Monday, June 12, 2023

Self-consciousness, by Louis Lavelle

The title of this book is “La conscience de soi”, which could be rendered most literally as “the consciousness of one’s self”, or more idiomatically as “self-consciousness” or “self-awareness”. Due to the constant uses of “consciousness” throughout the book which could not be very aptly rendered “awareness”, I went with the former. French does not have separate words for “conscience” and “consciousness”, but the latter sense is clearly indicated by speaking of “(consciousness) of” something, namely yourself.

Preface

I. Self-consciousness and the error of Narcissus

“Self-Consciousness” is a book aimed at demonstrating, through an appeal to everyday experience, that the consciousness we have of ourselves is ourselves. The point at which it allows us to say “me” is also the only point in the world where an exact coincidence occurs between knowing and being. In this book, we have tried to show what this being is, which self-consciousness reveals to us: a being composed of shadow and light, who grasps reality in the form of ideas, who is capable of communicating his thoughts to others through speech or writing, who acts with an initiative that is unique to him but employs an activity he has received and merely disposes of, who is always present to himself but whose self-love always falsifies sincerity, who is forever confined within his own solitude yet still communes with all humanity, who discovers his deepest intimacy in love, in the mutual and reciprocal intimacy between the lover and the beloved, whose life flows within time and ends with death but resides in an eternal present where he can already enjoy all the goods he will ever possess, purely spiritual goods.

Despite these analyses, the very title of the book may have raised concerns that self-consciousness would trap us in self-indulgent self-attention. This is the error into which Narcissus fell, and it is the error we have tried to defend against in this new book. For self-consciousness is not about looking at oneself in a mirror, as Narcissus desired, seeing only the shadow of himself. By seeking to reach that vain shadow within the reflecting pool, he could only perish. The self has no reality prior to the act of self-interrogation, not even regarding what it is, but only concerning what it will become. A mirror reflects only things—it shows us the universe, and within it, a body that I suspect, with a kind of astonishment, is mine, how others see me, but with which I hesitate to identify, as I draw near and withdraw from it in turn, perpetually confronting the face that I can scarcely touch with the face of that living body from which I am inseparable, which I touch with my hand but can barely see.

Narcissus’s futile effort to embrace his own image led him to the grave; he died from self-love. However, in reality, things unfold differently. The person who seeks to see oneself does not find the beauty one hopes for. In a kind of cynicism or despair, frightened and humiliated by what nature reveals, one is always ready to say, with a mix of consternation and defiance, “this is what I am.” Yet one says this when one is nothing yet, that is, as soon as one feels the awakening of all the forces that animate the life of the body within, forces that solicit one’s consent before it is given. One does not discover them without a certain terror, for one also feels that this being within, it is oneself and yet not oneself; it depends on oneself to become oneself. This only happens if one succeeds in converting it into one’s own substance, taking responsibility for it and assuming it. The self is born from the animal that always remains present within and whose impulses the self redirects rather than renounces.

However, it is possible to transcend both “Self-Consciousness” and “The Error of Narcissus,” or at least to show that these two works themselves are expressions of a philosophy in which the consciousness we have of ourselves encompasses the consciousness we have of the world. Left to itself, the self would apprehend only emptiness—yet it is the world that fills that void. Left to itself, the world would be a pure spectacle whose meaning eludes us—yet it is self-consciousness that bestows that meaning.

II. The extraordinary power of saying “me” and “I”

Existence is a great mystery, but I only discover it in the extraordinary power I have to say “me” or “I.” I know nothing of existence, yet I carry it within me, I possess it, it is what makes me who I am. And the greatest emotion I can experience, the source of all others, is that there is a being who is always present to me, whom I never separate from, who constitutes me, who always seems to elude me yet whom I always find, who imposes itself upon me despite myself and is such that it is myself. This emotion, where I discover an existence in the world that is mine, is never erased by habit. Whenever the slightest leisure is granted to me, snatching me away from the spectacle of things and the most familiar tasks, it is always reborn. It encloses me in a solitude that no one can penetrate. But in that solitude, I do not know if my excitement is greater in discovering the presence of a world to which I belong or in feeling that I myself belong to it. This is an indivisible and dual secret. In comparison, the familiar things that captivate our gaze appear as fragile appearances that retreat from me like an illusory backdrop.

The self forms an invisible and underground knot with existence. It plunges into the very depths of being, where its roots pierce the surface of the ground, causing my entire life to emerge into the light like a miraculous branching. Even in its darkest recesses, it seems to be wholly present, even though it knows nothing of it.

However, where I know nothing of myself, can I still say “me”? That thing so close to me, which seems to be me, if it remained forever buried in darkness, would be as foreign to me as the most distant things that I will never know.

Yet I do not believe this to be the case. It seems to me that there is a deep affinity, impossible to define, between this mysterious being within me and the self I will be one day when I become conscious of it. I find no such affinity between an unknown object and the knowledge I can have of it. Such knowledge never reveals it to me as mine or as myself; it remains an entity separate from me, known only through my knowledge. But when it comes to the self, everything changes: the self is born from the very consciousness I take of it.

Thus, I find myself faced with a strange paradox. Here is a being that was nothing to me as long as my consciousness remained unaware of it, but once it takes hold of it, through a true transfiguration or transubstantiation, it suddenly becomes the substance of what I am. Faced with so many mysterious things that life’s experience brings forth one after another from the depths of my soul, I always shudder to think that they emerge from me, that they will surprise and engulf me without my being capable of either claiming or disowning them.

But what were they before they came into existence? How can I even affirm their existence before the moment they come to bear witness to me, to solicit my attention so that I may know them as mine, my will so that I may take responsibility for them? They are merely hidden possibilities within my nature, which the self has not yet ratified or incorporated. Sometimes they seek to carry me away against my will, passing through my consciousness and overwhelming me, without my having the leisure to adhere to them or assume them. It seems they are within me yet not of me. They are forces that act within me without me. And I always apologize for being so weak that sometimes it feels like I succumb to them, as in the impulses of instinct or passion, and at other times, they carry me beyond myself, as in certain moments of inspiration.

III. The self or the indivisible power of self-knowledge and self-creation

Self-consciousness is not limited to the discovery of a hidden being that I recognize as my own. It is inseparable from an initiative that depends on me to exercise. The self is not a given entity; it is an entity that gives itself to itself every day. When it questions itself, it may find nothing within but a kind of desert. And one can understand that those who seek an object they can claim as their own find only their body. Indeed, this body constantly produces an internal vibration from which the self never escapes, but if one indulges in it, it ruins and obscures rather than constitutes. For the self is not a thing; it is a simple power that holds hidden resources within it, always available but subject to its own usage. Many people leave these resources untapped and never become all that they could be. However, none of them succeed in fully realizing the entirety of the being whose possibility they carried within themselves. It seems that each of us always dies incomplete. All these tendencies within us, which do not always surface into the light, form the substance of all our intentions; it is simply up to us to put them into action. Thus, we are responsible for both acting and not acting. This is evident in the ambiguity that seems inseparable from the intention itself whenever we attempt to judge it. For where there is no intention, the self ceases to be present, and where there is only intention, the self remains a virtual being that has not yet been realized. In both cases, justice absolves us.

The difficulty always arises from the thought that within us there is a self that is distinct from the very consciousness we have of it. Yet, first and foremost, before I become conscious of it, there is nothing I can say belongs to me or, even more so, that I am. And this consciousness itself does not reside in the light through which I illuminate something other than itself, but in an act that I assume and through which I produce that light without which nothing would be mine. Self-consciousness is distinct from the self if we imagine the self as an object presented to us from the outside, and it is identical to the self if it is the internal operation through which I make myself what I am.

Self-consciousness thus surpasses the distinction we usually make between knowledge and action. There is no difference for the self between self-knowledge and self-creation.

In self-consciousness, the mystery of life reveals itself to me in full light, yet it loses none of its mysterious character, for it is precisely that light that makes it the greatest mystery. It is the point where I continually discover and create myself simultaneously, but where self-discovery and self-creation merge with the discovery and creation of the world.

IV. The self is a solitude open to the whole universe

Self-consciousness never ceases to reveal everything it is capable of containing. We are so closely united with the things and beings we encounter on our path that we cannot unfold ourselves without the entire world also coming into bloom for us. Consciousness brings me into existence, and at the same time, I see all those things and beings come into existence, who inhabit the same world with me, and with whom I will establish all the unpredictable relationships that will weave the fabric of my existence. It is a continual revelation for me, and it is an uninterrupted creation.

The jaded and indifferent individual is one in whom self-consciousness gradually diminishes. Habit slowly envelops and lulls them to sleep. Existence becomes an irritating and familiar object for them, whose mere presence bores and repels them. Naturally, they push it away into the night, that is, into nothingness.

But self-consciousness is a perpetually new dawn. It is a light that is barely felt but can alternately outline the contours of things, render their depth transparent, constantly change their appearance, and soon provide us with the spectacle of a world of which we are the center, but whose figure constantly varies and multiplies with the slightest movement of our steps or even just our gaze. It is not only, as believed, a secret glow that illuminates only our inner cave. It is the same light that reveals the inside and the outside to us. If we lose consciousness, it is the self that sinks, but it is also the universe that collapses. Where self-consciousness diminishes, one should not believe that things acquire more relief in exchange: interest and life withdraw from them. They become mere images devoid of meaning. They cease to move us. Their existence is no longer comparable to ours. We cease to be part of the same universe with them; they detach themselves from us and no longer cooperate with us in the adventure of our destiny.

Even more so, the presence of other human beings in the world is inseparable from our own: self-consciousness is, for each of us, the consciousness of our relationships with others. What would remain of ourselves if we had to sever the ties that connect us to all the beings among whom we live, whose slightest contact is enough to alter our inner balance and sometimes change the direction of our entire existence? In the secret of solitude, it is to all these real or possible beings that we constantly think and whose mere image, as soon as it presents itself to us, is enough to rekindle the flame of life within us.

This is so true that one could even wonder if there is not a unity of human consciousness that is divided among all individual consciousnesses, like a multiplicity of luminous points, but whose light, through a series of reflections and refractions, comes from everywhere, so that each of them is both illuminating and illuminated with regard to all the others, that is, undoubtedly both created and creator.

This is why self-consciousness, far from confining us within our separate being like in a narrow cell, gives us an opening to the infinite.

Self-consciousness reveals to me the intimacy of solitude, but where the universe can be received. It is the solitude of a birth, but one that is the birth of the universe.

V. The self has the universe as its mirror

The world is like an extensive Self to which the self is coextensive by right: it contains countless riches, but within me, they are only powers whose disposition is, so to speak, entrusted to me. These powers not only contribute to uncovering and shaping me into what I am: they oblige the entire world to unfold before me. The self-awareness that each of us has acquired becomes, in a sort of projection, the very face that the world shows to us. And the adventure of Narcissus attests that there is no miraculous fountain where the self succeeds in seeing itself. It is because there is no other mirror for it than the world. For it has no separate existence. The world is its reflection. Far from saying that I can know everything except myself, it must be said that in everything I can know, I never know anything but myself. Thus, the essence of self-consciousness is to spiritualize the image of the world, to reveal its interiority and meaning to me.

Therefore, self-consciousness is a presence to oneself and to the world, a presence in every moment: the more present I am to myself, the more present I am to the world; where self-consciousness ceases, I live in perpetual absence. It is a dialogue of oneself with oneself, with things, with other beings, and with God. And in this dialogue, I no longer know if it is I who respond to myself or if I receive a silent response from everything that exists. I am always within myself and always outside: as I advance further, the line of separation between the inside and the outside never ceases to fade and reform. It is too readily believed that it is easy to establish a strict boundary between what is me and what is not me. But who would dare to say: up to this point, it is me, and beyond it is not? This boundary is infinitely variable and infinitely expandable according to the direction and power of attention or love. I feel at every instant, in an uninterrupted succession of oscillations, the world expanding or contracting for me, sometimes welcoming me and sometimes abandoning me.

Nothing here is predetermined, fixed, or circumscribed in advance. For self-awareness of what I am is the awareness of what I can be, of a power that is constantly in action and never succeeds in exhausting itself. Through self-awareness, I can dispose of this power in the miracle of the present moment. There is no knowledge here of a given thing but only lucidity in the exercise of an activity whose play can never be suspended. It is not like the vision of a landscape that presents itself from the outside to the gaze, but like a landscape that is born from the very act of looking. Self-consciousness is a reflection on oneself, but it is a reflection that, instead of assuming the object to which it applies, generates it by applying itself.

One should not think that self-consciousness reveals treasures to us that would already reside, as a famous expression goes, in a chest whose key it would provide us. That is only a metaphor. And it would be better to reverse it: for it would be more true to say that self-consciousness takes away everything we thought we had. It requires us to be free and destitute, in a state of perfect poverty, not desiring to acquire or retain anything. Everything we call wealth is like a burden on our shoulders, a veil before our gaze. Self-consciousness teaches us to possess nothing in order to become present to everything that is and can be. It must reduce itself to an act of pure attention which, deep within ourselves, is a kind of willing participation in that eternal and ever-renewed act which is the very act of creation.

Chapter I. Self-consciousness

1. Consciousness is our very being.

Consciousness is an invisible and trembling little flame. We often think that its role is to enlighten us, but that our being is elsewhere. And yet, it is this clarity that is ourselves. When it diminishes, it is our existence that weakens; when it extinguishes, it is our existence that ceases.

Why say that it gives us what is the most imperfect image? This image is for us the true universe: we will never know any other. Why say that it locks us in a solitude where we will never find a companion? It is consciousness that gives meaning to the words society, friendship, or love. It is within it that desire is formed, but also the feeling of possession, which is possession itself.

When consciousness seeks an object outside itself and suffers from not being able to reach it, it is because it suffers from its limits and only seeks to grow. Because there can be no object for it except the one it is capable of containing. It may well be said that it is confined within itself like in a prison: it is a prison whose walls retreat indefinitely.

But who could think that consciousness is a prison, except the one who closes all its openings? When consciousness is born, the being begins to free itself from the chains of matter; it senses its independence: an infinite career lies before it that always surpasses its strength and never its hope. As consciousness grows, it becomes more welcoming; the whole world is revealed to it; it communicates with it and is filled with joy to find so many outstretched hands around it.

There is no state of consciousness, not even suffering, not even sin, that is not better than insensitivity or indifference. Because they are still signs of being and life that testify to the power with which it allows itself to be shaken. One should not seek to abolish them, but to transform them. Everything that is taken away from consciousness is rejected into nothingness. The greatest, richest, and most beautiful consciousness is the one that unifies the greatest number of aspirations and purifies the greatest number of impurities.

2. Ambiguity of consciousness.

The characteristic of consciousness is to break the unity of the world and oppose a being that says “I” to the Whole of which it is a part: in this interval that separates them, it produces the incessant communication that unites them, it insinuates both thought, action, and life. But consciousness, which produces all these movements, is condemned to leave them unfinished; therefore, there is always clumsiness, discomfort, restlessness, and even suffering within it. This is the punishment of original sin, that is, of separation. But consciousness is also the principle of all redemption since it allows an imitation of God and a return to Him. However, the progress it accomplishes, the joys it experiences, can only be consummated through its disappearance.

Wherever consciousness appears, one observes an ambiguity that prevents it from settling. It is consciousness that attaches us to ourselves, to our secret and separate flesh; and yet it is consciousness that breaks our solitude and enables us to communicate with the whole universe. Man is a part of the world through his body; but he tries to encompass the whole world in his mind: and it is this dual relationship between the body contained in the world and the mind in which the world itself is contained that forms the drama of existence. Consciousness refuses to identify itself with either the body, which is a blind and unruly companion for it, or with the mind, towards which it is sometimes consenting and sometimes rebellious. The self consists precisely in this back-and-forth movement that alternately narrows its society with one or the other.

Consciousness urges us to act to break free from immobility, but also to act only for the sake of a perfect end that can fulfill us. Freedom is exercised in the interval between these two aspirations, one pushing us forward, the other holding us back, and it oscillates between all the appearances that seduce it.

Thus, in consciousness, there is both perfection, as it increases what we are, allows us to radiate upon the world beyond the limits of the body, and gives us a kind of spiritual possession of the universe; and imperfection, as it is also made of ignorance, error, and desire. Consciousness is a transition between the life of the body and the life of the spirit. It is a danger because it can be put in the service of the body, which it nevertheless constantly surpasses. It is a perpetual questioning, a hesitation that continues to give us insecurity in our daily life; and yet it is a light that guides us towards the security of a supernatural life.

3. Consciousness is a dialogue.

When we are alone, we say that we are alone with ourselves, which implies that we are not alone, but that we are two. The act by which we double ourselves to be self-conscious creates in us an invisible interlocutor to whom we ask for our own secret. However, of these two beings that arise within us as soon as consciousness appears, one speaking and the other listening, one looking and the other being looked at, we never know which one is ourselves: thus, every consciousness is compelled to play a sort of comedy in which the self constantly seeks and eludes itself.

This can be seen in memory, which is the best instrument for self-knowledge, the most subtle and the cruelest. We never have consciousness of what we accomplish, but only of what we have just accomplished. Memory requires distance, a stripping of all interest, which allows us to perceive our own reality in a sort of purified transparency: but this reality is already foreign to us, and to recognize it is also to deny it.

The consciousness we have of the universe is itself a dialogue between the universe and us, where the universe speaks to us as much as we speak to it. By observing our own body, other humans, and the entire nature, the self observes itself in witnesses without whom it knows nothing about itself. It never manages to directly grasp its true nature, but the humblest being, the smallest object, the most trivial event are like signs that reveal it. And the entire space is an infinite mirror in which it discerns the play of its different powers, their effectiveness, and their limits.

The one who wants to know himself more closely looks at himself in another self that is always a more moving mirror. The discovery of another consciousness is similar to those privileged places where we perceive the echoes of our own voice with enough delay for them to seem distinct to us, or those deep wells where they reverberate with a sonorous gravity that gives us a sort of thrill.

4. Consciousness as the creator of the self.

To think is to be self-conscious, to possess oneself. But there is no difference between the act by which I know myself and the act by which I create myself. Just as the fertility of the providential act continually produces new beings in the world, I also continually produce new states within myself through the act of my attention: thus, thanks to the operation of consciousness, I create myself as God creates the world.

What is the self, in fact, other than what each person knows about themselves? I cannot attribute anything to myself that I am ignorant of: that belongs to a being with whom I am united but whose movements I cannot identify with myself until they become an object of knowledge and assent to me. Thus, there is only a soul for the one who knows his soul and, by knowing it, brings it into being. And to seek to know oneself is not to assume that one exists before knowing oneself, as things exist before the gaze is applied to them: the essence of self-knowledge is precisely to make oneself.

That is because self-knowledge is not about discovering and describing an object that is oneself; it is about awakening a hidden life within oneself. Consciousness reveals to me the powers it sets in motion. It is for the self both an analysis and an unfolding.

They say that my nature is multiple and made up of powers that belong to me before I know them. But to know them is to exercise them, and can I call them mine before I exercise them? Truly, I cannot call that obscure treasure within which I constantly draw from and which always offers me new gifts and withdraws from me as soon as my attention weakens or my will refuses it.

5. The self chooses itself.

Why do you speak of the self as if it were a thing? There is nothing in it other than the power to become something at every moment, that is, something else. For the spirit to be able to embrace everything, it must be nothing; for it to be transparent to all rays, it must be invisible; for it to obtain anything, it must be smaller than a mustard seed and can only obtain something through its own germination, stripped of all body and particular possession so that everything it becomes is the result of its pure operation or pure consent.

The self can only know itself by expressing itself. But in expressing itself, it realizes itself; it takes possession of certain dispositions that were within it but not yet itself, and they only become its own through the choice and use it makes of them. It is this self expressed through action and speech that testifies to our existence in the eyes of others; it is this self that is the object of memory and gradually forms our most secret being. Thus, the self is not a given being but a being that constantly gives itself to itself, and the feeling it has of itself is less a revelation of what it is than a call to the act by which it will be.

The self always has some model it seeks to resemble, but even choosing a model is already beginning to realize itself. The self is a debate among several characters, but there is always one with whom it solidarizes. Within the self, there is a multiplicity of elements that form the material of its activity: the body, desires, the dreams of imagination, and even reason. But each of them can become the exclusive object of its care to the point of merging with the self in the end. Since the self becomes what it chooses, it is important for it to regulate its choice because it contains the seeds of all vices, and to make them grow, it only needs a little complacency.

However, choosing the best is not to mutilate one’s nature, nor to avert one’s gaze from one’s basest movements, nor to seek to suppress them. It is to use the hidden strength within them, to give them a different course and transfigure them. Then the self ceases to be divided. But it is one only if it unifies itself. The essence of spiritual life is to produce the most perfect intimacy among the multiple beings that inhabit our consciousness. Each of them, true, sometimes shows modesty by withdrawing, sometimes shows self-esteem by seeking triumph. But, just as in the external and visible society where all individuals must reach out their hands, understand each other, and support each other, each of our inner powers must consent to speak and listen in turn, to play its role in harmony with all the others. Inner peace is often more difficult to achieve than peace with others, but consciousness is a tumultuous people of which the self is the arbiter and the reconciler.

6. The most intimate intimacy.

Consciousness is an intimate and closed world that we discover with a kind of trembling. And the attention we pay to its hidden life reveals to us an infinite play of different nuances within it, becoming the source of all the delicacies of our sensitivity and multiplying the frictions and wounds within us. As our invisible being grows, our self-esteem grows as well.

There is a form of inner life that consists of not letting any of these tremors pass without holding onto them to prolong and delight in them. But this self-absorption produces a kind of contraction within it; it only gives it an illusory possession that exhausts it and prevents it from renewing and expanding.

We must delve deeper into intimacy to discover another world within ourselves where self-esteem, instead of refining, dissolves. Each of us experiences an incomparable emotion when we test its richness, depth, and infinity: it is a world in which we are all called to commune. Before it, the apparent world recedes and loses its reality; our petty concerns melt away; our life illuminates and transfigures. Will it be said that this is a distant and unknown land that can only be entered with supernatural grace? It is true that the one who speaks of it seems to use a mysterious, chimerical language devoid of all human interest. But by listening more closely, one gradually recognizes all the words. For this traveler comes from paradise, from a spiritual paradise that everyone carries within themselves and that is discovered and lived simply by desiring it.

Of all the forms of truth that reveal themselves to us, the one that is truly ours and reveals us as we are is so unique and personal that we can barely speak of it and never fully communicate it: the deepest intimacy is also the most closed intimacy. Yet it is the same people who are incapable of any true intimacy with themselves and with others. Because, in both cases, intimacy can only occur when self-esteem is abolished. But then, an inner sanctuary is formed within consciousness where all beings have access according to their sincerity, and they recognize the identity of their shared secret. For the essence of consciousness is to be impervious and to penetrate everything without leaving itself. Thus, it is the consciousness that has withdrawn the furthest into itself that is also the most welcoming; it is the one that gives the most and receives the most, and it no longer makes a distinction between giving and receiving.

7. Disinterested consciousness.

As soon as consciousness is awakened, the being who feels and acts directs their gaze towards all the goods that belong to them, indefinitely intensifying their presence through thought, delighting and reveling in their possession and enjoyment.

But the same consciousness that is capable of enslaving us is also capable of liberating us; for it presents to us the spectacle of our own states, which then appear to us as those of another. We perceive them in a purer light: we attain a kind of disinterestedness towards them; we detach ourselves from what the gaze shows us to merge with the gaze that sees it, and everything within us receives an invisible radiation from this enveloping and penetrating gaze.

The knowledge I have of my own pain is not painful, just as the knowledge I have of color is not itself colored. This impassivity of consciousness is the presence within me of the gaze through which God contemplates all things; but I am so far from God that the gaze that should detach me from my suffering often intensifies it even more.

Impassivity is the very condition of knowledge. However, this impassivity should not be confused with indifference or hardness. Undoubtedly, it makes us insensitive to all movements of self-love. But it does so in order to make us resemble a polished and bare surface, upon which the most fleeting nuances of reality, its most fragile aspects, reveal their presence through an infinitely delicate touch. This impassivity is the state of pure sensitivity; it no longer differs from perfect knowledge.

The being who regards themselves as an object throws themselves into the universe to become the spectator of themselves; but then they are already above the being they observe. The being I know within myself is no longer me as soon as I know it: it is already another. Thus, consciousness is an act through which I continually surpass myself.

It has been said that each consciousness is the image of what is above it and the model of what is below it; this means that without going beyond itself, it can know everything that exists. However, consciousness, by revealing to us the infinite, shows us the wretchedness of all our acquisitions. What would be the purpose of consciousness if it enclosed the self within its own enclosure? But by uncovering it to us, it constantly invites us to transcend it. And it is because it is disinterested that it frees us from our attachment to ourselves and consequently from our limitations.

8. To discover oneself is to surpass oneself.

We only become aware of our being and our life in an emotion so full of anguish, joy, and hope that it tears us apart and almost makes us faint. But this emotion, which should be permanent, is difficult to grasp; when it arises, it quickly fades away, leaving us free to devote all our attention and will to specific tasks. As soon as we manage to focus our gaze on it, that is, to perceive with clarity the presence of the universe and our presence in its midst, the day that shines for us gleams with the same miraculous light as the first day of creation.

Those who, in this initial discovery, only experience pleasure have not yet penetrated to the root of being and life. But the deeper the feeling they experience becomes, the more frivolous this initial pleasure appears to them. It is because they measure their responsibility before this destiny that opens before them and depends on their initiative, before this creative power that has been given to them and that they tremble to exercise.

Quite different from the one who, imprisoned in the labyrinth of their self-love, blinds themselves in the painful self-complacency they have for themselves, the one who seeks self-knowledge already begins to flee from themselves. They must separate themselves from themselves in order to see themselves. The essence of inner life is precisely to allow us to constantly escape from what we are and to bring to life an idea of ourselves that constantly reveals new powers to us, but obliges us to put them into action. Thus, in seeking self-knowledge, we are always seeking what we must become more than what we are: we are always seeking what is lacking in us, and we can only find it in a principle that constantly compels us to renounce ourselves in order to surpass ourselves.

Consciousness reveals to us the presence of that individual being that stirs within each of us, that quivers, desires, and suffers. But to become aware of it is to cease identifying with it. The self only realizes itself by keeping as far away from itself as possible, that is, from what it already is, and as close as possible to the very idea of the Whole of which it is only a part, but with which it communicates and from which it draws perpetual enrichment. The mystery of the self is to be nothing but desire, to fulfill itself only by moving away from itself and, so to speak, to be where it is not even more than where it is. It only has the certainty of discovering itself when it frees itself from itself, and for it, there is no other life than continually leaving itself behind and constantly taking refuge in a broader self that is always beyond itself.

Chapter II. Knowledge

1. Shadow and light.

There is only one truth that penetrates all minds, although it takes on different forms, just as there is only one light that illuminates all gazes, although none of them are struck by the same rays. Like light, intelligence reveals everything that exists; by drawing it out of darkness, it seems to create it. It approaches the gaze as if to offer itself to it, but the gaze must in turn reach out to meet it and welcome it. Just as light is composed of a bundle of colors, intelligence is composed of a bundle of emotions: and the purest intelligence is the one that encompasses the greatest number of emotions without revealing any of them.

Light is the principle of things, and it is its shadow that serves to create everything that is. It is only in its shadow that we are capable of living. We contemplate all objects in a light that comes from the sun and not from within us. And we perceive them in a half-light, like a mixture of shadow and light. Shadow is therefore inseparable from light; it is intimate, secret, and protective. Through shadow, light shields the gaze from its brilliance, just as truth shields the soul from its sharpest point through sensation.

We are blinded when we look at the sun, just as we are when we look at pure spirit. We can only see the multitude of bodies that reflect and capture light in different ways, just as we can only think of particular ideas, each of which expresses one aspect of truth. Light is like God: we do not see it, and yet we see everything else in it. It is in light that everything exists; it is what makes it visible. Thus, the principle of knowledge must itself escape knowledge: it can only know what is opposed to it. For the light that illuminates everything is incapable of receiving illumination. We only grasp the struggle between shadow and brightness, the interval that separates shadows, the limits of light, and so to speak, what it is not rather than what it is. It is the role of bodies to absorb light, and the role of minds to propagate it. That is why we see the former and not the latter. And indeed, the nature of true light is not to be perceived by those who possess it: they themselves become sources that illuminate precisely those who do not possess it.

There are transparent minds that let all the light they receive pass through; others, like mirrors, reflect it entirely around them; and finally, there are those who bury it in their own darkness like opaque bodies. Each mind seeks the zone of light that suits it: there are few that can withstand pure light; some delight in the most violent oppositions of shadow and brightness; others prefer twilight or diffuse light.

2. The gaze.

The beauty of the images we see in mirrors does not come from the beauty of the objects they reflect, but from the perfection and purity of their surface. The slightest unevenness or speck of dust is enough to distort the image, mutilate it, and make it unrecognizable. The mirror is similar to a gaze. The clearest and deepest gazes are those that receive and reflect the most light, and one no longer knows whether this light comes from their own depths or if they only receive it. Like mirrors, they reveal to us the ever-changing aspects of reality through their invisible presence, and they are not altered by these fleeting images; they retain no trace of them. The pure gaze grasps only fragile colors that the hand is unable to seize, just as the mirror represents objects behind it in a place from which their substance has escaped.

In the free movement of the eyelids, there is an image of voluntary attention. For it is up to us to open and close our eyes, but it is not up to us to create the spectacle that is offered to them.

The gaze does not produce light; it merely welcomes it. Similarly, the most perfect act of intelligence is an act of pure attention. But vision is the joy of the gaze; when it sees, the gaze loses its independence and seems to dissolve, for it becomes one with its object.

Like the eye, the mind has its pupil, which must let light penetrate and becomes narrower as the light becomes brighter. Once given passage, light seeps in everywhere like water. But our self-love constantly opposes new screens to it. The role of attention is to remove the screen. Immediately, through the opening, light floods us.

It is because the gaze reflects light that it itself appears luminous. Fixing the gaze is as difficult as fixing the brilliance of light. And yet there is no knowledge as simple or as penetrating as that which occurs through the meeting of gazes: eyes reveal the direction of desire, the ardor by which it takes possession of all the objects offered to it; in a momentary contact, they either deliver the being or refuse it.

3. Sight and hearing.

If knowledge distinguishes itself from reality and yet presupposes and imitates it, it can be aptly compared to the image reflected by a mirror or the sound echoed by an echo. A visible object is only a dark mass until the ray that touches it also touches a living eye that envelops it within the circle of its horizon. A sound is only a vibration of the air until it encounters an ear that captures it and reproduces it within its mysterious shell. Sight and hearing are the senses of knowledge: they are directed toward the universe that surrounds us, populating it with images and echoes; one makes the world visible, but in such a secret spectacle that only one being is capable of seeing it; the other makes the world audible, but through such an inner touch that only one being is capable of hearing it.

Touch gives us a carnal possession of the world: it extends the possession we have of our own body to the object. But the possession of the world through sight is more intellectual, more disinterested, and more perfect. The object must move away from me in order to emerge from the darkness and appear in the light; then, instead of merely sensing its presence, I embrace it like a painting: I grasp its outline and color; I discern the delicate relationships of its elements and its place in the midst of the world. Even if my hand has roamed over it at leisure in the darkness, it is the moment when my sight reveals it to me that gives me its revelation. It then becomes a pure object of contemplation. For vision is directed toward the material world, but it gives it a spiritual countenance. It grasps only an image, which appears as an illusion if touch does not confirm it, but it simultaneously delivers to us those parts of the world that movement allows us to encounter only one by one. It is through vision that the world is grand: it alone reveals Heaven to us. The visible universe possesses an immobile and silent majesty, and the movements it shows us, when sound recedes, resemble acts of thought.

Hearing, on the other hand, records all the vibrations that bodies undergo: they are messages they address to us. The illuminated object receives the action of light from the outside, but sound seems to obey an internal impulse, as demonstrated by the voice. By uttering a word, we give a soul to the thing. Light reveals the world to us: it is the Word that created it. Sight connects us more with nature, while hearing connects us more with humanity, and the timbre of the voice, though less rich than physiognomy, moves us more deeply. Seeing is discovering the work of creation; hearing is having a sort of complicity with the creator.

4. The ardor of intelligence.

The ardor of intelligence is an ardor of the entire being; it presupposes the ardor of the senses. True, this ardor risks diverting and blinding intelligence; it can make it succumb. However, without the ardor of the senses, intelligence languishes; it needs the fire that rekindles it and that it constantly nurtures. There is a power of penetration in the senses that it sharpens to its utmost point. Thus, the goal is not to overcome the senses but to make them serve the stimulation of intelligence, which alone can provide them with true appeasement. Every form of knowledge refines and purifies the action of a particular sense, and intelligence does not abolish sensation but perfects and fulfills it. The flame that has fed on the most impure materials can end in a brushstroke of pure light. Life is a great movement of fulfilled and resurgent desires: they must sustain each other instead of battling one another, and the most imperfect desires, which are often the most violent, confer upon us a power that is our responsibility to elevate in its use.

Goethe said, “When one does not speak of things with an emotion full of love, what one says is not worth repeating.” And Madame du Deffand, with more vivacity, said, “Go, go, only passions make us think.”

One who has never felt within themselves the sharpness of sensual desire always remains external to what they know: they are unaware of the subtleties, the modesties, and the defenses of the one who seeks knowledge because they find the supreme joy of solitude in the anxious anticipation that this solitude itself will be broken. And intelligence provides them with only ingenious artifices, for intelligence cannot see the truth without touching the soul.

Contact with reality always moves the most intimate part of our being. If this part remains deaf, nature appears voiceless. We must approach things with all the activity of thought and love: to think and to love is to discover our presence in the world, to feel and realize a supernatural unity between ourselves and the world. Knowledge cannot be separated from desire; it is a desire for union with the totality of Being. But there is a kind of reciprocal calling between intelligence and its object. Thus, the object seems to be drawn towards intelligence by a movement of love: there is a need within it to fertilize the intelligence that receives it and surrounds it with light. It constantly gives of itself, provided that it is desired in return.

5. Pleasure in reasoning.

There is a certain pleasure in quick reasoning, which is also a pleasure of self-love, the flesh, and the world. One does not see a person, if they are capable of succeeding, who does not take pleasure in the subtle games of dialectic: they demonstrate their skill and promise them victory. They have less taste for truth, whose evidence humiliates them, than for arguments, whose invention flatters them. It is the arguments without substance, or those that seem to undermine a common truth, that give them the most intense pleasure. They often seek to justify for the sake of play what they are not certain of. It even happens that they delight in deceiving themselves as much as in deceiving others.

However, one cannot clearly perceive the truth of a thing without perceiving its reasons. Reasons make truth accessible to our minds and give us the illusion of creating it and witnessing its genesis. Reasoning is similar to touch: like the hand of a blind person that continuously explores a smooth surface without embracing its entirety, it must deliver to us, one after the other, a series of reasons that we must feel the continuity of. But sight reveals the object to us in a single glance. Thus, one who perceives truth through an act of contemplation is placed above all reasons from the start. Neither the knowledge of what fills the world in the present nor the knowledge of myself or God is knowledge gained through reasons.

However, by forcing me to reconcile all my particular knowledge, dialectic can break contact with reality and engender all sorts of artifices. Countless contradictions continually arise from the limitations and refractions that truth necessarily undergoes in the consciousness of a limited being. We must not remain on the ground where they were born and seek to laboriously reconcile them; we must rise to a higher summit from which we can embrace a broader horizon in which they naturally reconcile themselves.

Thus, there is a certain taste for reasoning, which is a taste for cleverness and meandering paths: it bears the mark of self-love. We free ourselves from it through inner purification, which allows reasoning to fulfill its role as an auxiliary and requires it to lead us gradually to an act of simple vision. Only when it accomplishes this does the individual forget themselves, does their intelligence operate, and does truth become present to them.

6. Humility of knowledge.

True knowledge consists in effacing oneself before the object. Those who are best able to efface themselves receive the greatest and most delicate touches from both external and internal sources. Respect for external and internal experience expresses perfect modesty towards the universe and perfect piety towards God.

Many people take malicious pleasure in discovering the secrets of nature and conquering it by subjugating it to their own purposes. But a more serene and luminous joy is felt by simply perceiving it. We can only judge things correctly if we renounce the sovereignty that the self often claims over them. Then, in the clear and unified mirror of intelligence, we become capable of perceiving their pure form. True knowledge is not an exaltation of self-love seeking to reign over the world in order to dominate it, but a renunciation of self-love that bows before the world with admiration and docility. It is sufficient when it allows us to recognize our place in it and to fulfill our role with simplicity and discretion.

A person should not refuse any knowledge that presents itself through encounter or vocation. Nor should they actively seek it. Most knowledge is as external to us as material possessions; it is useless and inflates the mind instead of enlightening it. The number of knowledge that suffices to produce wisdom is very small, and they are very simple knowledge accompanied by a profound and gentle evidence. However, it is these that we are inclined to forget or despise in favor of curious and distant knowledge that is unrelated to our lives, but which we believe should astonish others and bring us renown.

This is because self-love takes less interest in knowledge itself than in the pride it can derive from it. It diminishes knowledge if it believes it can gain any advantage from such disdain. It delights in ridiculing those who are easily defeated and often thinks it can elevate itself by inventing subtle reasons to doubt the most well-established truths. But knowledge is a communion with reality, not a defeat or a victory. It is a confrontation between the universe and myself; the universe gazes upon me as I gaze upon it. And when these two gazes intersect, a light emerges that the slightest movement of self-love is enough to tarnish.

7. Youthfulness of knowledge.

All knowledge must possess perpetual freshness and novelty, an ever-renewing innocence, otherwise the contact between our minds and reality ceases to be felt. It should reveal the universe to us at every moment as if it were witnessing its genesis. The one who encounters truth, instead of continuing to move within the closed circle of their dreams, suddenly looks at what is before them as if seeing it for the first time. The world brings them only familiar knowledge that seems to have always been known and yet continues to unfold.

Often, memories veil and obscure our knowledge instead of serving it. They remove clarity and penetration from our gaze; they are like images that already cover the retina at the moment it welcomes the daylight. But things regain their perfect nakedness in the pure mind. It is their spiritualization that makes them constantly new; it is this that gives us the incomparable emotion of already knowing them and yet discovering them.

This is because there is no knowledge unless the intellect is engaged; and although the intellect is within us, it comes from a higher source than ourselves, always producing a new revelation within us. We can open ourselves more or less to its action, but this action always surprises consciousness as young as on the first day, like light for the eyes.

It is sometimes said that one knows something well when they do not yet know it well enough to be able to express it. This is because it is still so alive that it cannot detach itself from us; it is not yet an object that can be taken or left by anyone.

No knowledge is obtained by learning an already-formed knowledge; that is only the shadow of true knowledge. It is a stone on the path: we find it and put it in our collection, but it is also the obstacle against which we stumble. Knowledge itself is the path, and the humblest have yet to follow it, the greatest have to pave the way.

8. Spectacle or communion.

There is a secret contradiction in knowledge: it always requires a difference between the knower and the known, otherwise it would not be an act of thought, and yet it requires an identity, otherwise it could not claim any truth. It is compelled to separate itself from its object in order to be born and to reunite with it in order to reach its culmination, but in this union, the spectator disappears and knowledge is abolished by consuming itself.

Shall we say that knowledge does not seek to dissolve itself in its object but rather to dissolve, so to speak, the object within itself? However, just as we only perceive what is opaque to light, we can only conceive what resists intelligence. Suppose light spreads through a perfectly transparent medium, air or glass, without encountering any obstacle to stop, break, or disperse it. It is evident that in the perfection of its revealed essence, the world, which it penetrates in all its folds, would vanish like impurity.

The contradiction of knowledge acquires an infinitely moving power when it concerns self-knowledge. All this knowledge resides in the double movement by which one must distance oneself to be capable of perceiving oneself as a spectacle, and almost immediately return to oneself to achieve that exact sincerity that makes this spectacle itself appear illusory.

In God, the act of knowledge is perfect because it does not distinguish itself from the act of creation. As for us, we are only spectators of the created world, and we can only contemplate its existence and nature. However, as knowledge deepens, the world becomes more present to us; not through its fading image, but through its action that penetrates us more. Will it be said then that consciousness is destroyed? It seems rather that it changes its nature. It acquires a kind of surplus; it is less illuminated but more illuminating, as it tends to unite with the very principle that dispenses light. The distinction between the real and consciousness is abolished, not in an immobile identity but in a living communion. It participates in the creative power; the activity it exerts imitates the one that reigns in the universe, responds to it, and extends it.

9. Knowledge and creation.

Knowledge is a kind of complicity between the real and ourselves. We can only know an object by attempting to imitate and reproduce it through gestures until the completed gesture is suspended in a sort of immobility that can be contemplated. All knowledge is a beginning of metamorphosis. We only know the truth if we become truthful, and justice if we become just, and crime if we become criminal, at least in imagination. Knowledge not only imitates the work of creation but collaborates with it. It is faithful only if it is effective. It always distinguishes itself from reality by its imperfection, but reality is nothing more than the final state of knowledge.

Thus, truth is never pure contemplation. The only evidence that can touch our intelligence also touches our will: it expresses an order that must be both perceived and loved. It invites us to act, and the moment we discover it, it seems as if we have created it and have an interest in maintaining it. Otherwise, knowledge is separated from life, giving man a detached truth that life ridicules upon their first encounter.

There is a kind of knowledge that is a servitude of the mind to the object. And there is another that frees the object from its inertia and raises it to the dignity of the mind. Instead of being a burden to the mind, it gives it a more subtle movement; it engages all the powers of consciousness and realizes its unity. At this summit where it establishes us, not only is the difference between the spirit of subtlety and the spirit of geometry abolished and transcended, but also the difference between thought and volition.

The true ambition of knowledge cannot be to dominate matter; knowledge is not at the service of the body. It has a form of action that is infinitely more subtle: through it, the mind acts upon itself and upon all minds. For all humans contemplate the same truth; they all receive the same light, which makes them capable of communicating with each other and creating a spiritual harmony among themselves, with the world as the instrument and God as the witness. We can only love the truth because we love all beings, and it is the truth that unites them.

Chapter III. The birth of ideas

1. The welcome we must give to ideas.

Thought cannot be solicited by will. It possesses a kind of rebellious independence. When it speaks, it sometimes says the opposite of what we desired to hear, so men do not always complain about its silence. They even murmur in order to drown out its voice. Or it remains silent when we try to force it to speak, for one must not consult the inner oracle at inappropriate times; then it is the priest who answers us and not the god.

We may be asked to keep our eyes always open, but it is not certain that a beautiful spectacle will present itself to them; to keep our attention always alert, but it is not certain that a truth will come to meet it; to always be ready to consent, but it is not certain that it will be solicited. Yet, if the light that surrounds us at every moment seems to deny itself to us, it is because we have first denied ourselves to it; it is because we have not known how to open a passage for it to reach us. But the task is difficult, as it requires simplicity: thus, it happens that at the moment when grace is already approaching us, our concupiscence awakens and repels it by the very effort it makes to seize it.

Even when the idea has presented itself, it is still difficult to make good use of it. In order to keep the mind free, it is important not to dwell on it. We corrupt all the goods we have received through the efforts we make to retain them and the insistence with which we seek to exhaust their enjoyment. It is in its first revelation that light is most beautiful: when we fixate on it for too long, it becomes iridescent. In all knowledge, there is a final point that I cannot surpass without it becoming blurred.

However, although the will must neither prolong nor force the gaze of attention, no idea can truly belong to us unless it has undergone a slow incubation within us, unless we have kept it within the folds of our inner life for a long time, almost without thinking about it, and yet never ceasing to nourish it. Then it happens that when consciousness once again illuminates it, it appears to us as miraculous as those things that are close by and perpetually before our eyes, which support our entire existence without us needing to see them. And as soon as we see it, it stands before us, pure, firm, self-assured, with a fine contour, subtle and fluid like a living being.

2. Discipline of attention.

The number of ideas is sometimes a weakness for the mind as much as their scarcity: the mind should neither be empty nor overflow. Its role is to grasp, but on the condition that it can encompass. Too much activity harms it, as does too little. Nothing is more difficult for it than to find a measured approach that follows a natural and harmonious course.

Some are obstructed by the abundance of ideas that naturally arise from their own depths and become incapable of welcoming any external call; the movement that animates them leaves no flat surface within them on which the influence of things can be inscribed. Others are too plastic and receptive to too many impressions, but they lack enough movement for the action that stirs them to make headway within their inner life; they content themselves with constantly bearing the mark of what they undergo.

The mind must always reconcile two opposing qualities within itself: extensity, which allows it to embrace a vast domain where the multiplicity of forms of being reveals the richness of the world, and depth, which enables it to descend far enough within itself to discover the root of all that exists. It must not have too much openness, for it would become like a mirror that, in reflecting too many things, loses all its clarity, nor too little openness, for it would become like a mirror that, in maintaining its clarity, ceases to reflect anything.

Attention must remain tranquil, confident, and always at leisure. Sometimes, there is a sort of greed within it that stems from self-love, which seeks to avoid contact with reality and hinders the mind instead of serving it. All men have enough light, but few have enough simplicity to be content with it. Most are filled with impatience and leap beyond what they see; thus, unable to both receive the light that has been given to them and give themselves the light they covet, they always remain in darkness.

3. Flexibility of attention.

How could one govern one’s actions other than through one’s thoughts? It is through the effect of certain thoughts that one either restrains or lets go of one’s will. Therefore, it is contradictory to admit that one is responsible for one’s actions without being responsible for one’s thoughts. In reality, only attention depends on us. And our thoughts are acts, invisible though they may be, but the only ones that justify or condemn us.

We are the ones who guide our mind since attention depends on us. And since we only live among our thoughts, the essence of attention seems to be choosing the domain in which we delight in living. It gives direction to our gaze, and yet it always reveals to us a new spectacle that we could neither expect nor foresee. To be attentive is not to force oneself to think certain things; it is to maintain within oneself a certain openness that allows us to receive all the calls that things make to us.

However, in the effort of attention, we sometimes impose such tension on the mind that it becomes paralyzed. On the contrary, we must learn to preserve its flexibility and mobility. The mind should never apply itself to an idea in such a way that it no longer perceives its complexity or its connection with all others; it should never apply itself to a chain of ideas in such a way that it loses the agility without which it is incapable of grasping all the clarities that traverse it and surpass its purpose and sometimes its hope. Thus, it is permissible to find Descartes' method somewhat severe and even somewhat restrictive.

We should not ask more of man than for him to have control over his attention, but he must give it pure, humble, flexible, liberated from all preoccupation and self-love, without haste or delay, not allowing it to anticipate or let slip what is offered, not desiring it to be otherwise, not mixing in any ulterior motive, and not disturbing its transparency with desire or effort. Perfect attention is a point where activity and passivity merge, with the former being pure consent and the latter being the very gift to which one consents.

Sometimes, we accomplish a specific intention better when it is enveloped within a broader one that gives it more strength and momentum. Thus, constant thought of God gives more light to all our isolated thoughts. Only attention that is not bound by any human interest remains whole and indivisible; it elevates all the objects to which it applies itself. In that single act of being attentive to life, all events take their place, their value, their illumination without any of them managing to distract us. It is an attention to God that is God’s attention within us.

On the contrary, attention focused on a particular object divides us because it is incapable of wholly occupying us. Either it must become like love, which is the awakening of complete consciousness and renders the entire universe present within a single object.

4. Faithfulness to the same idea.

The mind can maintain its unity and strength only if it attaches itself to a single idea. For there is no idea that is not large enough to fill the entire capacity of the mind, and until it does so, we do not possess it completely. It is important to maintain the unity of vision rather than offering it an overly extensive spectacle. Yet, each idea is a focal point from which waves of light constantly spread, expanding its horizon. As long as it has not exhausted its power of radiation, we must not let it escape.

Because there is only one idea that can express our intellectual vocation; there is only one perspective through which our personal consciousness is capable of embracing the totality of the world. Beyond it, we may still imagine the real, but we can no longer perceive it. Throughout our entire life, sometimes without our knowledge, we carry within us the same thought. It constantly reappears in our consciousness, but we do not always recognize it because, at the moment when it shows us one of its faces, it veils all the others. It only consents, so to speak, to reveal them to us one at a time. Thus, we have never finished gathering all the light; we always seek to possess it rather than actually possessing it; it is always both familiar and unknown to us: it never ceases to bring us a new revelation.

Let us not attempt to change the vision of the world that is unique to us, for by merely holding onto it, it continues to expand. The entire world can fit within it. Let us not abandon the idea that best corresponds to the desire of our being, for it has the power to awaken all the faculties of our consciousness.

It is true that our thought thrives on change, but this change should not come from itself; it denotes the influence of reality that solicits and presses it, the variety of circumstances to which it must conform. However, our thought always derives its light and momentum from a single idea. However humble this idea may appear, it can have an infinite resonance within us, and we are neither enlightened nor moved without recognizing its presence, which always brings us the same strength and sweetness.

5. The birth of ideas and words.

To understand the mystery of creation, it suffices to pay attention to that moment filled with delight and anxiety when we witness the birth of ideas in the life of the mind. To invent ideas is to invent the world. The idea is the act of creative intelligence.

Let us accept that the idea is nothing but a name. In that case, we must restore to the name its original and sacred value. If it is capable of carrying the idea, it is because it is the talisman that allows us to take possession of all things by naming them, by grasping their inner sonority, mysterious concavity, and meaning. It must be uttered, at least in a low voice, for it to establish between the idea and the mind that subtle interaction, which will produce an even subtler interaction between the speaker and the listener.

Words often carry our thoughts higher and farther than their own strength alone could. They open our gaze to a vast horizon of light where we initially perceived only scattered gleams. And thoughts always find in words a sort of promise or even a risk that arouses their hopes and sometimes surpasses them.

There is such a perfect identity between the birth of ideas and the birth of words that the very term “inspiration” is there to express it: it is the nature of inspiration to create that miraculous correspondence between thought and language which reason always seeks to justify but leaves it both fulfilled and powerless. When we have encountered the truth, the connection between ideas and words presents itself to us with such ease and necessity that it cannot be undone. If it seems possible to change it, even in jest, let us fear that we adopted it in jest as well, that we grasped only the garment of the idea and not its essence.

Because the word is the body of the idea and is one with it: it is not a sign chosen among a thousand to express an already present idea. For the idea to exist, it must become incarnate; until then, it dwells in limbo. But as soon as it animates even the most common word, it lives and gives life to the word, and the word acquires an inner modulation through which it seems to reveal a secret of the spiritual world. It matters little whether one can now contest the reality of inspiration and argue that it reduces to a careful and meticulous observation of the most secret movements of our thought. To observe these movements is nonetheless not to produce them; to dig the canal is not to make the water flow through it. Recognizing what to neglect and what to retain presupposes that we already possess. It is about appropriating thought to our intentions, not about giving it existence.

6. Violence and calm of inspiration.

It seems that there is always a kind of violence done to us in inspiration: all the powers of our inner life are, so to speak, lifted and carried beyond themselves without any consent being asked of us. But these great emotions, these confused movements that shake our entire being, should not be sought after: rather, they should be restrained rather than provoked. They only have value through the source that nourishes them, which is often impure. There is no passion that, at the moment it seizes us, does not produce a disturbance of the flesh. We should not take pleasure in these mysterious touches that mark the weakness of our body and not the perfection of the power that passes through it.

But there is always a painful effort in inspiration that makes it resemble both an inevitable childbirth and one full of voluntary impulses. It shows us with admirable clarity that every creation is both a natural necessity and a deliverance. Therefore, alongside the joy it gives us, it is essential that it also causes us suffering, for it testifies to an absolute disregard for our individual being, which is temporarily suppressed, which must retract all its own powers into a kind of immobility and sleep in order to cease being an obstacle and become a path for the current that invades it, which now serves only a foreign god of which it has become the vessel. It still retains a half-consciousness of itself, but only to feel the constraint imposed on it, to perceive, in an involuntary regret, that all the goods to which it was attached—its memories, knowledge, affections, and desires—are rendered useless now that it is carried away by a more powerful movement with a higher origin. But the individual self refuses to succumb: it wants to manage its own affairs; it defends its own faculty of examining and judging as if it were the safeguard of its own being.

However, it desires that what it seeks will one day be given to it, and it must eventually consent to be overcome. It must annihilate itself in order to be fulfilled. And as soon as its jealousy ceases, it feels a supernatural grace penetrate it, by which it is both dissolved and regenerated. But then inspiration no longer resembles an inner exaltation through which we create a new world in a kind of intoxication. When it reaches its most perfect and purest form, the self is no longer forced by it: it is only a calm and even a void of the soul, an opening onto a world that is both very deep and very close, access to which was previously denied to us and which suddenly is revealed to us.

7. Attention and love.

All knowledge is an act of attention and love. It is always a recognition, not in the sense that it has already occurred once, as the Platonists thought—because what would this first knowledge be then?—but in a more lively and beautiful sense, it is a tribute we pay to the universe from which we draw existence and which supports and nourishes us. Knowledge gives us the presence and enjoyment of Being. How could it not also be praise?

But knowledge enables the ingratitude of those philosophers who, seeing that it depends on their attention, imagine that it is their own work and not a gift that they merely receive. Attention is both an act of freedom, since I have control over it, and an act of docility, since it allows me to participate in a reality that is given to me: thus, it is when the mind is most active that it is most aware of receiving the truth and not of producing it.

Attention resembles love. It is, like love, a consent that we have the choice to give or refuse, and yet it carries and surpasses our will. We should not solicit or pursue ideas that elude us. They arise, like the movements of love, from certain encounters in which there is neither demand nor offer, and they bring a gratuitous and unexpected gift. But we often let the gifts destined for us by Providence pass unnoticed: we are not always ready to think or to love. However, beyond wisdom, which always remains self-possessed but often content with little or nothing, there is a state of trust and abandonment that prepares us to receive everything. This state assumes that we have created a sort of internal emptiness, that we have freed ourselves from all particular concerns; it is humility towards the universe, an expectation, and at the same time a calling.

There is no attention that is not animated by an intention, which itself acts as a mediator between attention and love. And we have control over our attention just as we have control over our will, but the truth responds to us as it sees fit, not as we understand it: it depends on us to look and not on seeing. However, looking is choosing, it is loving: and how can light not present itself to the one who seeks it and who, in seeking it, loves it and, by loving it, already possesses it? There is a point where attentive gaze and the ray that illuminates it merge and become one.

There is an admirable circle between love and knowledge; for knowledge elicits love and love elicits knowledge. Love is like a knowledge that is sought after, and knowledge is like a love that is possessed. Knowledge is the redemption of the evil of individuality. It reunites us with the universe, from which sin separated us.

8. Penetrating into the world of ideas.

Each one of us must become like a spiritual being and a kind of pure demon, listening only to our secret voices, but in an inner calm that no tremor of the body will disturb. For the true world is the world of ideas, not the world of things. As soon as we enter it, we feel enlightened; our own nature, our destiny, the conduct we must follow, and our relationships with other beings appear to us in a mobile light that delights our gaze and magnetizes our will. As soon as we leave it, we are delivered to the blind forces of nature; we feel only our slavery and our misery. We only rediscover the lost light by turning back towards this invisible world: it exists independently of us since we were able to leave it; for it to be revealed to us again, we ourselves must now depart.

We do not create ideas. They are the elements of a world of thought just as bodies are the elements of a world of matter. They are revealed to us through an act of intelligence, just as things are revealed to us through an act of seeing. And just as our practical activity seizes things and turns them to the benefit of the body, our pure activity selects among ideas and, through the combination it makes of them, composes our spiritual figure. Thus, it can be said that all the ideas that enlighten our mind are from God. But the order we place among them is of human origin. It is up to us alone to choose the path on which our thought embarks: no matter what path that is, countless materials are offered to us; it is up to us to build our own work with them.

In the world of thought, at every step, we make discoveries that astonish and delight us. It is the mark of wisdom to know how to make good use of so many treasures and to keep them eternally to delight our eyes and our hearts.

It is not surprising, then, that we do not always dominate our thoughts, but that they also dominate us. It seems that we give them movement, but this movement carries us away. And when the discovery springs forth, we are like the spectator who sought the spectacle that is before his eyes but did not create it, who only anticipated it before knowing it, who now contemplates it with surprise and admiration and almost immediately lets himself be captivated by it.

Ideas belong to us just like our children. We have control over attention as we do over procreation. But the moment of birth is an hour of anxiety for us because we do not know in advance what gift Heaven will send us. And our children live before us and not for us, in a life in which our own recognizes itself and extends, but which nonetheless surpasses and amazes us.

9. Ambulare in hortis Dei (To walk in the gardens of God).

Just as the body is placed in space, the soul is placed in pure spirit; and just as the movement of the body continually reveals new objects to us, the movement of attention continually reveals new ideas to us. But just as an object does not belong to the eye that sees it, an idea does not belong to the soul that thinks it. Knowledge is a journey full of surprises in the world of ideas: each person directs their own steps, but no one can predict the revelations that will be made to them. And spirits are like bodies: there is a resemblance among all those who inhabit the same place and habitually contemplate the same horizon.

What a marvelous thing meditation is! Without using any material means, by simply silencing self-love, closing the door to all external solicitations, and refusing access to all individual concerns that hold us back and distract us, through the disposition of attention that lends itself to inner light and listens to the voices that arise within, thanks to the humility of a simple act of consent, we see a miraculous spectacle rise within us: dormant ideas awaken, rise, assemble in choirs, disappear and reappear as if to reveal to us their ever-similar and ever-changing form, the flexibility and rhythm of their secret life, the mobile constancy of their eternal presence, and the beautiful harmony that unites them like children of a single love.

They do not accept being grasped by an overly bold hand, nor even being looked upon with excessive desire. They do not bend to our will or to the crude artifices of our method. They do not die, but they escape as soon as we try to capture or merely hold onto them. Silent voices, formless shapes, lingering footsteps—ideas introduce us to a luminous world where our soul is born into eternal life. They themselves are foreign to birth and death. They do not cease to be when we cease to contemplate them; they do not occupy space; they do not change place; they do not penetrate us; rather, they welcome us among them, and our still timid soul opens itself to truth and love by becoming sensitive to their divine presence.

But how can we direct our gaze towards them before knowing them? And if they are all together on the edge of attention, which one will respond to our call? Our body is always held in one point of space, our life is always engaged in an adventure, our sensibility is always shaken by an emotion; to penetrate into the world of ideas, it is enough not to turn away from these events but to consent to discover their meaning and, so to speak, to envelop them in the radiant atmosphere of pure disinterest. Each event is the sensitive touch of an idea. Let it also be the gateway through which we will access the world of divine grace: incapable, without being destroyed, of rising to perfect unity, we will feel it present everywhere and diffused in the innumerable variety of these beautiful beings of thought, eternally young and eternally pure, who ceaselessly reveal to us, without altering or ever exhausting it, all the facets of truth.

Chapter IV. The message of the writer

1. Writing as an instrument of spiritual progress.

For each of us, truth appears in flashes, but our mind quickly falls back into its natural state of inertia and darkness. We then feel abandoned, and the painful effort we make to regain the lost light only reveals our powerlessness. However, if we manage to capture this light through writing, we become capable of reviving it when it seemed extinguished. There are privileged moments when truth passes by us and barely touches us before escaping; writing allows us to perpetually revive those moments.

But writing has other advantages. Like speech, and even better than speech, it allows thought to realize itself by expressing it. Speech often only translates a momentary and occasional communication with others. But writing always implies a long conversation with oneself, aspiring to become a conversation with all human beings. It must contain enough richness and depth to remain true beyond the circumstances in which it was born; otherwise, it satisfies only a curiosity interest. A book should not merely entertain us by taking us to places in time and space to which we are strangers and from which we withdraw our thoughts as soon as the reading is finished. It should be able to continuously stir the essential parts of our nature, revealing elements of ourselves that we carry within perpetually.

The best books do not teach us anything external to ourselves; they remind us of several encounters in which the truth they bring has already spontaneously revealed itself to us. We had caught a fleeting glimpse of it; now it turns into illumination. It ceases to be uncertain and nebulous; the purity of its outline becomes clear. Our confidence in the accuracy of our perception increases; until then, we did not dare linger on the faint trace that truth had drawn on the surface of our consciousness. Now that this truth seems to be presented to us by others, we dare to take possession of it. We become capable of contemplating it, experiencing it, and establishing ourselves in it. We are freed from the insecurity that timid, urgent, and anxious calls from our solitary consciousness used to produce in us. We find an echo for them in human communion, and now this communion populates our solitude, deepening it rather than breaking it.

The writer’s first duty should be to rise above all the circumstances of their particular life in order to provide all beings with support at all times and to show them as they would always want to be.

2. That writing should capture the eternal and not the fleeting.

One might think that the purpose of writing is to perpetuate certain fleeting thoughts that would otherwise disappear without a trace. Its role would be to preserve what will never be seen again; it could be compared to the role assigned to painting in impressionism. But why make so much effort to preserve the image of what has perished when the present still demands our attention, our activity, and our love? In reality, we should not seek to recapture from the past what has been abolished within it, something that has never been more than a pure passage in Being. We should only seek to recapture the contact with an imperishable reality that it allowed us to obtain for a moment, and that is all the more moving because time has immediately dissipated it. This contact, when found again, possesses greater purity as it has shed all bodily support, all connection with events; it has acquired such a character of simplicity and spirituality that we are no longer troubled either by the fear of losing it or by the effort to retain it.

Thus, the role of writing cannot, as some say, be to perpetuate what passes; it is rather to extract from what passes what is eternal. Nothing in our life has value except those sudden illuminations through which we suddenly discover, behind the fickle becoming that carries away and destroys everything that exists, a world that is both motionless and alive, sometimes opening up and sometimes closing, a world that appears infinitely distant and infinitely beautiful compared to the world we live in. Yet, it is enough to transparently gaze upon the most familiar things for them to allow us to penetrate it.

Such a world reveals itself to us only in sudden glimpses, and although it is eternal, it is often in the most fleeting moments of our lives that we perceive its presence most vividly. For it sustains everything in time, but it does not descend into time itself. The role of writing is to allow us to find the way to it. If it fulfills its function, which is to only retain the memory of the blissful moments when our thoughts managed to penetrate it, it must allow us to access it again when matter overwhelms us and time scatters us. Therefore, it is indeed true to say that the purpose of writing is not to preserve what passes but rather to open our gaze, within what passes itself, to that which does not pass. It must surpass time but not break its law, which dictates that everything that is only within time must cease to exist within it.

3. Contact with things.

The most challenging aspect of intellectual works is not to demonstrate power in construction, ingenuity in analysis, or elegance in style, but to maintain continuous communication with reality. However, ideas have a spontaneous playfulness, and words have a natural movement that entices even the most cautious, sometimes leading them away from solid ground.

Contact with things moderates the imagination and disciplines thought, while constantly nourishing and enriching them. Works produced through solitary meditation often possess grandeur and power, but a grandeur and power that mark the peak reached by the individual through the effort of their own genius. They may have more altitude than horizon, often revealing an arbitrary and deliberate design where the individual’s mark is too apparent. The resources that belong to them and that allowed their enterprise to succeed sometimes served only to build a castle of dreams and glorify their self-esteem.

But contact with things, which makes us feel our limits, also allows us to transcend them. Within things, there is a light to which our minds are not immune. They are not inert and silent; instead, they are full of voices that speak to all those who do not despise them. We cannot manipulate them at will; they resist us and enlighten us; they are the visible embodiment of truth. When we look at them, we no longer succumb to the confusion of mistaking the work of our imagination for reality. By comparison, the imagination appears fragile and unreal; it borrows from things the very appearance that allows it to exist. By maintaining contact with things, the mind gains strength and expansiveness. By measuring its place in the world, it ceases to confine the world within the limits of its dreams, for those dreams that claimed to surpass nature are constantly surpassed by it.

4. Continuity in the works of the mind.

Anyone can write a beautiful line of verse that cannot find a second line, nor the body, nor the rhyme. Anyone can encounter a beautiful thought that cannot find support or echo. However, although the light that illuminates us from time to time possesses a brilliance and purity that seems impossible to surpass, intellectual works cannot be limited to capturing these privileged moments. It can undoubtedly be said that such moments free us from the present, revealing to us an eternal present. But a work that possesses continuity alone can express the continuity of our life and the painful effort by which it has gradually formed. Only such a work reveals the successive refinements by which thought has had the leisure to review and enrich itself. In the accumulation of moments in time, there is an effect that liberates us from the fleeting nature of time and allows us to escape its eternal movement. The only works that possess grandeur are those that contain within them the experience and labor of an entire life.

Every individual has lived exceptional moments where, either through contact with another mind or in solitary illumination, they rise above the sequence of events and the fleeting course of their own states, effortlessly reaching a summit that one believes to have always known when in its presence, only to feel wretched upon leaving it. From there, one experiences a radiant sentiment of stability and certainty, the joy of participating in the secret design of creation. However, these blissful moments have no connection between them. They are like flickering lights that extinguish and reignite without obeying any law. Their successive appearances are separated by long intervals of darkness. One can never be certain that they will not vanish every time, never to return.

A great work requires the collaboration of all our spiritual faculties. It demands that we make an effort to retain and gather all the particles of light that destiny bestows upon us with intermittent generosity. It resists annihilation and oblivion through the invisible art that orders them. The harmony that reigns within it is made up of a multitude of patiently added successive touches. But it is a personal thought that introduces unity among them; this thought does not escape from time but dominates it by uniting all those dispersed traits into a single bundle. It takes possession of that which changes, leaving its mark and bestowing that immutable presence where the mind finds its sole abode. A great work captures all the clarities that the gaze can perceive. It grants us a permanent disposition, making them members of a luminous body possessing both unity and life.

5. Writing more secret than speech.

It is said that the soul is visible in the gaze, but it is through the invisibility of words that it renders its transitory activity perceptible to others, gradually discovering its own nature. The gaze does not obediently follow our will like speech does; it reveals our feelings and desires without our conscious intention. However, through words, the living act of thought is expressed as it unfolds.

Is it then necessary to attribute superiority to speech over writing because it possesses greater freedom and less formality, because we constantly have it at our disposal, because it is accompanied by the gaze and the inflection of the voice, because it maintains a more direct and vivid connection with the listener, because it can be endlessly corrected and amended to better conform not only to the form of the idea but also to the form of the soul that listens, and finally, because it is the result not of solitude like writing but of an agreement sought between separated beings? It is understandable that we often desire to find in writing some of the effects of speech. When I write, the reader should already be so close to me that I feel their presence, and they should feel that I am speaking to them.

Moreover, speech often obeys a more urgent inspiration than writing. When we are alone, inspiration does not always spring forth with the same strength; it no longer finds an echo to amplify and support it. Writing does not directly reveal its impact on others; it does not create immediate and tangible communion with them. Therefore, we sometimes regret being unable to fix speech through writing. But there is a kind of illusion in this desire because in the absence of the interlocutor, it would no longer possess the same allure.

This is because the person who writes listens to a different god than the one who speaks, a more hidden god. They seek to awaken in the reader deeper powers than those of ordinary life. And when they reach us most intimately, it is with words so silent that one might think they are silent. The coarseness of sound still persists in the most delicate words, but it is so veiled in written words that it is barely perceived. The ideal of writing is to bring us face to face with pure thought. The movement or fire of the gaze betrays the attentive listener, but in the reader, the gaze of their entire being is turned inward. It sometimes seems that thought infiltrates them without the intermediary of the body.

Writing a book is to reveal one’s own secrets to oneself. However, through it, the reader should think that they are discovering their own secrets. Therefore, the best books, those that reveal the reader to themselves most effectively, often confuse those who thought they knew the author.

6. Dialogue between the author and the reader.

We are more moved to find in an author the feelings we secretly experience than those we express, the ones that are dormant within us rather than those that have already blossomed. The works of the mind are aimed at a world that we carry within us and that is often invisible to our own eyes; the author who reveals it to us immediately establishes a mysterious intimacy with us. Yet, he does not offend our modesty nor gain any rights over us. For he does not force our consent: the discoveries we make, while reading him, seem to come from ourselves, and we are grateful to him for provoking the upheaval through which we discover so many hidden riches within our nature.

Everything that is written is a dialogue with oneself, that is, with other human beings. We speak to them, we want to persuade them, and we would not continue on the path for long if we did not hear their silent responses at every step. They sustain and constantly renew the movement of our thought.

It is not pride, but strength, to engage one’s entire personality in what one writes. However, it is pride to always attribute any misinterpretation to others. Most likely, we made the first mistake. The public and the critics, in seeking to understand us, collaborate with us. We should be grateful to them. They repay us for the effort we have made. They add their own effort to it. We owe them for enlightening us on what we should have said and sometimes on what we should have thought.

Even in the purest thought, there are shadows. It is formed by different rays of unequal brilliance. What it contains most vividly has not always been attained. For no idea is truly ours; even the humblest surpasses the acuity of our vision. And the eyes of others, fixed upon it, always add to the knowledge we had of it. Thus, it happens that interpretations that seem contradictory complement each other and correspond, in the same horizon bathed in the same light, to more or less fortunate perspectives, to more or less penetrating views.

One who devotes their life to writing may lack real friends; they are constantly sending a message to unknown friends. But the echoes they receive may sometimes seem a bit harsh, and they must be content with not knowing the purest responses, which are often the most silent.

7. Success and failure.

Praise can give confidence and strength, awaken activity, lift it out of isolation, and provide the support of human communion. But these advantages are quickly lost and more. By enjoying praise, self-love withdraws into itself and separates again. Assured of the power within us, confirmed by success, we rely on it. Then it abandons us because it cannot be retained, and it can only be obtained at every moment by a victory over ourselves.

Opinions and intellectual success do not always go hand in hand; they can even exclude each other. Those who have the most success outwardly are often those who feel the most inner misery: it is true that they often bury it in their deepest souls. But there is no visible success that is more serious than failure if the heart is not satisfied.

Failures, indeed, can intensify and embitter the desire for success: the writer then succumbs to the sting of wounded vanity and seeks revenge in the very feeling of injustice he believes himself to be a victim of. But they can also turn inward, serving his inner advancement, as long as he does not derive new enjoyment of self-love from that advancement: for it is terrible when self-love insinuates itself even into the victories of the mind and always demands to share in their fruits. It should be the role of failures to purify us of all movements of self-love and to awaken all our spiritual powers, not, as is often said, to help us overcome fortune, but because they can only be exercised in pure disinterestedness. They invite us to a free and divine life that we often would not have known or loved if the world had succeeded in attracting and holding us. For we are so weak that sometimes the world must reject us for us to detach ourselves from it.

External successes disturb and repel the most sensitive souls, and they can sometimes drain the joy of the spirit. For the joy of the spirit is self-sufficient; it does not need confirmation and does not feed on opinion. It does not confine itself within any enclosure; on the contrary, it transforms and illuminates everything that approaches it. Its action is one of constant and natural presence, innocent and unknown to self-love, which neither seeks to possess it nor complains of being defeated.

Our spiritual radiance is proportional to our power of solitude; it must silence all the echoes from outside. It then becomes the purest of all messages, the most immaterial and effective. It is when a book has not achieved fame, or when it has passed through and surpassed it, that it succeeds in creating the most selfless and perfect communication among a small number of minds.

8. Jealousy towards the living and the dead.

If the goods of the mind are the only true goods, one can only be miserable without them. And since it seems that it is within our power to acquire them, we feel inexcusable for being deprived of them. Thus, self-love always contests their possession by others, not because it thinks they are not the only goods, but because, being incapable of obtaining them, it envies another being for being able to derive vanity from them, as if where they exist, all self-love should be renounced. Honest and diligent mediocrity feels the most sincere and constant hostility towards the goods of the mind, in proportion to their power and brilliance. For it is certain never to encounter them on its path, and yet it is strengthened by the method it employs, which seems common to all people and renders all acquisitions that it cannot provide suspicious.

The presence of a flesh and blood being with a face, needs, weaknesses, a place in society, whom I encounter engaged in humble human tasks, renders his genius invisible and effaces the divine nature of the ideas he represents. Their value is heightened when he is reduced to a mere pile of ashes, for in my memory, he acquires a spiritual life. But if I can place him in distant antiquity, and if he already belongs to the memory of humanity, his ideas have lost, despite the efforts of historians, their bodily and individual clothing: they have become the common heritage of all minds.

But death is not enough to protect against the resentments of self-love; the living are also jealous of the dead. They are often more troubled by the memory of an enemy who is dead than by his living presence, which justified their hatred and provided an object for their attacks. Thus, there is a subtle jealousy that, instead of being extinguished by death, is heightened by it, as if death covered our enemy with unexpected protection. It is because people do not feel jealous of a real being, but only of the idea that he embodies and humiliates them; thus, his physical death, even if they desire it, does not cure their jealousy because it releases this idea instead of abolishing it.

The very hatred with which they pursue an enemy beyond death is proof of his immortality. This very hatred immortalizes him. By protecting them from what their enemy could have become, death does not protect them from what he has been: it forever fixes his past and gives him the immobile majesty of things that have passed. Death also defends him against the weaknesses he could have committed. It also defends him against the harm that could have been inflicted upon him. It bestows upon him a silent strength against which one feels powerless. It surrounds him with a barrier of respect. It can be the starting point of his glory.

Even more than by denigrating the living whose lives are intertwined with ours, self-love elevates itself by diminishing the merit of genius individuals whose glory has spanned centuries. There is in self-love a paroxysm that makes it hate all those great dead whose glory seems to diminish the glory to which it can lay claim. And the greatest among the living, whose weaknesses are more apparent, are protected by them against the most tenacious and secret envy.

9. Great men.

It is too quickly assumed that great men have carried in life the glorious figure attributed to them by the eloquence of our imagination. What made them great was often more accessible and familiar; it is enough for us to open our eyes to find around us many men who have the same clarity in their gaze, the same internal purity or strength of character. However, our self-love hesitates to recognize them, and our laziness only has the strength to admire those who have gained fame in literature or those whom fortune has marked with its sign. Yet the greatest things are happening before our eyes without us realizing that they are great, and they are the culmination of many small things. And there is no mediocre mind that, on some point, cannot have clearer views and more far-reaching aims than the deepest and broadest mind. The greatest and the smallest find themselves identical in the face of life’s essential events such as death, love, or pain. And sometimes, those whom we judged the smallest appear to be the greatest.

To create is always to exercise a power we have received; true greatness lies not in the value of the gift but in how we choose to use it. Thus, ideas always come unexpectedly and against our will to all individuals, and the only difference between them is that some know how to gather them while others do not. The genius lies in paying attention to the small lights that enlighten all people, but that most barely notice, for they almost immediately fade away if we do not take great care to protect and rekindle them.

But it also happens that greatness reveals itself to us all at once and inclines us, so to speak, before it. It is when we discover a being who is great only by what he is, and not by what he does, and who, through all the objects to which his activity applies, has only a connection with the Whole. From such an encounter, we retain only the revelation of a world more real than the one in which we usually live, and in which this great being always seems to exist. But then he appears capable of being self-sufficient, and we think that in the indifferent crowd, he can only perceive servants and witnesses, that he does not need friends since he directly enjoys truth and goodness. What could he ask of other beings who possess less than himself? Shall we say that his duty is to make them participate in the gifts he has received? But he does not resort to specific wills for that; his mere presence has a better and more certain effect. Thus, he attracts around him a circle of attentive minds who draw from him like from an inexhaustible source. But it is his destiny to give without knowing them, not to differentiate among them, not to grant any of them the slightest privilege, to silence any suspicion of jealousy among them, and to produce in them that feeling of admiration that surrounds his solitude and consumes it.

10. Serving one’s own genius.

All the unhappiness of humankind comes from the fact that nothing is more difficult for each individual than to discern his own genius. Almost everyone fails to recognize it, distrusts it, and is ungrateful towards it. They even seek to destroy it to substitute it with a borrowed character that appears more brilliant. The entire secret of power and joy lies in discovering oneself and remaining faithful to oneself in both small and great things. Even in sanctity, the goal is self-realization. The one who best fulfills the role that is uniquely theirs, and that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else, is also the one most in harmony with the universal order. There is no one who can be stronger or happier.

Therefore, our entire responsibility lies in the use of the powers that belong to us individually. We can let them wither away or make them flourish. Thus, our vocation can only be maintained if we constantly remain true to it, always proving ourselves worthy of it. The role of our will is more modest than we think; it is only to serve our genius, to eliminate the obstacles that impede its progress, and to provide it with constant nourishment. It is not about altering its natural course or imposing a direction that it has not chosen.

In every individual, there is a secret thought that they must have the honesty and courage to bring to light. They should not prefer a foreign opinion that appears more elevated but is unable to thrive on their own soil and will not grow there. We can hope to possess no other wealth than what we already carry within us. It is enough to exploit them instead of neglecting them. However, they are too familiar to us to seem precious, and we rush towards other goods that shine brighter but whose possession is denied to us. Even if we could attain them, they would leave only their shadow in our hands.

Yet, the confidence we have in our present vocation itself poses dangers. My vocation is not predetermined; it is up to me to create it. I must extract from all the possibilities within me the possibility of what I must become. I must not even confuse my vocation with my preferences, although my deepest preference must align with my vocation, nor mistake the call of my destiny for all the suggestions of the moment, although the moment always brings the opportunity to which I must respond. Wisdom lies in recognizing the mission that I alone am capable of fulfilling; to substitute it with some borrowed purpose and to aspire to greater thoughts than I can bear is to betray it.

Individual vocations in the life of humanity are like different faculties in the life of consciousness. Each faculty—intelligence, sensitivity, or will—must be exercised according to its own law, at its own time, and in suitable circumstances; otherwise, consciousness would not be able to achieve its harmony or unity. But when faculties are exercised correctly, the entire soul acts within them. Similarly, the destiny of all humanity is present in the vocation of each individual, provided they accept it and love it.

Chapter V. Activity

1. The power of activity.

The most dramatic experience I can have, as soon as my consciousness applies to it, is that of the movement by which I move my body, for example, my little finger, which reveals to me the mystery of my initiative and the miracle of my power. It makes present and alive to us at every minute Goethe’s words: “In the beginning was the act,” the act that is the beginning of all things. All modes of being are modes of an activity that sometimes triumphs and sometimes succumbs. I am where I act. The act is the prime mover by which I continually create my own reality at every instant. If I separate myself from all the objects and states that hold me back and scatter me in order to seek, by endlessly pursuing my own inner purification, the radical essence of my being, I discover nothing more than an act that, to be exercised, needs only a pure consent.

Pessimists think that the purpose of activity is only to rescue us from pain and boredom, and therefore to entertain us. But what kind of life is it that activity is charged with entertaining? What is its dreadful secret? Can it be distinguished from activity itself? Only the being that acts knows it, since it accepts entering into it and collaborating with it. But then it abandons all doubts, all regrets that until then, in fact, prevented it from living.

The act frees the finite being from all its chains: desire, fear, laziness, and boredom. It no longer allows it to separate itself from creation, still claiming to judge it; it involves it in the creative power. Therefore, one should never worry about the state, which only expresses our limitation, but only about the act, which expresses our essence. One should not have eyes for the world, but only for the activity that, at every instant, both within us and outside of us, brings it into being.

Because every life is an accomplishment, that is, an act that continually realizes itself; thus, as soon as our activity falters, we succumb to the miseries of self-love, everything becomes a burden to us, and the worst part is that we become a burden to ourselves. But as soon as it revives, it can have no other end but itself; it no longer leaves room for self-love to arise. For it is nothingness that has the power to become everything, that is, to give itself entirely.

2. Being delicate and being strong.

To be finite is to know and to know oneself, it is also to foresee and to strategize, to grasp the nuances of reality, to penetrate its folds, to be towards it like an attentive player who does not allow himself to be surprised. Finesse is a delicate tact of differences, a sensitivity to even the slightest change, a flexibility of thought and will, an ever-emerging sympathy that never loses its initiative and never becomes a dupe. It always surpasses the envelope of things; it guesses and already foresees the slightest movements of their secret soul. It is akin to taste. In the arts, it lends exquisite and natural grace to imitation. It can become an intellectual game in which sentiment is abolished. It is not very inventive; but it embraces reality so closely that it sometimes anticipates it: even before events are fully formed, it exercises itself on the broader keyboard of their possibilities.

To be strong is to build or destroy. It is to act upon visible things; to dominate them and put them at one’s service. One whose strength seems to command beings rather than things still treats beings as things; he makes them the instruments of his designs. Strength does not need to demand to obtain; that would be a sign that it lacks power and security. It does not need to have too keen a self-awareness; thought slows it down and scatters it. We even see strength practicing a kind of willful ignorance. It pays attention to a certain unity in the goal to be reached, but it is not very sensitive to differences in circumstances; it relies on itself to reduce them. It often acts contrary to reflection: it gathers together in buildings the elements that analysis leaves isolated; it grinds to powder the works that patience has slowly raised.

But it is necessary to seek a balance between finesse and strength. The extreme of finesse is always a return to simplicity. The renunciation of strength is often a sign of greater strength. Finesse is right to seek, through a kind of complicity, the most intimate dispositions of beings; but it is too attentive to the subtlety of their game. Strength is right to safeguard the clarity of vision and the rectitude of intention; but it is too interested in material effects. Their roles should be reversed, but by subordinating finesse to strength, turning strength towards the conquest of that inner unity which finesse withdraws from us, and reserving finesse for the details of execution that strength is incapable of managing. Thus, we would avoid finesse becoming too flexible and strength becoming too brutal. For strength must be so secret and hidden that it acts without being felt, and finesse must be so direct and sure that it effaces even the trace of too skillful a will.

3. Measure.

For thinking and acting, a disruption of equilibrium is necessary, but it must not exceed a certain degree. When the body is too secure, thought has less freedom; it has more movement when the body is not entirely satisfied: insomnia, hunger, if not excessive, give it more lightness and a sharper edge. Need has not yet turned into preoccupation, and it sharpens thought instead of diverting it.

One cannot act if not driven by some impulse, but one must be master of oneself in execution. Action is a supple and living adaptation to the conditions offered to us: it must be shaped in matter that we have not created. For this, one must not let the opportunity pass, but respond to it with tact and measure. Because the one who acts must respect modesty and taste. Measure is the virtue of an activity that pursues its end but has not yet reached it; it tempers the excesses of impulse; it makes us aware of the presence of reason, which is a discipline before being a light. It is akin to order, which precedes justice and truth but is only their image and has value only if it is a method that brings us closer to them, makes us sense them, and, to a certain extent, imitates them.

Measure is a middle ground between two extremes: it is capable of harmonizing with strength, wisdom, and grace; it is not an end in itself, but rather an art of pursuing all ends, of achieving them, and even enjoying them. Every end is an extreme that fulfills activity and leaves it no movement to go beyond. But even when it aims at the greatest goods, even when it possesses them, the spirit allows its equilibrium to be broken only to find it again and better feel the act that maintains it. This broken and restored equilibrium in the same instant is a good of greater value than all the others, without which they could neither be recognized nor enjoyed.

Measure, far from slowing down or weakening our activity, calls upon its entire movement to fill the interval that separates the extremes and calls upon all its strength to firmly hold the middle ground. The point is to ensure that activity maintains its balance without paralyzing its momentum. For the mind to be master of itself, it must place itself in an immovable center where it holds in its hand, without being overtaken, desires that are stretched toward all extremes at once.

4. Self-mastery or abandonment.

Measure, composure, self-mastery are not virtues that can suffice for us. They restrain all impulses, both the best and the worst. They can prevent enthusiasm from arising and even prevent light from penetrating us. They are virtues of defense, prudence, and reserve, but sometimes they are indistinguishable from certain vices such as closed-mindedness, cunning, and contempt. They favor all calculations; they make possible all deliberate undertakings in which the individual seeks his own advantage. They are useful to us whenever we are divided within ourselves, whenever we seek to attain a desired end, whenever we fear being deceived or failing; and thieves were once said to be sober and of good moral character. They restrain the movements of spontaneity: those of passion, but also those of love. They are only valuable in purifying the soul from all sensible impulses that risk dragging it away and diverting it and in preparing a self-gift that must be a perfect abandonment.

Self-mastery must not be a result of self-love but of that contemplative attitude by which we recognize that we are part of the Whole and that we must submit to its law instead of seeking to subject it to our desires. It is beautiful to be able to say that one has one’s heart under control, instead of being under the control of one’s heart. But this self-mastery can become terrible, as seen in Hindus who ask us to command our senses until an alluring form appears repugnant to us and a repugnant form becomes seductive. This is a sign of pride, a refusal to bow before the universal order, to recognize the signs it puts before our eyes, to respond to the calls it makes to us, and to accept the conditions of this communion with all beings that allows us to love them, sometimes because of their beauty that attracts and elevates us, sometimes because of their misery that we must still feel in order to seek to deliver them.

Self-mastery, recommended by the Stoics as the foremost of virtues and practiced by the English as an effect of education, without the need for philosophy, is often a stiffening of our separate self. It prohibits exchanges with other beings and with nature that are subtle and impossible when we refuse all abandonment.

There are two kinds of spontaneity: individual, selfish, and carnal spontaneity that consciousness and will often have to control, and spiritual spontaneity full of expansion and love, before which self-mastery is merely a restraint of self-love. They can be distinguished with light touches that need to be recognized without dwelling on them. They are not always in opposition: the strongest and wisest life is the one that possesses the most flexibility and freedom; it even happens that those who have not hesitated to trust the movements of their senses are most capable of trusting the movements of grace. We are always preached to about measure, and it seems that we never know how to stop in time. But it also happens that we have too much measure, that is, we lack the strength to push each action to the very end.

5. Common activity and exceptional activity.

Within each of us, there is a common activity that is exercised in almost all events of our life and an exceptional activity that presupposes the former but is, in relation to it, a justification and an escape. Each person expends the former so close to themselves that they hardly notice it. The latter more easily becomes a spectacle and an object of admiration. But perhaps it is not our truest activity: sometimes it reaches a kind of monstrous magnitude that causes it to lose solidity. It forms a brilliant bubble, but it is fragile and illusory if it is not nourished by the most common virtues from which it should blossom.

One should ask a person who has acquired glory if they have also brought happiness within themselves and around them, if in moments of solitude when measuring their own destiny, they have not felt the bitter sentiment of their own misery. For each of us finds within ourselves a judge much more perspicacious than public opinion. On the contrary, there is an invisible and hidden activity, always present to itself, which may not extend beyond a very narrow circle, but undoubtedly spreads its effects within it. It does not pride itself, but it never fails the one who possesses it. It does not acquire fame, but no one contests it, and no one thinks to weigh its true value against the esteem in which it is held.

It is certain that each of us, being an individual and not just a human being, has a unique vocation. But this is a common necessity that must be joined to common activity and transformed into a common use. The essential occupations of life, those to which it is most important to give seriousness and depth, are the same for everyone and are also the only ones that are always new. It is very easy to be mistaken about a person’s true worth: it is the relationships of daily life and the tête-à-tête of friendship that see through false values and elevate unrecognized ones.

The constantly renewed contact with oneself and with God gives a luminous and profound meaning to our most humble and familiar tasks. It teaches us to sense in their regularity a kind of spiritual charm, to savor the ever-renewed pleasure that the different hours of the day bring as they turn and their arrival is anticipated.

6. Professional activity.

Some individuals effortlessly devote all the resources of their mind to their work, while others can only spend them outside of it. The former have a greater inclination towards collaborative work, where a distributed task requires the collaboration of all and the responsibility of each, where rules serve as a guide and demand accuracy and skill in their application, where prolonged contact with the same object allows habits to form and difficulties to be measured [107] and overcome. They are rewarded for their perseverance and zeal with a visible, useful creation, whose perfection and merit can be immediately judged.

Others possess more independence, and even more indiscipline. The obligations inherent in any methodical activity paralyze them instead of supporting them. Their initiative must always remain intact. They only produce at their own time. Each of their actions must be commanded by an inner necessity, not by a task to be fulfilled. They are more like poets than workers. They almost never give what could be expected of them. But they deliver a surplus that surpasses all expectations: their mere presence illuminates us; there is a generosity in it that fulfills us.

It would be necessary for the former, who find themselves destitute when their work is lacking, to have rules to apply everywhere, as if the task of their occupation reigned over their entire life: then we would forgive them for lacking a bit of freedom and enthusiasm. The latter should be allowed to exercise their natural gifts, [108] their imagination, and the unpredictable play of their creative power even within their occupation. However, even in the occupation they have chosen that best suits their taste and genius, we will always have to forgive them for certain irregularities, and even a few shortcomings.

If the occupation does not always align with the vocation, it is often the result of a poor choice rather than bad luck. It is sometimes a test imposed on us by fate in order to compel us to discover and exercise certain hidden powers. It is almost always an illusion produced by vanity, by a lack of attention to the present, by the need for diversion, by the prejudice that one was destined for a more beautiful fate. But one should not create an opposition between our occupation and our human task: they should merge. The most perfect activity in the occupation is not the one that most faithfully conforms to the rules of the occupation, but the one that dictates them because it surpasses them. And if we should never make a profession of the divine part of our activity, there is no occupation that does not reveal it.

7. Entertainment.

Entertainment is the mark of my inability to be self-sufficient; it awaits the happiness of an external object that cannot provide me with any contentment. And desire itself is an evil only because it is the principle of entertainment.

There is a diversion of the body that prevents us from staying in one place. Vain and superficial men, carnal and transient, need this form of entertainment that always reveals to them some new aspect of the world, as seen in their love of travel. But the deepest individuals consider this novelty as always the same: it immediately loses its bloom. And what is always the same, namely their very presence in the world, appears to them as something perpetually new.

But the diversion of the body is always a defeat of the mind. Entertainment constantly shifts from one object to another because it always seeks a perfect satisfaction that no particular object is capable of providing. But the nature of the mind is to remain attached to an eternal object and to be capable of recognizing in the humblest spectacle presented to it a presence that never exhausts itself.

Any ulterior motive is a form of entertainment: it divides the attention we should have for the present and prevents us from dedicating ourselves to it. It represses the divine part of our activity. There are physical ulterior motives, such as the feeling of being ill, which subjugate the mind to the body; but the true ulterior motives are spiritual, such as the disturbance caused by a past whose image one can no longer bear, or whose consequences one calculates, and the preoccupation with a future that one fears or hopes for. For it is always time that diverts us.

Entertainment is an evil that should not be sought to be organized and regulated: that is a sign of a guilty conscience and inner sadness. Most people view their occupation as a task and seek entertainment elsewhere. But for many who find leisure more burdensome than the task, [111] it is the occupation itself that becomes their entertainment. However, it is the common fate of all those who seek entertainment to be incapable of enjoying it: for then it has an impure and bitter flavor given to it by the obscure preoccupation with a more essential task, from which the being seems to want to escape as if seeking to flee itself. It is only when activity ceases to be a form of entertainment and fully engulfs us that it becomes fruitful, joyful, and innocent; only then does it attain freedom, strength, and the grace of play. Otherwise, it either engages and prevents entertainment from arising or withdraws and entertainment is everywhere.

The two opposing vices of a failing activity are entertainment and torpor. But torpor is still capable of being shaken: it leaves a void in the mind that can always be filled. Whereas in any form of entertainment, the mind is occupied by an illusory object that is not sufficient to deceive it but prevents it from receiving anything. Anything can be a subject of entertainment, even the noblest and purest object. The greatest men, scholars, conquerors can live in entertainment. And what is often called genius is merely a brilliant form of entertainment.

8. The virtues of leisure.

Leisure allows us to experience ourselves and the world in a way that reveals things in a new and unknown light; it uncovers their very essence that remained hidden as long as we only saw their utility.

In leisure, activity becomes free and present once again. It no longer originates from an external demand that presses it, but from an invention that is inherent to it. It is freed from all preoccupations; it is available; it does not subordinate itself to any object. It follows its own movement and inclination, constantly creating its object and purpose without conscious thought. The way we employ leisure reveals our power and limitations. In leisure, some indulge in the pleasures of daydreaming, while others succumb to boredom. Only a few truly engage in a fully human activity, liberated from all specific tasks and capable [113] of surpassing and containing them simultaneously.

Sometimes, saving an individual means taking away their leisure, which they only know how to misuse. Many people, when given leisure, only embrace idleness, which is its corruption. Leisure should not be dedicated to entertainment; but the idle individual is incapable of even entertaining themselves.

Leisure is the condition of the wise, who have neither preoccupation nor impatience, who are ignorant of desire and regret, and whose activity always unfolds in a present moment that fulfills them. Some individuals possess leisure by nature, while for others it is the fruit of their work. Lastly, there is a leisure, the best and rarest of all, which is so indistinguishable from work itself that we can no longer determine whether the work is a reward, an obligation, a natural inclination, or a free choice. The sign of a free individual is the alignment of joy with their most habitual activity; the sign of a slave is the separation of joy from it.

It is a bad sign to begin by rejecting all occupations under the pretext of preserving the leisure and purity of inner activity. To demand empty time of occupations in order to fill it according to one’s own desires is to assume the most dreaded responsibility; it risks allowing the worst evil, the inability to act, to take hold. Activity must always be able to employ its full force; and sometimes one needs to have many things to do in order to do them all well. Inner activity is not a separate activity; it must support and illuminate all our occupations, instead of escaping from them; it seems to abolish them by transforming them.

Action possesses the qualities of ease, power, and fertility only in leisure; leisure also engenders knowledge and happiness. Leisure ceases when our activity is captivated and dispersed by the object; it is reborn when the object only serves to liberate it. Therefore, leisure should not be confused with inertia: leisure is the virtue of activity purged of any thought that divides it, capable of being exercised with simplicity and innocence.

9. Laziness and effort.

It is laziness, the failure to attend to the inner light and make use of the goods that are always within our reach, that often causes individuals to squander their intelligence and willpower in idleness and entertainment. There is no passion more powerful than laziness, but it is a passion of the flesh. Sometimes it is believed that there is a disease of the mind, namely drowsiness or languor; but the ailment is not in the mind, which is impervious to all attacks. There is an activity that is always ready, a grace that is always offered. It excludes laziness, which arises when we cease to listen to its voice and surrender to the inertia of matter and the indulgence of the body.

Effort is not, as it is believed, the sign of activity, but rather the mark of its limitation and impotence. And the being that acts through effort resists activity rather than consenting to it. As consent becomes more perfect, effort diminishes. Any material activity needs to be forced; it leaves another preoccupation in the mind and quickly produces fatigue. Any task-oriented activity needs rest. But inner activity is a gift and a liberation, not an effort that constrains and divides us. It alone can fulfill our entire capacity. It does not need rest to regenerate itself, as it is the one that regenerates our being at every moment. Idleness, on the other hand, produces its own fatigue, from which this activity heals us.

Therefore, we can only be certain that we have discovered true activity when we are aware that it can no longer tire or wear us out. It overcomes all particular tasks that enslave us. It is an activity that surpasses us, to which we can only consent, but which can neither dry up nor fail us. It is a total activity in which our dispersed activity is forgotten, unified, strengthened, and transfigured. To live a free and divine life is to exercise this pure activity, which is always a delight and a joy to us.

Chapter VI. Consent

1. Will and innocence.

By choosing certain ends that we attempt to achieve through the most skilled art, we preclude the future within the limits of our imagination. But nature is infinitely wiser than art. We must let ourselves be carried by it, instead of tracing paths before it, intended to surprise and constrain it. By yielding to the natural movement of our activity, enjoying its play, avoiding making it a means to our service and imposing our intentions as its boundaries, we give it all its strength and make it bear its most beautiful fruits. But, one might say, they no longer correspond to our desires. That is precisely what gives them their value: when life is purified of desire, it expands beyond itself, constantly bringing new goods that far exceed the expectations of all desires, even the wildest ones.

The only thing that belongs to the will itself is to accept or refuse a calling that solicits it. Entry into life is offered to us without our consultation: but we always have the power to exit. Similarly, the will can welcome or repel the movements of nature as well as those of grace. But the power that moves it always comes from further away; the will is only its vehicle; and it has this admirable role, both modest and sovereign, of opening a passage for it within us. Its operation is nothing more than a pure consent. It disturbs the order of the world if it claims its own power; not even a too personal will for the good prevents us from attaining the good. We must purify ourselves even from this will and yield to the good, but not force it.

One who has just eaten from the tree of good and evil immediately discerns evil from good, but it is because they see that good suddenly eludes them: then the will becomes their only recourse. But there is a state of innocence that transcends good and evil and allows one to possess good without boasting of it and without fearing its loss.

We must have enough trust in the order of the universe to think that the goods that present themselves to us without our having thought of them are always better than those we have sought and desired. The simplest goods, about which no one disputes: health, happiness, virtue, are so inseparable from our being that when we possess them, it is almost always without knowing them, without wanting them, and at least without dwelling on them to enjoy them.

2. The opportunity.

Thought and will must guard against the vast projects formed by the imagination in order to impose our self-love on the universe. In reality, nothing is required of humans except a state of attentive presence, where no call goes unnoticed, no opportunity goes unanswered. It is always a lack of wisdom to walk presumptuously toward a distant end that seduces us and to remain indifferent and blind to the invitations that Providence constantly addresses to us. We do things well only when we have abandoned all personal plans, and even our own will, when we are always at leisure with an ever-ready initiative: we must let a present necessity shake us and always gather all our inner powers in view of an action that allows no delay.

Too many opportunities are always presented to us for us to need to anticipate them; we should not fear missing out on them: we can only let them pass. But we must have enough discernment to recognize them and enough agility to seize them. The spiritual life asks nothing more from us than to respond to these propositions that are continually made to us. It does not ask us to provoke them, force them, or even spy on them too zealously; it is enough to accept them with docility. The humblest opportunities can give rise to the most beautiful actions. It is the quality of the action that our thoughts should be concerned with, rather than the matter provided to us. And those who do not demand to choose are also the ones who best perceive its spiritual purpose and make the purest use of it.

Samuel said to Saul: “Do everything that presents itself to be done; for the Lord is with you.” Now the Lord is with each one of us. Opportunities are a gift from God, and the trust we have in them is a form of the trust we have in Him. It is up to us to discern and make them fruitful, but not to create them. By sending us the opportunity, God provides for all our needs: it is the opportunity that gives our activity the test that strengthens it and the nourishment that sustains it.

It is always self-destructive to prefer the opportunity that we create to the one that is given. For in the universe, there is an order that we must embrace and not dictate. It is not enough for something to be good in itself for it to be said or done: it must be said and done at the right time and in the right place, that is, it must be in its proper place in the universe. Thus, no particular thing has inherent value; even the best things become detestable if detached from the order they should contribute to producing and maintaining. To live is to know how to use time and all the opportunities it presents to us in turn. The difficult thing, indeed, is to align our will with the occasion, and yet our destiny is fulfilled precisely by the marvelous encounter of our initiative and the events.

3. Saying yes.

Every act consists of saying yes; every act is an act of consent, for all activity comes from God, and the only thing left to us is to accept or reject it. But this consent that we give to God unites us so closely with Him that it is God Himself who seems to give it within us; and yet it is when His action is felt in its most irresistible form that we are most ourselves.

God’s power does not limit our activity but nourishes it. Those who apply their will to a personal work labor much and produce little fruit. The will has a more modest role: to silence the voice of self-love when it urges us to act, to avoid distraction, to dispose ourselves to receive the inner light and to let a more perfect power than itself work in us, enabling us to naturally and joyfully bring forth works that are much more beautiful than anything it could produce.

Thus, we must distinguish two kinds of activity within us: an activity that surpasses us but enlightens and guides us, and an individual activity that submits to the former or resists it. But when it submits, it almost seems to consent to its own abolition; then the former appears to reign alone, but at the same time, the ends capable of satisfying the individual activity are so perfectly fulfilled that, in receiving knowledge, power, and joy, it is under the illusion of having given them to itself.

All activity is superior to the one who exercises it; it is up to each one of us, by accepting to participate, to give ourselves our own being. But this acceptance must be constantly renewed, as it keeps us in existence by maintaining our union with God. As soon as we cease to give it, it seems that existence eludes us, and we only feel the misery of our condition and the impotence of our desires. On the contrary, the mark of the spiritual life is to abolish the difference between the will of God and our own will; it is to prevent the latter from pursuing a separate destiny and turning against the very principle that brings it into being.

At the moment this separation ceases, when the unity of the individual and the Whole is restored after having been broken, we discover within ourselves the personal independence we thought we had abandoned and the inner freedom we feared losing. By uniting with God, we become co-workers with Him in creation. By ceasing to be external to Him, we cease to be external to ourselves. We are freed from all the constraints that held us back, from all the concerns that troubled us, from natural servitudes, the chains of habit, and the weight of the past. We acquire initiative, hope, and joy; our life becomes an uninterrupted birth.

4. Docile matter.

Matter resists the one who regards it as the object of their activity and tries to force it, but to one who pursues a purely spiritual purpose, it becomes a docile servant that willingly responds to their desires. For it is not due to a corruption of our nature that we are obliged to turn to matter to act, but rather by a requirement of our love, which continually creates the world and gives its creation its most beautiful form.

Matter is never the object of activity; it is merely the means by which activity is exercised and assumes a sensible form that allows it to reach other beings, communicate with them, and move them.

When we are about to act, the spirit must not turn to matter as if it were an enemy to be subdued. It is even impossible for the spirit to ever act on matter. It can only act on itself, that is, on its own ideas, and matter follows suit. The spirit continues to pursue a movement that is peculiar to it, and without seeking them, it thus produces effects in the visible world that reflect all its inner successes and failures.

At least, we imagine that we can directly act on our bodies. But the effort we make to regulate our movements is often a futile act by which our spirit becomes enslaved to our body. The one who has the least concern for their body directs it with the greatest wisdom, provided they strengthen in themselves the principle of life of which the body is only the figure.

Similarly, in the absence of a charitable love that inwardly draws us toward another being, there are times when we use matter with a kind of fever, in order to demonstrate through the generosity of our gifts a sentiment that we suffer from not experiencing. But this is a defeat in which we seek to deceive ourselves; our action has a too apparent meaning because it is itself only an appearance of action. Only when it is the blossoming of an inner seed, which gives it life and growth, can it find its place in the world. But then it is immune to failure. It no longer needs to be desired; it happens by itself at the very moment it seems to have become unnecessary. It is perfect and invisible: it becomes one with the soul that brings it into being.

5. The fruits of activity.

We must not see any act as a mere means to a distant end, for that end itself cannot limit our activity; it is still only a means. Can we then sacrifice our entire life to an infinitely distant end that we are already certain we cannot reach? But it is the means we employ that are our true work: it is through them that our being takes shape. The object is but a mirage that attracts us; it diminishes to nothing as we approach. We possess nothing more than the action itself at the moment we accomplish it. The destiny of every end is to constantly elude us, as it can only arouse desire or extinguish it.

However, true activity never becomes a prisoner of its work. God constantly renews the face of the world, but through an activity full of initiative, flexibility, and freedom that never subordinates itself to its creation. And our own action, if it only regards its object, lacks purity; it becomes passive, subservient, and flawed.

Yet there are times when the work appears superior to the worker, and they no longer recognize themselves in it. This is because it still expresses their transient participation in an activity that has now withdrawn from them. However, the work always remains below the power that inspired it, even though it may now surpass the state in which the worker has established themselves. Among beings who act, some are focused on the result of the action and become slaves, while others are focused on the principle that gives it movement and life, and they are liberated.

Sometimes self-love seems capable of sustaining activity, but in reality, it corrupts it because it greedily seeks to taste its fruit. It urges activity towards success, thereby depriving it of its innocence, power, and the mysterious secret of its fertility. An act always produces a fruit, but the activity must neither make an effort to hasten it nor should sensitivity linger to enjoy it. The fruit should not be despised, but the virtue of the fruit lies in containing the seed that always gives rise to new growth.

There are actions that leave visible works behind them, such as sculpture, industry, and generation, and there are others that leave no trace, such as dance, intellectual pursuits, and love. It is the latter that are the most noble: they leave no trace in time; they are indistinguishable from their object. And when they have ceased, all that remains is a pure memory or a more perfect power.

6. Actions and the pure act.

No one can avoid making a distinction between actions and pure act. A man of action commits his life to time. He has perseverance: he seeks to determine the future in advance. All the events that present themselves to him arouse and renew his energy. He values an end based on the effort he must make to attain it; and even the obstacles he encounters seem to assist him by arousing in him the ambition to overcome them. Thus, it is unanimously recognized that action involves a duration during which it is exercised, a series of phases through which it gradually realizes itself, resistances that test it, but also make it imperfect and, in certain cases, cause it to fail.

The act is more difficult to define. It has more nobility. If one repeatedly tries out this beautiful word “act,” which is perfectly simple and perfectly pure, the only one that no epithet can alter or weaken, one wonders if it would not be appropriate to reserve it for some sacred use. The act knows no effort, duration, weariness, failure, repetition, or diversity. The characteristic of human industry is to seek similarities, in order to be able to indefinitely repeat an action that has succeeded once. But the characteristic of the act is to always produce new effects through an always identical principle. The act establishes a link between eternity and duration; in itself, it is eternal, but it allows all its effects to flow in duration. No action is ever capable of satisfying us; but the act always places the infinite within each of our actions and, as long as our mind is fully present to it, it gives us absolute contentment.

A perfect activity that precisely corresponds to its end does not merely occupy the space that is proper to it; [132] it infinitely extends beyond. It fills the universe. There is in it a boundless generosity, a love that embraces all that exists, a gift of grace where grace is entirely present. It makes no choices. It is a simple consent to life. It takes an interest in the smallest events, and the lack of material gives it greater purity. It does not seek to elevate us above ourselves. It knows no exaltation or violence. It has no demands. It is generous; it seeks only to communicate itself, that is, to give itself. And this is a gift that surpasses all other gifts, for it is the very power to produce them.

7. Perfection of activity.

The state to which our entire life aspires, and in which we would like to establish ourselves eternally, is not a state of peace, which is too close to inertia and death, nor a state of enjoyment in which we would have too much to endure and too [133] little to understand and do. It is the state of joyful, disinterested, and innocent activity, fruitful without effort, and always radiant and communicative. There are beings to whom this state is given as a natural grace, others who can only know it through intelligence and obtain it through a victory over themselves: the former are models that are admired, and the latter are masters that are imitated.

Sometimes our activity suddenly ceases to be restrained or delayed; we realize that it is because it has surpassed the stage of desires and attempts, because it has released a power that exceeds it, a movement to which it abandons itself. It is defeated, but it consents to its defeat. Now, what belongs to it is this consent that it can refuse; it is not the very act it accomplishes, since this act comes from a higher place, persists beyond the moment it is done, and no longer concerns the self once it has agreed to entrust its destiny to it, so to speak.

But what always remains ours is that personal and laborious search [134] through which, struggling against all movements of self-love, we aim to achieve that perfect effacement, that perfect docility that will open a path to such activity deep within ourselves. What is ours is the tremor it produces in our consciousness as it passes through it, the emotion and light it imparts. It seems as though our being has received a divine touch that momentarily lifts it above itself.

The perfect act is a dictated act: and we cannot be under the illusion that it belongs to us, even in the instant it is realized. Memory is incapable of retaining possession of it. Whenever it is reproduced, it always appears new to us. It never transforms into an image that is merely observed, or a faculty that is at our disposal: it has no individual character. It is a gift that we receive, and beings most different from us receive it just as we do. The characteristic of consciousness is to yield passage to it, and it is when it has renounced everything that is separate within it that it is best capable of welcoming it.

8. Passivity.

It seems that of all our states, the state of perfect passivity is the easiest to attain. For it seems easier to suffer than to act. However, this is only an appearance. There is a kind of passivity, or silence of the soul, which is also the supreme point of activity, consisting in becoming perfectly docile and receptive toward our spiritual movements, without slowing them down or stopping them through the initiatives of self-love. It is a state of innocence far removed from that aimless preoccupation, which is our most constant state and renders us both incapable of acting and unfit to hear all the calls addressed to us. There is a divine character in passivity: it is the inner opening through which a being, attentive to itself, consents to the inspiration that solicits it.

Whether in sensory knowledge or spiritual knowledge, we always find ourselves in the end faced with a revelation to which we are obliged to consent. But it is this consent that is the purest act, at once the humblest and fullest, that we can accomplish. True knowledge is a union with the total being, that is, a confluence of perfect activity and perfect passivity.

All the activity of the mind is exercised in view of truth: but as soon as the mind sees it, it becomes passive towards it; its initiative merges into blessed humility. It has no greater joy than when it believes it obtains the revelation of a reality it did not create: it bows before it as before a magnificent gift bestowed upon it. And it gains a confidence in its own strength that gives it a kind of intoxication. On the contrary, it is when it most distrusts itself that it seeks to pride itself, as though on a work that belongs to it, on a science it does not believe in. For men only create truth to the extent that they deceive themselves; otherwise, they discover it.

The perfection of activity is achieved through the disappearance of the obstacle against which it initially appeared to be exercised: then the opposition between inner movement and the object to which it applies, [137] between intelligence and knowledge, between looking and seeing, between desiring and sensing, between being and having, ceases. The passivity we speak of thus reveals the essence of our purest activity, which is contrary to both idleness and effort, and in which the contradiction of these two states is both resolved and transcended: for only the perfect act gives us a sense of supreme leisure, whereas idleness distracts and restrains us; only it carries effort to its goal after swiftly traversing all the stages that separated it.

9. Virtues of contemplation.

We can only purify ourselves of all the stains of self-love through contemplation. All sentiment, all effort, all action still depend on self-love, but pure thought never does. Better than any words, better than any action, a silent and contemplative presence ennobles and spiritualizes everything that approaches it.

Therefore, action should never be proposed except as a secondary end. [138] Not only does it derive its light and purity from contemplation, but it can have no other purpose than to provide a new object for contemplation: we still contemplate our ideas in the works of our hands, and perfect contemplation is indistinguishable from the creation of the world.

Contemplatives indeed perceive the necessity of action, since it is the instrument of contemplation: thus they elevate its value instead of abolishing it. And one could even say that they excel in action, for they are close to the source that produces and illuminates it: for them, it is merely a passage that effortlessly connects two stages of contemplation. But those who are active do not always perceive the necessity of contemplation: action appears sufficient to them; they do not see that it is in contemplation that it is born and fulfilled.

In all times and in all countries, people have understood that there are beings who are destined for a life that must be filled with contemplation, and that is why monasteries have been founded. [139] However, contemplation does not require separation or submission to particular rules: it accommodates the most ordinary material and social life. It changes nothing in appearances, although it transfigures them. And even the man of action testifies to the respect he has for it, since what he seeks through action, almost without realizing it, is still to bring it forth.

At the moment of death, man renounces all action; he aspires only to pure contemplation, which is all that remains to him. But it is through it that he takes possession of himself, of his fate which is now completed, and of his entire life that appears exhausted only because it has produced all its fruit.

Action is the means, but contemplation is the goal; it is the action that culminates and suddenly becomes perfect. It identifies us with the object contemplated, not through a outpouring of feeling that is still a too personal union, from which the individual intends to retain all the profit, but through an inner renunciation where the self loses the sense of its separation and gains the presence of pure being.

Chapter VII. Self-love and sincerity

1. The center of the world and the center of oneself.

By saying “myself,” I give the world a center: for the world cannot have a material point as its center, but only a thought that perceives, wills, and feels. Only this thought can contemplate its surroundings and embrace their unity. However, we have known for a long time that the world is infinite and that its center is everywhere. Therefore, there must exist other beings everywhere who also say “myself.” No self can be asked to renounce this privilege that allows it to establish itself at the center of the world; otherwise, it would be just an object among [141] all the others. But if the self is the center of the world, then it is itself without a center. And, paradoxically, only the idea of the Whole can be the center of the self; only it can regulate all its movements, give them momentum and purpose.

Since we are masters of our movements, there is no body from which our own body cannot move away; and since we are masters of our attention, there is no idea with which our mind cannot break contact. But just as in physical space we cannot detach ourselves from our own body, in spiritual space we cannot separate ourselves from our own thought. However, if we try in vain to escape from ourselves, even more vainly would we try to escape from the Whole where we are placed to remain alone with ourselves. For we find its immutable presence everywhere; it adheres to us more strongly than our very being. We can imagine that we disappear and the Whole remains; but we cannot imagine that it disappears and we remain.

Self-awareness is sterile and exhausting because it is the awareness of our limits. But we can only draw nourishment from outside of ourselves. It is outside of ourselves that each being discovers the elements of its own substance; it is by participating in what is not itself that it creates itself endlessly. By withdrawing into itself, it loses itself: it only encounters its separate being; by referring everything to itself, it loses contact with the absolute that makes it be. But by leaving itself, it finds itself; for it constantly surpasses its limits. Only the Whole can satisfy it.

This explains why the self cannot obtain any true good such as happiness, love, or knowledge unless it goes beyond itself. These goods are given to it as soon as it no longer seeks to possess them - and one could even say that it must give itself to them in order to be capable of possessing them. It is because each of them opens up access to the Whole for the self. But the self cannot hope to reach the Whole by expanding its limited extent, by stretching its feeble forces. It can only achieve this if it accepts [143] renouncing itself: then, and only then, does the presence of the Whole reveal itself to it, a presence from which it refuses to be separated and that constantly fulfills it.

2. Sufferings of self-love.

Self-love is inseparable from our limits: it makes us suffer from feeling them so close and forces us to be content with mediocre satisfactions that can fit within the narrow space in which they confine us. It exhausts itself in inward examination, but by focusing on the destiny of our separate being and not on that principle of truth and love in which our life is rooted. At the same time, it constantly compares us to others rather than to the highest idea we can have of ourselves, and from this comparison, it derives those meager joys and pains that, by occupying us completely, make us equally miserable. It can have a lot of ingenuity, sensitivity, and finesse. But it turns them into a susceptibility that tears us apart rather than into an understanding [144] that invites us to comprehend and love everything.

It takes us away from the present and makes us feel the shame of the past or the anxiety of the future. However, the thought of the past only reveals the irreparable to us, and the thought of the future only reveals the imaginary. But it is natural for self-love to involve itself in time and be incapable of stopping at the present; for the present so closely associates our own being with the being of the Whole that the self, obliged to respond to all the solicitations pressing upon it, seems to lose its separate existence at that moment; on the contrary, the past and the future deliver it to itself. Thus, self-love attracts us to what is not: it feasts on illusions. It is self-love that constantly makes us oscillate between regret and desire; it is the opposite of love, which is an ever-present self-giving.

When one is defenselessly given over to self-love, one is subjected to constant preoccupations; at every moment, one experiences painful stings. One is tormented by ghosts or phantoms without ceasing. Inner peace, freedom, and clarity of vision are acquired only by opposing the demands [145] of self-love with the hardness of indifference. But there is an indifference that is nothing more than insensitivity, from which self-love must deliver us, and a self-love that is nothing more than susceptibility, from which another indifference must deliver us.

The perfection of activity leaves no room for self-love to arise; but self-love occupies all the gaps that activity leaves as soon as it begins to weaken. Thus, it exhausts itself either by glorifying the successes it has just achieved or by complaining about the void it leaves us in and blaming fate for it. When fate is favorable to us, one cannot tell whether self-love experiences more joy in considering itself the artisan or the favorite. When fate is contrary to us, self-love finds bitter relief in considering itself the martyr.

The disappointments of self-love sometimes strengthen it and sometimes appease it. But self-love can always be turned against itself by making it feel that its true interest commands it to forget itself. For those who have renounced the pleasures of self-love also do not experience the troubles that [146] are more numerous and more intense; thus, they gain more than they lose. And they leave the field clear for other pleasures that do not change with events and do not depend on other people. If we try to discern each of the movements of self-love by observing how it arises, how it moves and wounds us, how it renders us passive and powerless, the knowledge of the miseries it imposes on us allows us to overcome them, rekindle our activity, transport it into the universal, and restore the confidence and joy it always takes away from us.

3. Comparison with others.

We are always amazed by the violence of the movements of self-love when we compare the insignificance of the goods that individuals dispute among themselves and the immensity of those they possess in common, such as being and light. But self-love is incapable of feeling the goods that belong to all; on the contrary, it takes pride in the most miserable goods, as long as others [147] are deprived of them. What it possesses must elevate it above others so that it rejoices less in what it has than in knowing that others do not have it; it detaches itself from the greatest goods as soon as it sees them being shared. It can only experience enjoyment if it pursues an advantage that is exclusively its own; and if, in the domain where it has established itself, it has surpassed its rivals, that is sufficient for it. This domain may be very narrow: thus, self-love exhibits the most acute sensitivity in the possession of certain goods that most people consider indifferent and contemptible. And it is this strange blindness of different self-loves for each other that maintains a certain harmony among them. But it is still self-love that makes us sensitive to the ridiculousness of self-love in others.

We are almost always indulgent towards vices that we do not observe in ourselves, whether they are apparent or hidden. It happens that we subtly praise all those whom we feel stung by and, in turn, lower the virtues that we lack. However, it is not always true, as people believe, that self-love denigrates [148] vice only out of malice and to conceal its presence. It may think that it frees itself from the danger of certain vices that threaten it by condemning them vigorously when it detects them in others. It is a means of defending itself against them and, so to speak, of rejecting them from within itself. For the good opinion of others is not enough for self-love: it also wants to have a good opinion of itself, and since a vice buried deep within us often appears openly in others in all its ugliness, we sometimes repel it with all our might, not so much to deceive others as to protect ourselves from the shame it may cover us with.

The troubles of self-love sometimes arise from the consciousness of an injustice done to us when we contemplate another person’s success. This is because the actions of others, when we observe them from the outside, always appear insufficient and imperfect to us. We are always severe in our judgment of our neighbor, always ready to snatch the tool from his hands. But at the same time, we are so full of inconsistency that we [149] also complain about accomplishing, without his help, a task that we would not want to entrust to him.

Finally, if we are more grateful to others for the good they allow us to do for them than for the good they do to us, it is because the former strengthens our self-love while the latter humiliates it.

4. Virtues of self-love.

Self-love is so ingenious that, in order to avenge the sufferings it inflicts on itself, it has come to be accepted that it is a vice to not have it. But this is not without reason. For where self-love is absent, there is only a mediocre sense of self and little delicacy. It is when self-love is strongest that it experiences the greatest joy in losing itself, as if by losing itself, it infinitely enlarges itself. Love is the point where self-love abandons itself in the very extreme where it finds itself fulfilled. This explains the apparent paradox: that the one who feels most keenly the misery and wounds [150] of self-love is most capable of renouncing it and sacrificing it.

For those who know how to love best are also those who have the most vivid consciousness of their separate being. The word “love” is too beautiful to think that nothing good can arise from self-love. The remedy for all the ills it engenders can only be to push it to the extreme: when it goes beyond everything it can ever possess, it sheds its individual form and therefore sheds itself; it then transforms into love of God. Even our very effort to be perfect comes only from a deeper and more demanding self-love than the effort to appear perfect.

Self-love arises with self-awareness. Like consciousness, it implies duality; it distinguishes within the same being the one who loves and the one who is loved. But just as consciousness, utilizing a light that comes from above, should not only illuminate the self but the entire universe, love surpasses me, and although it initially applies to me, it only fulfills its purpose and meaning when it applies to everything that [151] exists. However, some always act out of self-love, even in the good they do for others, and they conform to the law of the individual. Others act out of love even in the good they appear to do for themselves, and they conform to the law of God. Finally, there are those who so completely confuse self-love and love that these two sentiments always lend each other mutual support, and they conform to the law of our nature.

Thus, most people find joy in serving, and the measure of their ambition is the extent of the service they believe they are called to render, so that their self-love is inadvertently associated with ends that surpass them. The reality of the service rendered should make us tolerant of the benefit that self-love derives from it, and we should admire the wisdom of the means nature employs in the very works where selfishness seems most involved. Since every person must serve, no one should quibble over the services of all those who serve out of both self-love and love.

5. Sincerity.

  1. Sincerity.

The most perfect sincerity is found both in the humblest souls and in the greatest, which proves the kinship of humility and greatness. Self-love destroys sincerity; but humility does not allow self-love to arise, and greatness abolishes it.

Whether truth humiliates us or lifts us up, we should speak of ourselves, and even think of ourselves, with much reserve and delicacy. Otherwise, truth becomes immodesty or complacency of self-love. Inner sincerity is subtle and full of perils. Some scrupulous individuals fail in it by giving too much prominence to certain secret thoughts that are not yet temptations and to which the mind has not given the slightest consent. Undoubtedly, they trace a faint path in us that is enough to prevent us from completely disowning them; and yet they are not acts that commit us, nor even desires [153] that seduce us; they are possibilities that we only catch a glimpse of, calls to which we do not yet respond. But by considering them too closely, by bringing them to the lips to confess them, we give them a consistency they did not have in that troubled and mixed background where all the powers of human nature begin to form and still struggle for existence. Such demanding sincerity should not illuminate them with too bright a light and, by revealing them, allow them to penetrate us unexpectedly before they have even belonged to us. We are not responsible for all our thoughts, and the worst ones are sometimes a sign of richness: but we are responsible for taking pleasure in them, for preferring them to others, for seeking to evoke them, and for giving them a beginning of reality by the simple movement of attention.

The most tender and delicate souls find it easier to be sincere towards themselves than to be sincere towards others; for they fear the cruelty of words and even that of the gaze. And yet this sincerity towards [154] others is the image and consequence of the former; it must only be filled with discretion and love; it is a gift that we cannot refuse to others without showing them indifference or contempt. It is not merely a pure simplicity free from any self-interest; it signifies the trust we have in another being and the esteem in which we hold him. It fully satisfies us only if it keeps no reserve; but undoubtedly there is no intelligence clear and self-assured enough to hope to succeed in this: it requires all the power of love and the depth of communion between two beings that surpasses both the power of intelligence and the power of will.

6. Nakedness of the spirit.

This acute sincerity, by which the self becomes perfectly transparent and which is a stripping of the flesh and a luminous gaze of God within ourselves, is not the prelude to inner life, it is already its fulfillment. Sincerity has many enemies: haste, fear, vanity, [155] habit, external solicitations, the taste for elegance or virtue. But the nature of the spirit is to bring us into the presence of God, to reduce us to an act of pure sincerity. Thus, the life of the spirit is a perpetual initiation and a perpetual purification: for it is the act by which the spirit learns to find itself, to acquire that perfect purity that makes it sensitive only to the light.

Matter is like a garment under which we must feel the presence of the spirit as that of a naked body. But the garment reveals the body and conceals it at the same time; it has more or less grace and flexibility; it lends itself to various artifices. In some cases, it can even go so far as to make us forget the body, to be preferred to the body, and even to take the place of the body. Only those with clear eyes and pure hands can penetrate to the body.

Most people delight in enveloping themselves in veils, but the simplest or most dazzling veils, no matter how much they seduce us, only move us because of what they reveal of the body. Each of us wears [156] a garment of prejudices and self-love, a garment that conceals our true being and from which we can never completely strip ourselves. And even if we always fear abandoning it, for it is made by human hands; it protects us; it creates our appearance and our prestige; beneath it, when we encounter the body, we are afraid of this reality that is so sober, so gentle and mobile, so foreign to all ornamentation, that we can no longer abolish and that we can no longer bear to see; we almost immediately cover it with fabric, sometimes rich, sometimes poor, and always borrowed. Since in the body we only reveal the parts through which the life of the spirit becomes visible to others, the hand and the face, we must keep secret all the parts of inner life that betray the presence of the individual and the body.

It is understandable why any knowledge appears so cruel. It is enough for me to look at another person with too much penetration, without there being in me the slightest movement of self-love or hatred, for him to feel wounded, violated in the innermost part of himself. [157] He only consents to reveal what he is through a veil, and he does not want to receive the bright glare of light into his flesh without it being softened by shadow.

But this gaze that exposes him should not stop at the individual form of his being, which always makes him feel ashamed and miserable. In discovering the secret of others, we must also reveal our own. Above all, our gaze must testify to such a call for sympathy that it gives the person to whom it is addressed enough courage to see himself, enough ardor to seek to surpass himself, enough confidence to want to enter with us into a simple and true world where no being has any veils left.

7. Inner life and outward life.

Spiritual life begins from the moment we discover that the reality of our actions lies in the thoughts that produce them. Then appearances cease to satisfy us: no matter how much we modify them, we change nothing about the things themselves; [158] no effort, no artifice can prevent them from being what they are. We live in front of a witness to whom nothing is hidden, who is much more perspicacious than ourselves and who is the gaze of God. Only he can penetrate all appearances and discover our true being.

Lying is only possible because individuals can only show others an appearance of themselves. We should be able to show ourselves to the gaze of another person as we are under the gaze of God; and it is the mark of perfect simplicity to abolish any distinction between being and appearance. But only the purest individuals can achieve this. We deceive others by modifying our appearance, which is the only thing in us that they can know and that is more directly under our control than ourselves; and we believe that their gaze will never be attentive enough, penetrating enough, or perhaps loving enough to surpass it.

But we deceive ourselves as much as we deceive others because we form a kind of society with ourselves and we also present ourselves [159] as a spectacle to ourselves: only the error is much more serious here, for reality eventually eludes us when we have eyes only for the spectacle. But just as we never completely deceive others, we never completely deceive ourselves. We only agree to establish ourselves on the terrain of appearance and to agree that it is sufficient for us. The clarity of our judgments about the most admired individuals, as soon as we approach them, proves that it is very difficult to be deceived. And the effort we make in turn to play our role proves that it is a role we are playing.

There should be no distinction between our private conduct and our public conduct. The latter only has value if it expresses the former, if it is its image or fruit. However, most people apply their will to their public conduct: they exhaust themselves in creating a borrowed face and thus believe that they elevate themselves above themselves. In their private conduct, they relax and abandon themselves; and they then find themselves [160] cowardly and miserable. Yet there are very pure individuals who are only truly themselves in solitude; public life bruises them, awakens their self-love, hurts or overwhelms them, making them appear inferior to all others whose means of action and successes they despise without being able to match them. Only the strongest individuals make no distinction between their private conduct and their public conduct.

8. Vision of oneself and of God.

Only knowledge can give us true self-possession. It is the only possession that truly belongs to us: and when we act, it is always to acquire knowledge that we did not have before. We are dead to everything we are ignorant of: when we think we are discovering our hidden self, it is a self that we are calling into being. And whoever tries to escape knowledge is trying to escape being, as if he lacks the courage to establish himself there or to sustain its light; he aspires to be only one [161] thing, that is, to have existence only for others, who know him.

It is knowledge that reveals our inner ills; it enables us to heal them. But to know ourselves, we must be without self-love and without honor, like a patient before a physician: yet we always fear that the physician will not discover all the evil within us. It is by believing that there is nothing in our life that can remain hidden, that is, by believing that God sees everything within us, that we see ourselves. The essence of sincerity is to bring us into the presence of God. “God is the scrutinizer of hearts,” according to Malebranche, that is, the light from which nothing can escape. I can conceal what I have done or what I am from others or from myself, but not from God; that is, I cannot prevent my thoughts and actions from being what they are.

Thus, “know thyself” is not only the knowledge of oneself; it is also the knowledge of truth or of God. Amiel quotes the words of Angelus Silesius that “the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which He sees me.” And he adds that each person enters God as much as God enters him, undoubtedly meaning that it is in the light of God, and not in my own light, that I see both God and myself: because we cannot see ourselves without seeing God, just as we cannot see any object without seeing the light in which it bathes and which illuminates it.

Therefore, self-awareness is the awareness that God has of us; but this awareness is in God like the light and in us like the illumination. Or, to speak in another language, within us there is a spectator of ourselves who is God: He is the same in us and in all; He contemplates everything that is; we must unite with Him to know ourselves. For the self is like an opaque body that is enveloped by the light, but which stops it and buries it instead of allowing it to pass through and spread. But God is like the light into which all gazes penetrate and converge.

Chapter VIII. Solitude and communion [163]

1. Self-love and solitude.

Not all men are capable of making good use of solitude. Sometimes it sharpens a self-esteem that society has disappointed. Some, tired of a fame that now repels them and was nothing more than an unjust admiration or contempt, retreat into a fierce solitude, seeking a tranquility that eludes them, pursued in the furthest retreat by all the torments of public opinion. To keep intelligence sharp, activity leisurely, and happiness innocent, it was better to have obscurity with a few friends.

But sometimes self-esteem hopes to derive more substantial benefits from solitude. Because in the midst of people, it led us to seek illusory advantages that were denied to us, whereas in solitude, it believes that all the riches of the inner world will be revealed to it like a kind of secret. But these spiritual and invisible goods, which grow by being shared, cannot serve as sustenance for self-esteem: it drives them away as soon as it tries to grasp them.

We always seek the presence of God in solitude; but if we try to capture it, instead of forgetting ourselves in it, it withdraws. The slightest effort we make to appropriate it causes it to elude us, and its light itself darkens. The true inner progress achieved in solitude is not recognized by the joy that separate contemplation may give us, but by the stripping away of self-esteem, by the spiritual radiance that allows us, when we return to society, to annihilate the rivalry of interests between ourselves and others and to feel only the community of our destinies.

Self-esteem also makes it difficult for man to live in solitude and to emerge from it once he has tasted it. If it is so difficult for him to live in solitude, it is because vanity attracts him outward and scatters him among all the objects that surround him. And if it is difficult for him to leave solitude, it is because he turns everything back to himself and feels in the face of himself a sense of pride that he enjoys best when alone.

But if there can be a solitude that imprisons us in self-esteem, there is another that liberates us from it. Already, in it, an invisible society is formed that accompanies us within the visible and transfigures it. Self-esteem carries with it, even into society, a miserable solitude, but love seeks in solitude the source and already the presence of communion with all beings.

2. Cloisters.

The foundation of cloisters expresses less the need to erect a barrier between the spiritual and material world than the need to oppose to a life that has been proposed to us by God, and which is full of difficulties and trials that we have not chosen, a life that appears to us simpler and more perfect, but that obeys rules that we have given ourselves.

In the foundation of cloisters, one should not approve either the desire for separation between the temporal and the spiritual, or the desire to escape the demands of the most common existence, or the temptation to impose new demands that seem harder or more appropriate. Cloisters claim to realize a visible image of spiritual life on earth. But we should prefer the encounters that God places on our path in a more open society where all existences are mingled. Each person realizes their inner vocation through deeper and truer paths.

The solitude of the cloister is an imperfect symbol of the solitude of the soul; and those who have not found the latter in the world will not find it in the cloister. Those who allow themselves to be scattered by the world find in solitude the imagination that scatters them even more. And when they do not regret what they have lost, they abandon themselves to the torment of not finding what they came to seek. The only ones who can benefit in the cloister are those who did not need the cloister.

Monastic life is full of grandeur and pleasure, but a grandeur and pleasure that can belong to self-esteem. And it is undoubtedly against self-esteem that the most painful struggles take place in the cloister. For nothing is more difficult in solitude than discerning the voice of God from that of the individual. And it happens that the one who believes he enters the cloister only to renounce self-esteem seeks in the cloister only more violent and subtle joys of self-esteem. He flees to escape the weight of visible misery, but he imposes upon himself a misery of imagination, and the bitterness he feels is nothing more than remorse for his escape.

It is an inhumane act to withdraw from society to enjoy in solitude, and through meditation alone, oneself and God. Spiritual solitude does not exclude society; it calls for it; it is, in a sense, the ideal form of society: the idea of a perfect society that must be brought into the midst of men so that all men may enter it.

3. Solitude judges us.

The taste for solitude is not always a sign of a taste for spiritual life; it often reflects a somewhat unsociable sensitivity of self-esteem, the satisfaction one feels in remaining alone, no longer allowing oneself to be diverted from oneself, abandoning oneself to memories or dreams with complacency or bitterness. In the most favorable cases, this separation, which consists of keeping oneself away from others and abstaining from their contact, for fear that it might distract or soil us, is only a moment of virtue: it is necessary for us to purify and gather ourselves in the presence of God. But we cannot make it a permanent state without our self-esteem seeking triumph in it and our laziness finding delight in it.

No one will ever achieve anything great in the world if they cannot first withdraw into themselves, enclose themselves in perfect solitude like in a hard shell where they discover the germ of their own growth, the secret of their strength and destiny. All the powers of one’s hidden being must be gathered, tested, and matured before they are shown to the light. Once reduced to oneself and deprived of all external support, one is obliged to evoke all one’s spiritual powers in order not to perish in despair. Thus, solitude, especially if one is capable of maintaining it in the midst of other people, can only magnify him. In society, he only needs to go along to have the illusion of action; and it happens that false greatness gives him more satisfaction than true greatness. But solitude, by freeing him from all external solicitations, brings him back to the center of himself and gives birth in him to a thousand unknown and miraculous forces that change the face of the world for him and put him on an equal footing with his destiny.

A person’s worth is measured by the power of solitude that remains in him, even in the midst of society, and by the inner ardor that nourishes it. All our strength, all our joy arises from solitude, and so does all our wealth, because nothing truly belongs to us except what remains ours when we are alone.

Thus, solitude judges us: some consider it an abyss and some as a refuge. For some, it is a profound and blissful state that they do not always manage to achieve, and for others, it is a painful and tragic state that they never manage to overcome.

4. Being the same in society and in solitude.

One should not seek a compromise between solitude and society; one must know how to unite them, carrying each of them, so to speak, to the extreme: the perfection of solitude and the perfection of society merge. But for that, one must be the same in solitude and in society, showing in society only one’s solitary essence and making solitude a spiritual society with all beings. But most people are equally incapable of living in society and living in solitude. Because they need society, but to nourish their self-esteem, and they bring into solitude only the memory of the favors and wounds they owe to society. Thus, they are constantly being rejected from one to the other and cannot tolerate either.

However, someone who seeks to break their solitude because they can no longer tolerate it quickly realizes that they cannot achieve it. For who would want the company of a person who only seeks others because they are a burden to themselves? Indeed, how many people are first their own tormentors! And how can someone who causes their own unhappiness bring happiness to others? It is only if we know how to enjoy solitude that others can enjoy our company.

The society we form with other human beings is nothing but the extension of the society we form with ourselves. We are perpetually at war or at peace with them as we are with ourselves. And we feel close to other people when we are close to ourselves and far from other people when we are far from ourselves. The idle person has no contact with themselves: they are bored when alone, but they have no contact with others, who remain strangers to them, looked at with a mixture of indifference and a little anxiety. On the contrary, when our activity is exercised with confidence and joy, it fills the capacity of our mind entirely: then we can no longer be separated from ourselves, although we no longer make an effort to gather ourselves, and we are entirely focused on the event or the other person, although we no longer make an effort to approach them.

Thus, the same principle animates our solitary life and our life in the midst of others. A sort of exchange is established between them and us, which we have with ourselves. Our conscience is a kind of invisible society that maintains the same secret dialogue between our thoughts, a dialogue that never ceases in the external and visible society with other beings.

Moreover, the relationship between solitude and society is so close that its full meaning can only be understood by always remaining solitary in society and by constantly forming a spiritual society with oneself. Thus, it may not be necessary to separate periods of isolation and periods of communal life as strictly as is sometimes proposed. Because the one who is not distracted from solitude, even in the midst of a crowd, even in the presence of their best friend, who always maintains possession of themselves and the lucidity of inner vision, dwells near a living source where all their actions and thoughts are nourished; and they perceive only calls around them that urge them to make it gush forth and spread it.

5. Separation.

Sometimes, in the communication we seek to have with other beings, there comes a moment when we suddenly realize that it is being denied, whether it is our fault or theirs or the fault of nature. Then, in order not to turn it into hatred or war, we must know how to interrupt it and reserve it. We should never ask something of a being that they are not capable of giving, nor offer them something that they are not capable of receiving. Otherwise, we repel them.

All human beings must be mediators for one another. We should never refuse to be for others the mediator they are waiting for, the one who reveals them to themselves, who constantly lifts them above their present state and multiplies in them motives for trust and joy.

But nothing is more delicate than achieving real communication between two minds; if it proves to be impossible, it should not be forced. It may be an act of courtesy and charity to know how to abstain. The contact should not be sought at any cost because the effort made to create it when it is refused, the loss of innocence in the offer made of oneself, an ulterior motive and a preoccupation with success in the gestures made and the words spoken are enough to corrupt the entire enterprise. When communication occurs between two consciences, it is always a surprise and a marvel for each of them; but it is the possession of a good that can only be attained because one did not desire it. For self-esteem is what desires it; and self-esteem must renounce and cease to act completely for this communication to be possible: it can only claim it but cannot produce it or enjoy it.

No communication should be attempted when we foresee that it will be rejected. Then, a timidity arises within us that is not only a result of self-esteem but of the respect we have for the feelings we were about to reveal, which are fragile beings that we do not want to expose to hurt and contempt. We try to spare them a bad reception, and we do not want to reject these guests sent by God, who make His presence felt among us. By exposing such a precious treasure to indifferent or hostile eyes, you violate a secret, you corrupt sacred things. Those who now see it openly, and who have not recognized it, were closer to seeing it when they did not see it. At most, it should be hinted at to draw attention and desire to it, and one should know how to wait for the moment when consciousness is ready to receive it and be moved by it. The most painful solitude is the one that follows a failed communication.

6. Witnesses.

The loquacious or silent society of an indiscreet or indifferent witness weighs down, enslaves, endlessly prolongs each minute of our lives, and gives us the keenest desire for solitude. But it is better to have someone beside us who has no thoughts than someone with thoughts too different from ours. For every mind, as soon as it ceases to accord with another mind, is hindered in its own movement and, in order to maintain itself, calls upon the help of obstinacy and self-love. On the contrary, the presence of a thoughtless spectator can lend it a sort of silent support, just as the immobility of our surroundings sustains and encourages all our movements.

When our life is too intertwined with that of others, our thoughts rarely enjoy perfect freedom: even esteem, respect, and sympathy become chains for them. It requires a subtle and delicate understanding with another being for their presence to be a stimulus for our thoughts and not an impediment. Yet it often happens that we mistake the emulation of self-love for a mutual communion in the same truth.

But each person encounters those they deserve. There are blessed encounters that render us more lucid than when we are alone. The mere presence of certain privileged beings compels us, so to speak, to place ourselves under the gaze of God. For consciousness achieves its most acute and moving form not in the spectacle of nature, nor even in the pure spectacle of itself, but in that agonizing dialogue it sustains with another consciousness in whom it suddenly discovers an initiative that fills it with fear and hope, a call addressed to it, an answer given to it, a gift it can receive, a gift it can offer.

However, if another consciousness remains before ours as a pure witness, it almost always suspends all our movements: for to recognize our presence is to love, to desire, and to suffer with us. But even in love, which is the most perfect form of communication between two finite beings, each must retain the delicate sense of their own individuality and the contrast that sets them apart from the other, so that love never ceases to provide passage and bridge the gap.

Modesty and sympathy prevent us from revealing too much insight into either bodies or feelings. Any penetration is a wound. Thus, we see certain overly sensitive individuals who dare not lift their eyes to others because they possess timidity and a certain fearful kindness. They know that the gaze is always sharp and cruel, but they forget that its penetration, when it reaches far enough, also heals the wounds it inflicts. It must first reach the individual to the core, tearing apart even the flesh of self-love. But it goes beyond the individual, for within the gaze lies all the generosity and gentleness of light. It then becomes an active and benevolent presence that acknowledges the separation between beings only to create a communion between them filled with love.

7. Reserve and abandonment.

Communication with others is all the more perfect when it eliminates all reserve, all inclination to show oneself as different from what one is, to subtly alter the features of one’s face or mood. And the very sign of accomplished communication is the feeling of exact sincerity, of rigorous self-disclosure, and absolute nakedness that makes us believe we are covered by a garment only when we are alone, which falls as soon as another person appears.

But such communication cannot be sought or forced when it eludes us, for then self-love would take its place. It always requires complete abandonment, and for abandonment to occur, the individual’s attachment to oneself must be abolished. However, it should not be said that abandonment is the norm; discretion is the norm. It requires an infinite respect for the privacy of each individual, and it is discretion that gives value to abandonment.

We should not offer ourselves to those who refuse or extend beyond what they can embrace; at least we should only propose the gift and not humiliate ourselves to have it received. The communication between two beings is a grace bestowed upon them, and God reveals Himself to them without warning by illuminating their encounter, realizing it, and giving it a meaning that annuls and surpasses it. Therefore, regardless of the particular concerns that occupy them, this grace should not be rejected. It should not be anticipated, provoked, or overly eagerly sought. It requires a state of pure consent, a confident passivity, and blissful expectation.

Once a real communication has been established between two beings, it cannot be taken back. It has brought them into contact with eternity, a point of no return. Sometimes it may seem that it can be forgotten, but that is because it was not truly attained. Its manifestations may be suspended, and daily tasks may render it invisible, but then it possesses a more secret strength. It reappears when a new opportunity allows it to be exercised. Each time, it elevates us to a principle that contains infinite effects within itself.

There is no communication between two beings that does not imply absolute reciprocity from the very beginning. We seek to unite only with those who already welcome us, and we can only welcome those who are already one with us. The beauty of communion between two beings lies in the fact that each retreats into oneself and goes beyond oneself simultaneously; one discovers within oneself an inexhaustible richness that, through the mediation of a unique being, becomes common to all beings and grows continually by being shared.

8. Communion among human beings.

Leibniz regarded spirits as impenetrable to one another, but that is the law of bodies. Bodies move away from one another by their very nature as bodies. Spirits come closer and unite by their very nature as spirits, to the extent that they are purer spirits. Each of them then acquires more movement and more wealth. They are even more present to themselves as they communicate more with another spirit, for they then distance themselves from the body, which carries them outward, and turn inward toward the common hearth that grants them and all other spirits intimacy and light. The spirit simultaneously permeates spirits and bodies; it is perfect transparency, light without shadow, and the very gaze of God present in all that is.

“Ubi sunt duo vel tres congregati in nomine meo, ibi sum in medio eorum” (Matthew 18:20), the Gospel says. Sometimes solitude binds us too closely to ourselves. And when we rely on it to obtain spiritual life, it often brings us only individual reveries in which desire continually takes pleasure. Yet it is the same light that illuminates all humans; it does not belong exclusively to any of them. The encounter with another human being can sometimes provide us with a miraculous opening onto the world. The agreement of two consciences with each other, a double consent to the same truth, abolishes their separation. Any other understanding between two beings is merely apparent; it can only be a satisfaction and complicity of self-love. It isolates individuals while seeming to unite them. Relationships with another being have no charm or strength; they become a game that quickly wearies us if they do not enable us to be more present to ourselves, to exercise our inner activity more freely and perfectly when we are with the other than when we are alone. They must make us capable of overcoming all the alarms of individual modesty in the grace of pure abandonment.

Separated beings cannot communicate directly with each other, but only through knowledge and love of an object common to them. Society forms between them only through their participation in the same goods within the diversity of their individual vocations. The joy they experience when they realize that they unknowingly shared the same thoughts or affections reveals in them a kind of natural and voluntary identity that is the principle of their security and growth. It is impossible for one who awakens to the life of the spirit not to seek to awaken all others to the same life.

"Any truth communicated to another," according to Oscar Wilde, "diminishes the faith we had in it." These are the words of the weak who take pleasure only in themselves, who abandon and scorn an idea if they see it shared, and who lack the strength to establish themselves in a truth that surpasses them, living only to be received and given.

9. Populated solitude.

Nothing is more populated than solitude. And it is the society of other humans that appears to us like a desert as soon as it dispels those beautiful movements of thought that constantly stir us when we are alone. The society of humans thrusts us into a frightful isolation if we fail to maintain within it that solitude of the mind that only expands in their presence, allowing us to feel the most secret communications with them.

Only perfect solitude makes us capable of embracing everything. The one who withdraws into solitude is filled with love, and the one who disperses far and wide carries everywhere a desire that no object can ever satisfy. By freeing us from all the movements of self-love that constantly agitate us among humans, solitude creates an inner void in us that only the Whole is capable of filling. For solitude consists in refusing to lose oneself outside of oneself, in order to prepare within oneself an inner abode where the whole world can be received. However, one who allows oneself to be distracted by the external is a wanderer who has no home; they continually become estranged from themselves and everything that is.

The contact between two beings is always a contact between two solitudes. And through this contact, neither solitude is broken; in fact, it becomes even more intimate and secret. However, its boundaries have expanded, and it has more light. Those who are best capable of communicating with others are also those who know best how to safeguard their solitude. For another being to penetrate it, no one should be able to disturb it.

That is why love is a perfect form of self-awareness. The mere self-awareness already reveals in our solitude two distinct beings engaged in eternal dialogue with each other, and love continues the same dialogue between two initially distinct beings, enveloping them in a shared solitude. However, only God, who is the perfect solitary, can receive the totality of beings in His infinite love.

10. Solitude in God.

Solitude is like a sphere that encloses the soul and separates it from all creation. And within this sphere, one is left alone with God. Initially, humans live among other humans, but once they have discovered the inner world, solitude becomes a sanctuary for them. For we know God and unite with Him only in solitude.

Solitude is an imitation of God, who is an infinite solitary. It compels us to discover within ourselves a spiritual presence where everything that exists can be received.

The solitary person lives in God but also seeks, like God, to be self-sufficient. However, a finite being cannot take the place of God in this way. Shall we say that the greatest human being is the one who encompasses the broadest horizon within themselves, and therefore, for whom solitude is the easiest to bear? Yet, they continually exclaim, “Lord, you have made me powerful and solitary.” And they can only be self-sufficient when God responds to them, that is, when they can no longer find anything within themselves or any finite being that can satisfy them, and they renounce everything that belongs to them, recognizing within themselves an infinite presence that can never fail them.

But the greatest human being does not need solitude to be imposed upon them in order to live in solitude. They are alone everywhere; the difference is that instead of being alone with themselves, they are alone with God. This solitude is a thousand times more intimate and fruitful than any particular union that can bind us to specific beings. Even such unions are possible only to the extent that they prolong, manifest, and realize the union that each being has with God. Those who have severed all communication with God are desperate in solitude, and they are incapable of creating a real society with any human being that can break down the barriers in which every finite being is always confined.

The one who seeks solitude does not flee from others to be alone with themselves, for they know well that they will find nothing but misery once reduced to themselves. They desire solitude only because the unions they have formed in the world quickly reveal their limitations. What they desire is solitude with God, that is, an inner and total union with the limitless being, where all previous unions become mere separations. Thus, their taste for solitude is identical to their taste for the perfection of spiritual love. They take refuge in solitude when particular friendships reveal their insufficiency. However, in the silent emptiness of solitude, their soul is filled by an infinite object from which all particular friendships draw the light that illuminates and the strength that multiplies them.

Chapter IX. Love

1. Love and will.

Love is a consent of our entire being that does not consult the will but shakes it to its roots. Often it sneaks into us by surprise, without the consciousness being aware. And there can be the same blindness in the love that asks and the love that grants. When we suddenly discover its presence, it is too late to choose. And the sign that it is there is that our will, even though it feels troubled, has no strength against it. When it awakens and questions itself, it realizes that it has already given everything. It has disposed of itself unknowingly with a certainty and an impulse that far surpass its remaining power.

Thus, when love is present, the will cannot consider refusing its own consent. The resistance of the will can only be the resistance of self-love. When it triumphs, it is because self-love is stronger. On its own, the will is feeble and powerless; and the best will in the world could not serve to prove the lack of love. But as soon as love appears, it recognizes its master; it feels its weakness, but it is happy to feel weak. Its destiny is to obey without daring to resist or judge. It discovers a world that surpasses it but where its place is fixed. It no longer hesitates, it no longer seeks. Light has come. It perceives the horizon. It knows where it is going. It is now an attentive, eager, and joyful servant.

One should not hope to overcome love through an act of will. Because love is the deepest wish of our entire being. But one must delve deep enough into our soul so that only a love may be born in it that does not humiliate our will.

The will reveals both the weakness of love as soon as it comes to its aid and its strength as soon as it tries to fight it. Those who strive to maintain a duty-bound love with another being divert their power to love from its true end, using it without benefit to themselves or others, and eventually cease to believe in any other love than this illusory will to love.

2. Development of love.

Love is often believed to arise in the soul without being sought, like ideas. And, like ideas, when we seek it, it seems to elude us. Everything in it resembles grace and inspiration. But perhaps grace and inspiration offer themselves to all people, although very few people know how to welcome them. Thus, love always supposes an expectation and an inner consent, very different from the vain efforts of desire that push it away while thinking they call it forth. And just as someone who patiently awaits ideas gradually sees them present themselves and engage in a spiritual dialogue, someone who shows enough trust in love not to rush it finds it suddenly blossoming in their heart and awakening an echo.

It happens that the strongest love is not the one that reveals itself to us suddenly, but the one that, without appearing to consult us, slowly insinuates itself under our eyes. Love that reaches its peak at the first encounter quickly disappoints us: it passes like the instant that produced it. Love must be an inner act in which the whole being can, by engaging in it, discover both perfect fullness and infinite potentiality; only then does it gather all the moments of time within itself and penetrate into eternity.

Love arises from the contemplation of the beloved object; when contemplation ceases, love also ceases.

Therefore, imagination projects before itself the figure of the beloved object, which constantly appears more beautiful. It is important that this figure detach itself from us and our present happiness, that it constantly form a new goal before us, which in possession itself never ceases to recede and which we never cease pursuing.

As a result, there is no love that can live and endure if it engenders a habit; for habit engenders security, which blinds us. It is only when this blindness is broken, either by betrayal or by death, that we discover a secret sweetness in the broken habit. But it is no longer time to savor it: we then think about what it could have been rather than what it was.

Love is always an action. And when it ceases to be, it ceases to exist. Every action looks towards the future and contributes to its creation. Love that does not constantly concern itself with maintaining and increasing itself is destined to disappear. Love is like a fire that must be watched over. The intensity of its flame, its brilliance and light, depend on our care. If we abandon it to itself, soon only coals remain on the ashes.

3. Self-love and love.

Self-love painfully makes us feel our limits, while love always carries us beyond them.

But there is a perpetual debate between love and self-love, and these two opposites often have the same beginning. Love initially excites self-love, and one could even say that it develops it until it bursts forth and destroys it.

The most wretched form of love consists of loving another body that is only an extension of love for our own body and that distrusts or hates the spirit because the spirit, which unites all beings, would come to disturb its solitary possession. Thus, it separates us from other people, sharpens, in the secret established between us and the beloved object, the stings of self-love, and multiplies its pleasures and pains. It is only an apparent love: it is self-love that has taken on another face.

Many people do not know any other love. Instead of expressing a renunciation of self and a union with another being in the universal, love for them is only an alliance between two selfishnesses serving each other. They turn to their advantage even the subtle agreement that reigns between their thoughts, which is only a means for them to give and receive certain immaterial caresses. Thus, love should be a principle of union and a principle of separation at the same time: it would unite two beings only to increase their separate pleasure. And its attentive indulgences would have no other object than to allow each of them to feel with greater acuteness all that they possess.

True love abolishes all separations. It soothes and enlightens us; it establishes unity in our soul by uniting us with another being and, through them, with the whole universe. It spreads even to those from whom it should separate us: it suddenly makes us sensitive to their humanity. In this perfect intimacy that miraculously breaks down the barriers of individuality between two beings, all other beings can receive a spiritual welcome: this is the visible form of a happy love that is true to its ultimate purpose.

Any being to whom we give ourselves completely with a fervent joy where our own will is no longer felt, ceases to defend itself. Every gift that we make of ourselves without expecting anything in return is already returned to us. By renouncing ourselves, we become one with the pure spirit; we make room for it; and in it, all particular beings find access and communion. It interrupts all the debates of self-love; and, losing self-love in favor of love, it fulfills all the ambitions of self-love and surpasses them. Love cannot be the complicity of two selfishnesses that, isolating themselves from the world, make this isolation the source of their delights. It dissolves these two selfishnesses and creates around them a wider circle that constantly expands to include the entire universe.

4. Desire and possession.

Too often, love is thought of as a violent movement that carries us toward an object from which we are deprived. It is then confused with desire. It is less willingly studied in possession, as if it only appears in all its strength when it encounters obstacles that prevent it from being satisfied. Moreover, possession is often imagined as a desire that always dies out and always rekindles.

But if love is nothing more than a tense movement toward an end, as soon as that end is reached and it can be exercised without obstacles, it ceases to exist. It no longer has an object once it has found its object. Thus, love is most sensitive to consciousness when it is unhappy, when it is a powerful and unsatisfied aspiration. Then a violent duality appears within us between what we desire and what we possess, and in this self-division, the depth of passion is revealed.

On the other hand, happy love produces inner peace, harmony within souls, and harmony between souls. It is said that they forget the rest of the world; but it would be truer to say that they forget themselves, for the entire world is now present within them, and it seems to them that by obeying its law, they contribute to guiding its course. Perhaps, it is true, they no longer retain a distinct feeling of this love at the end; but it is because it is fused with their very being. They no longer entertain the thought that they have not always known it or that they might one day be deprived of it, and this is a sign that time has disappeared for them.

For most people, love does not extend beyond possession; once it is assured, it gives rise to boredom, fatigue, and disgust. They need the crises of uncertainty and jealousy to shake their sensitivity. They seek troubled loves that live only on hope and fear, that sharpen themselves on obstacles, and in which desire is seasoned with impatience and possession with anxiety. It takes great wisdom and strength to prefer an equal and complete love that allows us to enjoy the present, without ever exhausting it, of a happiness that the thought of the future no longer gives fear but is transformed into thanksgiving, nor hope that is transformed into action of grace. Those who know love best are not those whose desire is the strongest, for possession disappoints them, but those who know how to embrace in possession the richest harvest.

Almost all the misfortunes of love come from the fact that it is infinitely more difficult to possess than to desire. It is the law of desire to die in its own satisfaction: it only dies to be reborn and to die again. Love knows no such vicissitudes. It is constantly reborn from itself, never paying tribute to death. And while desire always runs towards its own destruction, love introduces us to eternity.

5. Love and affection.

Sometimes love is spoken of where there is trust, honesty, esteem, and admiration. These feelings do not replace love. They are not sufficient to create that total communication between two beings where there can be no secrets, where each penetrates the other’s innermost depths, and where the universe merges with the perpetually expanding circle of their shared inner life. They leave each individual with too clear a self-awareness, too much freedom to dispose of oneself. Each person retains a distinct sense of their own difference. They do not penetrate each other’s consciousness; they do not allow themselves to be penetrated. The affection they show is always governed by judgment. These are elective relationships that delicately reproduce the relationships we have in common with all human beings; they are privileged effects of the common inclination that draws them to one another and that, in each case, must accord with justice and truth. By pushing them to the extreme, love seems to abolish them. Because the essence of love is to occupy the entire universe; the deepest affection only occupies a part of it.

The generous effort we make to give ourselves to a being we esteem is enough to show that we do not love them with love. And yet, affection, mutual sincerity, and perfect trust that exist between two beings often suffice to elevate each of them to the heights of the other’s best qualities.

We encounter certain souls that are mobile, ardent, and filled with a kind of restrained tremor, souls that know the most powerful and secret inner aspirations, that seem to seek an ambitious solitude and neglect the ordinary course of life around them, but that anxiously call for someone who understands them, who penetrates their intimacy, and who shakes their hidden life. Their silence is an expectation, and their gaze sometimes closes and sometimes questions, barely containing the joy they already feel in giving themselves.

They sometimes find an affection slightly below them, but they know how to make it a union so perfect and tender that they do not regret a gift they did not receive; they lose the awareness of having lacked it. Their soul has kept the same movements, but affection now allows them to pour them out and communicate them, and the response they receive, however humble, is enough for them to imagine that they have found the object that was meant to satisfy them. If the encounter with true love could revive in them the hope that deceived them in the past, they would no longer be troubled, for they have acquired enough security and happiness to retain their benefits, to pour them into an affection that initially seemed so moderate, and to succeed in purifying and enlarging it by this means.

6. Silence of intimacy.

Within us, there is a zone of silence where a part of our inner life locks itself away, either because we don’t want anyone to penetrate it, or because we feel powerless to do so; it marks the limit of our love.

But deep within each of us, there is also a well of silence that we dare not even lean over without the presence of love.

Intimacy, indeed, is not always the result of love; often, it precedes it. Sometimes, it gives birth to love without our even having thought about it. It can infinitely increase a humble and timid love. But the love in which we have placed all our trust does not always withstand intimacy.

Is there a love so perfect that it allows us to always speak aloud everything we say in a whisper? But one can think that the role of love is first to change the nature of everything we say in a whisper. And this is undoubtedly the meaning of the most perfect love, which is the love of God.

The distinction between what we say aloud and what we say in a whisper is the measure of our separation and solitude. As soon as solitude ceases, self-love no longer makes itself heard as a separate voice. It is also not necessary for us to always speak aloud, as if what we think were invisible, or as if we wanted to conceal it by pretending to reveal it. Our most silent words are immediately heard by the soul that loves us, and since we live with it in constant communication, these words always find in it a response, that is, an echo. The greatest benefit of love is to bring about a purification of our secret life by freeing it from the limits of self-love, by revealing to it a deeper intimacy where different beings commune.

Thus, there is a silence of intimacy that is more poignant than all words, for it signifies a delicate respect for material separation and an immediate and perfect penetration between souls. By breaking it, words not only appear useless and crude, but they are seen as obstacles rather than means; they painfully remind us of our duality instead of abolishing it. They make us feel the presence of our body that we must forget and violate its modesty.

In the presence of the beloved, silence has more value than words; it possesses more richness and subtlety than the finest words. Unlike words, it does not limit the movement of the imagination. It maintains in the communion of beings a purely spiritual character, whereas words highlight the presence of the body that separates them and, by affirming love, seem to seek to strengthen it further.

It is only in silence that love becomes aware of its miraculous essence, its freedom, and its power of intimacy. Words destroy its down and its ever-burgeoning grace. Who can doubt that in Paradise, spirits enjoy themselves by communicating with God and with other spirits in the fervor of perfect silence?

7. Contemplative love.

There is no possession more perfect and pure than that which the gaze bestows. We possess everything we see.

However, people often prefer to entrust themselves to more obscure powers; for in sight, as in intelligence, there is too much transparency and clarity for them: the spirit finds itself reduced to an overly stripped-down activity. They only love their passions. They feel stronger the more agitation they receive, and they confuse possession with the obscure and passive movements of the lower senses. However, visual perceptions are not only meant to reveal distant objects that will provide us with more solid pleasures when we are close to them. They are not just promises or signs of things to come. They offer us a purer, more delicate, and more complete knowledge of the universe than other perceptions. They can detach themselves from the passions of the flesh. They present the world to us in a tranquil and blissful light. Thus, to love is to desire from the beloved an increasingly expansive, precise, and penetrating vision that would let nothing escape.

But this is only a sensory symbol of true love. We do not love the body; we love the spiritual being, an being we do not see. However, one cannot love an object that one is ignorant of; we only love its idea. But it is precisely the only love in which the one who loves can hope to possess the beloved. For the being resides entirely in the act of thought, and there can be no closer intimacy than that between a thought and the idea it thinks.

Will it be said that this ideal possession is too fragile to satisfy us, too distant from actual possession? But it is the essence of the latter, which, without it, is illusory and is sought after without always being found. When memory has purified all the events of our lives, erased the confused impressions we experienced when they occurred, so that only their deep and secret significance remains, our entire past will appear to us as in a painting, and all our activity will have become contemplative. Therefore, to truly love a real person, we must love them now as we would always want to love them. We must be spiritually united with them. Our love must no longer fluctuate with the state of our bodies or the unpredictable movements of our self-love. And for this, we must pay attention only to this idea of themselves as if they were dead, which, even when their very presence is given to us, is the only one that reveals their true being.

8. Personal love.

Although love is the true union of two beings and there is no union more perfect than that of thought and idea, it is not enough for the one who is loved to exist only as an idea in the consciousness of the one who loves, nor for the one who loves to love only an idea that is still a part of themselves. Neither of them would find relief in the thought that there is a reciprocity in this relationship that equalizes them.

But first, it is not true that consciousness is one with its ideas, that is, with the pure spectacle offered to it, which often is not enough to move it. Indeed, ideas exist only within us, and sometimes they are pure fictions of our mind. However, they are not us, since we can accept or reject them, and there is never anything that is us except our most hidden preference and, so to speak, our pure consent.

Furthermore, love is precisely the discovery of a being who is both infinitely more independent of us and yet infinitely more inner to us than the most perfect of our ideas. This being depends so little on us that we can instead place ourselves under their dependence. Therefore, we love them as a being who lives outside of us, as a real person. It is the characteristic of knowledge to transform beings into ideas, but love possesses the secret of this sovereign operation, similar to the one by which the world was created, and it consists of transforming ideas into beings.

However, this beloved being, who is so independent of us, is yet more inner to us than ourselves, for they are the one who gives us breath and life, just as we ourselves give breath and life to all our ideas. Thus, we see this remarkable cycle forming, which is the very law of love, and in it, an idea becomes a being that, in turn, gives us our own being.

What is common to all humans in love is the joy that this feeling makes them experience, associated, as Spinoza says, with the idea of the cause that produces it. But the mere presence of the beloved is not enough for them; it often adds to their misery. What they desire is the internal consent of their beloved’s will, which, if it aligns with the spiritual order, unites them with God and gives their joy the mark of infinity. Love then ascends to its principle and exhibits a character of perfection.

For perfect love is an act and a gift. It is not the contemplation of an idea. It breaks our solitude and, consequently, our limitations. But if there is only a gift in favor of a person, one can understand that only love reveals to us the personhood of another. If every gift is a voluntary act, one can understand that it engages our own. If every gift is a gift of oneself, one can understand that it is the most beautiful employment of oneself as well as the sacrifice of oneself. If the gift we receive vastly exceeds what we have given, one can understand that it is because, through the mediation of another being, it enables us to commune with a supernatural presence that acts upon us with a simple touch.

9. Creative love.

The only child that truly belongs to us and never separates from us is that inner self that bears the mark of our smallest actions, whose nature we gradually form and whose destiny we follow with anxious attention at every step. But the children of our flesh soon become independent of us, and when the love that brought them into existence still burns, they flee from us like flowing water.

However, love is not only the creator of bodies; if it creates the body of another being, it first creates the spiritual being of those who love each other: it is that very being. Love is too often regarded as a principle of union between initially separate souls, but it first begets each of those souls to itself; it begets them to each other. It is similar to intelligence, which is not posterior to the ideas it assembles but, in the same act, unites them and brings them into being.

Thus, every being that loves can witness the spectacle of its own birth. The effect of love is to disrupt the tranquil surface of our consciousness, to reveal its most hidden powers and set them in motion. The communion it achieves with another being is both the instrument and the guarantee of that invisible communion that takes place within itself, between its two natures: between its desiring self, forever hungry and miserable, and its spiritual self that alone provides nourishment and life. But the desiring self can only discover this so admirable and close presence if it receives from the outside a strong enough shock to compel it to move beyond itself.

Indeed, it is true that love tears us away from ourselves while begetting us unto ourselves. The soul does not dwell in the body it animates but in the place of its love; however, the soul only finds that place at the deepest core of itself. That is why the being we love first turns all our powers of attention and desire toward the center of our own secret life. But we must also cease seeking ourselves within ourselves if love is self-abandonment and transformation, if it always believes in receiving and never giving, if the being we love is always for us the predestined guide who introduces us to a supernatural world.

God embraces all beings. He gives them movement and life, which is why it is said that He loves them. There is no difference to Him between loving and creating them. But the love of creatures comes from Him and must ascend back to Him. It presupposes a separation among them that it abolishes. This separation and the love it renders possible only exist between beings of flesh, and that is why the love of the creating God can only be consummated in the love of an incarnate God.

10. Temporal and eternal love.

In love, absence often holds more power than presence. It is because love requires a spiritual and eternal possession. And there are times when tangible presence provides either too much security or too much insecurity, obstructing internal presence rather than serving it and nurturing emotion rather than sentiment. More than the silence that still accompanies the presence of bodies, absence lends to love an immaterial strength and purity. It can sometimes strip it of imagination, memories, and promises, leaving only the inexhaustible union of thought with the pure idea of the beloved.

Thus, one may wonder if those who have described love best have not done so almost always from a place of lost love or impossible love. However, one must be cautious of defeats and escapism that lead us to prefer the dream of love over love itself; they resemble the consolations of an impotent artist who, renouncing the present mark on matter, consumes themselves in the memory of a destroyed work or in the dream of an imaginary creation.

The weakest love, which thrives on sensory signs, and the strongest love, which disregards them, both derive sustenance from the present moment; the thought of the past or the future weakens them. They are a refuge for delicate spirits, for whom love ultimately becomes an entirely internal game where they endlessly pursue demand and response.

Love is life itself for the spirit: it transports us into eternity. However, like eternity, it must be at risk of being lost at every moment. And it is the combination of these two characteristics that gives it its ever-renewing anxiety that burns and tears us apart. If we rely on it and our activity ceases to support it for even a single moment, it descends into time. But we are troubled as soon as we cease to be fulfilled, and the thought of what we lack soon plunges us into an abyss of misery. Then, love seems to be stretched toward an ever-elusive end that we always seek to attain or retain. Once it engages with time, it only lives through crises. But love is true only if it aspires to free itself from time and not to take pleasure in it. And to know it, we must observe it in certain moments of possession where it desires nothing because its desires are surpassed, where it delights in itself and the spiritual presence of the beloved, where it does not seek to continue itself because it does not fear losing itself, where it wholly absorbs itself in its realized essence.

11. Infinite value of love.

Men who live by love, like those who live by thought, carry within them a permanent concern: they cannot be diverted from it without losing their movement and life. When it reappears, the world regains its shape and meaning; they find their natural place in it, perceiving once again the opposition of shadow and light, the taste of pain and joy. They are accused of enclosing themselves in solitude at the very moment they break it, when they take possession of everything that surrounds them, penetrating into what was closed, discovering what was hidden, spreading the breath [218] that animates them over an inert universe and giving it the inner palpitation that it would not have without love.

It can be said that the value of love depends on the one who loves: like freedom, one can make the best or worst use of it. But the value of love surpasses incomparably the merit of lovers: it elevates them above themselves. The heart of none of them is large enough for love to fit in. And it must not be said that each being loves with a love that is proportional to them, or that it matters little whether this love is small or great, as long as it fills their entire capacity. Since love unites one being to another, each one obliges himself precisely to surpass his own limits, that is to say, to leave himself, and yet to find himself, to sacrifice himself and yet to realize himself. Each one feels that love can do nothing in him unless he himself lives in love. Thus, love will never be lacking to him, but he will always be lacking to love. Love surpasses the beloved as well as the one who loves; it is a present infinity, but also a movement without end, a promise that is never exhausted. Thus, it has been compared to inspiration and fate: in relation to love, the perfection of our initiative lies in the perfection of our docility.

Therefore, the most meager love must be blessed instead of despised and complained about. And even the lowest love still elevates the soul that experiences it, although self-love may judge otherwise. It is not even true that the greatest souls can only accept a love that matches their own; for in the sincerity of the simplest love, they can find all the richness of the human heart. There is nothing more precious than the spontaneous movement, however timid it may be, that impels one being towards another. Love is indivisible; it always feels called to the enjoyment of the absolute. It does not give itself to us as something already done and predetermined: it is up to us to make it, and by giving our whole life to it, to discover that it is immeasurable. Thus, even in the humblest love, there are infinite possibilities that it is up to us to let perish or to make blossom.

As soon as love exists, it must therefore rise to infinity, but if it detaches itself from its universal and spiritual source; if, instead of crossing the finite being to surpass it, it transforms itself into infinity, it is inevitable that it will produce disaster and death, as Christianity maintains and as Racine testifies.

12. Love and unity.

There is only one love, although it gives rise to an infinity of feelings, just as there is only one intelligence, although it gives rise to an infinity of thoughts. One cannot renounce love without renouncing reaching the very core of the world, that is to say, the principle that gives our life its impulse and meaning, that breaks our solitude and harmonizes us with other beings, that resolves our duality and reconciles the spiritual with the material, that reconciles all our desires and makes us live in unity.

The one who knows love best is the one who embraces all other beings in the same love. He gives himself completely to each of them, since love is a self-gift and such a gift does not undergo sharing. The one who receives it finds it so perfect that he has the certainty of being loved with a love unique in the world. But one can only love a single being as one should if one loves all others as one should. The love I have for all supports and multiplies the love I have for each one, instead of dispersing it. Thus, any exclusive love is a theft committed, not only against other beings, but also against the very one we love.

Every love appears precisely as an exceptional bond between two exceptional beings; every love must be exceptional in order to embody each time the unique and total essence of love. In all knowledge and in all action, one must go from the principle to the consequences, from the center to the periphery, and from the hearth to the rays. In love as well, it is universal love, that is to say, the very being of Love, which is found in a perfect and indivisible form in the love of two particular beings. But it offers itself to each of them as such a personal and privileged gift that it [222] always resembles a grace that has had no example and will have no repetition.

One must have experienced the love of creatures to realize that the purpose of our life is not to dissolve our separate existence into the unity of the immense universe. It is an illusion to think that we could thus increase ourselves by one day attaining possession of the Whole and identifying ourselves with it; we would only annihilate ourselves. The universe is measured by each particular consciousness to which, without destroying it, it is capable of providing absolute satisfaction, but it is love that gives it to us.

A world where all the parts would blend into the unity of the Whole would no longer be the unity or the Whole of anything. It would no longer be a world. But love reveals to us with a singular acuteness the reality of this act of union which is the very life of unity. There is beauty and intelligibility in the world only because all the beings that compose it retain their own life and never cease to circulate within it and to unite with each other through an infinity of spiritual relations [223] that depend on the invention of each one and the consent of all.

The being who loves must realize through his love all his inner powers, penetrate his own secret and at the same time unfold it. The beloved object must be an independent being for him, whose worth he constantly enhances without ever exhausting it, and to whom he lends a personal initiative capable of always surpassing his anticipation or expectation. One loves a being who must be other than oneself and whom one wants to be precisely as he is, so as not to subordinate him to oneself and even to appear subordinate to him, if it is true that one receives from him everything one is now capable of possessing. But the mere mutual presence of two beings who love each other must give each of them such an impetus, such a movement, that at the moment when they are most united, each of them feels confirmed in his own law.

Chapter X. Time

1. Time, the craftsman of life.

Time is the creator, the preserver, the destroyer of everything that is. Thus, it calls individuals into being at birth, it sustains them in being through duration, it fulfills their being by recalling them into the immense womb of the past through death. It is the living act of the Trinity. And its different operations are only one: for it creates only by destroying, and every destruction in it is an accomplishment. It is the place of all genesis and annihilation. At every moment, it withdraws being from us and gives it to us: it suspends us between being and nothingness. And this was undoubtedly the profound meaning of Descartes' thought when he spoke [225] of continuous creation. Ronsard also said with trivial simplicity: “Time makes us, time itself devours us.” It is understandable, then, that people could worship Time as a god; and when they worshiped the Sun, it was not only because it is the principle of life, but because it engages life in time and imposes on it the rhythm of day and night, like the rhythm of seasons.

But time is not God: it is only the means that God gives to all beings to create themselves and fulfill their destiny. God is eternal; and eternity is the source from which the activity of all beings never ceases to draw; it draws from it with more or less confidence and continuity, and thus it brings their life into time. No being ever abandons the present, and it is in the present that it is in contact with eternity; but this contact is fleeting: it must constantly be renewed and lost for our independence to be assured. Therefore, the present has no content. We never leave it, and we cannot stay in it: [226] it is the point of intersection between a past that flees from us and that we must resurrect and a future that tempts us and that we must realize.

Because the present must never cease to be so that the individual can, at every moment, rediscover through a new act a life that perpetually subsists. But the past limits and constrains us because it is accomplished: it is the only thing that is and no longer becomes. Thus, it is the only part of ourselves and the world that we are capable of knowing: only it can be contemplated. The future, at least apparently, limits us even more: because it is hidden from us; and it expresses not even what constrains us, but what we lack. However, while the past gives us a spiritual possession of creation, the future allows us to participate in the creative act; it makes us instruments of divine power within the limits assigned to us; it entrusts us with its use and responsibility.

Time allows us to be the artisans of our own life and therefore to improve or corrupt it [227] at every moment. It should never fall below the highest point we have had the happiness of reaching, and the last moment of our life should be the fullest and most beautiful. But every person is like an artist whose every stroke risks spoiling the work begun and who does not know how to recognize that fragile moment of perfect success that he alters as soon as he tries to surpass it.

2. Time liberates and enslaves.

Time is the means given to us to exercise our freedom and participate in the work of creation: it measures the power of our individual initiative. And time has a meaning, it allows us to give our own life the very meaning we have chosen. It is what allows us to have control over our attention, to choose from the world the object of our contemplation, to become the authors of our own knowledge; it is what allows the development of all our powers. [228] Bodies create their independence within the universe through the movements they make, just as spirits create theirs within truth by the order they impress upon their thoughts.

The essence of the self is to give itself being: it can only succeed because it lives in time. And if life is to appear in time, it is precisely because it is a possession that must be acquired and can be lost at every moment. In relation to the infinite being, it is an imperfection to live in time, since time never ceases to take away what it has given me. But it is the perfection of my finite nature; without it, it could not develop and therefore could not exist.

Time allows my freedom to be exercised because it opens up the future before it. But it is also a chain because the past weighs on me with all its might, because the future itself drags me along, whether I am willing or rebellious: and it is a miserable life to have only the feeling that everything passes and to expect the end of the hour at every moment. The one whom events always surprise is always a slave: the one who controls time is capable of becoming master of beings and things.

All progress, all falls, and all rebirths occur in time. Time ripens and decays the fruit, it improves and sours the wine. Thus, all the problems posed to us are reduced to the use we must make of time. We can make the best or the worst use of it.

But in its best use, it disappears; it no longer has that ambiguity, that diversity of possibilities among which it asks us to choose: it becomes like a transparent vessel that only reveals the reality that fills it. Let us not become victims of time: for then, every minute degrades, gnaws at, and kills us. We must engage in a perpetual struggle against it: to emerge victorious is to save our being.

3. Time and self-love.

When our activity fills time, it no longer allows us the leisure to perceive its passing; our entire being, merging with the act it accomplishes, lives in eternity, indivisibly associated with creative power. In vain do I try to fill time with the spectacle of what I am not doing: I can barely deceive my boredom. As soon as my activity begins to wane, gaps appear between my aspirations and events, and it is in these gaps that the thought of what is missing, that is, what I have lost or what I am expecting, creeps in. Then I begin to live in time.

Time is a creation of self-love that separates me from the Whole and attaches me to particular goods. The one who remains indifferent to them and thinks that true good resides only in the inner attitude he can adopt towards all the goods given to him is freed from time. For only particular goods [231] are involved in time: and the one who ignores them also ignores regret and desire.

By failing to apply my mind to what is given to me, to penetrate it, to take possession of it, to feel in harmony with the rhythm of the universe, I allow myself to be distracted by the idea of what might happen to me; to torment myself further, I leave my very being, I escape into the two illusory worlds of the past and the future, I look backward and forward alternately, and I continually lament the passage of time, which is always either too fast or too slow compared to my desires.

It is idleness that allows all the fantasies of the imagination to intrude upon me with time. Then I live in anticipation, turned towards what is not and remembering what has been, anxious about what will be, which can be either a hoped-for or dreaded recurrence, or an unknown that alarms me even more. But the essence of wisdom is to remain attached to the present and expect nothing.

The taste for perfection is often the cause of all our imperfections: [232] we must not demand more from the present moment than it can provide. It is sufficient to immerse our activity in it without mixing in either the scruples left behind by an abolished past or the impatience of a future whose hour has not yet come. We no longer perform with precision what we must do in the present if we try to make it accommodate what belongs to another time; and our action loses its eternal value when it divides instead of deepening. The attentive act to its object leaves us with no awareness of the flight of time; this only occurs when we feel the emptiness of existence and experience not the insufficiency of what is given to us, but our own inadequacy as we contemplate leaving it without being capable of exhausting it or even feeling it.

4. Genesis of time.

“When one is present to oneself,” said Porphyry, “one possesses being that is present everywhere.” It is only from this absence of ourselves to ourselves [233] that our temporal life is born, and therefore our weakness and all our misfortunes. Time exists only so that there is always an interval between the being thought or desired and the being given or possessed. Time is not necessary for the unfolding of divine activity: it animates everything in an eternal present. Time is the measure of our weakness: in an instant, infinite activity accomplishes everything. It is the leisure of waiting that engages us in time; it is the anxiety of events that accelerates its course. But there is a new leisure that frees us from it when events, always occurring at their appointed time, make us feel our harmony with the Whole and realize its presence within us.

Because we live in time, we are never entirely ourselves at any moment, and our nature is not distinct from our life. It is spread out in succession. It permeates it. Or rather, it gradually constitutes it. What we gradually form is our very being, which will only be completed when it unravels from the bonds of time at death. Thus, [234] time measures the distance that separates us from what we ought to be: that is why it expands in idleness and appears shorter as our lives become more fulfilled.

We can only think of time in the present. But this thought brings a twofold trembling: the action we have just performed is now beyond our control, it is both abolished and accomplished; and the future we enter gives us the excitement of what is to come and awakens our still uncertain responsibility. The past is unique and fixed: it is a spectacle that fascinates us; it is a burden that weighs us down. The future is twofold and uncertain; whether it depends on destiny, it always presents itself to us as an event that may or may not happen, as an alternative between two opposites. And that is why sensitivity is attached to the past by a single feeling, which is at once complacent and melancholic regret, while we cannot contemplate the future without oscillating every minute between hope and fear.

The present appears unreal to us [235] because it is the passage from a past that is no longer to a future that is not yet. However, we never leave the present. And that is why our being is miserable and precarious. It is in the present that we feel the fragility of life, which possesses nothing since it leaves behind all the goods it believed to have acquired, and which haunt it like phantoms, but which is already inclined towards the future with all the forces of a desire constantly reborn and constantly disappointed.

5. The past.

What gives life its seriousness is the indestructibility of the past. If it left no trace in us, we would live in a sort of instantaneousness, without memory and without purpose. If we could abolish it by an act of will, we would live in a sort of instability, constantly attempting new trials that would immediately plunge us into nothingness. But the past is preserved in its entirety in the present: it is formed by the different geological layers that together support [236] the very ground on which we walk.

The past has a profound, venerable, and sacred character for us. It once traversed the present, and now it supports it without being affected by it; it roots our life in eternity. Antiquity, tradition, or simply old age have engendered the feeling of respect, which is always a respect for accomplished being: it is no longer directed towards the living; if it has perished, if it is near its end, it acquires the majesty of imperishable things. It is because the past is unused and removed from material use that it becomes a value in itself, beyond any comparison with our needs. Every event is ennobled in memory, which leaves only the idea, that is, the pure significance.

It can happen, however, that the past produces in us two opposing effects. The past can accumulate in the mind and gradually fill its capacity, so that the mind receives from the universe only a touch that becomes less vivid and a contribution that becomes less abundant. But it can also expand, [237] soften, and deepen it, so that reality never ceases to penetrate it through increasingly numerous and profound paths.

The past can never satisfy us; and indeed, it is true that each person tends to erase from their life their own past, to be reborn every day with a new heart. Thus, the world of memory sometimes appears to me as a curious spectacle that presents itself externally to my attention, which can surprise, delight, or repel me, but does not belong to me much more than the material world upon which my gaze falls. Is what has happened to me, but which I have forgotten, and of which others have been witnesses and kept the memory, still mine? Is there not a point where I begin to confuse the events that have happened to me with those that could have happened to me or have happened to others? And does not self-love intervene, without consciousness perceiving it, sometimes to disown a memory that weighs me down, sometimes to claim an action that I have not done and in which my imagination has indulged for too long?

6. The future.

The future moves us more than the past, and for many people, once an event has occurred, it ceases to affect them. Thus, they exhaust themselves in the pursuit of an object whose presence will be indifferent to them. They love nothing more than the anguish of what is not yet: it only ceases to give them disappointment when it becomes reality. They only experience their strength in the darkness of desire; it vanishes when they have to sustain the light of possession.

It always seems to us that the future will bring a revelation that will give both our destiny and the world’s its meaning and resolution. Deep within all men, there is a messianism that is mainly an escape from the present: many of them are like those Jews who spend their lives fleeing, first in thought to the past of the prophets, and then in hope to a future that fulfills the prophecies.

Undoubtedly, there is a future of the universe that imposes itself on us despite ourselves, and we await its advent with a sense of hope, fear, and resignation. But there is a future whose disposition is left to us, in which our freedom is engaged, and which allows us to leave our mark on reality. However, it should not be prematurely subjected to a too rigid plan; it must take its place in that future of the universe that eludes our grasp: it must be aligned with it.

There are people who plan every event of their lives from afar. Sometimes destiny favors them and confirms the certainty of their calculations. But their wisdom is never well-informed enough. By stopping too early the plan they intend to impose on their lives, they preemptively reject a thousand possibilities that will be offered to them: the choice they wanted to make will bring them less satisfaction than the humble acceptance of what was proposed to them. Every day, unexpected opportunities to act are found along our path; every day, new goods that we did not suspect are within our reach. [240] To have a more regulated life, should we pass by them without seeing them, blindly pursuing the uncertain path we once adopted and perhaps have not examined since then? Yet, I may have been mistaken: regret may come to me at the moment my life ends, whether I fail or achieve the object I have aimed for so long.

On the contrary, if I have never ceased to live in the present, attentive to all the solicitations reaching out to me and ready to respond to them, each of my actions suffices and carries its own reason within itself. None of them is a means to a distant end that always risks eluding and disappointing me. I do not postpone living. Everything that happens to me gives me the most current and complete experience of life. It is not the one who thinks the most about the future who safeguards it the best. It is the one who is disinterested in it, devoting all his strength to the present: the fruits of his harvest always surpass in flavor and beauty the art and foresight of the most skillful gardener.

7. Rhythm of thought.

Perfect activity possesses a natural, easy, and strong rhythm that is important to recognize in order to obey it. But each of us creates the rhythm of our own duration: Descartes is right to want to avoid precipitation, which is an excess of movement, and prejudice, which is an excess of inertia. We should not be in a hurry, but we should not be slow either. And we must oppose both slowness and haste with the regular and orderly movement that leads everything to maturity. Almost all people fail in what they do because they have not found the measure of activity that is exactly proportionate to their genius and allows it to bear fruit. An intellect that is too hasty risks imagining instead of understanding; it yields to impulse instead of waiting for grace. But an intellect that is too slow fails to grasp the flash of light at the moment it occurs and still seeks it when it has passed. It misses the opportunity to act and never finds it again.

There are indeed minds that have too much movement. There are others that lack it. The former move from one idea to another with great rapidity, but they leave no trace of them and never take possession of them. The latter have more stability, but they lack the flexibility that adapts to the changing forms of reality. Neither the former nor the latter are attuned to the natural order. The former are driven by time, while the latter resist its flow. The former attach themselves more to being and the latter to its modes. But being cannot be separated from its modes, and the mind must neither remain immobile nor become a passing place for fleeting states.

It is the mind’s task to regulate the sequence of its operations. If they are too frequent or too rare, it is because the pulse of our existence beats too strongly or too gently. Our attention is hindered by an excess of agitation as well as by an excess of inertia. It becomes incapable of finding its proper balance and giving our thought its regular pace.

We must detach ourselves enough from all complacency or impatience to remedy the uneven pace of our own duration and to precisely play our part in the duration of the Whole. We only experience a perfect fullness of being and life when no gap is created between the order of our thoughts and that of events. We maintain contact with reality only if we can recognize the opportune moment when things offer themselves to our mind and ask us to welcome them. Otherwise, our mind remains empty, and depending on whether its movement is too slow or too fast, it grasps only shadows from which the substance has escaped, or mere illusions that have never had a body.

8. Rhythm of events.

In order for time not to hold our gaze, distract us, worry us, we must recognize the rhythm of events and respond to it. It seems then that we are carried by time, like a boat that is not delayed by its weight or constrained by the effort of the oars; it is a sign that we govern it rightly. But almost all people would like to control the current. For some, time passes too quickly, and for others, too slowly. But both feel time passing, which is far too much: perfect innocence, like perfect knowledge, lies in recognizing its play and adjusting ours to it. But we always try to hold back the course of time or hasten it. And we think that this power belongs to us since our entire freedom consists in the art of slowing down our movements or accelerating them.

But we do not have control over time; it controls us. Its order imposes itself on us with inflexible rigor. There is a rhythm of time that is independent of us, for we always complain that it postpones or anticipates desire: as soon as our life consents to follow it, we avoid all the ills generated by boredom and impatience. The one who has harmonized the rhythm of their own life with [245] the rhythm of the universe has already entered eternity.

However, the difficulty for all people lies in aligning the movement of their imagination with that of events. Any mental process that stops too early or does not stop early enough is an error or a fault. We must not only seize the opportunity to act but also not leave it until it still holds some promise: otherwise, we would have no continuity in our intentions. We must leave it as soon as it withers, as soon as a new opportunity already calls us. Sometimes it seems that we stake our entire destiny on one opportunity, but we are not held captive by any of them; new ones present themselves every day, offering us a new destiny.

The wise person attaches themselves to the event with all the forces of attention and willpower because they know that in the event, their entire being is given to them. They do not prefer the phantoms that desire and regret constantly present to them, but rather discern the rhythm of time and joyfully and peacefully obey it, gratefully seizing everything time brings them and responding to every call of opportunity and every touch of inspiration with perfect docility.

9. Escaping the present.

We grow bored of the present, languidly desiring a situation in which we are not and of which we will grow bored when we are in it, just like the other. The present, in turn, becomes the object of regret, so true it is that the imagination feeds on the unreal, the past or the future, while the present is the austere stronghold of strong thought, the pillar of the mind.

We always seek to escape the present because we lack the courage to sustain it. It is because it is before our eyes that we avert our gaze from it. It is because it solicits our action that we call upon all the powers of dreams to free ourselves from it. It only begins to interest us when we sense that we will find pleasure in remembering it. And the most familiar events, those from which we could not extract anything before and which only evoked indifference and boredom in us when they occurred, acquire a mysterious charm when they are nothing more than images to us; it is because they then give us a means to escape the present, and we no longer feel threatened by the prospect of reliving them.

The past sometimes serves to console us for the imperfection of our current behavior by presenting us with past successes that reassure us of our worth. But this comparison is not enough to deceive us, and it leaves us with bitterness. It also happens, when memories of my past show me a spectacle too distant from my present life, that I hesitate to recognize them as my own: in them, I search for myself, and yet I also abandon myself. Finally, when they have too much strength and sweetness, it is the present itself that I consider a dream.

But I also escape the present through anticipation of the future. There are people who spend their entire lives waiting for a future in which they can finally begin to live, but this future will never come. Thus, their thoughts always project onto what does not exist, but they are powerless in the face of what does. They are like prisoners who live only with the hope of a freedom that may never be granted to them or that they may not know how to employ. But for them, death always arrives during the waiting period, and they are left with an empty existence. It is because, in waiting to live, they were only waiting to die. Between the misery that a certain moment in time brings us and the happiness that another moment promises us, there is a difference in degree that is often illusory. But between the present being and the nothingness of anticipation, there lies the infinite.

On the other hand, some people have a feverish haste to live, to encapsulate in the present all the future that awaits them; their hearts are as ardent as those of the former were languid. But the present must suffice and fulfill us, for the entirety of Being is contained within it. The future will not bring us anything new that the present does not already hold [249] if we are capable of discovering it. Therefore, it is futile to try to guess the future, to delight in it through dreams, to make an effort to chase after it. The one who is united with God knows neither impatience nor haste. Regardless of the sorrows that the moment brings them, they know how to remain in the place assigned to them by the order of nature. They measure the scope of their current task, love its humility, apply their will to it, and within its limits, they contain the boundless. It is within those limits that they experience the strong joys of being, seeing, acting, and loving.

10. The act of presence.

Our activity acquires power and joy as soon as it attaches itself to the present and no longer allows itself to be held back by any regret or second thought, by any interest or concern for success. And if the past is the atmosphere that illuminates our entire life, if the future brings all the promises of hope, it is in the grace of the present that one must make us feel its light and the other its momentum.

But attachment to the present can only be maintained through a constant act of intelligence and will. For we must become present to things for them to become present to us: only our activity is often deficient, so that if being is perpetually present to us, we are only intermittently present to it. All presence is presence of mind. Now, the nature of the mind is first and foremost to be present to itself, that is, to the light it receives: it may fail in this regard, but this light never fails it.

The most perfect person is the one who is most simply present in everything they do and everything they are. And the action they exert, they exert through their mere presence and without seeking to produce it: thus it is through a simple act of presence that the soul is united to the body and that God is united to the soul.

Youth always remains in the present: and by remaining attached to the present, we maintain a sovereign youth. The Immoralist delicately says, “I do not like to look back, and I abandon my past in the distance like a bird leaving its shadow.” But the most beautiful image of this abandonment, where we must let go of our entire past, is found in the manna of the Israelite that would spoil when he tried to keep it. Nothing separates two beings who meet for the first time more than the mysterious abyss of their double past. It even happens, when my friend tells me his unknown past, that I feel even further from him as he thinks he is getting closer to me. I can only feel united to another being through an act of total presence from him to me and from me to him, in which our double past is both overcome and denied.

However, if bodily presence is a sign of spiritual presence, it is the latter that is real presence: it always depends on us to produce it. Absence can sometimes favor it: it only extinguishes feelings when they are not strong enough to do without any sensory support. Otherwise, it sharpens and spiritualizes them; it frees them from the bonds that held them; it reveals their strength and purity to us.

For spiritual presence obliges our mind to employ all its powers of attention and love to create it, whereas bodily presence suppresses them because it reassures us of its reality. Thus, this given presence seems to exempt us from giving ourselves to the other.

11. Abolition of time.

Joy, a great thought, exclusive interest—everything in life that bears the character of the absolute suspends the course of time. The one who realizes their destiny and feels on par with being and life is always fulfilled by the present. Time only rolls imperfect and unfinished things that are incapable of subsisting and sufficing, like desire, effort, and sadness. And our thoughts only abandon the present to reveal their weakness and impotence.

As long as I apply myself entirely to the object that occupies me, as long as I do not separate from it, everything else around me may well flow through time, yet my consciousness remains exempt. And if it were argued that it [253] must necessarily operate in time and that the spectacle it witnesses also unfolds in time, at least while it remains attached to it, the discrepancy must be abolished between the rhythm of its own duration and the rhythm of the event. Therefore, how could it have a sense of time even in which it lives? For time is a creation of consciousness, and if you judge that I live in time when I myself cease to know it, the time in which I live is yours and not mine.

Material speed is an effort towards the abolition of time; if it seduces us to such an extent, it is not only because it allows us to fit more things into the same time but because it brings us closer to that state, which is that of perfect contemplation, in which we could embrace the totality of things in a single instant. This is Pascal’s point, which fills everything, because it is endowed with infinite speed.

We have invented subtle methods to travel more quickly from one place to another, to see an increasing number of images pass before our eyes in increasingly shorter time. However, thought has not followed the same rhythm; perhaps it has even slowed down. It entrusts itself to the accelerated rhythm with which things now unfold before it; and, in this kind of submission, the senses may still be shaken, but thought itself becomes indifferent and inert.

The characteristic of perfect activity is to abolish time instead of hastening its course. To always live in the present is to remain in contact with the same eternal reality, to refuse to stop, either to anticipate what lies ahead or to hold onto what is behind. For one must cease acting for the past and future to suddenly arise in opposition; they only tear us away from the present; they transform our entire life into a greedy and desperate flight in which we recognize ourselves as incapable of possessing anything. And this rapid movement by which we abandon all the objects that present themselves to us one after another gives us a kind [255] of fever that serves as our possession.

The love of novelty is a sign of frivolity, the love of permanence is a sign of depth. But one must have an extraordinarily strong mind to remain attached to a reality that is always identical to itself and to be capable of recognizing and loving it behind all the transient forms it continually shows us, without being carried away and seduced by them. The one who lives in change is always divided within themselves, always full of fear and regret; the one who lives in an immobile present is always concentrated and unified. Only they are capable of experiencing true joy. It is desire, dissatisfaction that creates time, and the wise forgets it because the present is enough for them; the saint surpasses it because the present gives them eternity.

Chapter XI. Death

1. Meditation on death.

It is impossible to establish any separation between the meditation on life, advised by Spinoza, who believes that the meditation on death is a mark of our impotence, and the meditation on death advised by Plato, who believes that it is the meditation on true life. For life and death form a couple: they only have meaning by opposing each other, and the opposite of life is not nothingness, but death. It is the idea of death, that is to say, of a life that ends, that gives to the feeling of life its extraordinary acuteness, its infinite power of emotion. As soon as the idea of death recedes, life becomes for us only a habit or a diversion: [257] only the presence of death forces us to look it in the face. Whoever turns away from death in order to enjoy life better also turns away from life, and in order to forget death better, he forgets both death and life.

It is because our life, which starts anew every morning, is closed by death and never starts again that it is an absolute for us; it must be exhausted all at once. And the tragedy of life is heightened by the thought that it begins again indefinitely, but in a world from which we are absent: as far as we are concerned, the dice are cast once and for all; if we make a mistake, it is forever.

Birth, which limits our life at the other end, does not have such a sharp presence for us: for it opens our destiny to a promise, whereas death closes it with an accomplishment. Can we even say that we are present at our birth, which offers us existence rather than giving it to us, and which plunges it back into immense darkness? It is the destiny of every being to germinate in darkness, like the [258] grain of wheat, and to die in the light. We are fully present to ourselves only on the day of our death when we can no longer add anything to our realized being, when the universe, in gathering us up, finally delivers us to ourselves.

But if death sheds light on the meaning of life, it is life in turn that gives us the apprenticeship and, so to speak, the experience of death. For only the one who enjoys the essence of life is capable, by accepting all the particular deaths that time ceaselessly inflicts on every moment of his separate being, of penetrating to that secret depth where all spirits draw the nourishment that immortalizes them. When a being has renounced himself, death is upon him without power. Far from seeking to retain something beyond death, far from being ambitious to possess anything, even in this life, he never ceases to make the perpetual gift of himself.

The meditation on death, by obliging us to perceive our limits, obliges us to surpass them. It reveals to us the universality of Being and its transcendence [259] in relation to our individual being. Thus, it opens to us the access not to a future life, which would always retain a provisional character, but to a supernatural life, which penetrates and bathes our manifested life: it is not a question for us of postponing it, or even of preparing for it, but, from today, of entering into it.

2. Fear of death.

The fear of death is first a trembling of the body that already collapses at the thought of the blow that will annihilate it. But it is above all the extreme pain of self-love, which does not limit itself to undergoing some loss, to abandoning everything it believes it possesses, all its goods, all its joys, and even food and the light of day, but which feels itself forced to succumb, to renounce not only the object of desire, but desire itself.

Consenting to death is sometimes the result of exhaustion of life and the love that the living have for it. Thus it happens that one who attaches his thought to the worries and misery of his temporal existence [260] looks at death with assurance; but it is out of cowardice, not courage. There is even a certain desire for death that is the ultimate point of laziness: it is the desire for material peace. But this peace can seduce us only because it is the symbol of the peace of the mind, which is the opposite of inertia, which is the state of an activity enjoying its pure exercise.

On the other hand, indifference to death is observed in all those who have confidence in life, and anguish about death in all those who curse life. The former, devoted to action and joy, do not have time to think about death. They would willingly imagine that it will be good for them, just like life itself. The latter, whose life is empty, fill it with fear. It is in accordance with the order that they extend their suspicions equally to death, life, and the vast system of things in which they are associated.

The one who loves life, who enjoys its essence, who knows that it always gives itself entirely to him, but that it never ceases to reveal new [261] aspects of itself, does not fear death because he has such a perfect possession of life that he feels capable of taking it with him even into the stars. But the one who hates life because he believes he has received nothing from it fears death because he knows that it must fix his state for eternity: he prefers to continue to moan and wait forever.

If we knew that our death will certainly occur on a certain determined day, instead of appearing as always possible and always avoidable, would we still fear it? We would have to prepare for it and accept it. But if the hour is uncertain, the event is certain: death is so intertwined with life that we must give both a single consent. Only the one who would know in advance the term of his life would live until then with a sort of security; he would postpone this inner examination, these thoughts, and these spiritual resolutions that would give each of our actions an absolute value if we could accomplish them thinking that it is the last.

If we fear death, it is because, feeling that our life is an emptiness to fill, we always fear not having succeeded and always ask for respite to add what is lacking. But this is an effect of self-love. For life is a mold that it is our responsibility to fill; but we do not know its size. The one who successfully accomplishes the task of each day must always expect to see the mold break and the statue appear. The one who dreads death wants to keep a mold forever in which he has put nothing: he does not want to see the statue emerge.

3. Proximity of death.

Up close, death fills us with horror because it degrades the body and turns it into a spectacle that humiliates us; from afar, it becomes serious and poetic because it has acquired a kind of immortality itself, because it gives beautiful themes to the imagination, because it frees life from its impurities and finally, through memory, it populates nothingness. [263] The flesh that was rotting just a moment ago has turned to ashes.

The thought of death is tragic and painful for the one who, still turned toward life, struggles and fights to maintain it. It is the greatest of all anxieties for the one who has not renounced life, who has not exhausted it, who has barely tasted it and feels his powerlessness to prevent it from fleeing. The fear of such a passage sometimes makes us desire a sudden death that takes away the leisure for reflection and resembles a ravisher who suddenly carries us away.

It is the most delicate natures that desire a slow death, one that is prepared for and in which life gradually unravels. But it is even better if life has long known a kind of intimate familiarity with death. In the one who has penetrated the idea of death and has prepared to undergo it, death, when it presents itself, appears as a small event that takes on a kind of tranquil simplicity: death is a calming.

When we ourselves are close to death, self-love initially causes the sensitivity to beat rapidly. But if we are free from self-love, never has so much light entered our thoughts, never has it had a more equal and agile movement. The presence of death allows us to see everything in its true light because it frees us from all interest. It reveals our true feelings, that is to say, those that were in us without us being clearly conscious of them and that we are amazed we did not know how to make more visible.

Thus, at the moment when we think we are about to leave it, life sometimes takes on a sort of luminous sweetness. But how could this sweetness leave any regret in our soul? It is a gift that death gives to life as soon as it appears imminent; it is she who strips the events of life of the tense and painful character they had for us while they were happening and transforms them into a pure spectacle laden with meaning. And it is this very spectacle that we carry with us into death.

4. Relations with the dead.

We are too preoccupied with the dead. We must seek to secure our own salvation and that of those who live around us; the salvation of the dead is no longer our responsibility; there is even in them a sleep that we have no right to disturb. It is enough that what was alive in them is still alive in us; in the eternal parts of our nature, we are not only their heirs, we are one with them. But we must not honor in them that separate form that still retains a human appearance and crumbles to dust as soon as it is touched. Let us not attempt to compare with their ashes what is already ash in ourselves and will join theirs.

By honoring the dead, some think they are defending themselves against their memory [267] that troubles them; but the dead leave us in peace if we innocently fulfill our present task. They disturb our sleep and paralyze our activity if we allow ourselves to be tormented by regret for an irreparable past; they illuminate and support our journey if we know how to associate them with the fulfillment of our destiny. The most pious people shelter the dead in their thoughts as in a living tomb; they have a spiritual communion with them in which their own conscience enlarges, enlightens, and purifies itself.

If death fixes our nature for eternity, it keeps nothing of all that in our nature was perishable and had only a momentary existence. The honors rendered to the dead only make sense because death has stripped them of all their weaknesses. Memory must imitate it, but it does not always succeed.

Thus, in the dead, it is even less their memory that we should honor than their idea. For memory leaves them an individual and material physiognomy; it can still be stopped by their errors and faults. But [268] the idea lives in us and animates us. It leaves in them only those traits of human nature that they share with us, which they provided for a few years with a unique and privileged incarnation. Then the dead can truly become present in us in the best and most vibrant parts of our being. The idea we have of them is destined to create a filiation between them and us; then this idea awakens in us a subtle light, an effective will to act. It does not condemn us to forget their face; only this face itself is purified and embellished; it presents to our eyes, in a spiritual form, one of the eternal aspects of the face of humanity.

5. Death and spiritual presence.

Spiritual life is a constant victory over death; it renders us indifferent to the constant death that is change; at every moment, it brings about a new birth within us. To live spiritually is to live as if we were about to die at any moment; it is already [269] to die to the life of the body, to enter into eternity even in this life.

Death, by destroying the life of the body, abolishes the visible spectacle that we present of ourselves to other men. But it allows those who love us to realize our spiritual presence in the secret of their conscience through an internal act that depends solely on their love. Already, when we lived among them, was not our only real presence for them? Bodily presence was the sign and instrument of it, but it served as much to prevent it as to produce it. It gave us so much joy because it was a kind of security for us. But a presence can never be given: there is only the presence that we give ourselves. Thus it happens that material presence separates beings more than absence does, by dispensing them, as if it could satisfy them, from realizing that inner presence which is the work of pure spirit.

On the other hand, it also happens that death, by destroying the spectacle of our being that we always were for another, succeeds in making us more present in their thought [270] than we were during our life. It reveals to us the essence of the beings with whom we have lived for a long time, but without perceiving them. It reveals to us all that we owed them, all that we did not do for them, all that we could have drawn from them, and that they offered us, but that we did not want to accept. Should we not, therefore, since death now prevents us from appearing, since it frees us from diversion and self-love, allow it to render us perfectly interior to ourselves in turn? Instead of plunging our life into darkness, death envelops it in a supernatural light.

After a long and painful absence, the idea of return is a beneficial spur, and the return is the sweetest consolation: one must have been separated for a long time to enjoy both separation and reunion at the same time. But death carries these feelings to the absolute: for life separates us from the total Being and death reunites us with Him. It seems, indeed, that death also separates us from the beings we have loved: but we felt, nevertheless, [271] that already the body separated us from them. And since, in material absence, we have sometimes enjoyed their spiritual presence more perfectly than when their bodies were with us, it is because death is the only means that the spirit possesses to always realize the perfection of presence through the perfection of absence.

6. Death heals desire.

The idea of death moderates and humbles all the ambitions inherent in life: it is impossible, in such a short duration, to satisfy them all, since they continue to multiply, nor to exhaust any of them, since each one continues to renew and grow. Therefore, death, instead of making us despair of life, leads us to change its meaning. It should divert us from the diversity of desires that lead us toward an unattainable mirage. For no finite object can give us true contentment. And even if it did not seduce us, it would not do so without time, where the possession it promises us indefinitely recedes. Death has [272] the privilege of redirecting our gaze from the transient modes of life to its present essence, and inviting us to enjoy its fullness and unity in the present moment.

Since death removes from desire its tomorrow and forbids us from continuing to identify our destiny with progress, it must teach us to think that it is not the journey we undertake, nor the stages we traverse, that give our life its true meaning. For it is impossible for it to aim for a goal that suddenly fails us: life reveals its imperishable being to us by forcing us to abandon all perishable goods, either constantly through the continuous death of change, or once and for all through death, which is but an irreversible change.

Consciousness is always in joy if it consents to enjoy the eternity of the activity that traverses it. By attaching itself to particular advantages, which death suddenly strips away from us, it becomes complicit with them; thus, it brings about its own death. By remaining [273] indifferent to them, it already gives us possession of that pure spiritual movement that must undergo the test of time to become ours, and which death no longer allows to subsist except in its unencumbered essence.

Thus, by breaking our future, death teaches us to give the present a plenary and absolute value. It teaches us to exercise all the powers of our present being, to enjoy all its riches with an innocent simplicity that excludes fear and greed. Who can think that, in the perfection of such confident activity, we would carelessly lose some unrecognized treasure? Will it be the past? But we carry it within us, completely liberated from the miseries of regret. Will it be the future? But it has become a fulfilled hope that no dream can deceive. Therefore, it should not be said of such activity that it is reduced to the present, but that it is concentrated in it; no one can desire anything more when they imagine their own condition as that of a consciousness capable of freely participating in eternal life.

We must not attempt, to elevate [274] death, to consider it as a means, by leaving this life, to attain a state that surpasses it: but the thought of death is the means of knowing, in this life, a state that death must confirm and not destroy.

7. Death fulfills the individual.

As long as we continue to live, the universe is to a certain extent dependent on us; it bears our imprint; and it can even be said to be the common work of all the living. But at death, the universe repossesses them; it gathers and merges all their actions within itself. And it seems that death equalizes all individuals, not only, as is often said, because it compels them all to take the same step, or because it deprives them all at once of all differences in fortune and opinion, but also because it erases the wrinkles that each of them had momentarily formed on the surface of being and abolishes them without leaving a trace in an abyss of indifference and uniformity.

But this is only appearance. It is life that creates a kind of community among beings: the same sky shelters them, the same ground supports them, the same instinct animates them, they participate in the same struggles, they follow paths that intersect, and their individual destinies resemble an imperfect essay that remains engaged in the dough of universal genesis. It is its denouement that suddenly fixes it by interrupting it. The earth that covers all the corpses makes no distinction in this ash: but thought does not confuse the dead in the same memory. And death, which a moment ago seemed to bury individual existence, alone has the power to liberate it: it allows us to embrace its curve now that it is complete, to discover its meaning that eluded us as long as it was still possible to deflect it.

For an entity to conquer independence, it must be stripped of all temporal interest. Now, the dead have become perfect solitaries; they are removed from all change, and our actions have no hold over them anymore. They are reduced to their pure [276] spiritual essence, that is to say, to the very truth of their being. All the perishable circumstances through which it gradually formed have perished. The role of death cannot be, as is sometimes believed, to give us an eternal contemplation of all the events we have experienced: that would be a dreadful fate. But each event appropriated our activity to a passing situation, while death abolishes the matter of all action to extract their meaning; thus, it is a liberation. It frees us in the same way from all particular attachments and leaves in our soul only the intention of our purest love.

The death of someone always grants access to a unique and imperishable form of existence in the spiritual universe: it is no longer within anyone’s power to annihilate it. As long as individuals mingled their lives with one another, as long as they acted upon one another, it was difficult to recognize what belonged to each of them individually. Now the separation has occurred. Death releases beings from this [277] kind of natural community in which life held them, to create within them personal independence through the perfect detachment that it produces towards everything external to them and which they could not have achieved by their own efforts alone.

8. Death is an accomplishment.

Death has a character of solemnity, not only because it opens before us the mystery of the unknown, into which each being must enter alone, nor because it carries to the extreme point the very idea of our fragility and misery, but because it suspends all our movements and gives a decisive and irrevocable character to everything we have done. It is not the abolition of life; it is its fulfillment. It gives an eternal gravity to all our actions by suddenly revealing to us the impossibility of making even the slightest alteration to them.

Thus, to prepare for death is to prepare for life, not because true life [278] must be rejected beyond death, but because the thought of death must give to all the acts we are about to perform, by freeing them from the constraints of the moment, a kind of immobile majesty that elevates them to the absolute and obliges us, so to speak, to contemplate in advance their pure significance. We must, in a sense, bring them into death to give them the fullness of life. As long as we imagine that we can still modify them, as long as we regard them only as perishable events that time will erase, it is impossible to discover their true weight: they only show us that at the moment they escape us. It is death that reveals it to us by making us attentive to the sound of their fall into eternity.

If it does not produce a paralyzing terror in us, the feeling of imminent death suddenly gives our life a supernatural purity and light. It invites us to see it as an accomplishment and no longer as a trial, as a completed painting from which the painter can no longer add any brushstrokes. Would the painter say that his work is dead now that it is finished? It is only now that it begins to live. No touch has for him that provisional and, so to speak, unreal character that it still retained as long as he had the power to erase it. The work has emerged from a world where everything becomes, to enter a world where everything exists.

Thus, the idea of death already introduces our life into eternity. Death completes instead of abolishing. Through death, life ceases to be an expectation and becomes a realized presence. This life, which until now had meaning only for us, takes its place in the universe like a painting that finally separates from the painter’s hand to join the heritage of humanity. However, at death, the painting that each person leaves behind and to which they dedicated their entire life is none other than themselves.

9. Death and solitude.

Death is a step that one always takes alone. The being who dies withdraws into solitude and breaks all the ties that connected them to the sensory world. Better than the most perfect recluse, they reduce all the beings they have loved to their pure essence, carrying them with their thoughts and love into the spiritual world where they seem to be entering and where, perhaps, they had the happiness of already dwelling. One who only feels immense anguish at the moment of death has not known this world of which the other is only the envelope, and death itself will not be enough to reveal it to them.

More than the sufferings of the body that we carry alone, death reduces us to our own strength. And if it judges us, it is based on this secret part of ourselves that we still keep within us when everything else fails us. Even in the sufferings that cannot be shared, the complaints of those who try to console us make us feel more keenly how separated we are from them. But this is much more true of death. What use are so many lamentations that seem to want to hold us back in the world we are leaving, when we should start accompanying ourselves in that invisible world where all beings will enter one day?

There are even two kinds of solitude that death reveals to us in their extreme form: there is the individual solitude of a body burdened with weariness, succumbing under the weight of its task and its pain, its movements slowing painfully, and it senses the initiative slipping away from it. The shame of a body at once so sensitive and so weak, which, at the moment it is about to cease acting, is nothing more than a powerless presence, compels every being about to die to seek refuge in a hole in order to end peacefully and alone.

But death consummates another kind of solitude. For if it detaches us from our bodies, it establishes eternal relationships with all other beings, first and foremost those surrounding us at our deathbed. By eliminating all the obstacles and separations that matter imposes on us during life, death expands and populates our inner being as the solitude of the spirit already does in this life. The latter already resembled an imperfect death; it loosened, without untying, the bond that connected us to the visible world; it already sheltered in life the dead we will someday become. Death, like solitude, by drawing the spirit back into itself, instead of abandoning the being to a separate and defenseless life, allows it to enter into a kind of pure intimacy with everything that exists.

Man always finds himself alone and naked before death. But it is this solitude and nakedness that make his greatness. He is only terrified by them if he has not experienced them during his life; but if this solitude and nakedness have long been familiar realities to him, he recognizes, at the moment of dying, the face that life itself had for him in its best hours. Instead of being torn apart by the loss of his affections and feeling their absence, he finds them again as he has always known them, that is, as imperishable parts of his spiritual being; they appear to him in a more transparent and pure light at the moment when the sensory manifestations that expressed them but also veiled them fall away like garments.

10. Entering into eternity.

“Do you think,” Plato asks in The Republic, “that a great soul that directs its thought to all times and all beings considers human life as something important?” It is because death only concerns self-love, while intelligence, which detaches us from it, embraces the entire universe and places the individual in an eternal order.

But death changes nothing in the eternal order. It only matters to the individual. It is only heart-wrenching for the finite and mortal part of the beings who die or those who are connected to them. It takes away from them the enjoyment of what was perishable in them, but in such a way that the idea of this deprivation can affect them and not its reality. It can also be said that death completes their existence or fulfills it. And the fear we have of it is a kind of fear of ourselves, a fear of the being we have given ourselves.

When we consider death as one of the events that are part of our life, our thought, as a spectator, should not be disturbed: because even if this event happens to us, it cannot touch the thought, which is the purest part of ourselves. It does not undergo the transient destiny of the objects it illuminates; on the contrary, it can only contemplate what is consummated, and death is the only means that allows it to realize life itself and possess it.

Time flows only for us; by breaking our temporal life, death seems to interrupt the individual enjoyment we had of eternal being. But the opposite is true: at the moment when we have completed our journey in time, death allows thought to recognize its unity and gives it a place in eternity. The self-awareness we had and the awareness of the Whole were constantly at odds during our life; death reunites them.

Many people are seduced by the idea of indefinite perfectibility of our nature, and they imagine a series of rebirths that would allow the creature to progress towards a god who continuously recedes into the future. But God encompasses within the eternal present all possible existences. It is on Earth that each being must discover its vocation and realize its essence. It spends its life choosing itself, but it eternally enjoys the choice it has made. It cannot even be said that it ever suffers from having made a bad choice, for it is not suffering to be deprived of certain pleasures that one initially despised. In the system of essences, there is a hierarchy, but each essence determines its own rank and realizes its own perfection at the chosen rank, which is only definitively revealed to it at death.

Chapter XII. Spiritual goods

1. The spirit contains everything.

How could the mind conceive an object that surpasses its own capacity? There is therefore equality between the volume of the mind and the volume of the Whole. The essence of consciousness is always to surround the object or to embrace it. Everything it can grasp must penetrate it. It is not among things, rather things are within it. We can think that they surpass a finite mind, but not the universal mind from which it is inseparable and in which it participates without ever exhausting it. Consciousness can be compared to a circle of light that gradually envelops itself in an increasingly vast circle. The idea of a circle that cannot be encompassed by any other is the very idea of the universal mind or sovereign truth. It is also the idea of the Whole; and there is this resemblance between the Whole and our own consciousness: just as there is nothing in the world outside the Whole, there can be nothing for us outside of our consciousness, although it continues to expand and our attention continues to make new discoveries within it.

Consciousness is like a spider placed at the center of a web, which is in contact with all points of the periphery through very sensitive threads. Knowledge is the web that we seek to extend over the entirety of time to weave it. Therefore, knowledge, which unites us with the Whole, gives us the joy of participating in its perfection: infinity is inseparable from it, and there is nothing that, in principle, can escape it. It is even impossible to have self-awareness if one seeks to grasp one’s being in isolation: to know oneself is to inscribe oneself in the Whole, to multiply with it the relationships that reveal all our powers.

Consciousness is not a closed world that is self-sufficient. It also receives the beam of light that illuminates it, but it is its responsibility not to let it dissipate and to regulate its use. It establishes in us the law that reigns in the universe, a law that turns against us as soon as we despise it, and outside of which all our actions are frivolous and ineffective. For there is no thought, no emotion, no event that does not express our connection with the total being and at the same time become incorporated into our personal being to shape it. If we try to confine them within the boundaries of the self, our self-love is fortified, our activity is restrained, our innocence is compromised. Only the idea of a universal and selfless consciousness, of which we are the instruments, puts everything in its place and infinitely expands our self by asking it to move further away from its own center.

In the spiritual life, the individual must constantly transcend oneself so that all their ideas, all their feelings, all their actions continuously associate their own destiny with that of humanity and the universe. Thus, the one who prays says: “Our Father,” and not “My Father,” because it is true that the spirit, surpassing all states and desires of separate consciousness, naturally extends its attention and love over the entire world.

2. The soul and the spirit.

The soul and the spirit are always together but engage in a perpetual dialogue and never manage to merge. The soul is individual, but it is the same spirit that is present in all souls. The soul is the mediator between the body and the spirit; it is a kind of spiritual body that allows the spirit to bring light into matter and allows matter to bring emotion and vibration into the spirit.

Thus, only the soul possesses consciousness, for consciousness arises from the struggle between flesh and spirit. The soul inclines towards both sides alternately; at times it listens to all the voices of nature, while at other times it seems enlightened by a supernatural light. Consciousness resides in this uninterrupted oscillation, in this initiative that prevents it from settling, in this choice that it continually renews.

The body does not participate in consciousness; it is below it; it is only an object to it. But it is consciousness that participates in the spirit, not the other way around: it surpasses consciousness; it is the principle that illuminates it, and one cannot say that the sun, which illuminates everything else, is itself illuminated. However, we know very well that our consciousness is weak and miserable, that it constantly welcomes the light but never has enough openness to let everything that the spirit offers penetrate it. Consciousness is a divided and even torn spirituality; it is because the spirit is cramped within the soul, where the individual captures it within their limits, but it always aspires to expand them and to regain the lost unity.

Thus, it happens that in this excess, consciousness succumbs, as in moments of inspiration or grace; then it gathers all its effects that were previously dispersed. This is also understood by those who speak of reason and consider it a judge of thought superior to thought itself, and by those who speak of God and attribute to Him all the life that animates consciousness, but not the turmoil in which it struggles.

Just as the body is located in space, the soul is located in the pure spirit. And just as the movement of the body constantly reveals new places to us, the desires of the soul continually reveal new thoughts. But it is not the gaze that creates the landscape, nor is it attention that generates truth. However, there is such a perfect harmony and subtle interaction between the gaze and material light, between the soul and spiritual light, that the soul and the gaze eventually no longer consider themselves separate from the principle that illuminates them. It only takes a little darkness within or outside to remind them of their humility.

It is our limitation and the resistance of matter that turn the life of the soul into a struggle, just like the life of the body. However, the victory of the spirit culminates in contemplation: then the soul enjoys its ultimate repose, which is the pinnacle of its activity. Thus, as soon as the artist’s hand finds rest, it forgets the successive touches it inscribed in the purity of the contour; but it then embraces it with such ease, firmness, and perfection that it suddenly experiences the joy of a discovery as well as possession.

3. Flesh and spirit.

Our life is at the junction of the body and the spirit. It inclines towards one or the other at times. And our light and happiness depend on the choice it makes. But the body and the spirit adjust and correspond to each other: each can prolong the impulse it borrows from the other. Thought sometimes exercises its own activity in a kind of inner delight that is a true concupiscence of the spirit. Similarly, the gaze can embrace the world in such pure and disinterested contemplation that it seems almost immaterial.

Life is a movement that must lead us gradually from the innocence of instinct to the innocence of the spirit. But for this to happen, reflection must release in us an initiative power that can engender all the curiosities and perversions of intelligence and flesh before dissolving into an activity that surpasses it and to which it must consent. Consciousness breaks the unity of life. As long as this unity remains broken, we take pleasure in the infinite meanderings of internal analysis, constantly doubling what the first act of reflection had already doubled: and this is a game that continually sharpens our self-love. But this doubling must lead us to a more perfect unity; by surpassing itself, self-love must allow us to discover within ourselves a spiritual being that, through knowledge and love, is capable of uniting with everything that exists.

Thus, within us, there is a selfish and carnal spontaneity that the will must constantly restrain, and a spiritual and divine spontaneity before which the will must fade away. For the action of the will is both powerful and modest: it either opposes an obstacle to each form of spontaneous activity or allows it to flow freely. The entire movement of consciousness fills the interval between instinct, which precedes the will, and grace, which surpasses it.

Flesh and spirit are not two adversaries that confront each other with the same weapons. Matter imposes a kind of violence on the spirit, but the spirit, by penetrating matter, tames and illuminates it; it turns it into a willing and attentive servant, happy to discover its vocation and fulfill it. We are born as flesh and become spirit. We are born as old prisoners of a long heredity and a body to which we are groaning slaves. And youth demands to be conquered through gradual liberation from the servitudes of the body and the heredity that sudden death deprives us of.

4. Jacob’s ladder.

Jacob’s ladder represents this back-and-forth movement by which we ascend to spiritual things and descend to material things. The fall is not a first and single failure that we spend our whole lives trying to redeem ourselves from, for we continue to fall and rise. These are our twin movements. When we cling to material goods, their weight drags us down. As soon as the spirit frees itself from them, it begins its ascent again. But it is the same movement that sometimes carries us above ourselves and sometimes brings us back to ourselves. It is the same love that binds me to myself if I restrain its momentum and that unites me with God if I consent to follow it.

The same force sustains vice and virtue. It is even sometimes said that virtues are more beautiful when they contain and restrain vices, but which give them greater acuity and vigor. Vices can deeply shake activity, shatter the indifference that is a kind of sleep or death of consciousness, and impart a strong impulse to the soul that, once it surpasses the limits in which selfishness imprisoned it, becomes the principle of all virtues. There is no power within us, no matter how misapplied, that must be destroyed and cannot be converted into a good use. The one who lacks anger lacks, for overcoming obstacles, a force that must be put in the service of wisdom. The one who lacks desire lacks the essential impulse that the attraction of good gives to activity. The one who has too much naivety also lacks delicacy and insight. And there is the same principle at the root of courage and anger, intelligence and cunning, love and sensuality.

The greatest danger of virtue is to give us the vanity of virtue, so that virtue can separate instead of uniting, and the soul, as it ascends, already begins to descend. As soon as spiritual goods present themselves to us, we can only lose them if we want self-love to enjoy them. The source of inner activity dries up as soon as self-love captures it to turn it to its own glory. Thus, the individual cannot seek to benefit from the only goods worth desiring without corrupting them. As soon as one can observe in virtue that narrow self-concern that leads it to retreat into a kind of secret pride, it means that self-love has already overcome it.

5. Sensible goods.

It is because we participate in Being that we strive for its sovereign perfection. But it is because we are finite and material beings that we strive for sensible and perishable goods. Thus, it is natural for us to approach God with all our faculties and pleasures with each of them. However, there is not a single sensible good that is not both an image and a limitation of an eternal good. Thus, by relating it to its source, instead of diminishing or sacrificing it, we can only enlarge and penetrate it.

Many people who would like to attach themselves to a great eternal interest feel boredom in the face of objects that seem destined to satisfy our taste for temporal life: ambition, wealth, gambling, luxury, industry, or love. More than others, they could say that they yawn at their own lives and that their soul seems even emptier the greater they perceive it to be. But it is precisely because it is empty that it appears great to them: they lack the strength to find the truth that alone can fill it. Now, the nature of truth is precisely to envelop the smallest things in light and to give a divine character to the most trivial and boring tasks.

Thus, it is an error to think that one must either, like so many people, immerse oneself in the pursuit of material goods, considering spiritual goods as illusions or luxuries for leisure time, or fully attach oneself to eternal things while despising and humiliating our sensible life, which becomes a sign of our misery. No individual ever has such a choice to make. What makes the beauty and mystery of our life is that it creates no visible difference between servants of the body and servants of the pure spirit. They perform the same small tasks, diligently attend to the humble needs of the organism, go to the same places, and interact with the same beings. But for some, external action is the goal and culmination of all their thoughts, while for others, it is merely the instrument and sign: their material gestures seem to dissolve and vanish, revealing only the inner significance that illuminates them.

The pleasures of the senses are a reflection of eternal joys; knowledge of the material world is a reflection of contemplative knowledge; carnal beauty is a reflection of uncreated beauty; human love is a reflection of the love of God. Therefore, these different goods should not be despised or claimed to be opposed to true goods. We must enjoy them according to their nature, with simplicity and innocence, but not without recognizing the trouble and imperfection within them, nor without admiring the gifts they offer us, nor without transfiguring them in a way that rediscovers in each of them a call to purer joys.

6. Sharing of goods.

There are two kinds of goods: those that can only belong to the individual, which are incapable of being shared, and those that only make sense if they are common to all, which are formed through communication and grow by being shared. These are spiritual goods. It is when we spread them that we receive them. The individual cannot acquire any particular possession of them that he could be jealous of, for he can only enjoy them by renouncing himself, by accepting to participate in a reality that nourishes and surpasses him. Thus, we must give them through the same act that gives them to us, and when we free ourselves from the bondage of self-love, we immediately draw closer to other people and provoke in them the same liberation. By relinquishing the goods they previously sought to retain, they enter with us into a new world where the same inexhaustible wealth is offered to all: we can only [301] enjoy it through a kind of mutual generosity.

On the contrary, whoever pursues his own good lacks it with certainty: it is therefore a great evil to want to possess a good that is only ours. And all the goods that we desire, we must seek to share them, need to share them, and feel them grow through this very sharing. The good that we do to others is the only way we can do good to ourselves.

True goods do not diminish when they pass from hand to hand; they even multiply constantly in the hands of the one who possesses them, continually rejuvenating the activity that produces them, that enjoys them, and that communicates them. Spiritual goods have no master; they belong to those who feel them and love them, they belong to those who take them. And the use one makes of them, instead of wearing them out or destroying them, is an act of love that constantly brings them back to life. It is therefore evident that the one who gives is the only one who possesses, and by giving, he never ceases to receive. Thus, the paradox is explained that the goods one receives are always proportional [302] to the goods one possesses. Thus, this saying is explained: “To him who has, more will be given, and from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” This is because there is no difference between having and giving, nor between the gift one receives and the gift one gives. But the laws of the eternal world are the very laws of the world in which we live: what brings happiness in this world brings eternal happiness, and what makes us unhappy in this world makes us unhappy eternally.

7. State of grace.

The important thing is not to avoid falling, but to be capable of rising to certain heights. Man remains hesitant and miserable, he allows himself to be attracted and deceived by the thousand appearances of happiness, he is nothing but a laborer at work, filled with blind and painful goodwill if he has not, at least once in his life, had a miraculous experience whose memory is his only support and which he constantly seeks to pursue and rediscover: it is that of a state full of ease and simplicity [303], where all his faculties find their freest and most necessary play, which excludes effort because it unties it, which gives meaning to the slightest events, to everything he sees, to everything he does, and always brings him a joy that far surpasses his expectations. Each of us feels within himself, on the threshold of consciousness, the obscure and imminent presence of such a state, even when he fails to make it palpable; as soon as it presents itself to him, he blesses it: he knows well that at any moment, a chance, an opportunity, a meeting, a gaze of attention, a movement of abandonment, or a simple act of consent is enough to make it burst forth. And its luminous reflection helps him endure even the grayest hours.

When grace sustains us, there is nothing it does not help us accept, even fatigue, even suffering. It occupies the entire field of consciousness and allows us to accomplish the most diverse and even the most tedious tasks without our joy drying up or our inner unity breaking. When grace is present, [304] we cease to look toward the future, to desire, and even to hope: we are fulfilled. And the sign of grace is that the present is always overflowing for us.

Grace, it is said, is not given to all men, and often it abandons us. Then, what depends on us is what we do when it is absent: the rest of life can only be filled with the memory, with confident anticipation, with patience, and with imitation of the moments when grace was present. But it is still up to us to ensure that we do not lose it when we have it, to keep its fruit when it withdraws, and finally, to always be ready to welcome it when it presents itself.

Grace always infiltrates us through paths we had not foreseen. To be certain that we can do nothing without it, we must have felt at least once completely abandoned. We must not solicit it through a prayer addressed to a god outside of us, nor await it as a revelation or a lightning bolt, nor regret it as a happiness [305] from which we are deprived; for it is within us, even when we do not see it, and it often suffices to withdraw into ourselves, to meditate, and to penetrate its mysterious presence in order to suddenly make it visible as if we had brought it forth.

In union with God, it is only a matter of allowing ourselves to be open to His action, and we destroy it every time we try to anticipate or force it. Nothing is more difficult than achieving perfect silence of self-love: even the ardor that carries us toward God is not always blameless, for self-love always seeks to possess, and we sometimes think it leaves us at the moment when it gains more dominion over us.

8. Dispossession.

We should never seek to acquire or retain any possessions, for we are always possessed by the object we possess: this is the means of always being poor, envious, and discontented. But it is by doing without all possessions, all owned things, that we [306] can acquire the only true possession, which is the power to generate all goods, that is, to draw them from ourselves. It may seem surprising that only the one who divests himself of everything he possesses becomes enriched. It is because until then, he had only possessed wretched goods that made him anxious, opaque, and burdensome: it suffices for him to abandon them to become a pure power capable of now participating in everything that exists.

All material goods overwhelm and blind us. It is because they cannot give us the feeling of true possession. For we only possess ourselves, and that is why the moment of the most rigorous privation becomes the moment of the most perfect fullness.

Our mind must be even more detached from intellectual goods than our body from material goods; if it can only possess the very activity it exercises, the only possession it can have regarding its knowledge is not to take pleasure in it, but to produce it. We only possess what we think at the moment we think it. It seems to us that what we know and remember is the object of [307] a possession that is both more apparent and more secure; but it only produces a satisfaction similar to that provided by material goods. Yet the possession of spiritual goods, like that of all true goods, does not distinguish itself from the operation that brings them into existence; when it does, it means that we have lost them.

If we must strive to have no possessions, to be perfectly naked and stripped, it is to become a mere act that is realized. For the only goods that have value are those we cannot lose: they are the goods we carry within us and always take with us; it is the ability to produce them all. All others make us slaves and burden us with the fear of losing them. When we no longer have this fear, it is because we have abandoned them to rise above them. Thus, all our misfortunes come from seeking outside of us and far from us the goods that are near us and within us.

When the separate self is asked to renounce itself in favor of the grace we describe, which brings within it the very principle of knowledge and love, this self must experience a feeling of joy and enthusiasm in the face of such a promise, since it feels that its being is on the verge of breaking its limits and expanding indefinitely. And on the other hand, it is inevitable that it opposes desperate resistance to this action that uplifts it, as it senses that it must disappear, that it must yield its place to another being it does not yet know, in which its most familiar being will be as if consumed: the thought of its own annihilation fills it with an inexpressible anguish that it must transform into a “total and gentle renunciation.”

End

at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)