banish it, but also to understand it, to grasp the reasons for this sudden discord that arises between reality and ourselves, to overcome it, but through an enrichment that must fill our lives and give meaning to our destiny.

b) Refinement and Deepening.

It is a very superficial view of our consciousness that can make us think that pain is merely an isolated state that occurs from time to time, and that it could be eliminated while retaining all the others, without incurring any loss. All our inner states are interconnected: we cannot sort them out without compromising the entire unity of our being. Our worth is determined not only by the joys we have experienced, but also by the sufferings we have endured.

Moreover, these joys and pains are more closely related than we think. The capacity to experience pain and the capacity to experience pleasure are inseparable: they are the two aspects of sensitivity. One cannot become insensitive to pain without becoming insensitive to pleasure, as demonstrated by the use of anesthesia. Our ability to suffer is the very sign of our sensitivity. “Man is a sensitive creature.” The slightest thing can hurt him, and it is this ever-imminent wound that gives such subtle meaning to all the contacts he has with things or with beings. In all the movements of our consciousness, wherever intelligence and will act, it is this pain close at hand that makes them so attentive, giving them both tact and insight. Thus, we see how all the sensitive points that pain reveals to us, all that pain experienced or possible at the very core of our consciousness, instead of belonging to a dark and cursed part of ourselves that we would only think of cutting off, contribute to giving us more light, sharpening our activity by revealing its finest values. But we must never forget that pain cannot produce any of these effects by itself: for many, it is a perpetual defeat, and for only a few, an opportunity for ever-new victories.

It is not necessary, in order to judge the value of pain, to question the very cause that produces it. Its spiritual significance depends not on the magnitude of the event that triggers it, but rather on the use we make of it. Even the most insignificant pain, whose origin escapes us, already possesses a sort of metaphysical depth. Nothing matters here except the attitude of the one who suffers. Physical pain first reveals to us the presence of our body and gives an extreme delicacy to the feeling we have of it. And this body becomes present to us not as an object or an obstacle, but in the very life that animates it, which is inseparable from our self-awareness. This awareness of life within us always accompanies us, but it often remains obscure. Pain revives it. It reveals life itself to us through the succession of its oscillations, through its ebb and flow, its impulses and falls, in the violent attachment we have to it, and in the renunciation it already demands of us and will require of us one day.

What can we say about moral suffering, which always brings a true revelation? It reveals to us everything we love about ourselves. It sheds light on all the mysterious powers, all the hidden attachments that reside in the most secret parts of our being. In this way, instead of narrowing our limits, it constantly expands them. But its role is even more to deepen us than to expand us. It provides us with a knowledge that is far removed from the knowledge we have of objects, which always remains, to some extent, external to us. Pure knowledge always resides on the surface of consciousness, whereas pain penetrates deep within us, to the essence that is one with value. It dissipates all those states to which our soul was previously delivered, and which belong to the realm of frivolity or pure diversion. Pain is always serious, and it is pain that gives life its gravity. We do not mean to say that pain is a good in itself. On the contrary, it is a good that is taken away from us: but it is the very consciousness of this deprivation that deepens our inner being, that, by stripping it of what it has, folds it back onto what it is, and by revealing to it the meaning of what it has lost, gives it infinitely more. Pain enters deeply into our consciousness; it plows it down to the roots. It allows us to measure the degree of seriousness we are capable of giving to life. Some beings have been transformed by the experience of pain, even if they no longer remember it.

Therefore, pain can refine or deepen us, but on the condition, as we can see, that instead of considering it as a foreign entity that we seek to suppress or to which we allow ourselves to be enslaved, we somehow consent to assume it, to incorporate it into ourselves, and to make it the means of our own development. Pain is always linked to the idea of a lack or insufficiency. It is the consciousness we have of all the forms of our misery. Hence, the greatest praise we can give it is to say that the worst misery for us would be not to feel it. But if our task is not so much to rid ourselves of pain as to repair the insufficiency of which it is a sign, then it becomes the condition for our inner progress. For consciousness possesses nothing in a stable manner; it is only transition and passage. It can never be content with anything. But whatever it has, it must give itself.

The worst illusion into which we can fall, when we consider pain as an evil to be abolished, is to think that only one thing matters, which is to return to a state in which we do not suffer, that is, to the very state in which we were when the pain began. But how could that be? Consciousness cannot desire an state through which it has already passed once: it cannot wholeheartedly orient itself towards a negative object, like non-pain. That would testify that in this realm, we prefer nothingness to being. Pain only makes sense to us if it compels us, by the impossibility of tolerating it, to strive for a state that surpasses it, but which represents progress for us, not a regression, and which would not have as much strength or richness for us if we had not experienced it.

Therefore, it can be said that the ability to suffer measures, in a certain sense, the power of ascent that each being is capable of. At the lower limit, some beings only know physical suffering: they desire nothing more than to avoid it, they do nothing more than endure it. Its limits are the thresholds of sensation and the very resistance of life. At the other extreme, there are beings who are inclined to think that only moral pains truly matter. It can be said that the possibility of moral suffering is immeasurable: it grows with consciousness itself. There is not a single region of our inner life where suffering cannot one day penetrate. Every new acquisition is an occasion for a new wound. It is in the interval between what we have and what we desire that the ability to suffer resides, which is nothing more than the reverse side of our ascending power.

c) Communion.

The same pain that risks continuously producing and aggravating our isolation and separating us further from other humans must obviously become, once our freedom seizes it and since opposites are always connected, a factor of communion that binds them. And even the communion will be even closer the more radical the separation risked to be. For if separation is overcome, communion must occur in the most intimate part of ourselves, where precisely the pain forced us to withdraw. Pain, insofar as it concerns the passive part of our being, is always linked to some action exerted on us by things or by other humans. Therefore, whoever suffers always feels their connection to what makes them suffer. To the extent that we break the ties that bind us to everything around us, as seen in indifference, we also diminish our capacity to suffer. But when pain affects us, we demonstrate our union even more than our separation from what affects us. And these two effects are not contradictory, except in appearance; it is at the moment when the being voluntarily separates from what makes it suffer that it gives pain a truly selfish character. But as soon as this detachment can occur, the spiritual bonds are already broken, and the pain has lost its intensity. However, it is through the beings we love the most that we experience the most pain, just as it is through them that we experience the most joy.

There are infinite ways for different beings to suffer because of each other. And this suffering is greater the closer they become. Its foundation lies in the very plurality of individuals, which not only maintains an insurmountable distance between them, necessary for communication, but also in their diversity, which is such that what is most original in them also forms the obstacle against which their effort to communicate always stumbles. It is what we would like to penetrate that is impenetrable. It is what we would like to give that cannot be received. Thus, we suffer from what separates us in proportion to the desire for union within us. We suffer from what unites us in proportion to the strength of that union, as shown by the sympathy that makes sufferings common. We suffer from all these signs of imperfection or insufficiency, from all these marks of failure that testify in us to our unworthiness of being loved and in another person to the powerlessness of our love.

Communion between beings is only possible when they first feel separated. And even then, it only begins from the moment they are both assured of being enclosed in the intimacy of their own solitude. Until then, no communication between them can be valid. They can truly act upon each other only in the most inviolable part of themselves, where everything offered and everything accepted seems to equally breach modesty. The individuality of different beings is initially an effect of matter, and it is known that for the most delicate, to be touched is already to feel wounded. What, then, should be said of the contact that can occur between two wills? We cannot think of our solitude being invaded by another, or of another person’s solitude opening up to us, without experiencing a sort of trembling, immense hope accompanied by painful anxiety. In the highest forms of communion between two human beings, where trust and almost continuous joy reign, this anxiety must remain, as it is still the mark of the sacred nature of solitude and the miracle that surpasses it. This is sufficient to show how, at the summit of consciousness, all the states that previously opposed and formed the condition of its ascent are fused together: separation becomes one with communion, and suffering becomes one with joy.

d) Purification.

By stating that pain is a means of deepening, we have already shown that it is a means of stripping away and purifying. If there has always been a connection between spiritual life and stripping or purification, often to the point of confusing them, it is because our spontaneous life exposes us to all the impulses of nature, to all the influences of the environment, and the essence of spiritual life is, on the contrary, to turn us away from them in order to allow us to rediscover ourselves in the purely internal exercise of the activity that defines our being. However, it is almost always admitted that the original characteristic of consciousness is to produce, as it ascends, an enrichment of ourselves. But is this enrichment essential? It can be agreed that it may threaten inner unity and that every new acquisition creates a new peril for us. In no domain, not even the purest, should the soul be guided by the desire to possess, and it is always unfortunate to speak of spiritual goods as one speaks of material goods. What matters is not what we have but our attitude toward what we have. We should not derive self-satisfaction or diversion from it. For then, our personality dissolves instead of growing. In all the goods to which we are attached, there is an object that belongs to us but is not us, that takes us out of ourselves and is precisely what we take pride in. It is undoubtedly difficult to achieve this dispossessing attitude towards what we possess, and it is even more difficult to do so with regard to invisible goods such as knowledge, intelligence, and virtue, because we derive a satisfaction from them that appears more selfless but is often a deeper and subtler vanity. The sense of stripping always involves turning away from what we have in order to focus on what we are.

Now, pain is for us a factor of stripping away. That is certainly not its primary effect, which is quite the opposite. For it is initially a violence imposed on us, in which we feel more keenly than ever our attachment to the good that has just been taken away from us. But purification can only occur in a second step that obliges us to exert all the powers of our soul to assess, by resurrecting its presence within us, the value of the object we have lost. This is where spiritual activity comes into play.

Sometimes, this object appears to us as wretched; then the pain ceases, and we experience the impression of liberation. On the contrary, its value continues to multiply and rise, now that we are deprived of its tangible presence, as happens with the death of a friend. It seems to us that it is precisely at that moment that we begin to know it, and that until then we have not truly loved it. Our pain then changes its nature: it deepens and becomes spiritualized. It is not a sterile regret; it shakes all the powers of our soul. It makes it alive in us; it achieves with it the union that we had sought before and which overly happy or too easy relationships had prevented because they took its place.

Popular consciousness has always considered pain as a means of purification. This is evident in the immediate connection we establish between fault and punishment, without the value of punishment ever being exhausted if we try to reduce it either to vengeance or to utility. It is not only because of the indissoluble unity of consciousness that we demand, when the will does wrong, that is, commits a fault, the sensitivity also experiences pain, that is, undergoes suffering. We do not see this only as the reestablishment of a broken harmony through a sort of compensation. We more or less obscurely believe, like primitives but also like Plato, who admirably illustrated this ancient belief, that there is a purifying virtue in pain: it is a natural movement of the soul that makes us seek, when misfortune strikes, even if we think that there is nothing more than a vestige of superstition in it, what we may have done to deserve it. And it seems to us that just as there is bitterness in the remedies that cure bodily ailments, it must also be the bitterness of pain that heals the ills of the soul.

But even this needs to be explained. It should not be a venerable error that continues to deceive us without bringing us any enlightenment. If pain purifies us, we must see how it achieves it and follow the movements of the soul by which this purification is accomplished. But first of all, it is not pain itself that purifies, just as it is not bitterness that heals. Every purification, every healing is accomplished through a reaction of the soul or the body, of which pain is only the mark. Furthermore, when consciousness is involved, one cannot think that the suffered pain suffices to erase the fault, for it can aggravate the evil instead of effacing it, and produce anger or resentment within us. Pain can only purify us if it is accepted, if there is a real connection between it and the fault, if the fault itself generates it through a reflection that applies to it and transforms it, if it is therefore willed at the same time as it is suffered: which is precisely the definition of repentance.

Thus, bodily punishment, when the soul has committed a fault, is only an image; it adequately represents that limited and passive character that is inseparable from all pain. But it is not what heals. It is a kind of substitute for the pain that the one who has done wrong must produce in himself; it is meant to call it forth and awaken it, but often it prevents it from arising. And pain can only purify us if the one who suffers it is the same as the one who inflicts it.

Healing is an inner conversion of the soul, and this conversion cannot occur without the memory of the fault, whose mere representation is enough to make me suffer. But this suffering is only caused by my present will that refuses to identify with what the fault has made of me. I recognize myself in the one who committed it, but I suffer because I do not accept remaining as such. And the suffering merges with the act that regenerates me; it is an effective suffering that the wicked do not know and that the virtuous person nourishes instead of exhausting.

At the point we have reached, pain ceases to be the unintelligible scandal it was at the beginning. It has become the moral suffering that, far from producing evil, delivers us from it. It is not imposed but rather willed. Here, there is identity between the idea of fault and the suffering itself: to be conscious of the fault is to suffer. Therefore, the liberating and purifying nature of the idea of fault should not be surprising, as being conscious of the fault already means being beyond it.

6. Conclusion.

We must first position ourselves at the summit of consciousness, where our will is fully engaged and where the profound meaning of our life seems to appear to us, in order to understand the lower states that enslave us when they remain isolated and only receive light when they are surpassed. However, it is only moral suffering that we can comprehend because it is ourselves who generate it as the very means of our spiritual progress. But perhaps one can think that it still radiates onto all other forms of pain, even the most obscure and atrocious ones. Every individual and all of humanity go through degrees of physical pain that express nothing more than our limitation, to a spiritual suffering that does not abolish the other, but of which we at least see the meaning and value. One cannot contemplate without dread the mass of suffering that fills history, but the fate of the entire consciousness has been involved in each of them: it is they that have brought human consciousness to the spiritual level it has reached. The greatest courage for every being is, instead of turning away from them, to consent to them and assume them at the same time because they have shaped him, because he cannot think of them without making them his own, because he is still exposed to undergoing them, because no one is solitary in the world and all the evil and all the good that occur there have an impact on all those who live: it is through this ordeal that consciousness grows, refines, and deepens, continuing its spiritual purification and liberation.

SECOND ESSAY: ALL BEINGS SEPARATED AND UNITED

Introduction

The problem of the solitude of consciousness and the communion that can be established between them is both the humblest problem of everyday life and the most essential problem of metaphysics, the one that encompasses all others and alone allows them to be resolved.

Our destiny is constantly being shaped through these small states that fill each day, which are often so insignificant that they go unnoticed, and we do not think that they can leave any trace in the world. But let us leave aside visible events, those that concern only the life of the body or are merely marks of a more secret reality: then we find nothing deep within ourselves but the sadness of feeling abandoned, misunderstood, and powerless, or the hope and already the joy of perceiving powers within us that are beginning to exert themselves and that encounter around us an encouragement or a response that strengthens them.

Sometimes we suffer from encountering in the world only strange or indifferent faces and from being pushed into an isolation that seems to cut us off from the universe and reveal to us a state of misery where no gaze is directed towards us and never intersects with ours: and our existence appears to us like a bottomless well in which we are buried. Sometimes, on the contrary, a light appears: we have just discovered another being just like us, another consciousness filled with restlessness and desire, and already very close to understanding each other through the very fear of not achieving it: the slightest word of friendship accepted or received then appears infinitely more real and precious to us than all the gifts of fortune or all the successes of ambition. But from there new sufferings arise: for as soon as indifference is broken, wounds multiply. Solitude now becomes a kind of refuge; and yet we suffer both from falling back into it and from being unable to remain there. For individual beings oppose each other not only in what they desire but already in what they are; and there is a separation between them that they cannot deny or bear.

However, if we want to embrace the entire destiny of a consciousness, once it is over, and seek what has given it its reality, its value, and its meaning, we must forget all the events in which it was involved and through which it manifested itself: these are only occasions, means, or testimonies through which it internally created itself, sometimes by tightening and deepening its solitary existence, sometimes by expanding and enriching it through the perpetual gift of self that it offered and rendered, which established its eternal relationships with other individual consciousnesses. These two miracles of solitude and communication between beings explain, one without the other and one with the other, our joy and our sadness, our wealth and our deprivation, our trust in life or our despair.

It would be blind to think that these are only superficial accidents of our subjective life that do not concern the very essence of reality. True metaphysics does not tear us away from this familiar world in which we never cease to act, to toil, to desire, and to love; it only seeks to give us a more penetrating and lucid consciousness of it, to deepen it to its roots, to reach in it that activity whose exercise is constantly proposed to us and which depends on us at every moment to accept, implement, and promote. Metaphysics only teaches us to perceive the meaning, dignity, and value of the most common feelings: in the smallest of them, it reveals to us a reality in which we participate, which connects us to all other beings and obliges us to collaborate with them in the creation of the world.

Only a materialistic prejudice, which experience constantly contradicts, can make us think that the very essence of reality resides in those blind and indifferent things that are scattered around us and against which our bodies constantly collide; for things only have meaning through the intelligence that illuminates them or the will that transforms them; they testify to a fallen spiritual activity, or one that has not yet concerned itself with them to animate and regenerate them. True existence is only that which is inwardly itself, which possesses creative initiative and self-awareness. Then things become instruments without which consciousnesses could neither exercise nor manifest their powers, nor be separated from each other, nor attest to each other’s presence.

Thus, by deepening the problem of solitude and communion, the very mystery of Being can be illuminated. For each consciousness perpetually gives birth to itself in a universe from which it is inseparable. It is only in itself that we can hope to grasp the creative power, albeit restrained and imprisoned, so to speak, within our own limits: and it is within these limits that solitude reveals itself to us as suffering, although it can multiply our strength and light by constantly bringing us closer to the source from which they spring. But if we have limits and yet can overcome them by encountering other consciousnesses that can sometimes constrain ours and sometimes bring it to fruition, it is because the diversity of created beings capable of creating themselves, seeking or avoiding each other, assisting or fighting each other, forms a cohesive whole where each one shapes its own spiritual calling by contributing to the formation of others.

It is then understandable why, of all the problems that reflection poses and that life imposes on us, there is none more constant, more profound, more dramatic than that of the solitude in which each being finds himself enclosed and the communion with others that always remains for him an object of supreme hope and supreme modesty. The world becomes dark for us and anxiety seizes us as soon as we apply to ourselves the truth of the ancient adage that every person is condemned to live and die alone. And yet there is no person who has not experienced certain encounters in which another person revealed himself as very close to him, already associated with him in the feeling of a destiny that was common to them, of a mutual presence impossible to abolish and that opened to both of them the access to a spiritual and luminous world from which solitude separated them but which now has no background anymore, which contains only intentions and meanings, where only acts of thought and will are found, which, respectively seeking to fulfill and support each other, never leave any being without initiative or without help.

I. — SEPARATION.

1. The secret cell.

Solitude is born with reflection and grows, so to speak, alongside it. Our life is initially intertwined with things, entirely surrendered to instinct or entertainment. But the thinking being seeks to take possession of itself; it withdraws within itself; it discovers within itself a world that no one else can enter, an activity that belongs solely to it and that it depends on itself to exercise.

It is inevitable that the initial step through which we become aware of ourselves reveals our solitude: it is indeed a step of separation that detaches us from beings or things that surround us and reveals to us the mystery of subjectivity, that is, the secret cell where our own life flows. We cannot think of ourselves without finding ourselves alone. This sudden revelation produces in us a metaphysical anguish that spiritual life deepens and delivers us from. One can judge that this anguish is itself very primitive, if it is true that the most desperate cry of a child is not the one it utters when it experiences physical pain, but when it feels abandoned, when it can no longer find the familiar faces around it and all its connections with the universe suddenly appear to be broken. Let us not diminish the value of such distress by saying that it is purely organic: it is the very birth of self-awareness. In the deepest moments of life, we see it reappear. And there is no philosophy that can reach the very heart of being and life without taking it as a starting point.

For many people, the world consists only of phenomena or events: and in the midst of them, their consciousness forgets and loses itself. For some, this is also a consolation that, by turning them away from themselves, allows them to bear life. However, to perceive that I exist is to perceive that I am unique, separate, solitary, enclosed within limits that can be pushed back but not crossed. And the mere thought that I have my own, subjective, personal existence, unknown to all and delivered to me, is enough to make me feel such an acute and poignant emotion that it seems impossible for it to endure.

It is thought that brings me into being, and it is thought that closes me off. It should not be said that this closure is imposed on me; for I continually impose it on myself. Each step in my inner life contributes to strengthening it. In the simplest beings, it offers little resistance; in the most delicate beings, it is imperceptible and yet without cracks.

2. The risk of solitude.

One senses that there can be no real communion between beings before they have truly become beings: that is to say, in order to be capable of self-giving, one must have taken possession of oneself in this painful solitude, without which nothing belongs to us and we have nothing to give.

There may be men to whom the feeling of solitude is unknown. Not that they have ever had true relationships with any being, that is, intimate and personal relationships; but they do not feel the need for it; they are unaware that such relationships exist. It is enough for them that their lives are engaged in the midst of nature, from which they receive all the solicitations: they always respond to it with a spontaneous and confident movement. And undoubtedly, there must also be moments of relaxation and abandonment in every human existence, where solitude ceases to be felt, where a person rediscovers within themselves, in a kind of play, the instinct of the animal and the innocence of the child: through them, we ascend to the humble source of life, and through them, we rediscover unity and balance among all the inner forces that reflection constantly disrupts. But we only become consciousness, a person, a center of autonomous existence, when we separate ourselves from the nature with which we were initially merged, when the entire world fails us, and when we have the strength to break away from all the surrounding objects that until then supported and moved us. One must have experienced the misery of a self deprived of everything and cornered into the experience of absolute solitude, that is, the experience of oneself, in order to find in the recourse to oneself, that is, in the discovery of an activity that depends on oneself to exercise, the responsibility for one’s own destiny. One must have run the risk of remaining forever lonely, anxious, and powerless in order to establish with the world from which one had initially separated relationships that, instead of being left to nature, are effects of will and love.

Our life can only acquire a character of depth at the very moment when we think it truly belongs to us, and that, in that ineffable intimacy where we can say “me” or “I,” we are alone in the world and the world can do nothing for us. Thus, solitude is the ever-raw wound through which I detach from the existence of the Whole an existence that is my own and whose mere consciousness is enough to give me a sort of vertigo. Can it be said that this is the imminence of a joy that we do not yet have the strength to bear, and like the faltering intoxication inseparable from our first steps? This would be true if consciousness revealed to us nothing more, in the presence of life, than a conquering impulse. But consciousness is precisely the opposite; it breaks this impulse, turns it against itself; it obliges me to suspend it in order to judge it. It delivers its disposition and use to a being that is still nothing, since it must give itself being, but that nevertheless measures its weakness and trembles at the prospect of being left to its own resources in that subjective horizon where it knows it is enclosed and where no other being will penetrate.

But our solitude is always even more inaccessible than we think. For the difficulty for us is not only to form a society with others, but first and foremost to form a true society with ourselves. The very nature of consciousness is to create an inner dialogue, an internal debate in which I never succeed in achieving perfect coincidence with myself. I never manage to express or even find everything that I am. I do not always recognize myself in the actions I perform, the words I utter, or the idea I have of myself. My deepest activity has too many obstacles to overcome in order to come to light; it leaves on the surface of my consciousness an uncertain image of myself that I never fully endorse.

And one could even say that I always begin to communicate with others as soon as I begin to communicate with myself. It is true that the most tragic solitude is the one that prevents me from breaking down the barriers that separate what I believe to be from what I am: for then my consciousness has become so foreign to my true being and my distress is so great that I can no longer say what I desire or what I lack. Solitude is the feeling of having within oneself the presence of a power that seems unable to be exercised, but that, as soon as it begins to do so, compels me to realize myself by multiplying my relationships with myself and with all beings.

3. Contact between two solitudes.

However, this solitude into which we have just entered, which gives us the vivid sense of a responsibility that belongs only to us and an impossibility in which we are nevertheless unable to suffice for ourselves, is experienced as solitude only because it is at the same time a call towards solitudes similar to ours, with which we feel the need to commune; for it is only in this communion that each consciousness will discover the meaning of its destiny, which is not to perceive things or dominate them, but to live, that is, to find outside itself other consciousnesses from which it continually receives and to which it continually gives, in an uninterrupted circuit of light, joy, and love, which is the sole law of the spiritual universe.

Solitude is initially nothing more than a withdrawal into ourselves without which our individual and subjective existence could not be constituted. And to sense around us other solitary consciousnesses is to intensify our own solitude, yet it is also already to overcome it. For as soon as different consciousnesses begin to encounter one another, the feeling of solitude changes and becomes more distinct; it ceases to be purely metaphysical and becomes psychological; it is always accompanied by the idea of impossible or failed communication.

We cannot come across other beings on our path who, like us, have their own secrets and intimacies, who seem capable of communicating with us but only to a certain extent, beyond which they wound and hurt us, and who possess an initiative that thwarts our expectations and calculations, silently questioning each one of them. What will they bring to us, and what are we capable of delivering to them that they are able to receive? What riches will they allow me to discover, either within themselves, where they will offer me sources to draw from, or within myself, where those riches remained buried until then? What light, what joys, what sufferings do they keep hidden in their gaze and in their hands?

Thus, the feeling of solitude becomes an unbearable burden for us when, looking at all the beings around us whose fate is inseparable from ours, we realize that we can have no other relationships with any of them except external and superficial ones. How can we then prevent ourselves from reproaching ourselves with a lack of openness or a lack of love that forces them to repel us or prevents us from gaining access to them? People pass by each other, performing certain movements, uttering certain words, using each other as they use things, but deep within themselves, they guard the secret of their own being, which they sometimes try to defend even though it is so difficult for them to reveal it. And if we direct toward others the same profound gaze that we direct toward ourselves, thinking that they too have a subjective and incommunicable life, our own sense of solitude intensifies and multiplies; we shudder at the thought of so many mysterious retreats destined to remain forever sealed, even though it is already a departure from our own solitude through imagination and desire to suspect an infinity of others around us.

In the way others behave towards us, when no vested interest is involved, we often discern nothing but indifference. But we bear this indifference in different ways. Sometimes, as if incapable of finding anything within ourselves to sustain us, upon seeing that our own existence does not attract any gaze of attention or love, we feel rejected from existence. Sometimes, we accept this indifference as the humiliating testimony of our lukewarmness, our inability to go beyond ourselves, our lack of confidence and enthusiasm. Sometimes, we see it as security, a blessing for which we are grateful to all those around us, both with a certain bitter complacency in our solitary thoughts and with the acknowledgment that any living relationship with another being inflicts some wounds upon us.

But indifference, whether we experience it or suffer from it, resembles inertia and death. Or rather, it is a living death, worse than death itself, because of the feeling of the presence of an offer made to us, which is the offer of life, and to which nothing within or outside us responds. However, it should not be overlooked that the apparently most invincible indifference often hides contempt, immeasurable disgust towards all superficial contacts that suffice for most people, and the burning demand for a self-giving that finds no outlet and in which the being continues to consume itself.

But if the solitude of indifference is like a desert, it does not grip us, it does not contract us as painfully upon ourselves as this other form of solitude that follows the movement in which our whole being reached out to others and is repelled. However, while true indifference is always without remedy, here, on the contrary, degrees can be distinguished. The one who rejects me does not ignore me; they do not reduce me to a mere object; they can recognize in me a vocation that is my own, which does not coincide with theirs, even though both find their place in the vast world. When I sense hostility in them, they are, without appearing so, already closer to me; they take an interest in my own life, which they seem to want to annihilate only because they fear they cannot bend it and reform it; they are already in solidarity with me; and in the struggle they undertake against me, they always begin by embracing me. Finally, it must not be forgotten that even in the most genuine and profound communications, things never go as smoothly as one imagines: there is always timidity, shyness in them; there is always a fear that sincerity may be threatened or will, and consent is always on the verge of refusal, and the separation of individuals persists in the very heart of the union that surpasses it.

4. The solitude of powerlessness and unhappiness.

But it is enough that other beings possess, like me, an intimacy that is their own, so that as soon as the slightest glimpse of it is offered to me, it appears so different from mine that the hope of breaking my solitude turns into a disappointment that makes it more bitter. Each person discovers themselves as an individual distinct from all others: in the inner world, there is nothing that can be borrowed or lent; there is no common territory whose use can be shared by several. Each person is forced to lead an existence that is only theirs, whose value comes entirely from being their own and therefore unique, and which, in its most exquisite originality, cannot be assimilated or understood by anyone. There is nothing in my consciousness that can make another’s state come alive in it. We all have the keenest sense of this; and when we reach this inviolable realm of individuality, we are always ready to say to our most faithful friend, “Here, you can no longer understand me.” The very words of the common vocabulary with which we try to express our most secret movements have a resonance for us that they will never have for another. In every being, there is an ultimate reality that has no common measure. Hence, first and foremost, the feeling that our solitude is irremediable. For there is an irreducible essence of individuality that can never be merged. By abdicating it, by seeking to smooth it over, we substitute superficial and anonymous communication for living and personal communion; it must be present and respected, not erased and forgotten, for the relationship between two beings to acquire true depth. We always invoke the inviolable nature of individuality in order to lament more bitterly a solitude that we do not have the strength to overcome: but we must not despise its secret or agree to let it be violated. Modesty is its most delicate protection: and in moments when understanding between two beings is most perfect, modesty becomes sharper instead of being lost.

But in the presence of an being radically different from us, the pain of the solitude in which we feel rejected is only of the first degree. In reality, this pain is always proportional to the hope we had of encountering another being with whom we thought we could unite. If they show no point of contact with us, we leave them with the feeling that we have never found them. Sometimes, on the contrary, a rapprochement and even an exchange have begun to establish itself between them and us. However, suddenly, through imperceptible reactions, we measure the abyss that separates us from them; then we experience a wound that is difficult to heal. Because we know very well that the very essence of the being reveals itself in these insignificant details, all the more serious because they escape their own gaze, and which reveal an absolute disagreement in the evaluation of values; an involuntary blow struck at that vital part of consciousness where all our delicacy resides.

Should we now accept this common affirmation that it is only pain that gives us the true experience of solitude? It is not denied that we suffer alone, nor even that the commiseration of others, through the very powerlessness it testifies to, further aggravates this solitude. Just a moment ago, my consciousness was directed towards you, completely open and welcoming; the slightest suffering that suddenly befalls me, the slightest memory of past suffering, immediately fold me back onto myself and turn my attention and interest away from you. Thus, more than any effort of reflection, pain produces a gathering of being within itself: for suffering is a limitation that makes it aware of its limits and confines it tightly within them. It can also be said that it renders any diversion impossible, if it is true that it captures all our attention, and that it is an absolute diversion, if it paralyzes it and renders it unavailable. Hence, it can be concluded that our power of solitude and our power of suffering grow in parallel.

However, physical pain reveals to us only the solitude of our bodies. It is moral pain that makes us sensitive to all the vital points of our souls; and the quality of this pain reflects the quality of the consciousness that experiences it. But what should we understand by moral pain if not the pain we feel in contact with other beings? Is it not always deeper the more trust and intimacy our relationships with them had? Is it not always the expression of an illusory, interrupted, or broken communication? Thus, it creates in us a form of solitude that is, so to speak, of the second degree: for this separation is at once evident and impossible. I suffer because of you, that is, because I cannot detach myself from you, even though the feelings I experience and the suffering that accompanies them leave me alone in the presence of myself and do not create any passage between me and you.

But the most dreadful solitude is the one that remains after these false communications in which we have indulged for a long time, in which doubt has crept in, and whose futility we perceive one day. It happens that another being in whom we placed our trust used us for their own interests or amusement. True, they shared a part of their intimacy with us, and we also opened ours to them. They did not always pursue a selfish end; but no matter how noble it was, it was an end that was specific to them and of which we were the instrument. We cannot make such a discovery without feeling a sense of terror; for we do not want to be an object at someone else’s disposal, a stone in a foreign edifice. Each being is a prime beginning: it possesses an initiative that is its own, which has absolute value and which directly connects it with God. In order for this initiative to be respected, it must never be subordinated to another; only then can relationships between persons truly exist. But these relationships are very perilous; they always risk being perverted, and they are as soon as freedom feels even the slightest constraint weighing upon it. Then I feel myself becoming a thing. How, under such conditions, could communication not collapse? How, in this internal shipwreck, could the living part of myself find refuge and salvation anywhere other than in that solitude I had believed to have left behind and which is now its sole refuge?

5. The solitude of free will.

However, the deepest heart of solitude does not reside in subjective existence, nor in the indifference of other beings, nor in the distance that separates me from them, nor even in the pain I experience through them; it lies in the very initiative that I am called upon to exercise, in the decision that depends on me to make, in the possibility that is given to me at every moment to make an act of acceptance or refusal, in the obligation I have to engage myself fully in each step of my life. I can seek all the help, whether from experience, reason, or friendship: but at a certain moment, even in the smallest things, I must make a choice that is mine, and in which my own being asserts and determines itself. Solitude is free will. For it is free will that gives me the metaphysical responsibility for myself.

But it is easy to see that what gives the free act such a grave character is that if it is accomplished in solitude, it precisely compels me to break it. It is not enough to say that it is through it that the self is constituted; for we know well that it cannot be so internal to ourselves that it does not have an unpredictable repercussion on other beings and on the entire universe, which frightens and paralyzes the most sensitive consciences. But it is enough to perceive that the act I am about to perform is awaited by the universe, and that no one can do it in my place, for suddenly the idea of my vocation reveals itself to me; and it is the vocation that makes possible freedom a real freedom and reconciles the solitude where the act originates with the living society that it is meant to create. Here, each of us is alone because they are a prime beginning, a creative power, a faculty to choose between yes and no that they cannot resign without disappearing; and each of us ceases to be alone, for to act is to surpass one’s own limits, it is already to give something of oneself and to accept receiving a response from which there is no escape.

The solitude of the individual being who believes themselves isolated in the world and incapable of sustaining themselves engenders in them a feeling precisely known as “distress.” But the value of the individual must not be contested, for they are always unique in the world, alone in bearing the weight and responsibility of their destiny. However, they can only succeed if they transform it into a vocation, that is, if they consider themselves not as a Whole but as a member of the Whole, from within which they draw their resources and to the formation of which they accept to cooperate. Solitude begins by separating us, but from a world that was external to us and that risked absorbing and distracting us; it first reveals to us the interiority of the individual self, and at that moment it produces the crisis of anxiety in the being who believes themselves abandoned. But they had to withdraw into themselves in order to find themselves; it is only now that they can hope to find others. They have separated themselves only from a world of appearances that separated them from themselves and from everyone else. They enter into a world that is initially their own but gradually opens before their eyes, in which other beings have access just like them, where they begin to discover them and to commune with them.

Such is the universal interiority that is at once the perfection of solitude and its abolition, which only the greatest individuals are capable of knowing, which they are always afraid of losing, which is never complete enough in their eyes and which always gives them, when they rediscover it, an abundance of light and joy. Not only do they already realize in it a kind of spiritual society with all beings in the world, but as soon as they return among humans, they find enough strength to also withdraw them from their selfishness and separation and to reveal to them an invisible solitude that is common to them all, and in which they can finally come closer and unite. I cannot conceive of another being similar to me, that is, solitary and miserable, without breaking down the barriers that separate us, without creating between them and me a sort of brotherhood of unhappiness. But I do not always realize that this very brotherhood dissipates the unhappiness that gave it birth: to think of a solitude that is not one’s own is to leave one’s own, to penetrate the other, to discover a world that is a universal “Self” in which each person finds the foundation of their own self and the selves of all others.

Consequently, it can be said that there are two kinds of solitude: a solitude of the individual self that must not be abandoned because it defends the prerogatives of the secret being against the vulgarity of an apparent and public universe, but which produces despair if it does not transcend itself inwardly and discover this universal solitude of the spirit that will allow the individual to enrich themselves indefinitely and to communicate with all other individuals, inviting them in turn to the same transcendence. In both forms, as the anxious modesty of the individual who knows they are unique in the world, and as the spiritual journey by which I separate myself from the world to unite with God, solitude must be maintained as the very condition of our inner salvation. But can it ever be feared that it is threatened? Villiers de l’Isle-Adam said, “There will always be solitude for those who are worthy of it”; because each person’s solitude is precisely the one they deserve.

II. — UNION.

1. Open consciousness.

It is consciousness, at least in appearance, that makes each individual an invisible and solitary being: for it is folding inward and perfect enclosure. On the contrary, it seems that my body bears witness for me; it is the image of my being that is exposed to other beings; it shows them what I am; it is through it, through speech and action, that I am able to reach them and form a society with them. It is in it that one must seek the imperfect signs of that secret reality that I carry within me, which is myself, and through which I escape even the keenest gaze.

Yet it is also true to say that this body, which is part of the world and presents others with the spectacle of what I am, is at the same time what confines me within myself and individualizes me; whereas consciousness, which a moment ago seemed so closed, always seeks to surpass the limits that the body imposes on it in order to encompass the totality of the world within itself. It is my body that is alone. It is what makes me an individual. It is what perpetually recreates that form of solitude in which I take pleasure and which is selfishness, while the nature of consciousness is to suffer from it and to constantly strive to break free from it. It is through my attachments to my body that this individual sensitivity is formed within me, which could not be understood without it, in which no one but me can penetrate and which also gives all the movements of thought and will an inimitable echo that only I perceive. And it is remarkable that the same body which, by its surface, is hardly mine and belongs to others rather than to me, possesses nevertheless an intimate and mysterious palpitation without which it is hard to see how the deepest acts of consciousness could still be attributed to me and even concern me.

The body undoubtedly oppresses consciousness, but like any instrument that constrains activity and yet cannot be dispensed with. And it is itself a living instrument that already symbolizes the activity it is intended to serve. For it is not enough to say that the body is wholly visible, but only in its most outward aspect, and wholly secret, but only in its most intimate reactions; one can also observe in it a double tendency to fold inward, as seen in suffering, or to reach out to the world, as seen in the slightest movements of the hand and the gaze. Consider only the gaze, which is already a victory of the body over its own limits, an outward movement through which it is the world and no longer the body that becomes my horizon: this world that I hold under my gaze is the same world that other beings contemplate; it is made up of the same objects upon which all gazes intersect and communicate.

But this comparison is remarkably instructive. It is not in vain that we speak of a light that illuminates consciousness. For we know well that the essence of this light is to allow the self to discover the non-self and, consequently, to constantly open itself to the knowledge of a reality that is accessible to all. Therefore, if it is the role of matter to separate beings from each other, the role of consciousness is to unite them by making this very obstacle the means of their union; its inherent essence is to be able to penetrate everywhere. It is already consciousness that creates around the body that luminous space in which both the gaze, the movement, and desire are engaged. In this space, all beings are situated as we are; around each of them a circle of clarity forms, the extent of which is measured by the power of its thought and the purity of its intention. All these circles intersect; they possess certain common areas that represent, so to speak, the means by which different consciousnesses enter into communication with each other, and certain areas specific to each individual, which testify to the irreducibility of each particular consciousness. Thus, it is consciousness that allows the self to leave itself and to communicate with another self through the intermediary of a reality they both perceive, but that does not belong specifically to either of them: the objects that fill space, the memories that populate time, the ideas that inhabit intelligence, all form the vehicles of a living communication among all beings, a communication that must always be remade and that remains constantly at risk. It obliges each of them to personally take possession of the object, the memory, and the idea, which never coincides exactly with another’s and must be confronted with it in order to be tested, clarified, and endlessly enriched.

2. Moving beyond oneself.

However, these are only means that consciousnesses employ when they seek to overcome their solitude and interpenetrate. But do they truly succeed? And can each of them do anything more than analogously reconstruct, with its own personal resources, what is happening in the other? Does it truly penetrate the heart of that foreign solitude to commune with it and thus abolish it?

It is undeniable that this is the deepest desire of our spiritual being. The power we exert over things alone is never enough to satisfy us; but the slightest contact we genuinely experience with the intimate life of another being immediately moves us. It is there that our destiny is engaged, indivisibly linking it to that of others from which it cannot be dissociated, and determining, according to the degree of selfishness or love, its eternal relationships with them. Faced with such an end, the joy that knowledge or possession of material things can give us appears remarkably frivolous. Here, on the other hand, the world of phenomena is traversed and the very essence of reality suddenly becomes present to us in a revelation that is also a creation. As long as we remain in solitude, we may fear that the universe is an entity over which we have no control; but let a communion be established between us and another being, and the universe becomes an immense interiority that is suddenly open to us and in which we never cease to make new progress. This explains why the nature of consciousness is to be carried away by an infinite movement, which can only take on a concrete and living meaning for it if it finds new reasons to love everywhere, in other words, if it encounters other consciousnesses on its path that both nourish and multiply it.

The impossibility of self-sufficiency does not arise, as one might think, from a sense of our limitations that drives us to constantly exceed our own bounds, as if we wanted to grow indefinitely and finally seek to equate ourselves with the Whole in which we are called to live. It is not by engulfing the Whole within its own nature that the being will succeed in breaking its solitude. And even God, outside of whom no being exists and who gives each of them the very strength that animates it, cannot be considered the only being self-sufficient unto itself, precisely because He constantly calls into existence an infinity of other beings to whom He shares the totality of His essence and with whom He forms a real society in which there is no longer any difference between having power and using it, receiving a gift and returning it.

There is therefore an evident prejudice in the movements of greed and ambition by which we seek to continually expand our dominion over things or infinitely expand the wealth of our separate consciousness. Solitude is all the more difficult to bear as the being enjoys more resources that belong exclusively to it and lacks none of the objects to which desire is usually attached. When consciousness no longer finds anything to desire, it experiences satiety and contempt for all the goods it possesses; it feels more separated from them now that it has them than when it was deprived of them. The more fulfilled it is, the more it feels its destitution. This is because no being can fulfill its destiny by hoarding all the richness of the world within itself, but only by going beyond itself to produce an action that liberates it, by finding other beings around it who can welcome it. My existence only makes sense to my own eyes if, instead of feeling abandoned to itself, it discovers its kinship with other existences with which it can unite and, through this union, rediscover the common principle that gives them all impulse and life. Then it will no longer lack support; it will no longer be separated from the world by a barrier of darkness. It will realize that it is both capable of understanding and being understood. It will become a means in the service of an end that surpasses it, and to which it can devote and sacrifice itself.

Therefore, no communication with others should be disregarded. When two people begin to discover a thought, an emotion, or an intention that is shared between them, they not only sense their fraternal resemblance; they recognize the identity of the principle that illuminates them and the purpose to which, unknowingly, they were already contributing. It is God who suddenly reveals His face to them, for only He can be the witness and guarantor of their union.

The person who lives isolated among others leads a secret existence that escapes the gaze of all and is nothing but a subjective dream. Thus, since only that person can penetrate it, they naturally become accustomed to regarding the world of things that can be seen and touched as the only real world, even though that world, which is equally given to all, is nevertheless alien to each individual. But when another consciousness offers us the contact of its presence, when its gaze penetrates us and ours penetrates it, then the reality of material things recedes and fades away; the dream that we carried within us suddenly acquires extraordinary substance; it is no longer solely within us once another has shown that it can be received there. In a kind of paradox, instead of closing us off within ourselves, it makes us go beyond ourselves. It becomes the true world where we no longer encounter objects that resist us, but wills that respond to us, where everything is transparent, active, and moving, where we can only perceive meanings being formed or living intentions associating.

Therefore, no true communication, no matter how timid, is insufficient. It abolishes the very possibility of that contempt which, as soon as it arises, however imperceptible it may be, already thrusts us back into solitude. For it is always an opening to an actual infinity that consciousness already senses and that continually nourishes its hope and renews its movement. If it is sincere, if it arises from within and shakes the very heart of the person, it is already a total gift, an entrance into the only world that is real, an inner world that appearances manifest and not an external world that they conceal.

3. Independence among beings.

What has generally led philosophers to believe that consciousnesses are closed off from one another is the belief that I could only bridge the gap separating me from another being through knowledge. However, as has often been shown, knowledge is often limited to the object and mediated by an idea, which cannot be equated with the being itself and decisively distances me from it at the very moment it represents it to me. This is evident when considering the gaze through which another being seeks to know me. It often betrays an indiscreet and even malicious curiosity rather than a desire to communicate with me; it places me among the objects it analyzes in order to seize and dominate them. In front of it, I can only think of avoiding it; it always inflicts a wound on me that compels my consciousness to close itself off.

The portrait that all French moralists paint of humanity is so cruel because it is the result of purely intellectual lucidity through which they manage to discern, with astonishing precision, what even the least refined individual hides from themselves. Such an attitude prohibits communication instead of fostering it; it allows for nothing more than a separate selfishness to be achieved in another being. It delights in revealing the secret means by which one tries to deceive; it is incapable of grasping and suppresses, instead of eliciting, the impulse by which each of us always strives to overcome or surpass it. On the contrary, communion brings beings face to face through an interpenetration of their lives, not just their thoughts. However, it is easily understood that such communion is not possible if each person directly confronts the other instead of first turning with them toward the source of their common inspiration.

Undoubtedly, it is not entirely wrong to think that I can only grasp the nature of another being by transforming myself into them, by thus realizing a beginning of metamorphosis. But such an idea should not be taken too far; for this very metamorphosis is a work of the imagination: it alienates me from myself at the very moment I think it unites me with another. True union preserves the independence among beings; it desires this independence without which their personal and mutual vocation would be lost instead of being founded and justified. It would be false, therefore, to think that communion between consciousnesses abolishes their diversity. Rather, one could say that it pushes diversity to its furthest point and gives it its true meaning. I never feel more like myself than when my actions align with yours, yet without resembling or merging with them. It is a grave mistake to believe that by renouncing this individual uniqueness that assigns me a unique mission in the world, I will succeed in drawing closer to you in an anonymous realm of repetition and imitation. To be united with you, to understand you, to help you, I must feel that your life belongs to you, that it does not merely duplicate mine, that it branches off at another point from the common trunk of existence but is nourished by the same sap.

Furthermore, I can only communicate with you through knowledge if the reality that is yourself is already formed and, so to speak, completed. But when we are face to face, the feelings we experience go beyond the mere desire to know each other. There is, between you and me, a sort of mutual calling, a double inquiry into the meaning of life, the hope for reciprocal revelation that will be given to us, the expectation of a miraculous assistance that we will offer to one another. In the most sincere and profound relationships, there always remains, indeed, a hesitation, a distrust that does not exist without the thought that they could be contradicted. This means that if the creation of a being is the possibility given to them to create themselves, each of us realizes that we can only create ourselves with the collaboration of all the beings we encounter on our path. Communion only exists in the exercise of an activity that is both personal and communal. All communion is a co-creation of oneself and others indivisibly, by others and by oneself.

4. Mutual realization.

Thus, different consciousnesses, through a sort of mutual intermediary, manage to recognize in each of them countless unexercised powers. For no power within us can reveal itself to us unless it is shaken by an external solicitation. And one can even say that it does not seek, as is commonly believed, to abolish itself in the possession of a fulfilling end, but to constantly resurrect itself in the contact of a presence that removes it from the world of pure potentiality. Now, if every object fulfills this role with regard to the faculty of knowing and acting, what can be said of another person whose mere encounter, once I manage to surpass the physical appearances, is already enough to stir me? It is true that it can awaken in me all the torments of self-love and jealousy when I compare myself to them in terms of what we both possess, but it must also engender infinite promises of strength and joy if I consider the inevitable solidarity that compels all beings to shape their destinies through the gifts they receive and those they give. When I am alone, there is nothing in me but a bundle of powers that I often forget require an invitation and assistance to be exercised. Solitude is being incapable of putting them into play because they receive no call. However, they can only receive this call from another being, and I cannot respond without a communion occurring between that being and myself, which, instead of limiting our independence, blossoms in a willingly embraced and loved collaboration. Perhaps this communion is most fully realized in its spiritual and purest form when sensible presence is no longer given to us, as in death, or has never been given to us, as in certain readings where the sense of separation that the body always contributes to maintaining among even the closest beings seems abolished.

Thus, all beings have a destiny to fulfill; in each of them, one finds the same powers, though they may be unevenly developed. The beauty of the world, the remarkable unity that reigns within it, precisely stems from the fact that each individual is a mediator for all those they encounter. That is why, in the presence of every being before me, I am always in a state of anticipation and request, anxious, moreover, to be able to respond to the anticipation and request that I already evoke within them. This already surpasses solitude. Not that it can ever be definitively overcome, for I must be able to overcome it and yet fall back into it at any moment. And true communion indeed consists of two united solitudes. But the trust that another being shows me obliges me to rise above myself so as not to deceive it. The feeling that each of us can bring a benefit to the other that we dare not deny is the cause of our mutual development. Individuals cease to be separate as soon as they recognize this fundamental law of consciousness: that we are destined to solitude when reduced to a state of pure potentiality, but these powers can only be exercised through one another.

The problem of communion encompasses the entirety of consciousness. The belief that consciousness always remains cloistered within itself arises from the definition of consciousness as the mere power to know things through ideas. Consequently, it is clear that no matter the volume of ideas it is capable of containing, those ideas will remain its own, and it will never transcend its own sphere. Strictly speaking, however, it is not the idea that is ours, but only the thought we have of it, and through it, each consciousness participates in a world that is common to all, within which countless particular perspectives can be distinguished, yet converge. Thus, intelligence opens up an infinite field before all beings, constantly revealing and branching out new avenues of communication that invite them to come closer and unite.

Moreover, in the act of contemplating my own solitude, I surpass it. By circumscribing my own being, I place myself within an unbounded being, but I also place you there. Thus, my individual consciousness and yours draw the same light from a universal consciousness, which is the common environment where they pursue their own lives, where they separate and where they unite. It is in this consciousness that I conceive my limits and yours, and where both of us can transcend them.

However, such communication alone is not enough to create a genuine communion between two beings. True communion can only reside in the will. The will seeks the being beyond the idea and never uses the idea except as a means. It cannot be denied that the will is an exit from oneself. In its highest form, it is creation, pure generosity. But the only worthy counterpart to it is another will that, once freed from selfishness, communions with the first in the exercise of an activity that has the same source and the same end, that is both personal and reciprocal, and that always ignites within consciousness that inner impulse we call friendship or love. Each consciousness constantly oscillates between selfishness and love, but the former closes it off in its misery rather than its richness, whereas the latter frees it from any particular possession to grant it the possession of an infinite good that cannot be enjoyed without sharing.

Thus, when communion is established, it possesses an inherent value that does not derive solely from the individual value of the beings communing. In fact, it must be said that each individual receives their own value from the communion they willingly open themselves to. And it is the one who seemingly gives the most who receives the most, for there is no greater grace for consciousness than the one that places it in a state of action, of giving. Therefore, when I am closest to you, I feel your being being born within me but flourishing in you, and there is no communion closer than the one that, at the same moment, evokes the same feeling towards me.

5. Transcending the individual.

To be capable of communing with other beings is to reduce oneself to a perfectly naked and stripped-down activity that, by constantly removing us from ourselves, grants us access to the totality of reality from which our individual existence initially separated us. It is to rediscover within oneself the deep source of life and to help others rediscover it. It requires renouncing everything that separates us from them: all privileged objects of our attachment, all material or individual advantages, all excessively delicate emotions in which our self-love might find pleasure. These are merely things or states that bind us when it comes to liberating ourselves. Therefore, the body, which belongs to us more closely than anything else in the world and always belongs only to us, becomes the supreme principle of closure, separation, and solitude. This is its role for all those who consider it an object rather than a vehicle of their attention and love. However, we must go further, for we know well that we will never be able to commune with a being who reserves and keeps the smallest parcel of reality for themselves. It is not that we ask them to share it with us, for it is from them, not it, that we need. And we can only reach them if they offer themselves to us as they are, without interest or past, ready at every moment to sacrifice themselves completely in order to be reborn completely.

Thus, any person who claims to still keep something for themselves is creating their own solitude. We must be detached from everything and therefore know the extreme poverty where we avert our gaze from ourselves to open it to the entirety of the world with a wholly pure heart and perfectly free hands, in order to experience the extreme richness that allows us, at every moment, to truly enter into society with all the beings that God places on our path.

The secret of each being prevents it from ever becoming an object, but the entire universe is an immense secret in which our own secret allows us to enter. Thus, it could be said that humans remain separate to the extent that, by withdrawing into themselves, they only find contact with the individual part of their own being, namely the tremors of their body and their self-love. But if this withdrawal becomes deeper, these tremors calm down, the gap that separates these two beings is bridged, and a communion arises between them, founded on the recognized and experienced presence of an identical principle that sustains and animates them.

Friendship with all living things is both the duty of every being and its very essence. It becomes the presence of God Himself, revealing to us, along with the principle that gives us life, the purpose that inspires our activity and constantly urges us to surpass ourselves.

III. — INFLUENCE.

1. Pure presence.

It often happens that we think we encounter a communion between beings, where there is only a mutual influence that they undergo. But influence can be the opposite of communion. It can enslave beings to each other instead of freeing them from their limits and allowing them to surpass them. It will undoubtedly be said that it is when it achieves this that it also reaches its most perfect form: then indeed it becomes one with communion. This is, so to speak, the pinnacle of influence, which needs to be distinguished from its lower forms that risk deceiving us and preventing communion instead of producing it.

The word “influence,” which is commonly used, has a mysterious and almost mystical resonance. We do not easily admit the influence we undergo or the influence we exert, although we are sometimes grateful for the former and proud of the latter. It seems that in influence, there is always a kind of infringement on personal independence, and consequently, there is a victim and a culprit. For the Ancients, influence referred to the action exerted by the stars on our lives; it was impossible to define or escape it; it determined the meaning of our destiny. However, the stars were there only to take the place of individuals; they served to represent the obscure and irresistible character of the influences emanating from them. Influence is real only when it is unknown to both the possessor and the recipient: even more so, it is always involuntary. It cannot be explained by reasons; it contradicts the most plausible ones. It penetrates into hidden regions where it is not always recognized, and where it seems most visible, it sometimes lacks depth. The one who appears to radiate it often merely reflects what he has received. It is always fragile and fears too bright a light: as soon as one becomes aware of it, one begins to free oneself from it.

In reality, the problem of influence confronts us with a kind of contradiction whose origin is clearly seen. Because the truest influences reveal ourselves to us: far from producing in us the feeling of being subject to another being or inviting us to imitate them, they suddenly free us from all constraints and restore our awareness of our authentic originality. Thus, we can only recognize them in order to deny them.

It is not always the men whom we admire and love the most who have the greatest influence on us. But for most of us, the most significant event has almost always been the encounter with another person who suddenly brought a new light to our lives, changed its direction and meaning, and provided it with a balance and, so to speak, an inflection that it had not been able to achieve until then. It is not necessary for us to have lived with them in long familiarity; a very brief contact may have been enough. Sometimes we can name the person who has thus imposed their decisive curve on our life; we may have forgotten them. Certain influences resemble impregnation: the more imperceptible they are, the more decisive they become. We would sometimes be surprised if the one who exerts them were named in front of us. They seem to merge with the play of natural forces. The influence of a book, that of a deceased person whose memory and example we have kept, often has more perfection and strength than that of a living person who lives near us, whose charm seduces us, and whose authority carries us away. It would be wrong to see influence as merely a kind of causal efficiency produced by words or actions; words or actions are only the instruments and signs of influence. True influence is that of pure presence; it has a metaphysical scope; it is a discovery of one’s own being in contact with another being.

As soon as we become aware of it, influence begins to dissipate. Because it diverts us from ourselves and attracts our attention to a being who is not us, whose life seems to invade us and substitute itself for our own. Then we start to defend ourselves. It is almost impossible to recognize the influence we undergo without suffering from it. The one who seeks it and loves it creates it with their own forces; the one who ratifies it judges it and therefore dominates it. But the one who suspects that it acts upon them, despite themselves, suddenly feels their consciousness and freedom in peril; they revolt against it and against their own weakness. They are afraid of having abdicated, of having yielded to another person the existence for which they had the responsibility and the charge. The broader the consciousness, the more welcoming it is; it performs an act of trust toward all the beings it encounters on its path, which is already a gift of itself. Therefore, it always runs the risk of being caught off guard: it sometimes believes it is giving when it has actually been taken away.

The purest and most beneficial influences are not those that cause us the least anxiety: the ease and joy with which we yield to them reveal within ourselves a kind of complacent passivity, a suggestion to which we have become obedient. It is the presence of another person that we sometimes discover within us instead of our own. We cannot entrust our destiny and conduct to anyone else. It is beautiful that in perceiving the vocation of others, we also perceive our own; but any act of imitation or substitution undermines the soul it believes it is building. Thus, there is a drama of influence that sometimes brings us closer to ourselves and sometimes takes us away from ourselves; sometimes seizes us suddenly, sometimes insinuates itself into us imperceptibly; sometimes remains unknown without enslaving us, sometimes enters consciousness and immediately divides and troubles it.

2. Prestige.

There are therefore different degrees of influence: at the lowest degree, two beings are in the presence of each other and they act upon each other through the purely individual part of their nature. One of them possesses a “prestige” that impresses the other. The reason for this prestige does not matter here and can be noble or vile: the only thing that matters is a relationship between forces that causes a more intense activity, finding a weaker activity in front of it that easily yields to it, abolishing its independence and carrying it along.

In individual prestige, the influence is unilateral; it always occurs in the same direction: it is always the same person who imposes it and the same person who receives it. It is sometimes unknown and suffered, sometimes accepted and loved. It is a sign of a certain power in the one who exercises it, but not always of real superiority. Because we encounter people every day who are superior to us and have no influence on us, and other people who are less worthy than us and whose prestige we suffer without being able to defend ourselves. However, prestige presupposes a certain correspondence between beings: only someone who feels an inner void that another person fills, a call to which another person responds, or even the awakening of a certain admiring emulation by which they seek to resemble the object that has captivated them, can be sensitive to it. This is, at the same time, a testimony of humility and a natural distrust toward one’s own forces, a movement of vanity and self-love that undertake to equalize themselves, at least in appearance, with what surpasses them.

Moreover, the isolated individual hesitates when it comes to their most secret thoughts; they do not dare to fully appropriate them. They need reassurance about them, to find someone around them who elevates those thoughts and has the courage to take responsibility for them. There is no person whose conscience has not been touched by certain clarities, certain desires that they have not had the boldness to take possession of; they required a kind of excessive intimacy with themselves of which they were incapable, and that made all those states suspicious to them. But the prestige of a renowned person or author suddenly gives them an unexpected value that momentarily flatters their pride; however, this material fascination does not deeply change them.

Influence can only arise when we encounter outside of ourselves not an exact reflection of who we are, but the fulfillment of an attempt that we ourselves have just begun to sketch out. However, by recognizing that it is accomplished elsewhere, we often believe that we are relieved of the task of accomplishing it for ourselves. The sketch is enough to satisfy us; we are too inclined to confuse it with the actual work that we now imitate through vain gestures whose origin is no longer within our inner being. Thus, our agreement with the one who acts upon us harms us instead of serving us: contrary to communion, such influence, instead of flourishing the tendencies within us, creates a mere semblance of our own being.

In prestige, it is always the individual who is displayed. It is always him that we seek. Thus, he always appears to me as exceptional and unique, different from all others and different from myself; surpassing them and surpassing me, effortlessly achieving everything I desire and love and that I myself remain powerless to accomplish, always possessing a wealth from which I constantly draw and which arouses and anticipates all my wishes. The quality of what he brings us quickly becomes indifferent to us; because we have attached ourselves to him not because of what he gives us, but because of who he is. How could we still question whether what comes from him is good, since in our eyes, something is only good because it comes from him? And soon, we become blind to his deepest spiritual dispositions that do not awaken in us any response capable of answering them. The critical spirit is destroyed; consciousness considers its disappearance and docility a merit. Yet it cannot invoke the example of love, which also measures the value of gifts by the very being who gives them but instead establishes and restores the person instead of abolishing it, always giving back a hundredfold.

Intellectual prestige is the one that produces the greatest fascination on us. There is no wonder that can surpass the appearance within us of a thought that does not originate from us but becomes ours as soon as another person manages to elicit it within us through the magic of words. Therefore, it is difficult to think differently from the one who taught us to think: in mature individuals, we find certain forms of thought that were imposed on them by their first teacher. Once again, it is almost impossible to consider truth independently of the one who teaches it; and our adherence to the truth, based on the person, often leads us to submit to external authority instead of inviting us to delve into the personal reasons behind our own consent. For no proposition can have the same value for us depending on whether it is expressed by the mouth of a person we admire or that of an indifferent person. And it is quite certain, indeed, that if truth is not an object, if it is alive, it is inseparable from the very consciousness that thinks it and is always in accord with it in value. Thus, the most beautiful formulas take on the most trivial appearance, and the most common ones acquire a singular nobility depending on the quality of the soul of the one who utters them. But it happens that by attaching itself to the appearance of the person rather than the person themselves, prestige hides from us the personal source from which truth must spring forth; it dries it up within us, leaving only a form that dazzles us and that we content ourselves with reproducing.

3. Individual influence.

Many men consider the influence they exert over others as the greatest of all their possessions, as a good before which all others pale, both those of knowledge and those of fortune: for them, it is the very condition of activity and joy. Neither our action on things nor our action on ideas multiplies our power as much as our action on beings. This desire to interest others in what we think and feel and to involve them in it can depend on several motives, depending on whether we seek in their approval a confirmation of our own life, or an extension and enlargement of our individual consciousness, or the awakening of an inner movement that frees them from the obstacles that held them back and allows their personality to flourish. And these various motives always associate in some way, as can be seen in the master who rejoices in having many disciples.

But there is no influence that is not full of perils: there is no man, even when he seeks to give to others the best that is in him, who is absolutely certain not to want to reign over them. What can be said of those who hold the slightest parcel of temporal authority and use it, often unknowingly, to obtain an assent that is too easy to provide them with the appearance? The most demanding do not settle for that: they demand a gift of the heart, which is the only thing in the world that cannot be demanded. The most delicate tremble before the influence they exert, as soon as they begin to suspect it: they begin to doubt the value of the goods to which they are most attached, at the moment when they see others pursuing them by following their example.

As for those who willingly lend themselves to influence, most often it is to relinquish an initiative that they do not have the courage to exercise, to find another being who will act in their place and assume a responsibility that they do not have the strength to bear themselves, to feel the pleasure of being crossed by a force that surpasses them and seems to elevate them, so to speak, above themselves. Some seek a silent and almost imperceptible influence, which they can consent to with humility, innocence, and gentleness. Others need a more imperious and brutal ascendancy that forces all their resistances and drags them almost against their will. The danger is always to let an inner activity, which we distrust, idle, but which we think we can revive through a substitute activity; it is to search for oneself again through another; it is to turn the imitation, which can only be material, of certain actions that have no place in the natural course of our life, into the glory of self-love.

The most serious thing is that this imitation can be spontaneous and remain unnoticed; then it gives a borrowed appearance to our whole being. It insinuates itself into ideas and feelings and produces a kind of admiration for ourselves, all the easier to explain as these states seem more remarkable to us for not being entirely familiar. In the secret and shifting world of consciousness, what subtle balance will allow us to discern what we believe we experience from what we actually experience? Within ourselves, we do not perceive what belongs to us in the most intimate way: it is what is not quite ours that holds our attention and captures our interest. But these imitated feelings, to which we believed we could rise, do not always have a long duration, and a crisis of sincerity is enough to dissolve them.

The essence of prestige is to create between two consciousnesses a relationship of causality comparable to that which governs the world of bodies. But the law of causality is inseparable from inertia; it only intervenes between souls when they begin to materialize. Spiritual communications are of a different order: they always provoke initiative instead of abolishing it; they exclude necessity and reduce themselves to an ever-renewing gift of light and love.

4. Inter-individual influence.

When influence, instead of being an effect of individual prestige, is reciprocal and, so to speak, inter-individual, it is less noticeable: for it is almost always mixed with sympathy, friendship, or love. It seems to imply an understanding and even a double consent where equality between beings is reestablished, where there is no longer room for force or surprise. Does this not suppose that there is a real agreement between two consciousnesses that allows them to communicate? Does not each of them find in the other an extension and enlargement of itself? Thus, is not the only real and profound influence the one that is reciprocal?

It cannot be denied that in each being there are moments of inertia and sterility. We are not always attentive to the desires within us, nor even to the objects before us; and we can be absent from both the world and ourselves. Consciousness is weak and always threatened; it needs to encounter other consciousnesses around it that awaken it, that are capable of resurrecting in it its most familiar movements, but which are too quickly extinguished. Thus, it is the natural state of each consciousness to be constantly both active and passive vis-à-vis all the others. Is this not evidence that the same power animates them all, to which they seek to respond in a sort of emulation and cooperation? And thus, does this form of influence not realize a transition between individual prestige and communion in the same ideal?

However, it is important to guard against certain dangers that are inherent to it; for it is often only a kind of mutual complacency of individuals for themselves, which tightens them within their own limits by giving them the illusion of surpassing them. We always believe that it creates a real communication between consciousnesses, as opposed to prestige, which only produces a purely external action and destroys intimacy or prevents us from penetrating it. But it happens that we mistake a double imitation for a living bond between two consciousnesses, in which each of them strengthens itself in its own feeling and reassures itself about its independence. When influence is reciprocal, we are not afraid to exercise it or to suffer from it; and the opposite harms of prestige accumulate: a kind of compensation is established between them that conceals them from us. Even when this form of influence is the expression of spontaneous and instinctive sympathy, we still imagine that it results from a choice, that it is possible to interrupt it, that it contains a voluntary acceptance by which our initiative engages itself by rejecting all constraint. But that is not always true: for every desire that is satisfied, every habit that is exercised also produces in consciousness the appearances of freedom.

Moreover, in this mutual action, each individual, taken as such, enjoys an exceptional and undisputed privilege vis-à-vis the other. Both seek each other, enjoy living near each other, judge the same things together, and communicate the feelings they experience. Thus, they end up forming a closed society that tends to separate itself from the society of other men, instead of serving it. It obeys its own laws. It gradually takes on a secret form, in which all relationships are transformed into allusions, which imply the existence of an evident and tacit communication, which sometimes fools us because we neglect to actualize it.

It must be said, as a result, that if the two beings between whom mutual influence reigns remain face to face as pure individuals, if they allow themselves to be carried only by that natural and easy sympathy that unites them, if they do not seek to surpass themselves, if they only delight in each other, but only to enlarge and multiply the delight that each of them feels for themselves, then all the dangers of individual prestige increase instead of diminish. For each of them actually abandons the other to undergo the influence of another; but since the other reflects their own image back to them and exerts on them an action in which they recognize the spontaneity of their own movements, it can be seen that when they abdicate, it is for their own benefit, but in such a way that they do not have to take responsibility for their own nature and that it is enough for them to recognize it in the action of an external force to which they now abandon themselves. Thus, they experience a double satisfaction in feeling that they exert and undergo an influence that remains the same: their most personal actions acquire more security and strength from the very response they provoke, from the success they achieve, and from the impression they give them of breaking the barriers of their solitude. And at the same time, they feel almost relieved of the effort to sustain and regenerate them; it is sufficient for them to be carried along by an action whose touch has become familiar and which they no longer have to perform themselves. A sort of unconscious agreement is established between these two beings that cancels out any too burdensome expense: for both of them experience pleasure in receiving what they had already taken pleasure in having accepted.

Thus, in inter-individual influence, there always remains an ambiguity that seems delightful to us. We imagine the prestige destroyed, and yet we experience a double satisfaction in imposing it and yielding to it. We intensify our relationships with others by giving them greater scope and depth, the constant relationships that are constantly occurring between the active and passive parts of ourselves; and already we have the illusion of entering a world that transcends our two individual beings and allows them to commune. But the inter-individual influence must lead us there: otherwise, it is mere appearance; it stimulates self-love instead of overcoming it; it relaxes activity instead of increasing its momentum.

5. Trans-individual influence.

No real communion between individuals can take place without mutual mediation. This is the highest degree of influence. Then, the two beings no longer seek to come closer through the individual part of their nature; they become vehicles of an activity that surpasses both of them: one brings a revelation to the other, but receives it anew by seeing it welcomed. Each of them forgets themselves, not for the sake of the other, but in the very message that unites them. The individual is transformed into a person. They retreat into themselves, but only to immediately emerge from it; they perceive their limits only to transcend them; they finally discover their vocation, which gives meaning to their own life only because it inserts it within a Whole of which they are a part and to which they now belong.

This third kind of influence, which does not go from individual to individual, either in the same direction or reciprocally, but which reveals to individuals a universal source from which each of them draws both the light that illuminates them and the promise of infinite development, this influence for which the individual is the instrument and not the agent, can itself be called trans-individual. It in a certain way realizes the synthesis of the previous two and gives each of them its value and significance. For the prestige of an individual always enslaves the one who undergoes it, whereas the ascendancy of an ideal for which the individual is the interpreter liberates the one who contemplates it through them, obliging them to live it within themselves, with a life that is also their own. And the mutual influence of individuals enriches and expands each of them, instead of squeezing them more tightly within their own boundaries, only if it draws upon the resources at its disposal from a principle upon which they both depend and to which they must first unite in order to become capable of uniting with each other.

By saying that spiritual goods cannot be separated from the person who possesses them and puts them into action, we mean that they can never be considered as ready-made things that could be given to us and that we would only have to receive: they must constantly be acquired. The one whom we believe capable of communicating them to us has made himself by making them his own; he invites us to make ourselves by sharing them. Therefore, no influence is good unless it allows the person to establish themselves, instead of obliging them to disappear and abdicate. Affirming the value of another being is not recognizing in them an individuality that nature has endowed with its gifts; it is admiring the use they make of those gifts, which invites us to make a similarly beautiful use of the gifts we have received. Value is not confined within the limits of individuality; it resides in its application, which always surpasses it and creates the very originality of spiritual life. No one is born what they must be, and no one has ever become what they are, that is, no one has arrived. But no one progresses except by going beyond themselves, that is, by triumphing over that attachment to themselves that separates them from other beings. And all, by escaping from themselves, equally break down the walls of their prison; they then rediscover the immensity of the free sky under which they commune.

The one who constantly seeks to amass new goods and is always afraid of losing them measures their own poverty at every moment. But spiritual goods cannot be confiscated. On the contrary, the one who divests themselves of all particular possession discovers an infinite abundance around them. They have at their disposal all the richness of the world, the enjoyment of which never ceases to increase for them when they share it. As soon as the influence becomes deep enough, the one who exercises it is only the messenger of good news; and the messenger fades away in favor of the message. Then one can say at the same time that the individual ceases to seduce us because they have renounced themselves, and yet nothing interests us more than this foundation of the person that has been realized in both them and us, and that simultaneously reveals to us the diversity and harmony of our particular vocations.

Here, influence loses all material character: it excludes all spirit of domination; it rejects all passivity. It is the revelation of our own initiative, the call of a grace to which we alone can respond and which opens the path of a destiny entrusted to us within the world. We must cease to think of ourselves in order to be ourselves. We must abandon all preoccupations that limit and isolate us in order to find, in a shared participation in creative activity, the only means that allows all individuals to unite by surpassing themselves.

EPILOGUE.

Is it possible now to embrace in an overview the entire path we have traveled? If every human consciousness must pass through Evil and Suffering in order to descend into that ultimate depth within itself, where the solitude it experiences reveals its communion with other consciousnesses, it is undoubtedly because there is a supreme principle residing at the core of each solitude that is at the same time the hearth where they unite. It is this principle that we have encountered when, seeking to recognize in communion itself the interplay of influences that converge, we have distinguished an individual influence, still close to prestige, an interindividual influence that often suffices for friendship, and finally the most beautiful of all, which is this transindividual influence without which there may be no true communion.

If the spirit were nothing more than our own secret life, it would bring us no strength or consolation. If it were merely a refuge where we would forget the tribulations of our temporal life, it would not enable us to understand or endure them. If it were merely an island of tranquility in a troubled sea, it would separate all beings from one another, preventing them from uniting. But the Spirit is within us and beyond us. It is a constantly offered Presence to which we do not always respond. We only discover it at the heart of solitude: but then this solitude is miraculously broken. The one who always seems alone is never alone. They have found within themselves a light that illuminates them, a source that nourishes them. Will it be said that they take pleasure in themselves? Yet, they leave far behind all those individual concerns that ceaselessly agitated them when their life was still purely external. The torments of self-love are appeased for them. By becoming a stranger to themselves, they have entered into their true homeland.

Not that they then turn away from the existence in which they are engaged; on the contrary, they alone are capable of contemplating it with lucidity and accepting it. They have acquired a kind of docility to life, to be understood not as resignation to the inevitable, but as a taking possession of the demands it imposes and from which they no longer shrink. For the spirit makes us participants in the very work of creation and assigns us, at each of its points, a responsibility that belongs to us alone. Thus, the world is what it is only because of our infidelities and failures. But to live according to the spirit is to constantly guard against succumbing to them, to constantly seek to repair them.

Now, this task is the same for each of us according to the function that is proper to us and the place where we are situated: in this sense, each of us is irreplaceable. This should heal all human beings from the inclination to compare themselves, which makes them jealous of one another and always unhappy. But it is not by becoming similar that people will best unite.

Nor is it by bringing their bodies closer together in a sort of common and public existence where their uprooted souls can only remain silent. It is by recognizing not only the privileged nature, but the unique nature of their situation and vocation, which allows them to come into contact with the Absolute, right where they are called to act; it is by discovering that all the other beings around them, also unique, both through the originality of their nature and the freedom that disposes of it, are like them, missionaries of the Absolute.

Thus, it is not enough to say that what unites them at the heart of solitude is the consciousness they have of cooperating in the same work. No effort of an individual left to themselves can bridge the gap that separates them from another individual: in a common task, each of them, as it happens, could remain eternally enclosed within the task that is their own; for communion can only occur between them if it first occurs above them. It does not result, although it has often been said, from a convergence of wills. And even the will that seeks it often finds it elusive. It resides in a higher domain, where the will is astonished to find it realized before it has even begun to act: it then has only to bow and consent.

This explains quite well why, if the Spirit is a pure presence, but a presence to which it depends on us to be attentive, the action that people exert on one another is quite different from what is sometimes imagined: it is also an action of presence, and one that is such that it seems that one never does anything to produce it, and that all the means used, all the motives invoked testify to their powerlessness to engender or explain it, since it can be lacking even when they are present. The action that one person exerts on others, it is believed, derives from their superiority, which creates around them a sort of radiating power: but, as has been shown, if they act by what they are and not by what they do, it is because the presence felt in them is already a presence that surpasses them, in which they participate and to which, through their example, they invite all other beings to participate. And it is known that the same is true of that mutual action where it is too often believed that a common goodwill, sympathy, and reciprocal mediation, a kinship between individual aspirations that support each other in order to satisfy themselves, are sufficient. But those are only effects. Every human friendship begins with the sense not only of a dual presence of two beings to one another, but with the sense of another Presence that establishes it, that is the same for both, which they can refuse, although it never refuses them, from which they continue to draw, but which is itself inexhaustible, of which they continue to be witnesses and instruments for one another, and in which they discover themselves both separated and united. When friendship begins to wane, it is not, as one might think, that their two souls have grown weary of each other: for they grow weary of each other only when they have recognized their own limitations; and that happens only when the spiritual Presence on which their friendship had lived until then has become more obscure and distant to them.

Solitude should not be endured as an inseparable misfortune of our condition, nor sought as a refuge from the hostility of the universe. We must fear and not desire diversion, upon which we sometimes rely to escape it: for our solitude is never perfect enough, and we are always divided between the inner and the outer. And it is precisely the extremity of solitude, its absolute deepening (at the moment when there is no longer any regret or afterthought for the world we have left), that delivers us from it: its excess causes it to burst forth. And it is then that we rediscover the world, as if we had never looked at it before, in a light that reveals its meaning to us, not free from the evil and suffering that initially seemed to fill it, but carrying them within it as a condition of its existence, as a trial that we are bound to undergo, as the marks of a duty that belongs to us. No one on this earth can doubt that we can enter into the life of the spirit other than through the life of the body: the latter supports the former, but never ceases to impede it. However, without the life of the body, without the miseries and the temporal condition to which it engages us, without the separation in which it confines us, without the need to which it subjects us, without the pain to which it exposes us, what being in the world could hope to have an individual existence, an existence that was truly their own and that allowed them to say “I”?

And it is upon this individual existence itself that freedom is grafted, which can be said to surpass it but cannot do without it. Freedom is precisely at the point of intersection between the life of the body and the life of the spirit, where one must always be converted into the other. For the life of the spirit can never be given; we must always acquire it. This is only possible through an act of detachment from everything that previously enslaved us. However, one is only free if one has the power not to be, to turn freedom against itself, to be a voluntary slave. Then we see freedom serving the body, increasing the separation between beings, seeking to dominate them by reducing them to the state of things and even imposing on them, as in wickedness and cruelty, the suffering that one does not want for oneself but that renders others at one’s mercy. Thus, the possibility of suffering is inseparable from these natural limits without which we would have no individual existence. And the possibility of evil is inseparable from our freedom, without which we would have no spiritual existence and would never enter the realm of Good.

But if it is true that we are mixed beings composed of a body and a spirit so closely joined that we distinguish them only by the preeminence we give at times to one and at other times to the other in our lives, it is well understood that Evil and Suffering can never be forgotten or abolished. They remind us of our human condition. Through the scandal that is inseparable from them, through our inability to understand and tolerate them, they are like witnesses that remind us that our true life is elsewhere. But there is no real spiritual life other than the one that has traversed and transformed them. Yet, their presence always remains alongside and around it. The worst suffering is to be unable to tear ourselves away from the evil that always tempts us. But if our salvation is undoubtedly beyond the world, it is in this world that it is realized. Therefore, the life of the spirit, in its most active and effective form, requires that we turn back to this world we had left in order to try to remedy the suffering that torments it. For it is characteristic of the spirit to leave no suffering without consolation. But we must not fail to recognize that only the strongest are capable of accepting it as the very sign of the sacrifice by which the body and self-love are renounced. It is also in the world that we must fight and overcome Evil, which seems determined to corrupt and destroy it, not, it is true, to deliver us, but on the contrary, to bind us to it in a sort of hideous curse. Therefore, it is understood that it is Evil and Suffering that, by weighing on all beings and imposing mutual duties on them, compel them to discover the common principle that separates and unites them.

  1. They were initially published in the “Bulletin de l’Association Fénelon” in two limited and non-commercial editions.↩

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