Friday, June 23, 2023

The Error of Narcissus, by Louis Lavelle

The Error of Narcissus is not, contrary to what the title suggests, a lengthy meditation on the myth of Narcissus - this is merely its starting point. Louis Lavelle starts from the idea of self-enclosure to ask himself what would be the openness to the other within the common world, which for him is the “total presence.” Thus, Lavelle dedicates himself to themes such as measure, which is “at the same time this tension and understanding that make each thing be in its place, that make each faculty exercise its most direct and strongest play,” and wisdom, which, “instead of being, as is commonly believed, a renunciation of the absolute, is, on the contrary, that encounter with the absolute that gives each thing its measure.” Ultimately, Lavelle seeks an existential perfection, conjecturing standards by which a person could judge their most intimate actions and reach purity, “so perfect and so united that it offers no opening for any attack. It does not divide itself to know itself.”

Chapter I. The Error of Narcissus

1. The adventure of Narcissus.

The adventure of Narcissus has inspired all poets since Ovid.

Narcissus is sixteen years old. He is inaccessible to desire. But it is this refusal of desire that will transform into a more subtle desire for him.

He has a pure heart. Fearing that his own gaze might tarnish this purity, it was foretold that he would live long if he agreed not to know himself. But destiny decided otherwise. He now heads towards a virgin fountain to quench his innocent thirst, where no one has ever looked at themselves. Suddenly, he discovers his beauty and becomes thirsty only for himself. It is his beauty that now generates the desire that torments him, that separates him from himself by showing him his image, and forces him to search for himself where he sees himself, that is, where he no longer is.

He finds before him an object resembling himself, which has come with him and follows his every step. “I smile at you,” he says, "and you smile back at me. I reach out my arms, and you reach out yours. I can see that you too desire my embrace. If I cry knowing it is impossible, you cry with me, and the same tears that unite us in the feeling of our desire and separation cloud the transparency of the water, suddenly hiding us from each other.

Thus begins this game of withdrawal and feints by which he distances himself from himself to see himself and leaps towards himself to seize himself. He had to leave himself in order to give his love an object that would be annihilated if he managed to join it. Only a little water separates him from himself. He plunges his arms into it to grasp this object that can only be an image. He can only contemplate himself and not embrace himself. He withers away without being able to tear himself away from this place. And now, by the edge of the fountain, as a witness to his miserable adventure, there remains only a flower with a saffron-colored heart surrounded by white petals.

2. The nymph Echo.

Narcissus asks the purest vision to make him enjoy his essence alone; and the tragedy in which he succumbs is that she can only give him her appearance.

He is speechless and does not seek to understand himself. He only wants to see himself, to seize his beautiful and mute body as prey, to which words would give some troubling initiative that could disturb desire and divide possession within him.

But even his failure prompts him to make a call, to implore a response. Restless in his solitude, which he believed he had overcome, he agrees to break the unity of pure silence, to search within the depths of the fountain for signs of his own life in that form resembling his own, yet doubling it.

Now, the echo reverberates his own voice as if to testify that he is alone, lending resonance to his very solitude. This response, which mimics his words and is only the imitation of a response, further separates him from himself and transports him into an illusory world where his own existence dissipates and eludes him.

Narcissus' punishment is to have been loved only by the nymph Echo. He seeks in the fountain another being who could love him. But he is incapable of finding it there. He cannot escape from himself. Only the self-love he has continues to pursue him, even when he wishes to flee from it.

The myth states that young Narcissus cannot be separated from the nymph Echo, who is the consciousness he has of himself. Echo loves Narcissus and cannot, in order to express her love, speak to him first. For she has no voice of her own. She repeats what Narcissus says, but she only repeats part of the words. “Is there someone near Me?” says Narcissus. - “Me,” replies Echo. And when Narcissus says, “Let us unite,” Echo echoes, “Unite.” She endlessly reflects his own words in a fragmented and ironic refrain, never responding to them.

3. The fountain or the source.

There is no fountain that can reflect back to Narcissus a faithful and already formed image. The fountain in which he gazes at himself is a spring where he gradually comes to life: the water constantly filters, ripples the surface, preventing it from capturing his trembling outline. However, let us suppose that, during an elusive moment, the spring runs dry, that the surface of the water becomes still and smooth like a true mirror, will he finally be able to contemplate himself as if frozen in that transparency? Once again, he must lose all hope. For this mirror is so sensitive that his very breath is enough to tarnish it; as he approaches, it stirs upon him, like a wind from outside, a thousand ripples he can no longer calm.

He undertakes this moving and contradictory endeavor to remain himself, that is, an invisible freedom, a questioning thought, and the secret of pure sentiment, while perceiving himself as an object that arrests the gaze, as an unfolded landscape, as a offered face. He wants to become the spectator of himself, that is, of this inner act by which he is constantly born into life and which can never become a spectacle without annihilating itself. He looks at himself instead of living, which is his first sin. He seeks his essence but finds only his image, which never ceases to disappoint him.

He sees in himself only the reflection of his beautiful, still pure body. But the gaze he casts upon himself is enough to trouble him, and he is now incapable of living.

4. The mirror and the reflection.

Transparency alone is not enough for the mirror in which Narcissus gazes at himself. One must also consider what is being reflected. Now, Narcissus contains within him the infinite depth of being and life. And his face is reflected precisely where he stops in this descent into himself, which knows no final end.

He searches for his soul, but self-love and the desire to possess himself form the reflection that, by limiting his pursuit, shows him the image of his body. Yet the emotion he derives from the discovery of himself is the same emotion he derives from the discovery of the absolute in which he participates. But it never reaches completion: and there is nowhere an object that can fix it.

If we imagine Narcissus before the mirror, the resistance of the glass and the metal present a barrier to his endeavors. Against them, he bangs his forehead and fists; he finds nothing by going around it. The mirror imprisons within itself a world beyond his reach, where he sees himself but cannot grasp himself, separated from him by a false distance that he can shrink but not cross.

On the contrary, the fountain is an open path for him. Even before finding his image, he delights in the transparency of the water and the perfect purity that no contact has yet disrupted. Extreme lucidity alone is not enough; he must traverse it to reach his image once it forms. But this world that welcomes him forever holds him captive, and he cannot enter it without dying.

5. The past and death.

I can only see myself by turning towards my own past, that is, towards a being I already am no longer. But to live is to create my own being by directing my will towards a future in which I do not yet exist and which will only become an object of spectacle once I have not only reached it but surpassed it.

Now, the self-awareness that Narcissus seeks deprives him of the will to live, that is, to act. For in order to act, he must cease to see himself and think of himself; he must refuse to turn a source, in which he gazes at himself, into a fountain whose waters are meant to purify, nourish, and strengthen him.

But he has too much tenderness for his body, which itself is destined to dissipate one day, for this past that eludes him and compels him to chase after a shadow. He is like one who writes his memoirs and seeks to enjoy his own story before it is finished. To look at oneself in a mirror is to see one’s own history advancing towards oneself: one can only read in it, backward, the secret of one’s destiny.

Narcissus is therefore punished for his injustice, for he desires to contemplate his being before he has even produced it himself; he wants to find within himself, for the purpose of possessing it, an existence that is only pure potential until it has been realized. Narcissus is content with this possibility; he transforms it into a deceptive image. He now resides in it, finding satisfaction not in his own being but in the appearance of himself, which he delights in, imagining that he has created his true being.

It is only as he advances in life that man begins to become capable of seeing himself. Then, if he looks back, he measures the distance traveled and discovers the trace of his steps. The spring in which Narcissus gazes at himself should only be visited at twilight. He can only look at a fading form in it, near its decline, at the moment when he himself is about to become a shadow. Then his being and his image resemble each other and eventually merge. But young Narcissus came to gaze at himself in the spring at dawn; he sought to look at what he should not see, and his tragic fate forced him to surrender his own body to the very image he intended to grasp.

Now he can only join that barren effigy. He is condemned to an early and futile death because he desired to obtain, before deserving it, the privilege that only death can grant a person: to contemplate one’s own work within oneself once it is fully accomplished.

6. A stranger who is himself.

No one can fully recognize themselves in the reflection that the mirror of self-reflection casts back at them. It is oneself and yet not oneself. However Narcissus attempts to duplicate himself, he confronts himself and brings forth an inverse and complementary image. He embodies the ongoing dialogue between the self and its image, constituting the very alternatives of consciousness that we have of life. Yet he never achieves that exact coincidence that would abolish them both.

Thus, we see ourselves as another who is not truly another, although they present us with nothing more than an appearance that cannot be grasped by the hand or retained by the mirror, and a false appearance that always betrays the model.

Narcissus is so close to himself that, in order to know himself, he moves away from himself, but he can no longer reunite with himself. And the fountain always reflects a face identical to his own, yet always new to him because it continually shows him the same stranger, that is, always the same unknown. Narcissus seeks the miracle of transforming his own being into a being that he can see as another sees. It is the desire to love himself as another could love him that drives him to understand this appearance that he presents to another. Yet another lends life to this appearance, while Narcissus has separated himself from it.

But here the drama begins: for the image he creates of himself has no more substance than the most fragile object; unlike a mirage that only deceives us from a distance, it remains so close to him that, as soon as he moves away, it dissipates immediately. Thus, Narcissus is the hero of an impossible endeavor, for he will never achieve with this image a true separation, an exact coincidence, or the reciprocity of action and suffering that marks true action.

Narcissus is moved by the feeling of his own existence. By observing himself, he produces an image of himself similar to those previously received from others. He renews it, multiplies it through movements for which he is both spectator and author. He begins to sympathize with himself. But even this image he gazes at in the fountain extends its arms not towards him but towards another.

Narcissus alienates himself; he is outside of himself, suddenly a stranger both to himself and to his own eyes. He is the fool who leaves himself and chases after himself, and he ends up like Ophelia. Why does he, who is alive, need this image of his own life, which is intended for others and not for him?

7. The shadow of a shadow.

If it were true to say that Narcissus could duplicate himself, he would find in his double a fragment of himself. But instead of duplicating himself, he redoubles to see his own invisible reality, and what he renders visible is nothing more than an unreal shadow.

Narcissus needs reassurance of his own existence. He doubts it, and that is why he seeks to see it. But he must resign himself, he who sees the world, to not seeing himself. For how could he see himself, the seer, except by transforming himself into the thing seen, from which he himself is absent? He, who embraces all things, how could he embrace himself? He must leave himself in order to possess himself, and if he searches for himself, he exhausts himself.

He who is the origin of all presence and imparts presence to all that exists, how could he become present to himself?

One who possesses knowledge cannot possess the existence of what they know. Yet Narcissus wants to unite being and knowing in the same act of his mind. He is unaware that his own existence can only be realized through the knowledge of the world. But he interrupts his life in order to know it, and he can only know himself as a simulacrum from which life itself has departed. He is but an empty vessel that reveals its form only through the content that fills it.

Narcissus knows nothing of the spring in which he gazes at himself, the foliage that shelters him, the vast world that surrounds him; he knows only that fragile reflection of himself that forms within these things, and without them, it would be nothing.

Narcissus trembles with emotion and disappointment in the revelation that is presented to him. Nothing could satisfy him except the sight of the entire universe springing forth from his gaze, as an act of creation and contemplation combined. But it is precisely the universe that suddenly disappears before him, replaced by the derisory and powerless image he obtains of himself.

It is an impious and disorderly vision where he refuses to contemplate the Creator’s work in order to contemplate himself, instead of creating himself and making himself his own work.

But Narcissus cannot bear to be or to act; he is reduced, as the subtle Gongora says, “to solicit echoes, to scorn springs.” He seeks what flatters him rather than what he truly is. Narcissus' body is itself nothing but an image that serves as a sign of his presence to those around him; but what does he pursue in the fountain, if not the sign of that sign and the image of that image?

8. Narcissus' complacency.

Narcissus exhibits extreme modesty towards others, but he sheds all modesty towards himself: he indulges in this lack of modesty.

Narcissus is amazed to be an object to himself and rejoices in seeing himself as a stranger would, while secretly enjoying the pleasure of abolishing that stranger within himself.

Narcissus desires to have no other spectator or lover than himself. He wants to be both the lover and the beloved. He wants to unite within himself two acts that only occur by opposing each other. It is, in parting ways, to find himself and to retreat back into himself when everyone else is only thinking of leaving themselves to seek an object to know or a being to love in the world.

But in this mysterious turning inward where he indulges, Narcissus rejoices that no external object separates him from himself anymore, that no being independent of him opposes another will to his own.

Narcissus shuts himself in his own solitude to keep company with himself: in this perfect self-sufficiency that he hopes for, he experiences his own powerlessness. He has coined the words self-knowledge and self-love, but he torments himself with the impossibility of fulfilling the acts these words designate. For he knows well that he is with the “me” that knows and loves, and not with the vain image he pursues of his knowledge and love.

Being known, being loved by himself adds nothing to the pure power he has to know and to love; it only appears to do so.

Narcissus’s crime is to prefer his image to himself in the end. The impossibility of uniting with it can only bring him despair. Narcissus loves an object he cannot possess. But as soon as he began to lean to see it, it was death that he desired. To join his own image and merge with it is to die. It was also his doppelganger that the Rhine Maiden sought in the moving waters.

Narcissus does not know that he must leave his body to perceive his image. He wanted to imitate God who, by contemplating himself, created his Word. He could only see the image of his body. But in it, he sees himself more beautiful than all spectacles, and this discovery makes him faint. He disappears into the fountain: for he wants his too beautiful image to occupy the entire space of his being, as happened to Lucifer when he became Satan.

Narcissus seeks to enjoy the image of his own body through the spirit. It is a daring and criminal endeavor that can only hasten his downfall.

9. The sin against the spirit.

Narcissus is secretive and solitary.

His error is subtle. Narcissus is a spirit who wants to present himself as a spectacle to himself. He commits the sin against the spirit by trying to seize himself as he seizes bodies, but he cannot succeed, and it is his own body that he annihilates in his own image. This image attracts and fascinates him, turning him away from all real objects, and in the end, he only has eyes for it.

In order to experience self-enjoyment, he turns himself into an idol, hoping to find before him an object he can enjoy. But only the dreamer can produce such an image of himself, and this image, in turn, perishes with its own dream.

And the tragedy of Narcissus is that the fountain imposes this effigy of himself upon him, an effigy he did not form himself. It is a product of reflection, where only reflection allows him to recognize himself, but it presupposes a being that reflects upon itself, to which he is no longer interested. Thus, he loses what he had most and is denied what he desires least in return. But the humblest act must suffice to deliver him from the misery into which he has fallen and restore to him the being he has lost. Such is the morality of his eternal adventure.

10. Death or birth.

Will it be said that Narcissus dies of sadness upon seeing a beauty that is his own and remains a pure spectacle to him? This image he tries to grasp is more beautiful than himself, but it is unattainable and inviolable like all shadows and reflections.

Or will it be said that his sadness stems from discovering, through this image, that he has a material form, he who thought he was only a pure spirit? And should we think, as the myth suggests, that the death of Narcissus forever closes his young and miserable adventure? It can be given another turn. Hermes transforms his death into a birth, which shows how inseparable these two opposites are. It is at the moment when a person sees the reflection of their form in the water or their shadow on the ground, and finds it beautiful, that they fall in love with it and desire to possess it. Then desire captivates them by this form. It seizes its lover, enveloping them entirely, and they love each other with mutual love. Such is the account of the incarnation of Narcissus, the moment when his bodily life begins.

11. Narcissus and Pygmalion.

Imagination seems to breathe life into all its creations. There is no person in whom does not dwell a dreamer who can say, “On such a day, I summoned the image of Alexander, and I saw it gradually come to life before me. Soon the young man began to move and displayed all the signs of presence and life. He had the face of a youth, slightly inclined to the side, as chroniclers say, round without being plump, with soft features, beautiful, calm, and somewhat sulky.” But the dream dissipates immediately.

Every person thinks, in flashes, that they can animate an image through the mere act of their mind. But they become intoxicated for a moment with their power and end up in despair. For creation only eternally rejoices the heart of God because He calls into being a true being endowed with a body and a soul, having its own initiative, who invokes Him and responds to Him. However, imagination leaves us to ourselves.

There is a tragic resemblance between the destiny of Narcissus and that of Pygmalion. Pygmalion had not loved any woman until then. But he contemplates the statue he has made and finds it too beautiful: it is the work of his hands and begins to stir his senses at the very moment he must part with it. He calls upon Venus, and it seems to him that the inward prayer he addresses to her softens the ivory and turns it into flesh. This motionless body is even more charming by being retained only by the bonds of modesty. Pygmalion is afraid of hurting it; he soon imagines that it returns his caresses. And his love is so ardent that he believes he can alone obtain the consent that will suffice to transform this lifeless body into a woman’s body. A miracle of fervor, where one finds by contrast all the traits of that impotent and rejected love that changes a woman’s body into a lifeless body.

Pygmalion is in love with his own work, which can only bring him disappointment if it remains a thing he contemplates and admires: therefore, to cease being its slave, he must abandon it and lose interest in it.

Narcissus finds only his own image before him, whereas Pygmalion borrows a little matter from the universe to give it a foreign form. He can contemplate something he has produced and wishes to make it a being. He has so much confidence in his love for it that he believes he can give life to what he desired. Therein lies his impiety, for he can only love a life that must first give itself existence before it can give itself to him.

12. Adam and Eve.

In His supreme wisdom, God saw Adam seeking himself like Narcissus and, duplicating him according to his desire, He made the body of woman appear before him, with whom he could join without annihilating himself. But left to his own devices, Narcissus creates a phantom that mimics his futile gestures and, while seeking to grasp his true being, transforms that very being into an illusion that fills him with despair.

Milton tells the myth differently: he first shows the representation of self-consciousness awakening, or the relations of the self with itself. But these conceal an impotent wish if they do not culminate in the relations of man with woman and of each being with all others. Narcissus dies of suspecting in himself that femininity which deceives him and which he cannot succeed in satisfying. But Eve suddenly comes into being in the light and seeks an explanation for what she is. She does not know where she comes from. Nature has not yet taught her anything. She inclines her face over the surface of the waters that reflect the purity of the sky and appear to her as another sky. As she leans, she catches sight of a figure that presents itself immediately to her. “I look at her, she looks at me. I recoil with a start, she recoils with a start; a secret charm draws me closer, the same charm attracts her. Mutual movements of sympathy anticipated our mutual interest.” But this charming object does not hold her captive. She does not linger on it complacently. It is necessary for a distinct voice to warn her that in it, her very existence is represented. “What you contemplate, beautiful creature, is yourself.” But she believes she sees another being. It is another being that she begins to admire. For it is not her own image that she pursued and sought to possess. It was a being different from herself, but through this image, she learns that it is also similar to her. She will be united with it and will give birth, says the poet, to a multitude of children who will call her the mother of the living.

Chapter II. The Secret of Intimacy

1. Know thyself.

Narcissus seeks in himself the secret of the world, and that is why he is disappointed when he sees himself. This divine secret is more intimate to him than he is to himself: it is the intimacy of pure Being. There is no image of him. He does not dwell in the fountain that reflects in Narcissus' gaze and returns to its mystery as soon as that gaze is abolished. He only reveals himself to a purely spiritual gaze, beyond all images and mirrors.

All that I can imagine in the world that is noble and beautiful, everything that bears the mark of value for me and that I can love, is my deepest intimacy. By avoiding it under the pretext that I am incapable or unworthy, I am fleeing from myself. The most superficial and base things that attract or hold me back are nothing but distractions that distance me from myself, not because I cannot bear the sight of what I am, but because I lack the courage to exercise the powers I possess or to meet the demands I find within myself.

We can only discover that our being resides in this secret intimacy where no one penetrates but ourselves by resorting to introspection to know it. But the self is only a possibility that is realized; it is never made; it is constantly being made. That is why there are two introspections: one, which is the worst thing, shows me in myself all those momentary states in which I constantly take pleasure; the other, which is the best, makes me attentive to an activity that belongs to me, to powers that I awaken and that depend on me to put into action, to values that I seek to recognize in order to give them substance.

For consciousness is not a light that illuminates a pre-existing reality without changing it, but an activity that questions its decision and holds my own destiny in its hands. “Know thyself,” says Socrates, as if he were already advising Narcissus. But Socrates knew well that one who knows himself never ceases to deepen and surpass himself. If the ancients say “know thyself” and the Christians say “forget thyself,” it is because they are not speaking of the same self: and one can only know the one by forgetting the other.

2. Intimacy with oneself and with others.

Intimacy is the innermost part that escapes all gazes, but it is also the ultimate foundation of reality, beyond which one cannot go and which one probably only reaches after traversing all the superficial layers in which vanity, ease, or habit have successively enveloped it. It is the very point where things take root, the place of all origins and births, the source and the hearth, the intention and the meaning.

The discovery of intimacy is a difficult thing, and once found, one must still establish oneself in it. But it is in it that we find the principle of our strength and the healing of all our ailments. It is because they are ignorant of it that so many people seek diversion or believe they can reform the world from the outside. But one who has managed to penetrate into intimacy no longer accepts being expelled from it. For such a person, all the illusions of diversion and external action are abolished.

Intimacy is indeed, as is often believed, the last refuge of solitude. But it is enough for it to reveal itself to us for solitude to cease. It reveals to us a world that is within us, but in which all beings can be received. However, the suspicion may arise that we are still alone and that this world is nothing more than a dream island. But when another being suddenly enters it with us, this dream becomes reality, and this island becomes the continent. Then the most acute emotion we can feel occurs. It reveals to us that our most secret world, which we thought was so fragile, is a world common to all, the only one that is not an appearance, an absolute present in us, open before us, and in which we are called to live.

Intimacy is therefore both individual and universal. The intimacy that I believe I have with myself is only discovered in the intimacy of my own communication with another. And all intimacy is reciprocal. The very use of the word confirms this. I would remain separated from myself as long as I could not give what I am and, in giving it, discover it.

One who exposes their intimacy no longer speaks of themselves, but of a spiritual universe they carry within them and that is the same for all. They do not access it without a kind of trembling. The most ordinary souls do not cross its threshold. The lowest flee from it and seek to degrade it: because the true being is there, and nowhere else; but they only feel contempt and hatred for it.

3. The secret shared by all.

Within us, there is a secret essence that we hardly dare to let our own gaze penetrate, as if that gaze, similar to a foreign gaze, would already start tearing it apart and violating it. However, the miracle is that I suddenly perceive that my secret is also yours, that it is not a dream without reality, but that very reality of which the world is the dream, a silent voice, but the only one that can produce an echo. For the very point at which each individual closes themselves off is also the point at which they truly open up to others. And the mystery of the self, at the moment it becomes deepest, when it is felt as truly unique and inexpressible, produces this kind of excess of solitude that makes it burst forth because it is the same for everyone. And only then do I have the right to use those admirable words: “to open myself to you,” that is to say, to abolish in myself all secrecy, but at the same time to welcome and grant access in me to your own secret.

Because it is only from another being that I can expect them to confirm and subject me in this spiritual existence that, without their testimony, would remain subjective and illusory to me. It is not that, as with the external object, I appeal to their experience as if mine could have deceived me. It is no longer a spectacle given to all beings, in which all their gazes come together. It is about that invisible reality in which I sometimes believed I drew the nourishment for my most personal life, but which still appeared to me as fragile and uncertain, and which I dared hardly take possession of as long as I only regarded it as mine; now that another person reveals to me its presence within themselves as well, it brings me a kind of miraculous light, it acquires extraordinary density and relief, and suddenly compels the visible world, which once provided me with so much security, to recede and thin out like a backdrop.

4. Deepened and broken solitude.

In the cell of self-consciousness, the self is confined like in a prison. It suffers from not being able to tear itself away from itself or to free itself from itself. It is always alone, and yet it is the power to communicate with everything that is. That is what makes it a spirit. But this power to communicate, it remains alone in knowing and alone in exercising. One can say both that it breaks its solitude and that it deepens it.

One must never put too much complacency in self-consciousness. Otherwise, it strengthens in us the anxiety and desire: it transforms being and life into objects that self-love wants to possess and enjoy. But that is not to descend to the very root of being and life. In this exclusive interest it shows for itself, the self thinks it is elevating itself, but ends up faltering. For it derives its entire existence from the object it knows and the being it loves. Therefore, it must go beyond itself to know and to love, that is, to give itself this existence that it initially claimed to grasp. Only then does it discover the secret of knowledge and the secret of love.

Sometimes solitude is a temptation for us, and it takes great artifice to maintain and defend it. But the wise seek in it only a kind of spiritual exercise that must prove its value and fertility in their relations with the outside world, which it initially seemed to abolish. Only then do we learn to live as we imagined we should live when we were alone. If in solitude we conceive the idea of a perfect society with ourselves, with the universe, and with all beings, it is the return to the world that, in a paradoxical way, interrupts this solitude, realizes it, and compels it to bear fruit.

5. Encountering another man.

There is an emotion that is inseparable from the encounter with any human being we meet on our path. And it is an emotion full of ambiguity, mixed with fear and hope. What is happening behind that face that resembles ours and that we see, while we do not see our own? Does it announce peace or war? Will it invade the space in which we act, restrict the limits of our existence, and drive us out to establish itself in the narrow domain we occupy? Will it instead broaden our horizons, prolong our own lives, increase our strengths, support our desires, create with us that spiritual communication that rescues us from our solitude, introduce a true interlocutor into the dialogue we pursue with ourselves, someone who is no longer the echo of our own voice, and finally make us hear a new and unexpected revelation?

This emotion is always felt before another person, before the one we believe we know best and love most; before any being who is not us but who, like us, possesses initiative, life, and freedom, capable of thinking and willing, and whose slightest step we feel can change the nature of our feelings and thoughts, and our very destiny. The history of our relations with them is the history of this emotion they constantly evoke in us, with its alternating phases, the promises it announces that events must sometimes fulfill and sometimes disappoint.

But often, this emotion almost immediately fades away, and the fear and hope that were blended within it gradually disappear. The being that passed before us has become a passerby who matters no more to us than the stones on the road. We have returned it to the nothingness from which our gaze momentarily drew it to life. This anxiety, so rich in inseparable and contrary possibilities that accompanied our first encounter, in which we questioned ourselves about a nascent adventure, expires with the first few steps. We trembled then in ignorance of whether we should desire presence or absence here, whether love or hatred would arise, whether we would receive more gifts or more wounds. And we already sensed that in the closest bonds, all these things, instead of excluding each other, would come to us simultaneously.

6. Reciprocity.

It is no wonder that the deepest desire that governs our behavior is to find other human beings with whom we love to live or, when we are more modest and less confident, with whom we can merely tolerate living. For we know well that there is no other problem for humans than how they can come to terms with other human beings. And all the miseries of life arise from the impossibility of achieving this.

The most discreet evidence of a separation between another being and myself is enough to suspend all my inner movements, not only those that were carrying me towards them, but also those through which, in solitude, my thought indulged in its own play. The slightest sign of communion, without needing to be voluntary or even conscious, is enough to revive them, to open before them the infinitude of spiritual space.

But often, the presence of other human beings, which we expected to become the field for the expansion of our freedom and the deepest source of our joy, and which we not only accepted but desired and loved, instead restricts us and saddens us, and we find it difficult to tolerate. However, let us not forget that when we begin to engage in a dialogue with ourselves similar to the one we engage in with others, we do not always tolerate what we are. For within us, there is a being full of demands before whom no individual, even the one who is us, is capable of finding favor. But the essence of patience is to learn to endure within and outside ourselves all the miseries of individual existence, and the essence of charity is to learn to help them.

Most people are indeed harsher towards others than towards themselves. And the mark of virtue, it seems, is to reverse this natural order. But we must not overlook the fact that the self within us is also another than ourselves, and one who shows no tenderness toward them will never show tenderness to anyone else; and the worst would be if they could feign it.

I am undoubtedly wrong if I complain about the treatment that others subject me to. For it is always an effect and an image of the treatment I inflict upon them. But if I am saddened by not being loved enough, it is because I myself do not feel enough love. It is the capacity for acceptance within me that causes others to accept me, and they only reject me if deep down inside myself I have already rejected them. Yet, reciprocity escapes the grasp of human beings: they seek to be noticed by those who are indifferent to them and to be esteemed by those they despise. “But you will be measured with the same measure with which you have measured others.”

I cannot stop blaming other human beings: I avoid them by pretending to despise them and no longer wanting to know them. But I cannot do without them. This disdain in which I hold them is only a sign of the very need I have to esteem them, and it dictates the duty I have towards them, which is to give them enough love to make them worthy of my esteem.

7. Self-knowledge and knowledge of others.

To be is always more than to know, for knowledge is a spectacle we create for ourselves. Thus, there is nothing more unknown to us than our own being; we never manage to detach our image from it. In a sense, I can say that every person knows more about me than I know about myself, but it is not an advantage for them. It is not necessary to know too precisely what one is in order to truly be oneself.

It is natural for me to know others better than myself because I am constantly occupied with becoming. That is why there is so much vanity, pretense, and wasted time in the way I consider myself, which hinders me when I need to act. I must leave it to others who do not bear the direct burden of what I am going to become and who, unlike myself, are more interested in my realized being than the action that realizes it. They see in me only the manifested man, the one who distinguishes himself from all others by his character and weaknesses, and not the man I want to be, who always seeks to surpass his nature and heal his imperfections. Within me, I constantly feel the presence of a power that has not yet been used, of a hope that has not yet been disappointed. Another person only observes in me the being that I can show, whereas I only see the being that I will never show. Unlike what they do, I always focus on what I am not rather than what I am, on my ideal rather than my state, on the fulfillment of my desires rather than the distance that separates me from them.

The misunderstanding that prevails among people always stems from the different perspectives from which each one looks at themselves and at others. They only see their own potential in themselves and see in others only their actions, denying them the same credit they give themselves. A kinship begins to unite them as soon as, surpassing what they can show, they develop mutual trust, which is already a silent cooperation.

But selfishness produces a blindness that, at the moment when I discover within myself a being that feels, thinks, and acts, only reveals in others objects I must describe or instruments I can use. Therefore, it is not surprising that the one who knows everything within themselves does not know themselves, nor that, for opposite reasons, each person remains unknown to themselves and others.

The most difficult aspect of our relationships with other beings is what may appear the simplest: recognizing their own existence, which makes them similar to us and yet different from us, the presence in them of a unique and irreplaceable individuality, initiative and freedom, a vocation that belongs to them and that we must help them realize, instead of being jealous or trying to bend it to conform to ours. For us, this is the first word of charity and perhaps also the last.

8. The painter and the portrait.

“Our eye,” says Plato, “is visible in the pupil of another eye.”

It is others who reveal me to myself. I test what I think and feel about the thoughts and feelings they continuously show and, so to speak, present to me. And their actions reflect back to me an image of who I am, whether they repeat mine or respond to them.

Conversely, to understand someone is to discover within oneself all the movements one observes in them, to momentarily abandon oneself, so that when you think you are following them, you are actually following yourself. Sometimes, you even precede them.

Beings cannot know themselves separately but only through mutual comparison, which brings forth similarities and differences among them. This comparison, in which everyone discovers and experiences their own potential, is not without danger. It sometimes tempts us to imitate, where our own being, under the pretext of enrichment, is absorbed into a borrowed being, or it leads us to denigrate, believing that by belittling what we lack, we elevate ourselves. However, every encounter we have, through the resistances it provokes, the effort it requires, the light it brings forth, and the secret agreement it suddenly allows us to sense, shows us to what extent self-knowledge and knowledge of others are intertwined.

This is clearly seen in the example of the painter who, when painting a self-portrait, portrays another person, and when painting someone else, also portrays themselves. The painter can only paint what they are not, what is distinct from them and opposes them. Thus, when they paint themselves, they oblige themselves to discover the very face that others see. However, the portrait they paint of another person is a work that comes from within them and shows to all eyes what no one else would see, revealing their own invisible vision of the world. Knowing myself means both becoming another and confronting myself with another. Knowing you means entering within me and finding myself in you: I discover in you the spectacle of an act that I only perceive within myself in its pure exercise.

Therefore, when looking at another, I never seek anything other than a reflection of myself, whose features are sometimes inverse and complementary to mine, sometimes more pronounced, and sometimes more subdued. But they only make sense if I experience within myself the very life they give shape to. All beings reflect back to one another their own image, both faithful and unfaithful, even in solitude.

Within each of us, there are several characters: a character of vanity that reduces itself to the spectacle it tries to present and looks at others with contempt and jealousy, a character full of timidity and anxiety, embarrassed to attract attention because it senses another, deeper, and truer character within itself that always seems to elude it, and the character it presents continually betrays. There is no true spiritual encounter except when two beings manage to awaken in each other that secret character in which they recognize themselves but at the same time surpass and unite.

No one asks others, and perhaps no one forgives them, for revealing those familiar emotions that confirm them in their own state. Communication with another being can only happen above themselves, through the movement in which each one of them, no longer thinking of themselves but only of the other in order to help and call them to a higher life, immediately receives from the other the same life they aspire to give. It can be said that, like all peaks, the summit of consciousness is as solitary as it is high. But only it, which attracts all eyes, is capable of bringing them together.

Chapter III. Being Oneself

1. Polyphony of consciousness.

The drama of consciousness is that in order to form itself, it must break the unity of the self. It then exhausts itself in trying to regain that unity, but it cannot achieve it without abolishing itself.

Consciousness, which is a dialogue with other beings and with the world, begins by being a dialogue with oneself. We need two eyes to see and two ears to hear, as if we could perceive nothing except through a play of two similar yet different images. Moreover, neither sight nor hearing ever operates alone, but by referring to each other or to some other sense that they awaken and to which they add. Thus, a kind of polyphony is formed where all the voices of the soul respond to all the voices of nature.

There is more: perception is never alone; it always evokes an idea, a memory, an emotion, an intention that in turn resonate with it and establish in us new dialogues between the present and the past, between the past and the future, between the universe and the mind, between what we think and what we feel, between what we feel and what we desire. Finally, consciousness always creates a gap between what we are and what we have, between what we have and what we desire; and it always seeks to fill it without ever succeeding. When I question my sincerity, its object is too elusive to ever satisfy me; it is too complex to be expressed without altering and mutilating it.

The difficulty of being sincere is the difficulty of being fully present to what one says, to what one does, with the totality of oneself, which is always divided and of which only certain aspects are shown, none of which is true. But the most upright consciousness, at the very moment it opts for one side, does not forget the others: it does not suppress them into nothingness, and without consuming itself in sterile regrets for them, it would still like to introduce, into the very side it takes, the positive essence and original flavor.

Logic, morality have accustomed us to think and act in terms of alternatives, as if we always had to say yes or no, without there ever being a third party. But this method is only suitable for somewhat rigid souls that do not know that the third party is not between yes and no, but in a higher yes that always composes together the yes and no of the alternative.

2. Cynicism.

Each of us is a scandal to oneself when considering, in this cynical comparison between what one is and what one shows, that there is no person in the world to whom one would dare reveal all the feelings that pass through one’s consciousness, at least as a fleeting glimpse. It even seems that one cannot consider them too closely without blushing.

The thing is, there is the whole person in each person, with the best and the worst. But true sincerity does not consist in considering all these obscure impulses, all these uncertain inclinations, all these undecided temptations that emerge within us, even before we begin to dwell upon them and give them some consistency, as real things that already belong to us; it consists in traversing them to descend to the depths of ourselves in order to seek what we want to be. There is an apparent sincerity that discovers with terror what we believe we are, which is only what we could become if our vigilance were suddenly interrupted.

Consciousness contains the ambiguity of possibilities within itself: it is the source of all discouragement and all failures if one seeks in it an already formed reality rather than the very power that forms it. Therefore, it is not sincere to merely express all our nascent feelings and give them substance through words before we have accomplished the inner act that alone can make them ours. And it is only on the consent we give them that it matters to judge ourselves.

Thus, sincerity often appears as a conversion in which, by recognizing that our life is bad, we begin to show that it is good. This is what explains why, as it has been said, the person who makes a confession that changes them overcomes the shame of the confession. If the light with which we envelop our past, purifying it, reconciles us with it, it is because it compels the very action we have performed to evoke a power that we now want to use for better purposes. And it should not be surprising that the person for whom we feel the most vivid and passionate interest is not the one liberated from all vices, but the one who, always feeling their sting, sharpens their entire spiritual life through it.

3. The actor of oneself.

It is the person with the most wit who most easily risks becoming the actor of oneself. They are never satisfied with what they find within themselves. They constantly alter it through reflection. Their true being is always either below or beyond their present being; they never succeed in distinguishing what they imagine from what they feel. They find a thousand characters within themselves. They conceive a thousand possibilities that surpass the reality as it is given to them. It takes effort for them to turn towards it, to focus their gaze on it and hold it close, even though it often requires only a little simplicity and a little love to achieve it without even desiring it.

When I look at myself, there is always another present, a spectator to whom I show myself and who is always like a foreign observer before whom I only appear: I am no longer a being but a thing, an appearance that I already compose.

Narcissus' dialogue cannot exist without duplicity: to be double is consciousness itself. And the distance between what I show and what I am is the product of the reflection and effort I make to be sincere. Thus, I never have the impression of succeeding. Hence, sincerity is always a problem, and no one can judge either another’s sincerity or their own.

4. The impossibility of deception.

In human interactions, an apparent being is formed that always replaces the real being. This supposes a self-abdication and self-humiliation that are not noticed enough because an unworthy subterfuge masks them; for our real being still wants to take advantage of the opinion held of our apparent being.

But can I truly hope that others will mistake the appearance I show for the reality that I am? In each of my words, in each of my actions, one can observe either a mark of self-love that fools no one, although one may let them believe it, or an expected confession, watched for and yet almost useless, some of which others seize upon to help me and others to overwhelm me.

Dissimulation is more difficult than one thinks. The body, the voice, the gaze, the face are not only witnesses, but the very being, and to an observer keen enough, they betray even the most secret intention, even the intention of revealing nothing, as seen in the legend of the Nordic girl who never told a lie for fear that the stone of her ring would change color. The same happens to the firmest and most audacious face. And if the face remains the same, the gaze, which is more subtle, would be altered, or that almost imperceptible harmony that gives the being its most natural demeanor.

We always speak of the refusal or modesty of self-revelation. But there is an equal incapacity to do so and not to do so. For sincerity is ambiguous, and it can be said that there is nothing more difficult than both showing oneself and hiding oneself. Often, there is nothing more difficult than making another see the very thing I am trying to reveal to them. The sincerity I can achieve depends on both them and me. And beneath voluntary sincerity, there is a possible sincerity that friendship measures and tests.

Conversely, dissimulation also implies the mutual complicity of the two beings present, who both agree to accord more reality to what they show than to what they hide and who both refuse to admit to themselves that they only have eyes for the reality they want to hide, although it can always be seen in some way, like the act that conceals it.

But it happens that each person deceives themselves before deceiving others. They allow themselves to be convinced by their self-love before seeking to convince others in turn. They are their own first witness and measure on themselves the success they can achieve with others. But even if they fail, they continue the same desperate endeavor. For people live in a common agreement within a world of appearances and pretense: their words resonate in it, even though the entire truth is before them and their gaze plunges into it. The awareness of this discord can even give them a cruel pleasure.

5. The ring of Gyges.

How, one may ask, is it possible not to be sincere if what I am coincides more with what I do than with what I think? And if there is no gap between what I do and what I show, what gap could there be between what I show and what I am?

Let us set aside this insincerity that is only a will to deceive: it deceives others only if they are not perceptive enough, but it never deceives me. It is only a momentary means that I use to achieve a certain effect, but the will to produce that effect leaves a mark on myself from which I can no longer separate.

People know well that they cannot hide anything of what they are. And if they had the ring of Gyges, they would all ask for the power to achieve it. For it conceals our bodies in such a way that it allows us to create, in the world of visible things, an effect whose cause remains invisible and no longer belongs to this world—a first miracle, no doubt. But the miracle would be complete only if the ring, by making us invisible to others, also made us perfectly internal and perfectly transparent to ourselves, if from the myth of Narcissus at the fountain it made a reality.

Fortunately, the ring is not given to us. It would be the ultimate test for us. The anguish of existence, the secret of responsibility lie precisely where we turn into an action that everyone can see and that leaves its indelible mark on the world a possibility that initially only existed within ourselves. But since we do not possess the ring, most people exhaust themselves through their words, their silence, and the works they accomplish to create an image of themselves that is not in accordance with what they are, nor even with what they desire to be, but with what they want others to believe they are.

6. Sim ut sum aut non sim.

The highest duty, the subtlest difficulty, the gravest responsibility is to be everything that one is, to assume all the burden and all the consequences. Frankness frees me by giving me that courage. It is falsehood that binds me.

The essence of consciousness is to compel me to take possession of myself. And this act of taking possession resembles a creation, as it consists of realizing a possible being whose disposition is, so to speak, entrusted to me. But to remain in the state of possibility is not to be. I could thus not be, not accept this existence that is constantly offered to me. But I cannot become other than what I am. It is contradictory for me to become another without annihilating myself. Falsehood is the refusal of my very being by the self.

To be what one is, undoubtedly nothing is more difficult for the person who has begun to think and reflect, to make even the slightest distinction between their nature and their freedom. Will they only follow their nature, even though they judge it, often lament it, and sometimes condemn it? Or will they place their trust in their power to judge and in their freedom to act as if they no longer had a nature? But nature cannot be forgotten: despising it is not enough to silence it. It is nature that puts all our powers at our disposal; sincerity discerns them and puts them into action.

To be sincere is to delve deep into ourselves to discover the gifts that belong to us but are nothing unless we make use of them. It is to refuse to leave them unused, to prevent them from remaining buried within us in the darkness of possibility. It is to make them manifest in the light of day and to increase, in the eyes of all, the richness of the world, to make them a revelation that continually enriches it. Sincerity is the act by which each person knows and creates themselves simultaneously. It is the act by which they bear witness to themselves and willingly contribute, according to their abilities, to the work of creation.

7. Finding what I am.

Regarding others, sincerity is an effort to abolish any difference between our real being and our manifested being. But true sincerity is sincerity towards oneself; it consists not properly in showing what one is, but in finding it. It demands that beyond all superficial planes of consciousness, where we only experience states, we penetrate into that mysterious region where deep desires are born and embraced, giving our entire life its connection with the absolute. For the gaze we direct towards ourselves produces in us the best or worst effects depending on the object it turns to and the intention that guides it. Either it only considers our states, for which it always shows too much complacency, or it goes back to their source and frees us from their enslavement.

The essence of sincerity is to compel me to be myself, that is, to become myself what I am. It is a search for my own essence, which begins to adulterate as soon as I borrow external motives that drive my actions. Because this essence is never an object that I contemplate, but a work that I realize, the deployment of certain powers that are within me and wither if I cease to exercise them.

Sincerity is therefore an indivisible act of introspection and self-transcendence, a quest that is already a discovery, a commitment that is already a transcendence, an anticipation that is already a call, an opening that is already an act of faith towards a revelation that is always latent and always about to emerge. It is the link between what I am and what I want to be.

It can be said that sincerity is a virtue of the heart and not of the intellect. “Where your heart is, there is your true treasure.” This is sufficient to explain why sincerity always brings infinitely more richness than the most dazzling lies.

8. Piercing the heart with a sword.

One must pierce the heart of a sword, says Luc, to discover its deepest thoughts. But only innocence can achieve that. It is wrong to say that innocence does not see evil: it tears apart all the veils of self-love; it lays bare our entire being. But so it is with virtue, which, as Plato would have it, knows both vice and virtue, while vice only knows vice.

Sincerity consists of a certain quiet boldness by which one dares to enter existence as one is. But a double fear almost always holds it back: the fear of the very power one possesses and the fear of the opinion to which one exposes oneself. It is the passage from the secret world to the manifested world that creates our perplexity.

But it is too concerned with appearances. If I am within what I should be, I will also be so without. True, it requires a stripping away that I am not always capable of. I do not always receive enough light. I am not always present enough to myself. I am not always ready to speak or act. Often, I must know how to wait. And sincerity requires a great deal of reserve and silence.

The mere consideration of the judgment of others paralyzes all our movements: it makes us ashamed of what constitutes our superiority if it is challenged or not recognized. But in solitude, one must act as if one were seen by the whole world, and when one is seen by the whole world, act as if one were alone. Furthermore, even vanity, if it were great enough, could no longer be satisfied with appearances, which almost always suffice to nourish it; it would have to annihilate itself in the infinity of its own demand and find no other satisfaction than what perfect sincerity could give it. It is a weak and miserable vanity to accept that appearance can surpass being; but it belongs to vanity to constantly surpass itself and even reverse itself into its opposite, namely to precisely refuse that being could ever be unequal to appearance.

There are two kinds of people: those who only have an ear for self-love and never think of the image they present of themselves, and those who do not suspect that such an image exists or that it can differ from what they are.

9. Beyond myself.

Sincerity requires me to keep silent about everything in me that belongs only to me, but to reveal everything in me that resembles a revelation of which I am the interpreter. In such a way that it can only speak of things that are within me, but always as if they were not of me. It simultaneously translates what is most internal to ourselves and what is most foreign to ourselves, the truth for which we are responsible.

You say, “I am sincere,” and you believe that saves the value of what you say or do. But what does your sincerity matter to me if it is not the sincerity of anything, if it only reveals to me the movements of your self-love and the sad signs of your weakness and misery? You assert this sincerity both as an excuse and as a source of pride. “This is what I am, I do not deceive you about myself. And this being that I show you has its place, just like you, in the world, and the same sun illuminates it with the same light.”

However, the sincerity you claim is most often a false sincerity that interests neither you nor anyone else: it echoes nothing in me if it reveals nothing more than a fact over which neither you nor I have any control. The sincerity I expect, the only one I need, which makes me attentive to a destiny that is personal to us and yet common to us, is the one in which I see your being not describing itself as a thing, but seeking itself, affirming itself, and already committing itself, attempting to penetrate to the very essence of reality where both of us are rooted, in order to recognize the very marks of what is demanded of it, of a task it has to fulfill and to which it is beginning to set its hand.

10. Truth and sincerity.

It is commonly believed that there is nothing easier in the world than being sincere, and that it is sufficient, to achieve it, not to alter, even imperceptibly, the reality as it is given to us. To lie, to conceal, is to intervene, to act with one’s own will, to substitute an image for being with which it no longer coincides. To be sincere, is it not enough to let things be what they are?

But the problem is more difficult. As soon as I begin to speak and act, as soon as my gaze opens to the light, I add to reality and modify it. But this modification is the very creation of the spectacle without which reality would be nothing to me. It is when I look at the world that it is born before me, like a spectacle shaped by perspective and the infinite play of shadow and light. Yet no one admits that reality is created by me in the very act that grasps it; it possesses certain characteristics that impose themselves upon me in spite of myself, and on which I call other human beings as witnesses. And thus, I succeed in distinguishing truth from error.

But sincerity is not truth. Thus, the art of the painter translates, with varying degrees of sincerity, the personal vision he has of the universe. And only this vision can be said to be true. Yet no one will accept that to be sincere is to reproduce, as it is, my own vision of things, whereas to be true would be to reproduce, within that very vision, things as they are. For it is in the quality of this vision that my sincerity resides. It is the very effort I make to make it ever more delicate, penetrating, and profound.

Truth invokes a light that encompasses all that exists, that illuminates me as long as I open my eyes. It can be said that sincerity itself is nothing more than the simple consent to light, but on the condition of adding that the truth in question here is the truth of what I am, and that it is not enough for me to contemplate it, but that it is first a matter of producing it.

Truth is often considered as the coincidence of thought and reality. But how could such a coincidence be possible when reality is other than myself? On the contrary, if sincerity is the coincidence of myself with myself, one may wonder how it is possible to miss it. But self-love provides for it. The essence of sincerity is to overcome it. And it can be said that, in contrast to truth, which seeks to align the act of my consciousness with the spectacle of things, sincerity tries to align the spectacle I present with the act of my consciousness.

It seems that only sincerity can overcome this duality of object and subject, which philosophers have made the supreme law of all knowledge. If Narcissus was lost, it is because he wanted to penetrate to the heart of himself. He believed that he could see and enjoy himself before acting and making himself. He did not have the courage for that incomparable enterprise in which the operation precedes being and determines it, that creative approach of which mathematics already offer us a model in pure knowledge, and of which internal sincerity gives us a dramatic application to ourselves.

11. Active sincerity.

To be sincere is to show oneself, but through action. It is not about speaking, but about acting. However, we are always inclined to give the word “sincerity” a less profound and weaker meaning: it then consists of speaking truthfully about oneself. But how can one speak truthfully about a being that is never fully realized, and whose every word, every action, further adds to what it is? How can one speak truthfully about oneself without a quiver, without a blush that alters both the truth and oneself?

Sincerity must go beyond words and reach an invisible intimacy that words always risk betraying. They only outline its shadow. Sincerity only appears when this intimacy begins to manifest itself, that is, in acts that determine our very being and engage our destiny.

Sincerity does not consist in reproducing a preexisting reality in a resembling portrait. It is itself creative. It is a virtue of action, not just expression. Our “self” is nothing more than a bundle of potentialities: it is up to us to actualize them. True sincerity lies in fulfillment. And it is easy to understand how one can miss it, either out of laziness, fear, or because one finds it easier or more useful to yield to opinion and renounce oneself, following the path in which the environment leads us.

Sincerity no longer distinguishes the act by which one finds oneself from the act by which one becomes oneself. It is both the attention that awakens our powers and the courage that gives them a body, without which they would be nothing. Power is the calling within us; courage is the response we give to it. Sincerity does not merely scrutinize the hidden intentions with pitiless lucidity, as one believes; it compels the secret being to cross its own borders, to take its place in the world, and to appear as it is.

12. Returning to the source.

As soon as I begin to act, my life is enclosed in a situation: it carries the weight of its past; a thousand forces begin to pull it; it is a movement in which I find myself caught and I do not know if I suffer it or produce it. But sincerity rejects all these solicitations that press upon me; it obliges me to descend to the depths of myself. It is always a return to the source. It makes me a perpetually newborn being.

It frees us from all concern for opinion or effect. It brings us back to the origin of ourselves and reveals us to our own eyes as we emerged from the hands of the creator, in the first draft of life, before external appearances seduced us and before we invented any artifice.

It shows us as we are, and not in a portrait that is still external to ourselves. It requires no assurance or oath. It is that perfect clarity of vision that leaves no room for shadows between you and me, neither the shadow of a memory nor the shadow of a desire; it is that perfect rectitude of will that leaves no detour, no evasion, no ulterior motive between us.

It is, finally, a perfect inner nobility. For the sincere person seeks to live under the open sky. They are the only ones proud enough not to conceal anything of themselves, not to expect anything but the truth, not to be content with mere appearance, to establish themselves so closely in being that they no longer distinguish themselves from appearing.

13. Under the gaze of God.

Sincerity is the act by which I place myself under the gaze of God. There is no sincerity elsewhere. For God alone, there is no longer any spectacle, no appearance. He is the pure presence of all that is. When I turn to Him, nothing else matters in me except what I am.

For God is not only the ever-watchful eye to whom I cannot hide anything I know about myself, but He is also the light that pierces all darkness and reveals me as I am, without my even knowing that I was that way. That self-love that hid me from myself is a garment that suddenly falls away. Another love envelops me, rendering even my soul transparent.

As long as life persists within us, we still hope to change what we are or to conceal it. But as soon as our life is threatened or near its end, nothing matters except what we are. We are perfectly sincere only in the face of death because death is irrevocable and lends our existence, which it concludes, the very character of the absolute. This is what we express by imagining the gaze of a judge to whom nothing escapes and who, on the day after death, perceives the truth of our soul even in its most remote detours. And what does this gaze signify if not the impossibility of adding anything to what we have done, of escaping ourselves in a new future, of still distinguishing our real being from our manifested being, and, at the very moment when the will becomes powerless, of not embracing in an act of pure contemplation this now accomplished being that was until then only a sketch always subject to some modification?

It is not enough in sincerity to evoke God as a witness; one must also evoke Him as a model. For sincerity is not only to see oneself in His light but to realize oneself in accordance with His will. What am I, if not what He asks me to be? But an infinite distance immediately reveals itself to me between what I do and that power within me that I only wish to exercise: yet I never cease to fall short, and to the extent that I fail, I am nothing more than an appearance that a breath dissipates, and that death will abolish.

This is the true meaning that must be given to these words: “Whoever is ashamed of me in this world, I will be ashamed of him before my Father. Whoever recognizes me in this world, I will recognize him before my Father. I came into the world to bear witness to the truth.”

Chapter IV. Visible Action and Invisible Action

1. The game of responsibility.

Every action reveals and betrays us at the same time. It is the expression and appearance of our deepest being. But it is also a test. We truly become ourselves only when we go beyond ourselves to act, when we leave the realm of pure potentiality and assume a place in the world, claiming responsibility in it.

We are already responsible for our thoughts. Just as there is a gap between intention and action, there is also a gap between intention and the thought from which it arises. Thus, responsibility can always be traced back further. Its deepest source lies where consciousness begins to form. But it becomes increasingly evident at each stage of this uninterrupted progression, as it employs means that manifest it and takes on a tangible form visible to all. Since the essence of responsibility lies in separating oneself from the world in order to assume its burden, I am in a sense responsible for both what you think and what you do, such that responsibility becomes ever more subtle and can never be assigned a limit.

There is no frivolous or insignificant act, that is to say, one that does not engage our responsibility and the entire order of the spiritual universe. Therefore, it is not surprising that responsibility always encounters resistance, without which it would not arise, and without which our actions would not belong to us, detached from spontaneity and instinct. However, these resistances are found within ourselves, not only in the external world. They mark, through the difficulties that each being encounters in making things docile, the deeper difficulties it faces in creating itself, in finding itself.

2. Claimed responsibility.

The weakest individuals always seek to evade responsibility before acting and push it away after acting. They make more effort to absolve themselves than to avoid the need for absolution. However, they expect to be held accountable when they commit a fault, and they are only willing to answer for it when events seem to justify them. They do not want their responsibility to be engaged in the destiny of the universe in advance, and they only accept being charged with it when the universe has already taken their side.

On the contrary, the strongest individuals, before or after an event, always embrace this burden. They relentlessly claim and increase it. At the moment of action, it always seems that the action depends solely on them. After acting, they always reproach themselves for not having done enough. With an intemperate pride, they attribute to themselves a omnipotence that they never feel they have wielded well enough. They are too indifferent or contemptuous toward others to reserve the slightest influence for them in the outcome of their endeavor. Success should be self-evident and barely holds their attention. However, their failure, or even the failure of others, if guided by charity, leaves them dissatisfied, anxious, tormented, and inconsolable. Their physical distance is of no importance. They consider themselves responsible for the entire world: they want to bear the blame for all the evil they are capable of discovering in it, without consenting to share it with either God or their fellow humans. Their gaze is so sincere, penetrating, and profound that they immediately discern infinite resources within themselves that they have not utilized. They cannot conceive that grace could ever have been lacking for them: they know it is total and indivisible, but they constantly fear that they may not have been worthy of it or have failed to respond to it.

Yet the most courageous person, who always ascribes the responsibility for failure to themselves, thinking that they did not employ the necessary means, lacked decisiveness or perseverance, also knows that the appearance of failure is not always true failure. It should not be judged by the pain or the correspondence between intention and outcome, but rather by the spiritual fruit that the act may have borne. They do not believe that anything can happen in the world that is not the result of a secret justice with scales far more precise than those of our sensitivity, following laws as flexible as those governing the fall of bodies, yet equally rigorous.

3. Praise of work.

The ancients said that the gods had taken revenge on Prometheus because he had taught humans to work, that is, to transform matter with their hands and imprint it with their spirit. They feared that humans would then turn away from them and cease to worship them. Thus, work was considered rebellion against God before it was seen as a punishment from God.

However, things can be understood differently. According to Proudhon, work is the visible manifestation of moral activity. It is the expression of the creative act and continues the very work of God. It is, so to speak, an emanation of the spirit that subjugates matter instead of being subjugated by it. Work frees the power of the spirit. It shapes the individual by transforming things. The modification it imparts to matter humanizes and spiritualizes it, but it also compels the self to go beyond itself, to surpass solitary contemplation. It brings beings closer to one another in the pursuit of a goal visible to all, in the construction of the world where they are all meant to live.

That is why all work, stemming from the realm of ideas, which exists only in consciousness, inevitably tends to become collective work. In every task, the individual aims at the object itself, not at themselves, and beyond the object, they address the neighbor through their actions. Dedication is work tested and measured by its effects. And the person who dies the most noble death dies from work and dedication.

4. Activity and its work.

Activity, while in progress, frees us from all the servitudes of the body and the soul. It is ignorant of both the work it produces, although aware that it is never barren, and the rules to which it was supposed to be subject, even though it cannot violate them. There are no two forms of activity, one material and one spiritual, because there is no bodily movement that cannot be spiritualized, just as there is no impulse of the soul that cannot expire in a bodily habit.

It is futile to think that there can be pure activity that does not affect the body or undergo the resistance and trials of things. The question, however, is where the means and ends lie. It is a superstition to believe that the object of activity is solely to transform the visible world and seek to disappear in the perfection of one’s own work. The spirit always leaves this work behind; it is nothing more than the instrument of its exercise and progress.

Space is the path to all its acquisitions, but it is not where it dwells. Because our activity leaves a trace in the realm of space, the world can be subjected to it. However, this victory of the spirit always risks turning into defeat, as it inclines towards the belief that its function is to dominate matter, as seen in industry. It then takes pleasure in measuring, producing, and constantly enhancing these visible effects that depend solely on itself. By subjugating things, it becomes subjugated to them. It rejoices in the ease, security, and certainty it achieves by acting upon them according to implacable rules that always succeed. An activity that possesses such a skillful mechanism for influencing things, delights in it, and only strives to improve it, becomes its servant. It is a dead activity.

5. The birds of the sky and the lilies of the field.

In the Gospel of Matthew, it is said, “Take no thought, saying: What shall we eat?” Yet that is the concern of almost all humans, from the adolescent who leaves the shelter of their birth to the elderly person who is just a step away from the grave. “What shall we eat?” ask the scholars of economic science. One would be mocked for wanting to imitate the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. And who would dare to imitate them without feeling any tremor?

But this is a misunderstanding of what is being asked of us. To act like them is to faithfully listen to every call that arises from within us and respond obediently to every solicitation that comes from outside; it is to begin our life anew at every moment, entrusting all the effects of our actions to an order that surpasses us and that we cannot alter or prescribe. It is not a matter of surrendering to fate lazily or despairingly, depending on whether one inclines more towards security or anxiety. Rather, we must exert our will to its fullest extent, aligning it precisely with the circumstances in which we find ourselves. As for the resulting effects, they no longer depend on us but on the order that reigns in the world, an order that can never be violated, yet one in which we can collaborate to maintain. However, it still triumphs when disorder emerges from our will, causing disorder in things.

The greatest mistake of humanity, particularly in our time, is to think that the supreme good, which resides solely in an operation that the soul must perform, can be obtained through external means. People are consumed by the pursuit of enjoyment. Yet they expend great external effort to create the means to have everything, turning away from the internal activity that would spare them from having to employ those means, and the lack of which prevents them from possessing what those means bring.

The misfortune of individuals often stems not from a lack of action but from excessive or ill-timed action. They introduce into the natural order the effects of their will that, while serving one of their present desires, violate other deeper desires that awaken when it is too late, producing a great upheaval that they had not foreseen and under which they may be buried.

6. Invisible action.

The only activity that is real, effective, and beneficial is that which operates invisibly. Many people, on the other hand, believe that the essence of all action lies in altering things and conforming them to their desires. Yet it often happens that this action, which changes the appearance of the world, takes the place of true action that changes minds and replaces it.

The deepest action is also the most hidden: it seems to produce no visible effect, yet it penetrates the furthest, though with a radiation that is imperceptible. It appears to have no contact with the body, yet it transfigures it. Its perfection lies in producing only other actions that seem to arise on their own and be self-sufficient. Its aim is to make the source that gave rise to them be forgotten.

It is beautiful that true activity is always invisible. It is beautiful that the secret of ourselves can never be violated, that the initial origin of everything we do is concealed from all eyes, that it cannot be tarnished or troubled. At the moment we begin to intervene in the work of creation, it is done in such a discreet manner that no one would think it had just been altered, and they do not recognize our hand in it.

The eyes of the body only perceive events, i.e., movements; they do not grasp their meaning, i.e., the motive and intention behind them. Every action must have the same appearance, whether it is driven by selfishness or love. No external sign should distinguish the purest sacrifices from the most ordinary actions, for only the gaze of the spirit can render matter transparent and recognize the spiritual truth it expresses but conceals. Among those who perform the same actions and seem to nourish the same thoughts, some are driven by concerns of self-interest and self-love, while others never cease to give everything. Facial expressions, words, postures, habitual gestures may resemble one another to those who observe only bodies. In this way, living trees during winter cannot be distinguished from dead trees. And yet, there are subtle marks within them that testify to the presence of life, discernible only to those who carry life within them and whose sole attention is devoted to it. However, it may happen that those with the most sap, who, at the prescribed time, bear leaves, flowers, and fruits, still deceive even the most vigilant and attentive experience.

Perfection is achieved when the distinction between material activity and spiritual activity is abolished, or when, contrary to the natural order, material activity becomes invisible and spiritual activity becomes visible.

7. Action of presence.

The deepest action is an action of pure presence: and any effort we make to support or add to it is a sign of its imperfection and inadequacy. We only act to make ourselves present to reality, to ourselves, to others, or to God. However, all presence is spiritual, even though it can only be attained by traversing and surpassing sensory presence. Yet, it happens that sensory presence, while appearing to fulfill us, ends up being sufficient. We believe it exempts us, and it manages to prevent us from accomplishing the personal and living act that could truly give us the other. Conversely, when spiritual presence occurs, we no longer need sensory presence. We must not succumb to the weakness of desiring it. To say that a being acts through its mere presence is to say that the effects of its action multiply without the need for its volition. This is how God governs the world. And this is how each one of us proceeds when our action is the simplest and the best. In that state, all our movements unfold and conclude with such ease and naturalness that we are, so to speak, carried by them, even in the initiative that produces them. Therefore, it is not surprising that the will, as soon as it intervenes, can hinder them by trying to assist them.

The most perfect activity is always experienced as a pure consent to be and to live. Its works are only sustenance, which it must continually consume in order to constantly rekindle itself at the same source.

8. Perfect simplicity.

True simplicity is invisible. It is pure, transparent. It alone abolishes the distinction between being and appearing. Thanks to it, the most difficult things become the most natural. Most people only seek to leave a mark or a testimony of their passage on the world. But all appearances perish: and whoever, out of a desire to put on a show for others, only focuses on acting upon them, perishes along with them. Simplicity knows only an entirely inner world; it never looks outward. According to the Tao, the most beautiful thing is not to do great things or to give a grand image of oneself; on the contrary, it is to leave no trace in the world of appearances. This can be interpreted as no longer casting any shadow and preserving the integrity of one’s pure being.

People almost always feel that goodness should resemble a rediscovered order, one that is invisible and unnoticed. It is a kind of spiritual balance where everything occupies its rightful place, untouched by desires, regrets, or movements born of selfishness or hatred. However, people take pleasure in being seen. They believe they elevate themselves by violating order instead of confirming it. And even if it means becoming wicked or perverse, many who are unable to do so still enjoy pretending.

The most effective action, which is also the most generous, possesses a silent necessity that outwits and surpasses all calculations. This activity, so to speak, without movement and without object, accomplishes everything and is contested, declared impossible, and thus prevented from coming into being. The wisest and strongest people do not need to defend or describe it; their role is to exercise it and bring it to light.

It is in silence and solitude that all our powers are born and tested. The tree nourishes all the fruits it can bear with its sap, but it remains unaware of them; it is not its role to see or taste them.

9. Silence and words.

Silence is an effect of prudence, by which one refuses to be judged or engaged. It is also an effect of asceticism, by which one restrains the spontaneity of one’s natural movements, renouncing the desire to count in the minds of others, to obtain their esteem, or to exert influence over them.

However, in silence, there is still a kind of homage paid to the gravity of life, for words constitute an intermediary realm between those inner feelings that only have meaning to us but that they always betray, and the acts that change the face of the world, often replacing them. The most frivolous person is content with speaking without engaging their thoughts or conduct. The most serious person speaks the least; their knowledge lies in contemplation or action.

Words are only valuable if they mediate between the potentiality of thought and the reality of action. One could say that they make thought real, even though they are still only a virtual action.

Because words reveal our thoughts and already give them a face, they begin to bind us. Yet, they cannot be confused with actual deeds, but they call for and prefigure them; they make us unfaithful if we do not fulfill them. Thus, words tend to chain our freedom, and we must be cautious with them if we want them to have no impact on it, so that it always remains a first beginning, an ever-new relationship between an ever-emerging will and an ever-unpredictable situation.

A spoken word is enough to change the state of things, even if it may not appear so. It disrupts the relationship between two individuals, even if it reveals nothing they do not already know, but it does reveal it. What was a suspended possibility a moment ago has now come to light. What only existed within my soul now appears on the outside. No one can avoid taking it into account, and from now on, my entire behavior depends on it.

Yet, an infinite distance remains between what I am in my own silence and what I can express or convey. However, there is a mysterious power of silence that is the power of what I am, always greater than the power of what I say. This inner silence, this absence of any concern for the spectacle it may provide, restores each being to itself and prevents it from hesitating or pretending.

Thus, it happens that I am closer to you through my silence than through my words.

The deepest love has no need for words. In its most subtle and ardent manifestations, breaking the silence would only break it; it would weaken it to justify it. Where it exists, it is one, complete, and indivisible; it cannot be shown without dividing it, without placing above its presence, which surpasses everything, a testimony that always falls short.

This is true for every action we undertake, even in education, which, even when it seems dependent on words, depends first and foremost on pure presence, always active and always offered, in such a way that it needs no solicitation to attract attention or any request to elicit a response.

10. The face of sleep.

No power of the soul can be maintained except through the very acts it produces; otherwise, it weakens and eventually dissipates. It is therefore vain to think that this power must be preserved in its pure state, as if its own exercise were to wear it out, corrupt it, or dissipate it. Let it cease to be exercised, and it is nothing. What is an inner disposition that is not attested to by any action? In this sense, I am what I do, not what I can do, which often turns out to be what I believe I can do.

Will it be said that during sleep, it is my consciousness that slumbers, suddenly becoming heavy and sluggish? But isn’t the very nature of consciousness to be always awake, agile, and light? And if the face did not bear witness to a hidden power that exists in one person and not in another, where would the difference be between the intelligent person who sleeps and the fool who sleeps? However, only the effect will allow judgment. One who retains such power throughout their life without employing it never distinguishes themselves from the fool. They are merely accountable for their foolishness; they are, if you will, a voluntary fool. But between these two types of fools, who would ever dare to draw an absolutely secure line of demarcation?

Nevertheless, the essence of a being is an indivisible unity that is altered by specific traits of character, words, and isolated actions instead of translating it. Movement, it is said, reveals it, but it divides it. It is in immobility that we discover an infinity of real and potential movements that compensate for one another, allowing us to apprehend it in a single glance, contained and retained within its own boundaries, before any manifestation that shatters it and externalizes it.

A mask is only feigned immobility. Physiognomy is a living immobility that prefigures and already initiates a thousand movements at once, all the more significant because they do not need to be completed.

It is easily understood, therefore, that it has been said that a person’s true face is revealed to us only during sleep. They no longer act, they no longer monitor themselves. Their will is suspended. We see them not in what they do but in what they are, that is, in everything they desire to do. Sometimes they appear to us with the calmness of a god, miraculously freed from all the concerns of their humanity; sometimes they are pursued and overwhelmed by it; sometimes they are marked by a fold or a furrow of disgust, contempt, or hatred, which the necessities of action or the presence of other people temporarily conceal or erase. And it is to hide themselves that people hide while sleeping.

11. Our fixed essence.

What am I going to do with existence in this long interval of time that I always think separates me from death, where everything depends on what can be given to me and even more so on how I will embrace what is given to me? There is a major rule that I must always keep in mind: every act of my life, every thought of my mind, every movement of my body must be like a commitment and a creation of my very being, testifying to the choice I make and my will to be such. This should also be true of every sentence I speak or write, which too often merely describes a memory or designates an object.

For each person invents themselves. But it is an invention whose end they do not know: as soon as it stops, the person turns into a thing. Then, they begin to repeat themselves.

However, there are many differences in the way of repeating oneself. Some repeat themselves because they have found that spiritual and ever-renewing unity on which all their actions depend: they have established themselves in an eternity where nothing appears to change, but where in reality everything is always new. For there is no other novelty than the discovery, in each moment of time, of the eternity that liberates us from it. And others content themselves with repeating certain gestures they have learned to perform, precisely because they have not found that inner source of inspiration that made their repetition itself a constant spiritual resurrection.

If we spend our lives discovering our own essence and bringing it forth, it seems that there is a moment when it reveals itself and becomes fixed. Then we see the individual either become a prisoner of certain feelings they have learned to experience, of certain actions they have learned to perform, and of which they remain a prisoner until their death, or become liberated, flourish, and traverse in all directions the infinity of the spiritual world into which they have just entered and where they now reside.

Birth brought forth my personal existence into the immense universe, but in order to allow my freedom to be exercised and, so to speak, to choose what I will be. But how will I have used it? I will only know at death, which is the hour of all reckonings, where my solitude is consummated, and where I can only take with me what I have given to myself.

Chapter V. The Powers of Sensibility

1. The “sensitive” self.

The value of the word “sensitive” is sometimes diminished, as it is thought to only indicate a certain weakness of the body in the face of everything that astonishes and threatens to break it, a lack of courage that abolishes self-control. And it could be shown that someone who is sensitive is not always delicate or tender, and that there is often more weakness than humanity in sensitivity, and more self-love than love.

But the word “sensitive” is so beautiful that it must be preserved from all uses that debase it, allowing it to maintain the ambiguity by which it inclines sometimes towards the senses, sometimes towards sentiment, without ever breaking the fragile bridge that unites them. It maintains a kind of balance between them, and as soon as it is broken, we are left with only the words “sensual” and “sentimental,” which we hardly dare to use.

It is clear, then, that there is always an incessant danger in sensitivity, which is even more pronounced when considering that by relating everything that happens in the world to the self, it risks shaking within itself all movements of self-love and all movements of charity.

However, one should not allow sensitivity and the heart to be separated, even though sensitivity belongs to passive and fragile souls that only receive, that are always moved and always hurt, and the heart is the impulse of active souls, always ready to give of themselves and filled with boldness and generosity.

Nor should sensitivity and love be separated, even though certain souls appear to have a great deal of sensitivity and little love. But sensitivity only has depth if it arises from love, if it follows all its movements and reflects all its fluctuations.

2. A fragile balance.

Sensitivity abolishes separation but not distinction between the individual and the Whole. It is the testimony of their mutual presence. It generates the most subtle communications between them. From one to the other, it stimulates a whole play of calls and responses that never exhausts, on which no habit can have a hold, and that connects our life to reality through such close and vivid ties that knowledge, in comparison, seems abstract and colorless.

Only sensitivity reveals to us the belongingness, the point of conjugation between the universe and us. It is the living encounter of what comes from us and what comes from it. In its highest forms, it expresses, as seen through joy and love, an agreement between the activity and passivity of our soul, between what it desires and what is given to it.

It has been observed that in the progress of life on the surface of the Earth, the beings that ultimately prevailed were not the strongest, most violent, and most brutal ones, for the ground we tread on today is their ossuary. Instead, those frail and sensitive beings, with their light and delicate bones, who existed in the Stone Age, found a fragile balance early on between their needs and the natural forces: attentive to all solicitations from within and without, still incapable of distinguishing between a creation of thought and a suggestion of instinct, they seemed to have a foreboding in their nascent consciousness that the life of the body was merely a prelude to the life of the spirit, that it had to endure the latter and would one day be sacrificed to it.

3. Sensibility of the body.

Sensitivity presupposes a delicacy of the body that allows it to be shaken by the subtlest and most distant external actions, to discern their finest nuances, to perceive its delicate balance constantly disrupted and constantly restored, and to occasionally be overwhelmed by a kind of tumult that consciousness can no longer dominate. Through sensitivity, the entire world ceases to be indifferent and foreign to us: it acquires a kind of consubstantiality with us; our body is connected to it by fibers so secret that none can be affected without us being wholly affected.

It is a marvelous thing that, in sensitivity, the body itself becomes permeated by us, participating in the consciousness we have of ourselves, seemingly expressing with such accuracy the harmony or conflict that reigns between the universe and us. Sensitivity is the state of a body that reveals itself to us as ours and already spiritualizes itself: in it, the revelation it obtains of itself is so acute that it is a sign that it begins to abolish itself, as indeed happens in that sort of excess where it is on the verge of failing.

That sensitivity depends so closely on the body and all its agitating movements is both a requirement for it since it can only connect us to the universe through the body and a contradiction since it is the essence of our intimacy, that which in us can never become a spectacle like the body. However, one can dream of a pure sensitivity in which the soul, ceasing to endure the body’s actions, renders it obedient to its own. It would allow us to perceive its most hidden processes without being perceived itself. And the distinction between the soul and the body would be abolished: not that the body itself would disappear, but it would be reduced to its most perfect function, which is to be, with regard to the soul, its invisible witness.

Sensitivity occupies all degrees on the scale of the soul, from the humblest, where it is still attached to the earth, to the most sublime, where it loses sight of it. It must never cease to unite them; otherwise, it succumbs to the complacency of the senses, where its inner momentum dissipates and vanishes, or it is consumed by a spiritual ardor that is incapable of nourishing itself. It is the joys of the earth that it must unify, spiritualize, and carry up to the heavens.

4. Sensibility, echo of the will.

There is a sensible attraction in things that provides us with the most intimate and truest communications with them: in comparison, all the efforts of pure thought appear futile and powerless. But we have no right to yield to it. If we allow ourselves to be seduced, we soon become slaves to things. The sensible attraction itself eventually withers. It has been a promise for us that has not been fulfilled, an invitation to which we have not known how to respond. The astonishing thing about sensitivity is that it seems to be an end in which the soul rests: whereas it is a disturbance intended to provoke an act of the soul without which we can possess nothing.

It is always easy to arouse in the soul an interest intense enough to stir the powers of sensitivity. This success often suffices for us, but we should be ashamed of it. What a mediocre victory to have succeeded in surprising you by pushing my action to the point where you begin to succumb! The difficult thing is to reach the seat of your strength, not your weakness, where the spirit consents and the will decides, but with a consent and a decision that engage them forever. Up to that point, there is nothing in our relationships that is not insignificant and frivolous, not worth the effort of parting the lips or even moving the little finger.

But there is an almost constant state of sensitivity that, much better than the fluctuations to which it is subject, gives my life its quality and the very atmosphere in which it bathes. It is always related to a profound choice that I never cease to make, to my essential attitude in the face of the universe. However, the bond that unites them is very subtle; my self-love constantly doubts it, and it takes an act of faith of extremely rare simplicity and purity to believe in it. Yet it is at that moment that sensitivity receives its true significance, establishing us in a spiritual world where we discover the very value of all the acts we can perform and obliging us to think that there is never any other hell or paradise than the one we are capable of giving ourselves.

It is said that our most secret intimacy resides in the movements of sensitivity, but there is an even deeper recess within us where the will is formed. In the will, we go beyond what we are, and sensitivity should be the echo of what we will to be in what we are.

Already it faithfully translates all the inflections of intention and desire. If it often appears surprised by unexpected blows, it is because our plans do not regulate the order of the world. No endeavor is ever more than an attempt. There is always an insurmountable distance between what I obtain and what I hoped for, measuring the gap between my own will and the reality on which it acts. The direction of my will depends on me, but I produce my own happiness and unhappiness, unintentionally, and through a kind of return, where we find the effect of a necessity that far surpasses all the resources at my disposal.

5. Sensibility united with intelligence.

Coldness, indifference, and that wary reserve which is sufficient at times to place a critical mind outside of being and life should not be regarded as the true marks of intelligence. It is sensitivity that gives birth to attention: it accompanies all its movements.

It is sensitivity that distinguishes in the indifferent world that surrounds us, upon which the sun equally bestows its rays, zones of interest that solicit our gaze before it begins to penetrate them. The world becomes a spectacle for us only because we seek in it the fulfillment of our desires. Thus, it should not be believed that to grasp reality in itself, sensitivity must be abolished within oneself. On the contrary, the opposite is true: its exercise should be pushed to the utmost, so that it becomes capable of embracing, so to speak, the totality of reality within itself.

Reality always begins by touching us, and what touches us is already that which is united with us. But being touched is not yet understanding, and intelligence always goes beyond all contact. It precisely embraces what lies beyond. Its proper function is to continually expand our horizon and give free rein to our power to think and act, beyond the limits of our body. Yet it never completely leaves the body. One could say that with any object it applies to, intelligence makes us feel its presence through a more subtle touch; however, it must be added that for it, to feel is still to have a premonition.

There are two difficulties of opposing senses, one of which is being able to engage sensitivity in all regions of one’s intelligence: below that, intelligence remains abstract, which is its most common characteristic; the other is surrendering to the movements of sensitivity without obtaining illumination from intelligence, causing sensitivity to remain corporeal, which often seems sufficient for it. It is only at the point where they coincide that the idea becomes incarnate and realized, and we attain the consciousness and possession of what we are. That same current of life that blinds and carries us away when experienced without being known would become indifferent and foreign to us if it could be known without being experienced.

6. A sensitive balance.

Just as heat and light can be separated, and we speak of obscure heat and cold light, so can intelligence and sensitivity act independently. However, in spiritual matters, they always function together; they merge and blend in such an intimate and perfect manner that they are no longer distinguishable. And, in a curious paradox, each of them gives the other the penetration it would lack if it were to act alone.

For it is not enough to think, but we must feel that we are thinking, not just think that we are thinking, as is often said. If thought did not interest sensitivity and stir it, it would not truly be my thought; the self could neither claim responsibility for it nor feel its presence and effects. But it is this union of an impersonal and clear intelligence with an obscure and secret sensitivity that constitutes the perpetual dialogue of the self, not only with itself but with the universe.

There is, so to speak, an intellectual sensitivity in which it seems that reality becomes present to us and penetrates our intimacy in such a felicitous encounter where truth and life become one.

For the most perfect sensitivity is not the most violent or the quickest. It resembles a scale that weighs and, instead of becoming frantic, registers the lightest actions with the slowest and most enduring oscillations. The coarsest sensitivity knows only differences in intensity, but they concern only the body. The finest sensitivity disregards them, transforming them into differences in quality. It never passes through the same state twice. In each state, it captures that infinitely delicate nuance that reflects the incomparable essence of things and the mysterious relationship they have with us. In the crudest sensitivity, the will is always taken by surprise, and in the finest sensitivity, it is always consenting.

It is noteworthy and rich in teachings that there is only the thickness of a hair between the gentlest and most exquisite sensitivity and the blindest and most unbridled sensitivity. Only intelligence transfigures it, envelops it in light, and endows it with the perfection of a balance that, when disturbed, leads it back to a kind of delirium. If sentiment carries intelligence and animates it, intelligence, in turn, illuminates sentiment and calms it.

And at the summit of consciousness, all the spiritual light given to us aligns with our charity. It is like a sort of response to our charity, and, if one can say, a charity bestowed upon us by the world.

7. The defeats of sensibility.

Sensibility is initially painful, and we use the term “sensitive spot” to indicate that even the slightest contact with it is painful for us. It is understood, therefore, that it seems to grow along with our capacity to suffer. How could it be otherwise, since it is in us the mark of passivity, and the being that is born into life and experiences its power must perceive any state it is compelled to undergo as a defeat? Thus, any limitation of activity humiliates consciousness and elicits groans.

The word “sensitive” always evokes the idea of an external action that touches us and already begins to tear us apart, rupturing that obscure solitude where all our blossoms were preparing, sometimes provoking in us a recoil that repels it, sometimes proceeding within us like a secret crack. Life is therefore always raw, like an open wound.

There is undoubtedly a kind of proportion between the pleasure and pain that a sensitive soul is capable of experiencing. But, paradoxically, it may be more difficult to be receptive to pleasure because it requires greater openness, a simpler, more complete, and rarer consent. Thus, one must be capable of overcoming self-love to recognize the pleasure one feels and surrender to it.

However, self-love is often more powerful than our taste for pleasure. For pleasure humiliates us by obliging us to accept it; the more we desired it, the more it costs us to let ourselves be defeated. The opposite happens with pain: it provokes in us a rebellion that confirms our independence. And when we accept it, it is through an effort that raises us above it. Moreover, the most acute, profound, and undeserved pain produces in us a kind of complacency and provides self-love with a bitter nourishment.

Perhaps one day, man will have to learn again to say yes to pleasure as he once learned to say yes to pain, and instead of taking a sort of vanity in the pain he is compelled to undergo but against which he always rebels, he will overcome the shame of acknowledging a pleasure that steals away his consent.

8. Distresses of pain.

Pain is the mark of our finite being. But it would be a grave mistake to see in it only a pure negation, as some optimists wish, who, in banishing it, believe they are raising and enlarging us. It is not even enough to say, according to a distinction made classic by philosophers, that it is a privation and not only a negation, the privation of a good that we desire and sometimes know. We know well that it is a positive state, often more positive than the pleasure that remains almost always frivolous, whose presence is ambiguous and can be contested, and that always hovers like opinion, and which, even at its most intense, never fails to distract us. Pain, on the contrary, clings to our real being with a tighter and more tenacious grip: it pierces all the appearances that cover it until it reaches the deep retreats where the living self takes refuge, contracting into darkness to elude it.

It simultaneously wrests from it the admission that it suffers and the admission that it lives. This admission is sought by the wickedness of the child who tortures an animal, the cruelty of the tyrant who enjoys the sight of tortures, the irony of the man of the world who spies on a face for the mark of the wound he inflicted. This joy derived from the pain of others is the mark of our victory, not over a thing, but over the life of another being that is suddenly laid bare and is in our hands.

But precisely because pain affects only our finite being, it reveals to us the reality of our individual and separate existence. It reveals to us what we are when the world fails us, what remains of ourselves when everything else is taken from us. When the world is against us, we suddenly measure the tragedy of our own destiny. And the pangs of pain appear impossible to bear because they sever all the threads that sustained our soul and body amidst the vast universe. Nature already accomplishes this through all the evils with which it burdens us, skillfully making us feel the dreadful wretchedness of our bodies. When the perverse will of men comes to its aid, bodily pain recedes before a distress of the soul that seems irremediable. For true distress is spiritual; it arises from the very sight of the voluntary malice that fills the world, from which we are not always exempt, that resides also deep within ourselves, and which, by compelling all beings to nourish the feeling of their own power with the suffering of others, creates some unspeakable form of horrible solidarity among them.

In pain, there is a sort of contradiction: we no longer hold fast enough to being since all the ties that united us to it are successively severed, rendering us similar to a piece of flesh torn from the body that gave it life, and yet we hold it too tightly, for it is all these fibers that become sensitive in all the points where they do not entirely manage to break. Therefore, it is not surprising that the one who suffers seeks to escape from the world and life and to consume in insensibility that solitude to which pain forces him to retreat.

9. Transfigured pain.

Humans are undoubtedly mistaken in considering pain as the worst of all evils and only seeking to abolish it. It makes us sensitive to evil rather than being evil in itself. And through this very sensitivity, it allows us to still participate in being and in good.

There are pains that are linked to the very essence of our condition, and one can say that they are always present, although a certain blindness or indifference often makes us forget them. The deepest beings always render this presence alive within themselves, and it is only in this way that they can descend to the root of existence, accepting it in its entirety with courage and lucidity.

There are pains that are linked to the dignity of our existence, and we can neither hope nor desire for them to ever disappear. No one doubts that it is a disgrace, not a grace, to be incapable of feeling them. Perhaps, if one dares to say, our greatest humiliation is in the face of certain evils that intelligence reveals to us, to remain indifferent.

The value of each being undoubtedly depends on the extent, subtlety, and depth of the sufferings it is capable of experiencing, for it is suffering that establishes the closest connections with the world and with itself. The extent, subtlety, and depth of all the joys it can ever know have the same measure. But who could renounce pleasure as well to escape pain and desire insensitivity?

Therefore, it must be said that pain should not only be endured or even accepted but also willed. A consciousness that seeks to dull it would dull its own point. It is not enough to say that one must will pain, as we will our destiny or the order of the world. It is pain that deepens consciousness, excavates it, makes it understanding and loving; it opens within us a sort of refuge where the world can be received; it imparts the utmost delicacy to all the contacts we have with it.

But it is difficult to bear it with firmness and gentleness; pain engenders the worst declines, stupefaction, bitterness, and revolt in those who, unable to embrace and penetrate it, seek to reject it but fail to do so. It is because pain comes to seek the secret of its most intimate and personal life within the depths of being that it revives all the powers of self-love within it. Pain never exhibits that kind of generous freedom that often accompanies the movements of a happy person. That is because its virtue is of a different nature. The most serious problem is not to numb pain since it would always be at the expense of sensitivity, that is, consciousness itself, but to transfigure it. And if all the pain in the world left us with no choice but between rebellion and resignation, it would be despairing of the worth of the world. But this pain can only have meaning if it nourishes the very ardor of our spiritual life.

Pain is mine without being me. If the self inclines toward it to the point of becoming one with it, it succumbs. But it can also detach itself from it without ceasing to feel it and in order to possess it. In such an acute state, the individual within us is both present and surpassed. And pain becomes like a burning flame that devours the individual part of my nature and compels it to consume itself.

Chapter VI. Indifference and Forgetfulness

1. The two indifferences.

We are familiar with Voltaire’s words, which seem to be the very definition of radical indifference: Everything is equal at the end of the day, and everything is still equal at the end of all days. However, should we say that everything is equal for the universe or that everything is equal for us? Who would dare to invoke their own experience to claim that everything is equal for them? And if we want everything to be equal for the universe, it is still true that this equality of the universe to itself can be, for us, sometimes an object of admiration and sometimes an object of despair.

In the same sense, it is asserted that everything is true and everything can be said. But that does not mean there is an equal value among the things that can be said. Otherwise, they are merely matters of opinion. Only those who can think and live them know what they are saying when they say them. And the fact that everything can still be said is precisely a sign that in the world there are countless beings, each of whom can adopt their own perspective to engage their own destiny and salvation within it.

However, indifference is sometimes an abdication and a death of the spirit that accepts everything that is given to it and renounces introducing into the world the mark of its action, that is, an order that comes from itself. On the contrary, it can also be the triumph of the spirit that, without recognizing any value in things themselves, gives each of them an inner significance that makes it, in a certain place, at a certain moment, the best of all.

There is undoubtedly an indifference that is an effect of self-love and a testimony to the hardness of the heart. But there is another indifference that is a victory over self-love, which, forgetful of all particular preferences, discovers the absolute nature of each thing and assigns it its place, rank, and incomparable privilege in the Whole that it contributes to maintaining.

2. Indifference and delicacy.

Indifference can arise from either an excess of softness that prevents any imprint from being engraved in the soul, or an excess of hardness that makes it impervious and which we often mistake for strength.

However, it can also be the effect of extreme delicacy, of attentive and fierce modesty that trembles as much from within to break its own enclosure as from without to avoid breaching discretion. Thus, one who does not surrender or even struggles against any surrender goes beyond all the feelings to which others do not hesitate to yield and for which they reproach him for not experiencing.

What is called indifference is sometimes nothing more than a certain ardor of love, but one that is too modest to lower its gaze to states that belong only to the individual, at the moment when it impresses upon us a touch that is the sign of our divine origin: it is the counterpart of the pure movement that always carries love to the very center of the soul, where its spiritual destiny is realized. The marks of too direct tenderness barely hold it back; it quickly forgets them. They are only passing disturbances to which it reproaches itself for being too sensitive because they reveal a form of union in which it refuses to indulge and which only has value if it is transcended.

There can be a charity in abstaining, respectful, discreet, attentive, and loving, which assumes the appearance of indifference. It preserves us from fixing on another person a gaze that weighs them down and wounds or overwhelms them, as seen in certain spontaneous and oppressive forms of sympathy; it obliges us to sacrifice them. It liberates within us and within them an activity that is not only deeper and more personal, but also truer and more effective; it transcends appearances to reach the essence. It elevates each individual by demanding from them the sacrifice of self that opens up a new world where self-love no longer dictates the law.

One should not complain about an apparent indifference that is not always blind or negligent. It is often the mark of an excess in a love that penetrates to the heart of the most miserable existence, but instead of expiring before that misery and intensifying it by becoming tender towards it, it traverses it and already uplifts it.

3. Indifference towards the gift.

Sometimes there is an indifference towards rendered services that is neither hardness of heart nor lack of love nor the indication that one thought they deserved the services and more. Indifference, not even the one shown, but the one felt, can also be the effect of delicacy. It is often self-love that shows its sensitivity in gratitude, while generosity, which never demands anything in return for the gifts it gives and is not conscious of giving them, welcomes all those who offer themselves without considering whether they are being addressed to it or whether it benefits from them. It does not bear the idea of merit in the giver or debt in the receiver; it repels that overly personal character of the gift that would create too tender a complaisance between them. It simply accepts that the function of some is to give and the function of others is to receive, or that their relationship changes depending on time, circumstances, personal states, and the very nature of the gifts. It does not know which ones have the better fate.

This indifference towards self-interest in oneself and others can be the other side of an exquisite sensitivity towards a spiritual order that it observes with accuracy and finds joy in maintaining. Such indifference diverts attention from everything that the separate being tries to retain but compels it to leave behind all attachments, to place above them the idea of a good that is common to all and for which each being is a servant. One who is indifferent to self-love takes an interest in other people only to obtain from them the same indifference to self-love. They seek only to envelop the entire universe with them in a community of intention and desire.

4. Indifference and disinterest.

There is a remarkable alliance between disinterestedness and indifference. The disinterested person ceases to be interested in oneself in all things but considers in each of them their own weight and, so to speak, their value in the absolute sense. In such a way that by being indifferent to oneself, one recognizes the differences in all things, or one can enjoy everything because they never think of enjoying themselves.

The essence of disinterestedness lies in obliging us to always walk forward without ever looking back to measure the distance we have traveled. Even in the act of thought, it forbids us from dwelling on the truth to possess it and take pleasure in it. For any success we may achieve is a success for the individual that we are and can only be expressed through some gain that benefits us. However, in the spiritual order, it is the effect that we seek and not the gain, the use of our powers and not their increase, and this self-sacrifice that is also self-fulfillment.

That is why we must make it a rule to always be disinterested or indifferent to everything that may belong to us and maintain that freedom that is never in greater danger than when we allow it to be enslaved by success. For its most difficult role is not to acquire but to have the strength to free ourselves from all our acquisitions.

That which has become radically different from me can only be indifferent to me. Therefore, indifference is a position of defense, or rather, withdrawal, in relation to all the surprises of self-love. Indifference is therefore the remedy for self-love and should only extend to the things where self-love was previously engaged. The most demanding and purest indifference is the one that applies to our states of mind. It is the indifference of the will towards everything that can give us pleasure or pain. It is more perfect the more vivid the sensitivity itself is. It leaves our courage intact whether destiny burdens us or favors us.

To be indifferent to what happens to us, to the occasion and the event, is to recognize in each occasion or event the differences that allow us to respond to them. And apparent indifference is at the same time a living generosity through which I equalize all the blows of fate by turning my gaze not to myself, who bears them, but to God who sends them to me.

5. An indifference of the spirit, which is justice.

Philosophers say that the spirit is indifferent to everything, and it is because of this that it is capable of understanding and receiving everything. The perfection with which it embraces all forms stems from the fact that it has none itself. It is its weakness that gives it its power and allows it to endlessly shape reality with the most accurate, precise, and flexible contours. And because it does not alter the essence of things, it reveals their true differences to us.

There is a holy indifference: not making a preference between beings who are on our path, giving them our full presence, and responding faithfully to the call they make. This is positive indifference, which is the opposite of negative indifference with which it is often confused. It only asks us to greet everyone with the same radiant welcome. We must hold the scales equal among them, without prejudice or predilection that would tip the balance. Then, in our conduct towards them, we become capable of introducing the subtlest differences but giving each person what they expect, what they ask for, and what suits them. The most perfect justice merges here with the purest love, and one cannot say whether it abolishes all election or whether it is everywhere the same love of election.

We know well that “not making a difference” is the same as being just; therefore, it means applying the same rule to everyone without making any exceptions or showing favoritism in our judgments. It is placing ourselves in the viewpoint of God, who envelops all beings in the simplicity of the same gaze. But that gaze is the opposite of an insensitive gaze; it is a gaze of love that distinguishes in each particular being exactly what it needs, the words that touch it, and the treatment it deserves.

Indifference towards all events is only the effect of their disproportion to the love for the infinite that is within our souls and that no finite object is capable of retaining. It places all the things that fill the world on the same level, which is the level of the world, without pausing to consider that there may be one among them that, possessing an absolute privilege, would require us to sacrifice the others. But by placing the spirit infinitely above things, it becomes capable of discerning even the subtlest nuances among the things themselves, of appropriating each of them to the circumstances in which we are engaged, and of imparting to them that perfection which is the very perfection with which the spirit, at every moment, penetrates and disposes of them.

6. The smallest events.

Indifference teaches us to equalize great things with small ones; it shows us that, no matter how humble the event presented to us may be, everything is at stake for us depending on whether the spirit gives it its presence or withholds it. The essence of being and life is undivided; it is found completely even in its most insignificant modes, and the problems remain the same when the scale is changed.

The same invisible activity suffices to transfigure the most ordinary things, and it is already fully present in the slightest of our actions. It alone is capable of giving them value and meaning by obliging us to engage our own destiny and the destiny of the entire universe each time. For the Whole is always there before us and within us, without any division, even in the most wretched object, which already raises all the fundamental questions.

One who seeks to expand their activity to reign over an ever-wider horizon reveals the emptiness of their soul. It is not the gravity of the act that occupies them, but the brilliance of fame. However, fame attaches itself indiscriminately to the most common and the most beautiful things, depending on the greatness of their appearance. And yet it is evident and even just that the most beautiful things never appear to the eyes of the majority. Therefore, the soul must stop seeking a larger stage as soon as it realizes that it is not enough to enlarge itself.

It can also be observed that it is often easier to spiritualize small things than great ones. In small things, intention easily surpasses matter, but it is the opposite in great things.

Finally, there is a sublime power of the point and the instant that elevates them above space and time, that frees the spirit from all the images that betray it and from all the effects that dissipate it, that reveals to us the perfect purity of its disembodied act before it allows itself to be seduced by the conquest of either an external space or a past or future that pull it away from itself.

7. The different forms of forgetfulness.

There is a virtue of forgetfulness just as there is a virtue of indifference. Undoubtedly, there are memories that elude us when we pursue them, others that gradually fade away without us noticing, and there are also memories that impose themselves on us against our will, which we cannot chase away when we want to.

On the other hand, it seems that only the future, which belongs to the realm of possibility rather than the accomplished, depends on us, and only through it can we make good or bad use. But we also have a certain control over the past, even though it is forever realized. It is through an act that is still in the future that I can revive it or let it remain buried; to some extent, it is within my hands.

Forgetfulness is the mark of our weakness and misery since it perpetually causes the self to escape from itself. But it is also the mark of our strength because it shows in our consciousness a power to abolish that is comparable to its power to create, and in a sense, it surpasses it. It is also for us a means of continuous purification and rebirth. It gives us the presence of what is by removing the presence of what is no longer. It carries within it a annihilating and liberating power that detaches us from all the concerns that hold us back and allows us to start our entire life anew at every moment.

There is a negative and carnal forgetfulness that separates me from a past whose sight I can no longer bear, whose responsibility and consequences I deny, as if, through the omnipotence of my blindness, I try to annihilate it without succeeding. And there is a positive and spiritual forgetfulness by which I reject, so to speak, my entire past in God, in order to place all my trust in the present gift of His grace. The first is a forgetfulness that resembles death, and the second is a forgetfulness that resembles resurrection.

But if the power to forget is such a force, it happens that the power to remember is an even greater force, the cruelest when it produces resentment, and the sweetest or most beautiful when it becomes forgiveness.

8. Always imperfect forgetfulness.

In this life, no memory ever completely dies. It struggles to exist before disappearing: it always leaves some obscure glimmer, even when attention turns away from it, and its latent presence reveals itself through some muted unease that consciousness does not confess.

Forgetfulness always seems involuntary, even though the will often appears to desire or at least accept it. People say about some offense, “I will try to forget.” They try to forget the painful past. But whoever wants to forget actually wants to remember. In forgetfulness, the past must detach itself from us; if we try to detach ourselves from it, it clings to us even more.

The will to forget is a movement of self-love. But then self-love is in conflict with itself, always remembering; wounded and humiliated, it seeks to heal itself and intensifies its wounds. Yet, there is a mysterious complicity between forgetfulness and will: in this sort of twilight where forgetfulness is, so to speak, consented to, the gaze manages to avoid a memory that displeases it. However, this happens because there is a division of the will within us that, in the same act, calls and suppresses it.

9. Forgetfulness and stripping.

We must let memory follow its natural course, which is to respond in the present moment to the solicitation of events. As soon as memory detaches itself from the action it should illuminate, it harasses us with frivolous images or oppressing remorse. And that is why we often make more effort to forget than to remember.

Immediate memory is usually sufficient for us. It is the search for self and a self-love eager to harm itself that refuse to be content with it. Thus, we see the will that pressures memory and substitutes a past, over which it is powerless, for the present that should suffice. But it becomes for us an overwhelming burden. The past needs to be transfigured, and it becomes poetic through the veil of forgetfulness that shrouds all its ghosts.

All the miseries that fill our daily lives, all the grievances, all the resentments that separate even the closest beings, closing them off from one another and turning them either hostile or resigned, patient, and secretive (which is sometimes worse), arise from their inability to forget the incessant wounds they inflict on themselves through this very duality that makes them different, that is, makes them exist. No memory can strengthen their union, which begins to fade as soon as it is forced to resort to it. It is always recreated in a present act that abolishes the past and has no dreams of the future.

Forgetfulness must be an inner stripping away for us. Just as we must cease perceiving the objects that surround us to obtain in memory a spiritualized and purified image of them, that image itself must disappear so that our soul no longer retains anything but the secret power that produced it. Things must pass to leave in us only their memory, and that memory must also pass to leave in us that deep trace that changes our entire life and even the spectacle that the world presents to us.

The progressive formation of our inner being evokes both the work of the painter and the sculptor. The work of the painter results from an accumulation of successive strokes. These thousand different strokes survive the gesture that made them. Thus, it seems that our soul gradually creates itself as a spiritual painting. But forgetfulness evokes sculpture, whose rule is more abstract and severe. It is what the chisel detaches from the marble that reveals the form. Similarly, the self must forget all the events that have befallen it and even all the states it has gone through, so that it finally appears in its nakedness. And we cannot imagine it without forgetfulness, which always accompanies it but is never sufficient to produce it, nor purification, nor stripping away, nor forgiveness, nor sleep, nor death, in other words, none of those beautiful renunciations through which our being withdraws into the solitude of its essence and truth.

Chapter VII. Vocation and Destiny

1. Difference between spirits.

It is difficult to reconcile breadth with depth. Some people only have eyes for the spectacle of the world. They need it to continually renew itself before their eyes. They admire its variety and novelty without ever tiring. But their contact with it is only superficial: it is enough to keep their curiosity awake and fill their minds with images that always seek to escape solitude.

Others always remain in the same place. They constantly turn over the same thoughts, endlessly digging into the ground on which they were born and to which they remain attached. They turn away from the sunlit and rain-soaked plains, and they seek, where they are, an underground source from which they can drink. How difficult and desirable it would be to unite breadth and depth, to follow all the paths where life leads us without ever straying from the point where it springs forth!

Some individuals themselves are like sources from which new riches continually flow, but most are like canals that carry wealth from one to another without producing it themselves. And we see nomadic minds and others who cultivate their own soil.

Now, “there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; there are differences of ministries, but the same Lord; and there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all.”

All beings receive the same light, but they all receive it differently. Some are like white surfaces that reflect it all around them; these are the ones with the most innocence. Others are like black surfaces that bury it in their own darkness; their souls are closed chests. There are those who divide it, capturing certain rays and reflecting others, like surfaces of various colors that change in brightness and shades depending on the time of day; these are the most sensitive souls. There are still others who are like transparent surfaces, allowing all the light to pass through them without retaining anything; these are the ones closest to God. Some can be compared to mirrors in which nature and the viewer looking at them are constantly reflected and seen; these are the ones closest to us, and their mere presence is enough to judge us. Finally, some evoke prisms in which white light blossoms into a miraculous rainbow; these are the ones who sing the glory of nature through art and poetry.

2. One’s own genius.

All individuals have genius if they are capable of discovering their own genius. But therein lies the difficulty: we often do nothing more than envy others, imitate them, and try to surpass them instead of exploring our own resources. And we can’t deny that whenever we are true to ourselves, we experience a clear ardor that surpasses all other pleasures, rendering them tasteless and useless.

But how do we discover this personal genius that eludes us when we seek it, that most beings can only doubt as they see their lives pass by in misery, boredom, or diversions, that sometimes briefly flashes in the most ordinary consciousness but vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it, contradicted and repressed by our most constant preoccupations, and is never an idea that can be defined or an inner impulse that can be directed?

The mere thought of our own genius always shakes our self-esteem; it gives it a kind of anxiety and already the strongest and most subtle satisfaction. However, our genius is opposed to our self-esteem, which is preoccupied with ourselves, which values opinion above reality, and instead of supporting our genius, obstructs it and prevents it from manifesting. Genius appears at the moment when, suddenly abandoning all the movements of self-esteem that constantly trouble and distract us, we gain access to a spiritual world whose discovery is the result of pure disinterestedness, which gives us what we cannot give ourselves, and of which we become witnesses and interpreters, without using it for our own ends.

Therefore, it is the abandonment of all self-esteem that reveals our true genius. But as soon as it weakens, self-esteem rises again and attributes the defeats inflicted by genius to itself as victories.

It seems that consciousness has been given to us not so much to choose what we want to be, but to discover what we are. We are truly free only when the revelation of our own necessity is given to us. Until then, we believe ourselves to be free, but we are merely playthings of our whims, wandering from trial to trial, from failure to failure, always unsatisfied and detached from ourselves.

Will it be said that there is no worse slavery than being confined within one’s own essence? But the complaining self proves well enough that it has not found it. Yet the remarkable thing is that it depends on us to find it, to delve into it, and to remain faithful to it; otherwise, it is nothing but a power that remains unemployed. In a sense, one could say that the essence of madness lies in wanting to escape one’s own law, in failing to shed enough light and love on the being we carry within us, which depends on us not to know, but to fulfill.

3. From character to vocation.

The individual is the character, in the most common sense of the word, but also in the strongest and noblest sense. The will is always in conflict with it, but it is always the character that prevails, whether the will falters or triumphs.

In it, the self becomes one with its own manifestation. It expresses its most constant and profound inner disposition, one that eludes all artifice. It determines my most intimate happiness and that of those around me. But one can say both that it is me and that it is not me; it is me more radically than my own will, since it precedes its action and outlives it, and it is not me, since I did not will it and my will detaches from it, acts upon it, seeks to constrain it, and strives to make it serve.

However, when we speak of ourselves, we do not think of our character but of that purely potential being, that still undetermined and unengaged pure freedom, which is the most precious thing in the world for us and the discovery of which evokes the most emotion. And when the moment comes to act upon it, we immediately sense that no being is anything other than the truth or error, the good or evil that it carries within itself, in a sense. That is what each person sees, seeks, or flees within themselves, and not their individual nature, which is nothing but an obstacle or a vehicle, which only has meaning and even existence through the value it can assume and the participation it can offer us.

Only then can one speak of vocation, but we see that every vocation is always spiritual: it is the discovery of our true essence, which becomes one with the very act by which it is realized. With it, it can be said of every being that they receive “a new name which no one knows except the one who receives it.” Each being thus attains its own greatness, and it is understood why this greatness must be both given and achieved.

4. Vocation of each individual and each people.

Peoples, like individuals, can have no other vocation than a spiritual one. It is not a vocation to conquer the goods of the earth or to subjugate others to oneself. It is a vocation to liberate them, to allow them to find themselves, to discover and fulfill the vocation that belongs to them in turn. Here, as everywhere, we find this admirable paradox that no being can realize itself except by cooperating in the realization of all others.

This is because there is only one spirit in which each individual, and even each people, participates through a personal act according to the gifts they have received. It is up to them to become aware of it and to put it into action through continuous creation. For them, there is no more benevolent idea than that of a role they have to play in the formation of human consciousness, a role that no one can assume on their behalf and without which all the possibilities within them would fail to see the light of day.

However, this view that human consciousness is like an immense and anonymous being, with each individual or people having a predestined function, should not be accepted without reservation. Only individual consciousness is a center of its own light, an original center of responsibility. The genius of each people undoubtedly carries within it the genius of all the beings that form it, who undergo the same forces and contribute their particular initiatives to it. But the greatest invent while others merely suffer; they are always strangers in their own people; they resemble people who come from afar and bring with them some extraordinary revelation.

5. Discerning one’s vocation.

There is a current within us that propels us, but it is such that we only have a secure sense of following it if we ourselves make it spring forth. Thus, vocation is a response to the most intimate call of my secret being, without anything else substituting for it that comes from either my own will or external solicitations. It is initially nothing more than a power offered to me; the original character of my spiritual life is to consent to make it my own. It then becomes my true essence.

One can fail in their vocation due to a lack of attention to discover it or courage to fulfill it. But it is not discovered if one forgets that each person has their own vocation and that it is up to them to find it. And it is not fulfilled if one does not sacrifice all the usual objects of interest or desire to it. Sometimes we only feel its presence when we are unfaithful to it.

There is the gravest danger in imagining that this vocation is distant and exceptional, when it is always close and familiar, enveloped in the simplest circumstances in which life has placed us. It is a matter for each of us to discern it in the very tasks that are presented to us, instead of despising them and seeking some mysterious destiny that we will never encounter.

Vocation is not distinguished by any extraordinary mark that would be a sign of our election, and it remains invisible, even though it transfigures the most humble chores of daily life. It is because it is the sense of an agreement between what we have to do and the gifts we have received that it is a light and support for us. With it, each person is born into spiritual life, ceases to feel isolated and useless. Thus, it does not exempt us, as one might think, from wanting and acting; on the contrary, it burdens our shoulders with an immense responsibility; it must make us ready to always accept new obligations, to always engage without waiting.

6. The inevitable choice.

Each of us has the ambition to embrace the totality of the universe with our thoughts. But we can only do so from our own perspective. It is wrong to expect us to strive to abolish this perspective in order to reach things as they are. For then, things escape us and cease to be relevant to our lives; they become lifeless themselves. We cannot hope to grasp reality better by detaching ourselves from the reality in which we are placed. We can only do so by immersing ourselves in it with all the powers and resources that belong to us. The presence of the universal being coincides for us with the realization of our individual being, rather than surpassing it and excluding it.

Man always fears committing too quickly. We see the most cautious, as well as the most ambitious, hold back and wait. Therefore, they let the moment pass because they covet a higher destiny or because any choice that solicits them closes off the horizon and separates them from the Whole they are eager to embrace. But the particular being that I am, the opportunity presented to me, and a certain proportion that always exists between my freedom and the event constantly compel me to choose. And the very choice I make, far from limiting me, strengthens me by obliging me to establish order among my inclinations. It unifies them instead of dividing them. It provides me with an entryway and progress into the Whole that is infinitely more valuable than the ideal possession I imagined but refused to begin realizing, under the pretext of keeping it pure.

No one can wait until they have discovered their vocation before taking action. There is a moment when they must wager on it and take the risk of that wager. And perhaps it is even necessary for this waiting, discovery, and wager not to succeed each other in time, but to occur simultaneously at every instant. That is the very drama of the moment.

7. Fidelity.

It is more difficult than one might think to remain faithful to oneself. Laziness diverts us from it, delivering us to external causes, and also self-love, by which, in order to elevate ourselves above what we are, we become estranged from ourselves. True courage consists in recognizing our unique vocation in the world and remaining faithful to it amidst all the obstacles we encounter, never allowing ourselves to yield before them. For it is these obstacles that make it burst forth and compel it to fulfill itself. Even temptations are nothing but tests that judge us.

Fidelity cannot be separated from time. It obliges me to keep the memory of the past, even though my life begins anew at every moment. But if it must begin again, is it to break with the past and continually pursue a new object by renouncing all those with which it has formed? Or is it to surpass and promote everything it has already done by constantly returning to the timeless source of all possible actions, reforming them, making better use of them, increasing their fruitfulness, even if it means sometimes losing the memory or transforming it into a will that constantly renews and repairs itself?

Fidelity obliges me to pursue the fulfillment of intention even in action, yet without forgetting that action appears in a different time and has too much density for any intention to contain it in advance. Fidelity is not that apparent rectitude full of austerity and self-love that refuses to let action ever deviate from intention, but the whole problem lies in knowing how it should deviate, whether by evading the object it had aimed at or by embracing it within an ever-expanding circle.

This fidelity to oneself gives us a kind of natural and spiritual nobility at the same time, which constitutes true self-consciousness. But Narcissus has not known it. It is not fidelity to an object or even to my past, but beyond all objects and pasts, it is fidelity to a certain purpose that no object or past could fulfill, and that always opens up a new future before me. And this purpose is a kind that God has for me and that I may never realize. Then, my life is a failure: it has continued as it were outside of me and without me, remaining in a world of appearances and continually passing with them.

8. Destiny and vocation.

The development of a plant is almost always explained by the nature of the seed and the action of the environment. If it were the same with ourselves, we would be confined within the network of fate. We would have a destiny without a vocation. Vocation implies a consent of freedom, a use of the gifts we have received, and the conditions that life imposes on us. It is precisely in the interval that always separates what we are by nature from the circumstances in which we find ourselves that freedom sneaks in; it is between these two determinisms, that of the inner and that of the outer, thanks to their encounter, that it exercises its play. For it is freedom that brings them into relation, that demands weapons from each of them against the other. It is through the action of events that freedom gains power over the forces of nature and disciplines them; it is through the action of these forces that freedom takes possession of events or provokes them.

The nature of destiny seems to be to bring us situations to which freedom obliges us to respond. However, this response is not, as is sometimes believed, purely internal and spiritual; it acts on our destiny itself. Moreover, destiny is not just a test that is proposed to us from the outside without our being consulted; it is called forth by our freedom to allow it to exercise itself. Events are opportunities provided to it, always related to its aspirations, its power, its courage, and its merit.

Wisdom lies entirely in a certain proportion that we are capable of finding between what we want and what happens to us, without being able to say whether what happens to us takes the form of what we want or what we want takes the form of what happens to us.

9. Events and chance.

Destiny is not constituted, as is often believed, by the sequence of events that fill our duration. The most significant events can produce in our soul an emotion that upheaves it; but in itself, it is merely an echo of the body. Our mind can be bewildered by it without truly participating in it.

Furthermore, there are times when we must magnify the event that has most shaken us and force our imagination to make others feel or to feel again the same upheaval it once provoked in us. But we never succeed. This is especially evident in the example of the most terrible war adventures for those who have experienced them: each one then measures the distance between the flame of fire that consumed them and the ashes it left behind, which no effort of memory can revive.

An event may have extraordinary relief at the moment it occurs. It may surprise us and surpass us, but until then, it is still only an object of spectacle. It belongs to our life only through the judgment we make of it, through the interpretation we give it, through its secret link that only we know, with the inner drama of our conscience. And it enters into our destiny only when it becomes for us a call or a response that the world addresses to us, a personal miracle that only makes sense for us and in relation to us.

In games of chance, one can feel most clearly this kind of presence of destiny that subjects the player to events over which it seems he has no control, yet each one affects him as if he had aimed for it. This becomes evident when events seem to favor or punish the winner or loser. But even chance should be spiritualized. We must not treat too lightly the deep feeling of having seized or missed the opportunity, of attracting or deflecting it, of being carried by it in a kind of momentum or abandoned by it in a kind of distress. There are no laws of chance that we merely endure on one side and states of mind that merely follow them on the other. These states of mind also act in the course of all events, and the words “expectation,” “desire,” and “hope” conceal their efficacy rather than express it.

10. The unique destiny.

It may be surprising that there are missed destinies. But our destiny only appears when it is over, and we say it is missed when it seems that it did not coincide with our vocation.

There is no sentiment more beautiful, profound, and strong than the one each individual experiences when, delving to the root of self-consciousness, he feels he is alone in the world, that his destiny is unique and incomparable, that he is not exposed to any misfortunes that befall others, that in war it is he who will be spared, and that death itself will never come for him. Yet, we know with certainty that things will not turn out this way, that our fate will be the same as that of all men, that all misfortunes can befall us, that we too may not return from war, and that we will surely die one day.

But this knowledge only applies to our body; it leaves intact the very consciousness we have of our spiritual intimacy, which is a world upon which no external event can have any hold, into which we enter through a personal and free act, and from which we can never be expelled—meaning it is eternal.

One who consents to give this feeling its full effectiveness and presence, to delve into its foundation, would undoubtedly find in it the appeasement of an anxiety that is always inseparable from the thought of one’s destiny. Above all, they would find a kind of experience of eternity—a uniquely and personally intimate experience that we alone know but cannot be dissociated from the intimacy of the Whole, which is truly imperishable. They would find, as a counterproof, the evident realization that others only know from me this appearance that is my body, just as I only know from them that appearance which is theirs, and that bodies are subject to the common law of appearances, which is to change and decay, whereas intimacy itself escapes these laws by revealing to us, through an act of spiritual conversion, the significance of our own existence that illuminates everything that happens to us.

It is a great mistake to think that each of us advances in a straight line toward a distant and inaccessible end. Each of us revolves around our own center, continually expanding the circle we describe within the totality of Being. Thus, the role of time is different from what is usually attributed to it. It is not a forward flight in which we lose what we leave behind without being sure of ever acquiring anything. It allows us to encompass in a curve that we trace around ourselves a region of the world that is increasingly vast, like the growth of a rose. It allows us to unite the perfection of rest, in that core of ourselves from which all our actions proceed, with the perfection of movement that constantly renews and enriches them. It is very different from the circular motion of the ancients, which leaves no room for progress. But progress for each being lies in the gradual realization of its own essence. It is an alliance of the finite and the infinite that compels it to strive towards a state of perfect maturity, where it dies only to bear fruit.

11. Election of every being.

Each being must act in the world as if he were conscious of having been chosen for a task that only he can fulfill. Once he has discovered it and begins to devote himself to it, he feels that God is with him and watches over him. He is full of confidence and joy. He loses the sense of being abandoned. He is freed from doubt and anxiety. He is now associated with the creative work. He is cleansed of his impurities. He has no past. He is reborn every morning. He lives in wonder, weak and sinful as he is, of having been called to an action that surpasses him, for which he always receives new strength and experiences new zeal. Such is the mystery of vocation, which, when perceived by the individual, produces an incomparable emotion: that of no longer being lost in the universe but occupying an elected place within oneself, being supported by it and supporting it, and always discovering harmony between one’s own needs and the assistance that is continually received, between what is desired or hoped for and the revelation that is brought to him.

Vocation is properly what is irresistible in the exercise of our freedom. But it also creates that personal and individual connection between God and each individual, which is the true object of faith and without which our life is devoid of meaning and lacks any connection with the absolute. It is the drop of blood that Pascal’s torn heart demanded that Christ shed for him on the cross.

Chapter VIII. Torments of the Individual

1. Self-love.

Self-love indulges so much in itself that it lingers even in the feeling of its own misery. In such a way that it becomes more bitter while seeking to heal itself.

One should not lend too sympathetic an ear to this self-consciousness that I have of myself as a unique and inimitable being, for it always awakens self-love, which seeks to hold onto everything and converts everything to its own use. The deepest act that every being can accomplish is a free and generous act toward this very consciousness of oneself, which is always surpassed and never enslaved by it. But Narcissus remained its slave.

Self-love corrupts our relationships with other human beings in many ways. It generates susceptibility, making us presume hostility in others that we fear, even when they are not thinking of us at all. Our suspicion can create hostility, even when there was only indifference or benevolence on their part, ready to emerge.

I see things that others do not see, and others around me see things that I do not see either. And people also do not find pleasure in the same things. This causes them to misunderstand and, as soon as they stop being jealous of each other, they begin to despise one another.

The principle of all conflicts that engage them is that they establish comparisons between themselves. And in all domains, their relationships reproduce the one-on-one encounter of the rich and the poor, where it is uncertain which is more hideous, the contempt of one or the envy of the other.

2. Opinion.

Opinion is the most belittled thing in the world: “it’s just an opinion.” And we always contrast it with knowledge, along with Plato. But at the same time, it is the thing we hold onto the most, simply because it is ours, because it seems to express both a preference of our nature and an act of our freedom. We claim the freedom of opinion. Thus, each person clings to opinion as the most precious expression of their individual being.

But there is no opinion that brings pure satisfaction to any person: by calling it an opinion, one already acknowledges its weakness. They are content with admitting that it is their opinion, without always claiming it to be the best. And the choice they make is a choice determined by appearances. It is precisely when the opinion begins to falter that they cling to it with a sort of despair. It is then that they resort to the supreme argument: “at least it is mine,” offering their whole self to defend it, even at the very moment they feel it waver.

It is said that we should recognize equal value in all opinions. But that is impossible and contrary to reason, as it would mean they all cancel each other out. To say that all opinions have equal value is to say that they have no value at all, that they do not contain a clear vision of the truth, but only express preferences of desire or probabilities of imagination.

One cannot find a way out by saying that people are unequal in understanding but can become equal through sincerity. That is still far from true. It is not necessary to claim that the most sincere opinion can still be foolish or false, for there may always be some degree of alignment between sincerity and truth. However, no one can ever say to what extent their opinion is sincere, and undoubtedly it is never fully sincere as long as it remains a mere opinion. The most sincere individuals are also the ones most hesitant to opine.

Opinion struggles to triumph like the individual. Whoever raises the value of one also raises the value of the other. It reflects all the fluctuations of character and vanity, which subside once we succeed in attaining knowledge and possessing it. Instead of comparing their opinion to that of others, the wise person who understands their origins withdraws the power self-love gave to their opinion and refuses to engage in the fight.

It is not the opinion of others that should be despised, but first and foremost our own. However, contrary to what one might think, it seems that those who try to convert others to their opinion already harbor a certain insecurity about it. By gaining the agreement of others, they seek to reassure and confirm it.

3. Rule of thumb.

Every true judgment expresses a preference and always presupposes a comparison between values. But people do not appreciate perfection or merit according to the same rule. A good rule, it is said, should possess as much flexibility as that lead rule used by architects, which could conform to all the twists and turns of reality. But every rule is more or less rigid. It deviates more or less from reality precisely because it is a rule. And each of us applies a different rule based on the ideal they themselves have conceived. It is, of course, a sign of their own participation in the absolute. However, since there can only be one absolute, even though every person participates in it according to their nature, they all engage in conflict with one another in its name. They think they are rejecting compromise with the absolute when they are actually fighting in others the participation that is denied to them.

Hence, the differences between people are not just differences in delicacy, insight, or depth; they always involve the absolute of which they believe themselves to be custodians. And if they fight, it is not only for themselves, as one might think, but for that part of the absolute that they feel within them and which opposes them, even though it should unite them.

Each of us is a unique and incomparable being who is superior to all others in all matters that belong to their pure essence, i.e., that express their original relationship with the Absolute in the world. But what should invite us to humility is that for the same reasons, each of us finds themselves below all others, even the humblest and most miserable person, in the matters that have been left to them and that also testify to the privileged gifts they have received.

Our self-love almost always judges other people based on their inability to perform as well as we do in some task where we believe we excel, but only within a domain that is precisely ours. We do not think about measuring our own incapacity if it were a matter of performing other tasks in a domain that specifically belongs to others.

4. Hatred of difference.

We should not be surprised by the hostility that threatens every individual existence and grows as that existence becomes more unique and grand. It is not just a law of human society but a profound law of Being. For no difference can arise, either in the primal indistinction or in a still tribal social mass, without an attack on the unity of the Whole, on the equal presence and equal dignity of all parts within the same Whole. Naturally, a compensatory and destructive reaction arises to restore them. And what shows this is that any individual difference that is highlighted is most often used to belittle others. But it is only a strategy of war since the movement can occur in both directions according to the interests of the moment. And the only thing that matters is that they vanish in the indifference of the same Whole.

As soon as our life begins to manifest itself, hostility and contempt immediately begin to surround it. This should not surprise us. For we cannot tolerate in others those marks of individual nature that we immediately perceive as pretentious, insufficient, and ridiculous. But we also have our own marks, which are not the same, and we do not notice their weaknesses even though they appear in the same way in the eyes of others.

The strongest and deepest hostility is expressed in the smallest things. It arises from their essence, which suddenly reveals itself and irreconcilably opposes them: motives that are too apparent or too legitimate justify it and hide it. Motives do not matter; even the most serious ones are abolished as soon as beings reveal themselves to each other in their own depths. Everything then becomes pretexts and motives, even the most innocent events. It even happens that those who are best suited for unity are also the ones who create the most irreparable divisions and cause the most bitterness.

Sometimes, we are astonished that a single word forever separates two people who seemed to be friends until then. In comparison, the most serious disagreements, open quarrels, and conflicts of interest had little effect. It is because that word is disinterested; it seeks no advantage, aims to inflict no wound; it may have slipped out by chance. It seems innocent and without consequences. Therein lies its profundity. For it betrays the very being and exposes its essence.

5. Critique of greatness.

If all greatness is relative, there are people who have no other way to elevate themselves than by belittling everyone around them. Only the greatest attract their blows. A constant negation, through which they think they rise above what they deny, and ever-new criticisms that demonstrate the demands and fertility of their minds, sometimes make this heap of ruins appear as an edifice. But they do not rise above the level of what they have destroyed. Their soul is empty and swells only with air. For there is nothing that can fill it or make it greater than all those discoveries made by others, which it was not capable of itself. They prefer to cast them into oblivion rather than appear obliged to nourish themselves with them.

Every critique classifies its author, whether they surpass them, remain on their level, or show themselves to be beneath them. Some arrogate the right to classify others without realizing that they themselves are being classified, and not always in the way they try to suggest.

The greatest works are always the most exposed. They always have a limit since they express an act of affirmation through which a choice was made and that very limit was chosen. They contain infinity, it is true, but as a power of development, not as an already offered gift. They provide the most admirable material for criticism. Against them, criticism, which seeks weakness and inadequacy in everything, is almost always right. But what does it offer in return? Is it a return to indifference, to a non-being that should not have been disrupted? Or is it instead a cooperation in that imperfect creation, enriching it infinitely by revealing new aspects of being that it called for but left in the shadows? The strongest critic enlarges the things they discuss, while the weakest always diminishes them.

But malice can almost certainly attack the greatest individuals because it never fails to provoke in them some reaction of anger or self-love, which always diminishes them and justifies it.

6. Hostility towards the spiritual.

No one realizes their own life on their own, but only through the mediation of other human beings. I need friendship to affirm and assist me, but I also need hatred that tests me, that forces me to become aware of my limits, to grow, to constantly purify myself, and that makes me increasingly faithful to myself, defending me against all temptations of ease or success, obliging me to retreat into the deepest, most secret, and most spiritual part of myself, where attacks can no longer harm, where there is no object they can seize and destroy. Thus, the most spiritual person is also the most hated, for hatred is only love enslaved, jealous of itself and irritated by its own impotence. The fate of the righteous, as described in the Gospel, is always before our eyes.

The most persistent hatred is directed at those who genuinely show indifference, not just feigned, towards the goods that other people value most. It intensifies even more when directed at those who possess and have the power to dispense those goods. In such cases, they believe themselves despised and deprived of the only means of influence they could count on.

The slightest spiritual progress withdraws from us the support of other human beings who see in us a being who is beginning to be self-sufficient.

The world hates all those who are outside the world, that is, outside that society that suffices unto itself but where no being is self-sufficient, where no reality matters except in the appearance that reflects it and the opinion it gives; all those who have access to another world where society is of no value and where each individual must be self-sufficient, where reality remains interior and invisible, where appearance is abolished, and where opinion becomes unnecessary. This spiritual world beyond the material world is never an object of spectacle, but it is the only one in which we live. And as soon as our gaze penetrates it, every object recedes and fades away unless it becomes, in relation to it, either a means or a sign.

7. Pride and humility.

The greatest source of humility for the deepest minds is the presence of the body, which is, for the most superficial minds, the source of all vanities. The way we deal with the body, which we must say is ours and which most people say is us, the necessity of providing for its needs, enduring its miseries, accepting its revelations and displays, making us almost constantly exposed and indiscreet, that is what compels us best to humble ourselves. But true humility is a remarkably rare metaphysical attitude, the ultimate lowering of our entire being towards the earth, which demands a supreme uplifting of our soul towards God: for no one can annihilate themselves except to allow God to occupy the empty place. And it is only in God that the abyss of humility, which is the miracle of voluntary Incarnation, could be realized.

There is a false humility, which is truly pride, through which one despises everything that others possess or value, inwardly congratulating oneself for being above all that, and yet being the only one to humble oneself. The humble should not lower themselves before God only to raise themselves even more in front of other people, taking advantage of the very act of humility that they alone know. They always expect more from others than from themselves. There is no attitude more difficult to maintain than true humility, the kind that seeks no revenge from self-love.

Only humility can produce gentleness. Pride is always impatient and irritable. And the pride of being gentle would abolish gentleness. But the one who is gentle does not think enough of oneself to get irritated with others. Pride makes us so proud of what we are that it leaves us dissatisfied with the greatest blessings that can be given to us, while humility, which makes us dissatisfied with what we are, allows us to enjoy the smallest things we receive. And perfect humility even makes us content with how little we are, however insignificant it may seem to us.

8. Humility and esteem for others.

Only humility is capable of grounding us to the soil where we take root; it compels us to rely on it and protects us from all falls. And it appears as a virtue because pride, which makes the ego the center of the world and elevates to infinity the small part of reality it occupies, is the strongest of all our vices. It compels us to reconsider, by considering what we lack, the judgment it passes on ourselves. But it is for the purpose of rediscovering our own measure.

Humility is never a self-contempt that debases us and almost always reveals resentment against ourselves and against the universe to which we belong. It deprives us of all our resources, whereas humility circumscribes them to make better use of them.

But there are many difficulties in this regard. We do not see ourselves as we see others. When we are both judge and party, it is unfair to apply the common rule. Our gaze should be directed within ourselves only at our duties and in others only at their rights. Unlike the crude judgments of the lowest beings, who esteem what comes from themselves and despise what comes from others, the noblest beings do not value what they have done and always find in what they see others do a power they admire and believe themselves to be lacking. The former can be demanding only towards others, and the latter only towards themselves. Here, humility, while remaining the opposite of pride, becomes the mark of our pride.

True humility consists in esteeming others more than oneself, in observing in them what they have and in us what we lack. While everyone claims to teach their neighbor, humility is an aptitude for being taught. It forms the closest bonds between people: for I can reject what another imposes on me, and even what he gives me, but I become attached to him through what I have the humility to ask of him, or even to take from him.

9. Being simple and not humble.

The word “humiliation” contains an ambiguity that reveals to us the ambiguity of our own life. It is both a sign of the most contemptible cowardice to accept all humiliations without being capable of standing up, and of the rarest courage to receive them without yielding to resentment and the desire for revenge. Humiliation is not always a sign of baseness. It even happens that pride sometimes resides in the soul of the one who humbles himself most perfectly before God, suggesting that he never humbles himself before another human being.

There is a dignity that individuals must maintain, without which, regardless of the humiliation to which they are reduced, they would deny the presence within them of a soul capable of the highest spiritual destiny. However, they feel a deeper misery than all the insults, which compels them not only to forgive but to accept them.

Most of the time, humiliations wound our self-esteem at some sensitive point, but it is up to us to cauterize the wound by healing ourselves of self-love at the very point where it has inflamed.

Humility can only be a momentary and provisional attitude of the will seeking remedies for self-love, vanity, or pride, like turning a stick in the opposite direction to make it straight. But the goal to be achieved is rectitude, which resides in simplicity. The intention must be upright; it is only reality and life that have the power to bend our soul to make it consistently conform to their infinite flexibility.

10. Avarice, intoxication of pure power.

Avarice, along with pride, is the deepest vice of self-love. Avarice opposes greed because it is the desire to save rather than acquire. It enjoys what it possesses and does not risk it to acquire more.

The miser is a recluse whose enjoyment is always secret because he cannot show it or share it without jeopardizing his wealth, which gives it to him and is no longer his alone. He hates his loved ones and heirs, believing they have some claim over him. With a single glance, he embraces all the possibilities that gold represents without realizing any of them, not even in his imagination. He does not even imagine, as people believe, all the goods he could give himself, which are, on the contrary, the greatest of all evils for him because they destroy the only thing he can love. By trying to imagine them, he would already divide and corrupt the pleasure derived from the pure power that he believes he retains over them.

Avarice is a vice of old age that assumes long experience, seeks to accumulate the means to enjoy all the pleasures that could fill it, and yet despises those very pleasures. It is an intoxication of power that we see can extend to all things, but from which we make no use for fear of diminishing it or annihilating it. It can be said that the miser enjoys a pure possibility, but it is a real and not imaginary possibility since the gold is present to represent it; he enjoys even less the feeling that he could convert it into an object of sensible enjoyment than knowing that he will always refuse to do so.

Avarice is a subtle vice, a vice of the mind and not of the flesh. Perhaps it is, par excellence, the vice of the mind because it is the pleasure derived from the indeterminate possibility of all enjoyments, a possibility that can only be thought of and is better for us than any experienced enjoyment. Avarice is inseparable from the thought of a pure power capable of endlessly growing and that must be kept in a state of power so that its exercise does not diminish it.

Money gathers within itself the ideal satisfaction of all desires at once, but the desire for money repels the satisfaction of any particular desire, even its image. It is the desire to be able to satisfy them but without ever satisfying them. Avarice is, therefore, the only passion that can never be imprisoned by its object, not only because the money I do not spend can accumulate endlessly, but also because money represents all goods at once without obliging me to focus my thoughts on any of them or confine them to the limits of enjoyment.

He who needs money the least is a voluntary ascetic. He loves its presence and detests its use. He is the most absurd of beings, but he is also the one who experiences the most disinterested joys, strictly contentless joys. The desire for money has allowed him to triumph over all his other desires. He knows that the money that allows us to satisfy them places us above them, that expenditure, which destroys them, once again subjects us to their yoke.

The joy of the miser contains a contradiction, but it makes this joy particularly acute; for he can permit himself everything and permit himself nothing; he possesses everything and possesses nothing. He has the power to transform a virtual possession into an actual possession but delights in never using such power. Hence the allure of gold, which quickly replaces the allure of pleasure, which compels him to endure so much suffering, which gradually becomes the enemy of pleasure and always ends up fleeing from it after seeming to pursue it. The pursuit of the Rhine gold bears the mark of a perversity of the mind that relentlessly pursues the goods of the earth, subordinating all its efforts to them, and yet will never possess them, possessing only the very effort it makes to possess them.

11. Spiritual gold.

There is a spiritual avarice just as there is material avarice. In the realm of the spirit, we see both frugal and prodigal individuals. But there are also those who endlessly accumulate treasures they never make use of: they fear losing everything precisely where they must lose everything in order to acquire everything and to disregard the finite, which belongs to us alone, in order to have before us the infinite, which belongs to all.

Money provides us with a fairly accurate representation of all spiritual goods. For it is the opposite of them, and yet it obeys the same law. It is the opposite because it represents nothing more than what can be bought and sold, that is, what belongs to the realm of matter and produces in us the sensations that need only be experienced. Whereas spiritual goods depend on an inner act that only we can accomplish, on a consent of our soul that only we can give.

But money is also the purest of all material goods. It accumulates indefinitely, as long as it remains untouched and unutilized. It contains all others; it is the pure power to acquire them. We understand why avarice is the most violent of all passions and also the most terrible because it is almost spiritual in its development and even leads to asceticism, although it seeks only to subject the world of sensible things to its control.

Although the miser thinks only of the future, of which he wants to be the master in advance, one can still observe in him an effort to escape time by preserving all material goods from the wear and ruin to which time condemns them, by bringing into the present, where we have the idea, a pleasure that most people expect from the future, which alone will realize it. This is the paradox of avarice that transfers to money the characteristics that can belong only to the activity of thought: for it alone is exercised in the present, whereas money anticipates the future; it alone finds completion in the possession of the idea, whereas money only has meaning if it is eventually converted into enjoyment.

Avarice spiritualizes our activity, but without detaching it from the matter to which it remains even more enslaved than if it were to consent to its use.

It applies to the physical realm a process that has the highest significance in the moral realm. It can indeed be said that the powers of inner life are restrained actions, but it deeply alters them because here no power can be detached from its use, which, far from ruining it, strengthens it. It is truly spiritual, not through this kind of abstinence towards any action that could diminish it, but through a disinterestedness and generosity that compel it to always act, without considering whether, in the course of action, it can gain or lose.

There is true spiritual gold of which the other is only an image, which attracts us and always deceives us. Only this can give rise to avarice, which is the fear, when spent, of seeing it wear out and be lost. Whereas spiritual gold only truly exists in the very expenditure we make, which produces it and indefinitely increases it, as seen in the exercise of thought, will, or charity. However, there is a sort of natural materialism within us that inclines us to consider all spiritual goods as being kept and retained for ourselves alone, always ready to be squandered and corrupted as soon as they are shared, whereas true wisdom would instead regard material goods as goods only in the moment they are spent and as capable of both increasing and changing their nature, that is, of spiritualizing themselves, through the right use we make of them.

Chapter IX. Exchange Among Spirits

1. The two senses of the word “common”.

Life only has meaning for the one who, entering a spiritual universe that is the same for all, discovers within themselves the place of their own existence and the mark of their personal destiny. There lies the total presence in which all beings commune. It is evident that the most common things are the most beautiful, such as air, sky, light, and life. And in the soul as well, it is the most common feelings that give us the purest joys.

But there is a hideous and common existence that begins precisely when the individual detaches themselves from this ever-present communion and, in order to distinguish themselves from all others, shuts themselves within their own limits and only reveals outwardly the instincts of the body and the movements of selfishness. Through a sort of paradox, no longer having any connection with the common core of all existence, but only with other separated individuals, they end up imitating them in order to, if not hoping to surpass them, at least not be inferior to them in any way. This false resemblance abolishes, instead of strengthening, all the real bonds through which beings can unite. It is the body that acts within them, or vanity, without the consultation of the spirit: this is the most wretched sense of common existence that one can give to this word.

The common, therefore, is both the perfection of our activity when it has discovered the source from which it derives, and its decline when it has renounced all initiative and allows itself to be carried away by externals. But the true distinction of the spirit consists in continually leaving behind those things that are common in the second sense, in order to discover those that are common in the first.

Thus, one must lend attentive ears when speaking of common things, for it may be what one obtains and possesses effortlessly, that is to say, what one imitates, or it may be what is rarest and most difficult, because it compels all beings to surpass themselves in a principle in which they commune. And the risk in societies where the multitude rules is that individuals prefer things that only become common through repeated selfishness over those that can only become common through transcended selfishness.

2. Separation that unites.

Separation and unity call to each other and are reconciled in this living cooperation of two beings aimed at a certain end that transcends both of them, and to which each contributes according to their own genius.

They are not merely interdependent like two opposites. Each of them is a means that must be employed in the service of the other. It is the most personal and solitary being who is capable of accomplishing the most selfless and pure act of communion. And every communion is but an illusion; it destroys us instead of strengthening us if it does not simultaneously grant us a heightened awareness of our separate existence.

For that which separates us also forms the space that allows us to unite. Beings can only communicate from the moment they recognize and accept the differences that set them apart. Thus, each one brings to the other a revelation that they could not find within themselves. It is a mistake to seek around me beings identical to myself, reproducing all my thoughts and feelings. It is a mistake to seek in them only a resemblance to me, neglecting the individual part of their nature that constitutes their true being, which enables them to say “I,” which is the very point where I encounter them and which I must reach in order to break my solitude.

If humans were able to recognize the inimitable singularity of each individual existence, they would immediately dispel within themselves selfishness and jealousy; they would experience mutual admiration that would impel them to invoke one another instead of repelling each other. For it is this singularity of each being that expresses the share of the absolute it carries, so to speak, and makes the entire world interested in its destiny, however miserable it may appear. I think the exact opposite of what you think, but I also think that your thought is necessary, just like mine, for the order of the world, and that without it, mine would find neither a place nor support within it and would consequently lack both reason for existence and truth.

However, humans always strive to persist in their own being and, therefore, to protect their own kind. Any difference is hated by them as a challenge to their individual essence, an attack upon them. It is hardly necessary for them to suspect in this difference the slightest evidence of superiority; it suffices that it eludes their grasp, that it draws their gaze towards it, for them to feel diminished, already abandoned, forgotten, and ready to disappear within a universe that denies them. The revelation of the “other than me” is the revelation of a world without me, which can still subsist and exclude me.

The differences that set human beings against one another are a test that judges them. The weakest and most selfish are offended by them and only seek to abolish them. The strongest and most generous always derive more joy and richness from them; they desire not their eradication but their multiplication. And in the discovery of their own limits, they feel so well supported by that which surpasses them that all the beings inhabiting the world become friends to them.

3. The identity of relationships with others and relationships with oneself.

The relationships that other people have with us are always a reflection of the relationships we have with ourselves. Each person experiences, to a certain extent, the feelings of antipathy or irritation that others have towards them.

However, this identity of relationships we have with others and relationships we have with ourselves is often subtle and difficult to recognize. Thus, someone who pursues another with hatred as if they wanted to annihilate them often seeks revenge on them for the failure of the same character they sense within themselves, a character they could have been.

What is mine encompasses all these movements within me, movements of nature that please or displease you depending on whether you find within yourself a similar or contrary initial impulse.

But what is mine is not yet myself, for what is truly me is the being that welcomes or directs all these movements, that takes pleasure in them or yields to them, that resists them or combats them. There are occasions when they may displease you because of the very love you have for me, just as they may displease me as soon as I consent to separate myself from them, to cease being complicit with them; there are occasions when someone who has aversion towards me rejoices in seeing me delivered to them. They indeed belong to the world of nature in which I find myself ensnared, but in which I am obliged to choose, where nothing is presented to me whose meaning I cannot change, which I must spiritualize and transfigure. And the essence of friendship is not to praise them, but to assist me in taking possession of them with lucid tranquility, in order to make good use of them, to soften and rectify them.

4. Acting for others.

We are asked to act towards others as we would act towards ourselves. But just as I must witness the spectacle of the world and not the spectacle of myself because, as a spectator, I cannot simultaneously be the object of the spectacle, I must not act for myself but for others; and I can never be the end of my own action precisely because I am its author. Thus, the pernicious effects of the need to know oneself, which led Narcissus to his death, and of the egotism of action, which also always fails, are both cured.

In a marvelous paradox, it is when I cease to gaze upon myself and instead look at those around me that I come to know myself without having intended to do so. It is when I cease pursuing my own good and seek that of others that I also find my own. Every ray of light must illuminate the world before returning to illuminate me. Every action that enriches me is a selfless action, and I only grow through my sacrifices. Thus, the world is what it should be; its perfect unity is realized only when, in the reciprocity that connects all beings, each one does for others precisely what they refuse to do for themselves. But in doing so, by renouncing desire, they attain far more than their desires could anticipate or hope for, not because others, in turn, act only for them, for this cleverness of desire does not change its meaning, but because the action that has no trace of enjoyment is also the one that elevates and strengthens me.

Yet it is often said that the ultimate moral injunction is to love others as we love ourselves, to do for them what we would do for ourselves. It seems that this is all we can demand of our weakness. But this expansion of egoism contradicts and shatters it. It can also be said that the one who truly loves is the only one who does not think of loving themselves, and that love for others is the only love that can be pure; in the end, it becomes the model that governs self-love and, in turn, purifies it.

We judge that the tree whose essence is the best is the one that bears the most beautiful fruits. For it not to die and to continue to bear fruit, it must part with them each season; they then become nourishment.

5. Not seeking to act upon others.

It is easy to see that truth is a living act, that it cannot be found without being produced within oneself and without inviting others to produce it within themselves as well. It is proven by its effectiveness, by the communication it establishes between us and the universe, between us and all other beings, in the knowledge of the same universe. However, there is a deeper and more personal exchange among consciences that we always mourn when it eludes us, but which should neither be sought nor desired; it must be an effect, without having been a goal first.

For in this effort to communicate with others, there are boundaries that must be learned not to cross: the boundaries that separate individual callings from one another. In their diversity lies a beauty, a perfection that must be capable of being known and respected.

Attempting to force these boundaries violates the delicacy of the individual being within their unique and incomparable mystery. It is a laborious endeavor that often leads to futile quarrels. And there is always the risk that self-love interferes and engenders much incomprehension, resentment, and bitterness.

What a futile undertaking it is to solicit a connection that continually eludes us! Should we be content to say that it requires exceptional relationships between two privileged beings? But each person, in principle, can attain it with everyone. However, it takes infinitely different forms, not only like the individuals themselves, but like the respective situations of each of them with regard to one another. They are different paths that must be discerned. What unites me to one person would separate me from another. The diversity of these paths can only be recognized with great sensitivity. Confusing them spoils everything. Here, no rule can provide support, no good will is sufficient. And it can be said that one must present oneself as one is, but each person is diverse, with different points of contact and different means of influence. It is not skill that matters here, but truth. Relationships between one being and other beings can only become real where certain possibilities are respected. It is our task to discover them, which requires many trials, conflicts, and failures. It is only this precise proportion of each and all that allows individual beings to recognize their true essence and unite in the absolute.

6. Discretion.

We only have power over another being if we do not desire to have power over them. Because the intention I sense in you to conquer my agreement warns me and prevents me from giving it. It distorts and corrupts your own thinking, which no longer looks at itself but only at the success it seeks to obtain. No one acts based on what they aim for, but rather based on who they are. If someone seeks to insinuate themselves into another’s consciousness in order to dominate it, it is due to self-love, which tarnishes the purity of their spiritual gaze. They substitute a temporal desire for success that hinders them, and sometimes a pathetic plea that only evokes astonishment, resistance, or coldness, and blinds instead of enlightening. Corrupting one’s own thinking is wanting it to triumph instead of seeking only to give it its most perfect and stripped-down form. That is where its sole triumph lies.

I only start to interest others when they perceive in me a perfect disinterestedness and even, so to speak, an indifference to convince them. It is the one who retreats deep into the core of their own essence, losing all concern for attracting attention or being heard, who has the greatest chance of achieving this. Because the charlatan who only seeks appearances gathers around him nothing but bodies. I must always present myself to others as I am, in my own strength and balance, without aspiring to be a model for anyone, with an awareness of my own destiny, the thought that everyone else also has theirs, and that they are close to communicating as soon as they cease to want to enslave themselves.

Perfect humility, the tranquil certainty that our thoughts only interest us, who are responsible for them, and find support in them even if they receive no echo, also gives our soul that constant presence to itself, that unwavering pride and vigor that accompany rediscovered innocence. And this significantly diminishes the significance of all the means by which most of our contemporaries seek to act, to produce some visible effect, to acquire some external influence over other people. All these means fail, as they should. Because the only thing that matters is to be, not to act. Or at least, if it is true that I can only be by acting, this action is merely evidence by which I show what is within me and from which I should expect, not that it makes me admired and imitated, which is nothing, but that it generates in all beings a call to create a work that is their own within a shared destiny.

Therefore, we must exercise great caution in our relationships with other people and not try to force a response that is denied to us, not hate or seek to abolish the difference that separates us from them. It is through the respect we have for that difference, through our discretion towards it, through the expectation that it reveals itself, that we will find the path that will one day lead us to the common source of our dual secret. Each individual always resists the action that another claims to exert on them, rejecting the gaze that penetrates and violates their intimacy. But they respond with an extraordinary surge of trust and joy to any call towards an invisible presence from which they draw sustenance, and which, as soon as another being evokes it, ceases to be an illusion, a game, a hope, and becomes the very presence of the living God who establishes their personal existence, their specific calling, their present community with all other beings.

7. Light of charity.

Charity is both the simplest and the most difficult of all attitudes of the soul: it is a pure attentiveness to the existence of others. But charity is love, and love is never, as is often believed, a movement of passion that blinds the mind instead of enlightening it. In the most perfect spiritual communion, two beings are said to be of one mind, a summit that cannot be surpassed but that love alone is capable of attaining. Sometimes it becomes unrecognizable, as no shadows remain in it, and it is indistinguishable from pure light.

I cannot refrain from advising other men, reforming their thoughts or actions, seeking agreement between them and me, wanting them to have the same preferences and follow the same maxims. And it is surely because I seek to reign over them, to find in them confirmation and extension of what I am. But it is also because I know that all consciences are one and seek the same truth and good.

However, within each individual, there remains a desire for independence that sets them apart from other beings, refusing both to impose their own law on others and to submit to theirs, and seeking to defend the uniqueness of their own calling rather than entering into a common community with them. Yet these two desires are one and the same. And no one will discover their own genius except by discovering the source of inspiration from which the unique genius of all other beings also emanates, which therefore brings them closer to one another the more faithful each of them is to themselves.

8. Bearing each other’s burdens.

Can any man truly offer assistance to another? Is there not a solitary retreat where each being remains inaccessible? As soon as one allows themselves to be influenced by an action that comes from another, can it be said that their solitude has been broken, or that they have found a superficial path that keeps the profound abysses of their secret lives separate? If our power of penetration can only reach that far, can it be either benevolent or cruel? Does our despair worsen when discovered, or does it find relief in being shared?

“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.” But you may ask, “Don’t I have enough burdens of my own? Is it ever possible to carry someone else’s burdens? How could they ever become mine?” Wouldn’t such a claim be more indiscreet than generous, more audacious than delicate? Yet, just as one can only know the world and not oneself, the responsibility that each person assumes toward themselves is the responsibility they assume within themselves toward the world. I merely suffer my own misery; necessity compels me to. Selfishness suffices for that. But another’s misery, I take it upon myself through an act of freedom and an act of love.

If it has been said that the word “service” is the most beautiful word in the language, it is because it clearly indicates our subordination to a good that always surpasses us. And when we serve, we oblige ourselves to surpass our own limitations to find, beyond them, the very object of our action. Then we cooperate in the work of creation, instead of merely being a created thing or using already created things for our own purposes.

9. Receiving and giving.

It is said that no one can ever receive what they cannot give themselves and that, to be capable of receiving a gift, one must be capable of giving it.

However, the honor we give to God does not consist of giving Him nothing, but rather in showing ourselves worthy of receiving His gifts. And if a good person cannot be honored by an evildoer, it is because they are incapable of receiving anything from them.

The greatest good we do for others is not to communicate our wealth to them, but to reveal theirs to them. For no one receives anything as a good that is foreign to them. Therefore, they can only receive themselves as a gift. Every gift we receive is the discovery within ourselves of a power we possessed without suspecting it. But as soon as it is revealed to us, it appears more intimate to ourselves than anything we thought we had.

And if the essence of consciousness is to lead us into a presence that surpasses us, it is understandable that only the one who receives the good has consciousness of it, not the one who does it. For the one who does it only needs to act according to what they are, whereas the one who receives it enriches their own life with a power they carried within but did not exercise as long as they were alone.

Therefore, if there is nothing more sterile than an unreceived gift, it can be said that it is the one who receives the gift who makes it a gift, giving it its effectiveness and virtue.

10. Recognized greatness.

No person is capable of creating their own genius; it is sufficient for them to recognize it and remain faithful to it. Yet they do not achieve this alone: the greatest individuals always need to reassure themselves through the secret response or sympathy they find in certain very simple beings whom destiny has placed close to them, and who are enough to console them for the ignorance and contempt in which they are held by the majority.

Because the value of a being does not reside in what they are but in a truth whose presence they acknowledge within themselves and of which they are the interpreters. And in order not to feel threatened by doubt or despair, they must have the feeling, even if only for a very brief moment, that the light they have received can be shared. The true sign of greatness is having achieved within oneself that inner void, that perfect silence of the individual, namely, self-love and the body, where all beings hear the same voice bringing them a common revelation. The greatest things, in turn, never fail to produce this silence.

The purest consciousness is always the most transparent. It is through an abdication of self, where all its powers seem to vanish, that the individual realizes themselves, feeling the birth of that inner confidence that allows them to grow and fulfill themselves. And it is when attention is most docile and faithful that action is most personal and effective.

Therefore, there is no inherent greatness in the individual, or at least their own greatness can always be contested. It can even be said, in a sense, that there is no greatness except that which is recognized or capable of being recognized, which often leads to misunderstanding or judgment based on applause. But we find more secret signs within ourselves: the ability to evoke all our aspirations and fulfill them simultaneously, to make the most beautiful and fruitful seeds germinate within us, to break the boundaries of our solitude, and for a moment, to become equal to the whole universe.

Hence, it is true to say that the greatest individuals are great not because of what they give us, but because of the reception we are capable of giving to their gifts. In a sense, their greatness is owed to us. It contains nothing more than the very richness we have received from them once we become capable of recognizing its origin, that is, returning it to them.

11. Spiritual affinities.

The subtlest center of vocation does not lie in the choice of the work for which we are suited and which only involves the actions we can exert on things, but in the choice of our friendships, the people with whom we enjoy living, who understand us and assist us, with whom we experience constant familiarity, and who, instead of stifling our genius with distrust or hostility, support it and allow it to flourish.

Recognizing our spiritual affinities and never compromising with them is the secret of strength, success, and happiness. The writer also needs a circle of sympathy that strengthens their self-confidence and enables their work to grow and mature. There may be some who have missed their destiny because they failed to find it, create it, recognize it, or misunderstood it. Just as a writer needs an audience that understands and supports them, often with greater ardor the narrower it is, every person needs an environment that is like the fertile soil without which no seed can bear fruit. However, it would be a mistake to think that this environment is given to us and that we simply endure it. Like all events in our lives, it is a meeting of freedom and fortune.

However, caution is required. Because all the beings surrounding us, all those who come across our path, are as many opportunities or tests that we have no right to reject. Therefore, what is left to us is not so much the choice of those among whom we are called to live, but the discernment of the point of connection between their destiny and ours, where they fertilize each other instead of ignoring and fighting each other.

12. Elective friendships.

There is no mind that does not seek a kindred mind, with which it can feel united in thought and in the pursuit of the same things. And if one were to reflect on it, it is in this community of desire that the true foundation of love resides, rather than in a mutual search for oneself, which is often confused with it and is properly its perversion. Love always goes beyond the beings who love each other, reaching towards an object they aspire to and in which they commune. Although it is universal and obliges us to love all creatures, just as intelligence, which is also universal, obliges us to think about everything that exists, we understand that there can be a chosen being for love, towards whom it is right for it to be directed, just as intelligence attaches itself with predilection to a single idea in which it nonetheless finds the complete truth.

Within me, there is a friendship always ready to be born, and before experience has disappointed me, I am amazed that every human face is not a friend to me. But it is not a gift that can remain anonymous. For I am a unique and individual being: my intimacy with myself is always momentary, local, and physical; and my friendship has the same characteristics. It is still only a possibility as it wanders from one person to another; it must eventually settle. It needs someone who also has a name, who is alone like I am alone, and whose intimacy extends only from him to me and cannot, without contradiction, be offered to everyone.

Every person believes they will find in the world another person capable of understanding them, that is, of sharing the same desire. But there is an enchantment that causes the identity of desire to oppose beings to each other in their animal part, as enemies ready to tear each other apart and kill each other, and brings them so closely together in their spiritual part that they become friends to each other, that is, each of them becomes the soul of the other.

The friend is the being before whom we have no restraint, that is, before whom we show ourselves as we are, without making any distinction between ourselves and the spectacle we seek to present. In him, this difference, which is characteristic of our relationships with other human beings, between the inner, which has reality only for us, and the outer, which is the appearance we show, is abolished.

But the friend is also the being before whom we are nothing and become capable of reducing ourselves, without fearing to humiliate ourselves, to a pure questioning of what we want and what we are worth. The friend is the being before whom all the powers of our inner life can be tested without blushing.

13. A partially open paradise.

There is a point at which a spiritual exchange begins with another being, which changes all the relationships we had with them until then and makes us forget that they could have existed without them. This spiritual exchange is only established through the discovery of a world in which each person shows the other what they were already on the verge of seeing, where every truth receives an inner clarity that turns it into beauty, where everything that is seems to merge with a desire that is born and fulfilled.

There is nothing rarer than such an exchange; most often, it occurs only in flashes, either with beings we have only seen once or with beings who are most familiar to us. Almost always, it is sensed rather than experienced: it is impossible to either fix it or make it reappear at will. For it makes us escape from the material world where the will can neither grasp it nor imprison it. It is a spiritual paradise, but one that only ever half-opens.

All the other relationships we have with people—fairness, trust, sympathy—only make sense if they represent it, announce it, and already lead us towards it. Their role is to seek it, but they do not always find it. When they exist without it, they are exposed to all perils. For as soon as two beings are in each other’s presence, they are two strangers who, as they get to know each other better, are astonished at how different they are. Individuality first asserts itself in order to divide us. Then certain agreements and accommodations begin to appear, the idea of certain limits intended to protect an inviolable sanctuary within each of us, sometimes a mutual complicity that increases our separation from all others, and in the most favorable cases, the feeling of a mysterious alliance that extends our own life, sustains it, and multiplies it.

But, although all these relationships contain a reflection and a premonition of true spiritual exchange, they do not suffice for it and sometimes even prevent it from occurring. For it does not reside in these more or less strong or more or less happy bonds that desire or fate can forge between two individuals; it only begins where a presence is offered to them that they limit themselves to discovering and that they penetrate through mutual mediation.

Two beings can only come together in the same spiritual place. To discover another spirit is to discover another gaze that meets ours in the same light. Then it happens that we are engaged in such a pure exchange that it is impossible to discern any matter in it, and as soon as reflection finds it, communication becomes slightly less perfect.

Chapter X. Tranquility of the Soul

1. Peace of the soul.

Inner tranquility always allies itself with solitude and with the freedom of the mind. It excludes indiscreet zeal, by which we always encroach upon our neighbor’s task, preventing them from fulfilling it and forgetting our own. It is lost as soon as I begin to compare myself to others and, leaving my domain for theirs, think only of replacing them or defeating them.

One should not reproach those who think that the world could collapse without their soul being troubled for their selfishness. For it matters little if our body perishes and the earth and the heavens, as long as our soul remains master of itself and true to itself until the end. Whereas it happens that the most beautiful gifts of the body, the earth, and the heavens, if she does not receive them properly, become for her the worst perils, corrupting her and forcing her to betray herself.

There is a peace of the soul that consists of avoiding all murmuring and violence, but which is an active peace through which we learn to bear the trials that are sent to us and to love them as a part of our destiny. It is never an effect of inner inertia or even a gift that we have merely received. It requires to be realized through a very pure spiritual operation that transcends time and is never affected by events, impressing upon sensitivity an uncompromising delicacy and converting every disturbance into light, every expectation into action, and every emotion into love.

The peace of the soul demands that we drive away all the solicitations that continually assail us and that are like flies passing in front of our eyes, which our gaze cannot help but follow.

We must abolish all concerns, not to evade the seriousness of life, but to make it appear. For all particular concerns distract us, which means that there is only one concern that deserves to hold us, and that is to respond at every moment to the demands of the event.

The greatest and strongest men are entirely devoted to what they do. The others are always preoccupied.

The leader who commands should not have more concerns than the humble worker tied to a task that no one in the world looks at, but from which everyone reaps the fruit. And one can never admire enough the words of that man whose country was invaded, whose army was defeated, who held the fate of civilization and the world in his hands, and who said: “I have tasks, but no concerns.”

It is feared that the peace of the soul may end up resembling a kind of sleep, and it may indeed happen that thought and love slumber like the body. Yet this sleep itself is sometimes accompanied by an obscure and subtle action, and like the sleep of the body, it can restore, rebuild, and regenerate all the powers of life. But true inner peace resides in that perfect freedom of the mind that makes it capable of carrying out all the movements of which it is capable and gives it sovereign agility. This is only possible through the annihilation of all concerns, through the purity of the heart, and through the moderation of self-love.

There is no man in whom there is not an inclination to evil, but we should not be troubled by this. It follows from knowing that it is the condition of our nature and being assured that there is in us a good will that knows it, dominates it, and, even if occasionally defeated, does not associate with it.

2. No haste.

There is a point of perfection where all the inseparable oscillations of emotion and passion come together in a supreme balance, where the most extreme alternatives of sensibility, instead of canceling each other out, unite and merge into a unified and calm possession that is a single act of intelligence and love.

Inner calm is the secret of strength and happiness. There is no nobility without slowness, no perfection without stillness. These are the signs of a power that exercises itself through its mere presence, without needing a gesture or effort that alters its essence and forces it to leave the pure and tranquil possession it has of itself. It does not descend into the world of matter, although matter nevertheless obeys it. It does not propose any end, as if every end remained external to it and threatened to subjugate it.

One must not be in a hurry or ever show any haste, as the slaves do who always reveal on their faces the ugliness of covetousness, the confession that they find nothing in themselves that belongs to them, the impatience to leave and the fear of not arriving on time. But what good does their haste do them? All the ends they run towards are particular ends comparable to the object they have in hand, and it is doubtful that they can bring them any more. For they are contained within the same Whole whose presence is already given to them.

What good can so much haste do? We will always arrive. We have already arrived. And the difficulty lies in enjoying what we have rather than reaching for what we do not have and which we will be unable to enjoy when we have it. For every end is properly out of reach, and we always reject it into an indefinitely recurring future. Therefore, we must learn to destroy the idea of an end that we constantly pursue and never reach, which compels us to wait to live and prevents us from ever living.

The extreme point of life always tears through the surface of reality in the present, and we must not think of the future, which will itself be another present. The unhappy person is the one who always squints towards the past or the future, while the happy person is the one who seeks not to escape the present but to penetrate it and possess it. We often ask that the future bring us a happiness that we would then only have to enjoy in a new present. But that reverses the terms of the problem, for it is from the present itself and from the way in which we know how to dispose of it without turning our gaze elsewhere that all the future happiness we can ever give ourselves will emerge.

3. Resources proportionate to our needs.

The whole art of life consists in not allowing all the good dispositions that appear in us in flashes to wither away, but rather in retaining them, putting them into action, and making them fruitful. The essential sin is undoubtedly the sin of negligence.

We always have enough light, if we so desire, to discern at every moment the best action we should take. It is to evade ourselves that we wait to be better instructed. By seeking a universal rule that can apply to all cases to determine if it suits the one presented to us, we blind ourselves willingly. We still ask to know the farthest consequences of our actions, even though they do not depend on us. But the growing seed does not know if the fruit will ripen.

In this very earth where we must live, our clarity is proportionate to our needs. Everything we have done will have here and in eternity necessary consequences without us having to foresee or fear them. Strictly speaking, they no longer concern us because they are not the result of our will but of the order of the world. And we must accept that, in this world that infinitely surpasses us, everything that begins with us ultimately reaches its conclusion without us.

There is an atmosphere of life that is made up only of prejudices, but it is in this atmosphere that we breathe. It is from it that all the balance we can achieve, all the effectiveness we can have, depend. It undoubtedly takes courage to praise prejudices. Those who accept them change their meaning, but the one who gave them that name only thought of freeing himself from them. Now, to free oneself from prejudices, Lamennais already said, is to free oneself from order, from happiness, from hope, from virtue, and from immortality. Perhaps it is easier to reject prejudices than to take possession of them and delve into them.

4. What depends on us and what does not depend on us.

The Stoics made happiness depend on a precisely recognized and respected distinction between things that depend on us and those that do not. To regulate the former according to reason and not to concern ourselves with the latter was the maxim of supreme wisdom, to which the will must never cease to be attentive.

But behind this apparent humility, there is much contempt and much pride, contempt for the things that do not depend on us and yet make up our life, with which it is always intertwined, and over which we cannot claim either that they can ever remain indifferent to us or that we are forever capable of exerting any indirect or distant action upon them. Such resignation resembles the revenge of our powerlessness, an advance-accepted defeat to avoid the risks of a battle. Yet in a world where everything is interconnected, who would dare to set in advance the limits of our power, of the task to which we may one day be called?

However, there is also much pride in thinking that the slightest thing can depend exclusively on us, although there is a realm of freedom where a pure consent occurs that cannot be forced. But the resources at our disposal, the success of our conduct, the awakening of our initiative, and the grace that supports it far exceed the limits of our will. And the person who has the most power and happiness is the one who is so well attuned to the order of the world that he can no longer distinguish what comes from him from what the world brings to him.

The distinction between what depends on us and what does not depend on us establishes too deep a division between the world and us. There is nothing that does not depend on us in some way, and we are collaborators in the entire creation. But there is nothing that depends solely on us, and the very possibility of raising a finger is a gift given to us, to which we only accept to respond.

Yet it is not when we are fulfilled that we feel our independence most strongly; it is in deprivation and abandonment. That is undoubtedly what the Stoics meant. And what can depend on us, if not to still have confidence in life when the joy of living is denied to us?

5. Daily virtue.

There is much strength in the word “neighbor” used by the Gospel, commanding us to love our neighbor and to limit all our duties to this love. Nietzsche himself complains that he who prefers society to man also prefers the distant to the neighbor.

In the same sense, it can be said that all virtues are virtues of the private individual, and the virtues of the public person are still to act only as a private individual.

Real life is this humble and common life, which is visible only to a very small number of beings who are closely united to us and from which those who are eager to appear quickly turn away, seeking to shine on a larger stage. It is made up of an infinity of emotions, thoughts, and actions that, at every moment, give us real communication with the things and people around us. Beyond a very small circle, all these movements of our soul escape us, their intimacy diminishes, and the effects they produce no longer depend on us.

We must not despise all these short-lived events, which nevertheless fill each of our days, all these incidents of daily life that leave no trace and find no echo but in which our entire being constantly engages, the only ones to which we can give a vivid and full meaning and which undoubtedly allow us to obtain in every point a contact with the absolute. If each person knew how to turn their gaze back to them and dedicate all their care to them, there would be no need for those grand designs by which we seek to change the face of the world. It would be changed without us even wanting it.

6. Avoiding quarrels.

We must avoid the unbearable attitude of those who are always quarreling with themselves and with others.

We often seek to achieve victory in a struggle whose outcome matters little to us and in which our heart is on the side of the opponent. The only thing that matters to us is to prevail, not to be right. Therefore, we must know how to abstain from all engagements in which victory is more valuable to us than the spoils. The defeat of our enemy, if it is the defeat of the truth, is also our own defeat. Thus, intellectual disputes are more to be feared than any others, for they revive self-esteem precisely where the role of the mind is to subdue it. Any dispute obscures the inner light; the wise person perceives it only because they always maintain great equanimity. And if they are wrong, they rejoice even more in yielding than in triumphing, for when they triumph, they keep what they have, and when they yield, they enrich themselves.

Our relationships with others should never take the form of a trial in which, in the end, one must win and the other must lose. Two individuals are not toward each other like two combatants, one of whom must conquer and the other succumb, but like two mediators in the search for a common good, and what each one obtains benefits the other. It has often been said that all men are like a single man who realizes himself through the diversity of individuals and the succession of generations. They are united like our different states of mind at every moment or in turn. Like them, they struggle for preeminence, and it is not always the best who prevail. But in our relationships with other men, as in our relationships with ourselves, it is a question of mobilizing all the powers of consciousness and reconciling them, obliging them to support and cooperate with each other.

7. Gentleness towards other men.

Gentleness is the remedy for all the evils caused by self-love, but there is an indifference that can only destroy them by destroying us. However, it is not easy to be gentle with oneself. Many individuals are in a state of constant impatience and irritation, not against others, but against themselves. And when others come into the picture, they receive the outbursts.

Gentleness is inseparable from humility. A person who is full of themselves is sensitive to the slightest offense; they are always angry with themselves and constantly complain about the lack of respect they receive. On the other hand, someone who never asks for anything and believes they deserve nothing sees others only as a source of joy or a weakness to which they sympathize and seek to assist.

There is no deep relationship between people that is not based on gentleness; all others are superficial, poorly concealing the hostility and contempt that divide instead of unite. It is only through gentleness that separated beings can recognize their separation while providing mutual support and communicating in the feeling of their mutual vulnerability. It obliges us to handle each other with both natural and learned delicacy, making us more aware of all our wounds, which may appear more sensitive, but only for the purpose of tending to and healing them.

Gentleness is not an act of indulgence towards others' flaws; it is a testimony to their very existence, their presence in the world, which ceases to offend us. We do not seek to combat or destroy them through war but accept and appreciate them. We enjoy their presence as if sharing a spiritual cohabitation that transcends the physical cohabitation. Gentleness is an act of kindness towards others, not only acknowledging who they are but also recognizing their potential. It discerns in them countless possibilities that a rougher touch would suppress and wither, but which, without the attention and trust it provides, might never have been perceived or come to fruition.

By submitting to all the laws of human condition, gentleness already allows us to rise above them. The one who rebels against these laws reveals the extent to which they feel and suffer under their slavery. However, the one who accepts them with gentleness comprehends and illuminates them. It must be said of these laws that their yoke is gentle, and their burden is light.

8. Gentleness and firmness.

Among all the virtues of the soul, gentleness is the most subtle and rare, especially in our time. It is always the most difficult to maintain and practice. Sometimes it can be confused with ease, softness, or insipidity. When the slightest will is involved, it becomes false and repulsive. True gentleness is always so attentive, delicate, and active that we are constantly amazed at its benevolence without seeming to give anything.

Gentleness is not, as sometimes thought, the opposite of firmness; it is its polish. Firmness should not repel our hand but support it, and the gentlest contour often has a sharpness that moderates desire and serves as a guide. The union of gentleness and firmness is sometimes so perfect that they become indistinguishable. They are not recognized by the person who possesses them and, in acting, yields to natural necessity and grace, nor by the person who experiences them and finds in them a call and support.

Gentleness is far from weakness; on the contrary, it possesses true strength. It dissolves all resistance it encounters. The strongest person is not the one who resists passion—either their own or others'—through the violence of effort, but through the gentleness of reason. Any will becomes taut when one tries to overcome or break it, but gentleness persuades it. Only gentleness can triumph without a fight, transforming the adversary into a friend. There is a false gentleness that immediately leads to violence and a true gentleness, more powerful than violence, rendering it unnecessary and annihilating it. Gentleness is not, as believed, a lack of impulse but rather a contained and appeased impulse. It is not a weakened will but a transcendent will that no longer needs to be taut. It imitates nature but transfigures it because nature does not know gentleness, only indolence or fury.

9. Gentleness and light.

No one can truly know the life of the spirit if gentleness is foreign to them. Animosity, bitterness, or sourness encountered in some individuals are signs of self-love; they carry a taste of flesh that pervades all their thoughts, regardless of their strength and grandeur.

Sometimes we see scientists rushing in search of truth as if it were a conquest. They believe that truth only reveals its secrets to those capable of compelling it through rigorous demonstration or the instruments of torture. But in this kind of violence, truth may be captured, yet it does not form an alliance with us. For it to become the reward of the mind, it must encounter exact docility towards things, being capable of faithfully following their most sinuous paths. It always requires the mind to achieve a certain harmony and even coincidence with reality, which is measured by its very gentleness. We must listen to the answers that truth provides us in a state of inner stillness and silence. It awaits the complicity of an attentive mind where it must already find acceptance, respect, and love. As soon as we try to force it, truth becomes rebellious and seeks to escape.

We must calm the tumult of the body, the blind reactions of instinct, and achieve perfect inner gentleness so that things may reveal a clear countenance and show us their friendship. There is no event, circumstance, or being placed in our path that we are incapable of embracing with violence or gentleness. Many people seek and delight in violence because it offers them more agitation. Some prefer indifference, either by nature or by design, calling it wisdom. Only a few know that divine gentleness that permeates the atmosphere in which we live, spiritualizing everything it touches.

Gentleness is born of light. Nature always provides the impetus: when light succeeds in calming and merging with it, it expires gently. Gentleness is the opposite of indifference, as this light, as soon as it is born, radiates with love. Therefore, gentleness is not the opposite of ardor; it is its most perfect and purified form. If Pyrrho, who is the prince of skeptics, practiced true gentleness, not indifference as some claim, it is because behind all the doubts of his thoughts, there was a delicate participation in being and life that many of those who pronounced judgments on such matters with greater boldness might have envied.

10. Patience and gentleness.

Patience is to endure and wait, which is more difficult than acting and resolving. It is the virtue of time, and we need patience to bear living in time. First and foremost, it is about filling time when it appears empty. And there can be no better means for us than patience, which is a kind of gentleness towards time, which we do not seek to violate or abolish.

However, patience does not consist solely of waiting, as some believe; it also involves suffering, which means both enduring and suffering. Will it be said that, being the virtue of time and suffering, it can only be a kind of resignation, incapable of creating and always devoid of joy? Indeed, there is a negative patience that can only bear the trials of life and life itself as a trial. But there is also a positive patience in which suffering is accepted and desired. Patience embraces it without recrimination. It receives it without moaning. It does not seek to boast of it as an exceptional fate or a mark of chosenness. It does not seek vengeance against all those spared by it. It recognizes it as a gift to be loved and made one’s own, as an essential element of one’s person and life.

This positive patience keeps the soul active and even joyful in adversity. It endures all contradictions without succumbing to movements of self-love or anger. It transforms all our initial agitations into gentleness.

In its deepest essence, it knows how to pursue a work whose fruit it may never see. It is rightly called perseverance. It is not blinded by the intoxication of prosperity or adversity.

Patience knows neither indifference nor abandonment. It requires great strength and trust. However, it sometimes holds me back from acting. It does not rush ahead of time. It does not lose heart, even if time never fulfills the promises of eternity because it does not wait for that eternity. It already lives in it. Having time ahead of us, which redeems everything, means considering that nothing in the ending time actually ends, already being beyond all times.

Perhaps patience is the highest virtue of the will. As Fénelon says, “To become impatient is to want what we do not have or not want what we have.” As long as we desire the suffering we endure, it is not suffering. Why turn it into true suffering by ceasing to desire it?

11. A presence that always surpasses us.

Habit makes me blind and indifferent to all the extraordinary things that fill the world—the light, the movement of my own existence, and even you who speak to me and suddenly come before me. But without habit, I would see everywhere objects of terror or miraculous presences. The child knows very well that it is the most familiar objects that, when they fix their gaze on them for a moment, forgetting their use, bring them the greatest astonishment. And the most perfect art is the one that reveals them to us in a kind of revelation, as if we were seeing them for the first time. Thus, without habit, reality would present itself to us in such a direct and vivid manner that we would not bear its sight. We ask habit for a kind of security.

However, all endeavors of the mind aim not to acquire habit but to break it, in order to discover the fabulous spectacle it conceals and always conceals. Therefore, people are wrong to despise the humble object before their eyes, to indulge in sterile dreams of the future, or to imagine a world beyond death that would finally fulfill their expectations. The whole of reality is given to them, but it is difficult to obtain a pure image of it. It is not by surpassing appearances, as always claimed, that we will grasp the truth, for we always need a truth that manifests itself. The greatest minds make apparent what had escaped us until now and will soon be buried by habit. Behind the world and beyond death, there is no other reality than the one we contemplate today, but some reject it to chase after illusions, while others find in it, according to their capacity for love, all the joys of the earth and of heaven.

Chapter XI. Wisdom and Passions

1. Dual nature.

The deeper an tree plunges its roots into the darkness of the earth, the higher its foliage rises, trembling delicately at the summits of light. And its motionless majesty is but a shifting balance where all the forces of nature play and counteract each other, but also respond to each other and contain themselves with an inner certainty more beautiful than any abandon.

Each one of us is similar to the tree: we bury in the secret of our soul the most obscure, the deepest, often the most selfish and base feelings, which are sometimes the most nourishing; but the purest love remains miraculously bound to them, without which it would soon cease to be ours, and instead of growing its boldest and most fragile branches into the impalpable azure, it would gradually dissipate and disappear.

Nature and mythology present us with the same images everywhere. The butterfly is a caterpillar with wings: but the man who rises highest in the life of the spirit elevates his own caterpillar to the heavens. The Centaur, the Sphinx, and the Siren equally express how man stands upon an animal still equipped with hooves, claws, or scales. For man is a mixed species. Therein lies his own uniqueness and the very principle of his calling and destiny. It is folly to want to make him a god or reduce him to an animal. He more closely resembles the Satyr, who partakes in both natures, and it is uncertain whether his most ardent desire is to elevate the animal to the contemplation of divine light or to bring the god down into the flesh of the animal in order to thrill it with all its shivers.

Man’s reason itself is a proportion between two instincts: an animal instinct that imprisons him within its limits, and a spiritual instinct that makes him forget them. Reason is the suture of the spirit and the flesh. It maintains their balance. It attaches the spirit to the body, which moderates its impetus; it suspends the body to the spirit, which moderates its descent. But if there were not a dual nature within us, how could we be allowed to choose what we want to be? Our freedom thrives on this ambiguity. And though it is impossible for it to ever completely identify with either the angel or the beast within us, it is nevertheless the one that grants victory to one or the other from time to time.

Within each of us, there is a kind of vertical oscillation that occurs within our very being, an alternate rise and descent that constitutes the very life of our consciousness and determines that, with the same resources, some rise above the earth while others plunge into the abyss.

2. Uniting extremes.

Measure is not mediocrity or lack of strength; it is that kind of inner fullness and just proportion with the universe that should allow each being to be itself and master itself, that is, to hold the extremes in hand instead of fleeing from them or succumbing to them. Because it needs the extremes and carries them within itself, instead of rejecting and abolishing them. Far from being the middle ground and remaining equidistant from both, it fills the entire interval that separates them in order to unite them. It tempers each of them, not through a kind of slackness that it imparts, but through the power with which it also embraces the other. It is not shaken from that center where the gaze must have enough breadth and the feeling enough depth to bring together and reconcile the opposites without tearing itself apart between them. The one who maintains measure measures all the abysses of being without experiencing vertigo.

Measure is at once that tension and understanding that enable each thing to be placed in its proper position, that allow each faculty to exert its most direct and strongest play, supported by the play of all the others that regulate its use by lending it their effectiveness: it is the unity of all the powers of being cooperating with all the powers of the universe and finding in them both a limit and a support. In the infinity of desire, there is a kind of perpetual excess that prevents us from attaining or possessing anything. And wisdom, instead of being, as is often believed, a renunciation of the absolute, is on the contrary the encounter with the absolute that gives everything its measure.

In mathematics, all problems are problems of measure and limits. It is no different in our lives. Each of our actions expresses a relationship between us and the universe: that is our measure. And all these actions themselves tend toward a limit, which is our essence, and of which it can be said both that it surpasses them and that it establishes them.

3. Compensation.

It is because each of us is a mixed being whose essence is always realized through a balance maintained between two extremes that neither the most beautiful nor the ugliest aspects within us seem entirely ours. Within us, there is what we call consciousness, which is both a gaze, a command, and a wish: that is the divine part of ourselves. But within us also resides the being to which this gaze applies, which is rebellious to the command and unfaithful to the wish: it is the part of ourselves that belongs to nature. The self is the link between divinity and animality; in it, the spirit is incarnated and the flesh is spiritualized.

Measure is an act that is all the more perfect when it has more resistance to overcome and more effort to exert. The highest art is that which requires the most resistant material but triumphs over it, the most violent inspiration but contains it. In the noblest activity and even in the purest love, there is always a controlled anger.

This is because every excess is a sign of weakness and not strength. No excess goes unpunished. There is an excess in knowledge when it becomes an ambition for pure thought that turns into greed or play and disregards action or discourages it, instead of supporting and illuminating it. And even in virtue, there can be excess where one does not know whether the being is testing nature or testing God, but it shows a lack of humility, a self-confidence and trust in its own resources that deprive it of the sense of what it can do, prevent it from measuring the relationship between its nature and its will, and one day compel events to contradict and overwhelm it.

But one never exceeds measure without some form of compensation occurring somewhere, by which balance is restored. Instinct finds on another point, where it escapes attention, the strength that was denied to it where it sought to break through. And as soon as it is restrained, it paralyzes through its inertia the very will that had conquered it. Conversely, anyone who would sacrifice thought to action would see that thought reborn and squandered in the form of a dream, or introduce a chimera into the very action it sought to exclude.

4. At the boundaries of consciousness.

Is it true that at the borders of consciousness there is a terrifying and marvelous world that is close to us and within us, that is us without us suspecting its presence? But how can it be ours as long as we are unaware of it and have no control over it? Will it be said that it suddenly explodes into consciousness through effects that always surprise us but shake us enough to deny that they belong to us? What is this fate that unfolds within me and of which I am a powerless spectator? I can only call it mine at the point where my thought begins to illuminate these obscure impulses and my will begins to associate with them or suppress them. This violent and dark world may be as close to me as one wishes, but it is not me. Does it even have an existence in itself before consciousness lends it life, sometimes to dominate and appease it, sometimes to delight in its fury and amplify it? There is nothing within us that truly deserves the name of unconsciousness, only an ever-emerging consciousness, sensitive to all external solicitations, to all calls of the flesh and the senses, to all voices of opinion and passion, and that never ceases to expand, enrich, purify, and corrupt itself according to the consent it accepts to give them.

Without consciousness, I would be nothing, not even a thing. It is consciousness that gives me existence by revealing to me that it is my existence. Yet, it is itself an intermediary between the nature that surpasses it below and the reason that surpasses it above. But it has control over them, and that is why it can be said to be both the best and the worst of things. Sometimes, it becomes the servant of nature and even uses the artifices of reason to corrupt and degrade it. Sometimes, by subordinating itself to reason, it spiritualizes and transfigures it.

5. Ecstasies of the soul.

The soul is like a kind of fire entrusted to us that it is our duty to maintain; it is our duty to provide it with only the purest materials. It is not enough to say that, like fire, it purifies everything it touches; for the quality of the flame always depends on what fuels it; it can produce a dark smoke that takes away its light and even its heat; it can extinguish and leave only bitter ashes or consumed coals in the hearth.

There are different ecstasies that can arise from the exaltation of all the powers of the soul, both noble and base. The true function of reason is to discern them rather than abolish them. Shall it be said that the simplest and strongest individuals are those who receive all touches of the spiritual life without ever being intoxicated by them? Or shall it be said that they only know one ecstasy, which is that of pure water? It is the ecstasy of regained innocence, which receives a new inspiration before every event by abolishing, like innocence itself, all internal divisions, all aftertaste of self-love, all fury of imagination, all shadows of complacency or perversity.

6. Reason, the faculty that measures.

Reason is the most beautiful of all our faculties, provided we do not make it the faculty that reasons but the faculty that measures. Instead of trying through labor and artifice to draw some subtle consequence from a presumed truth that experience has not yet tested, reason must remain the power to judge, that is, to give each thing its place and value within a Whole that it never loses sight of.

Reason does not reside, as is often believed, in the abolition of passions but in a discipline imposed on them, which ratifies and gives them light and effectiveness. To appeal to reason first is to say no to life before its first impulse. An inert and insensitive man, whether by nature or practice, is not reasonable, but the one who, possessing the strongest life and the most ardent passions, seeks in them the impetus that lifts him up, the matter he orders, the power of expansion that manifests and expresses him.

Within reason itself, there is a kind of abstract poetry and ecstasy. And that is why, although it is often a sign of mediocrity for those who listen only to inspiration, it can also be a sign of delirium for those who rely only on what they see and touch.

Just as the cup of an extinct volcano is filled with pure water, the most violent passions, when their fire is extinguished, dig within the soul a kind of depth that gradually becomes transparent and reflects the entire sky.

7. Passion and the absolute.

One must not despise the passion that reveals to us the meaning of our destiny, that arouses, exalts, and unifies all the powers of our being, and that introduces the presence of the absolute and the infinite into every event of our life. Those who despise it so much are also those who are incapable of experiencing it. It frightens their prudence and confounds their timidity. Almost always, passion needs to be nurtured rather than restrained.

There are minds that always remain spectators, that always hold back and never engage in the game: passion never visits them; they only observe it in others to condemn them, not without some jealousy. They complain about its violence and partiality, but that is because they themselves lack the strength and fervor to give to it. They only observe its most outward effects, at the moment when it overwhelms us and seems to conquer us, in the convulsions that occur when it begins to emerge or when an obstacle threatens it, that is, as long as we have not conquered it ourselves.

Passion is the opposite of emotion, which is bound to events and confines us to ourselves, whereas passion originates from within ourselves and transforms events. Emotion is an expectation that feeds on time, while passion is a presence that feeds on eternity; it captures time instead of being captured by it. But the time of emotion seeks an end where it can unravel, while passion does not seek an end; it needs infinity to subsist. It only asks of time the occasions that reveal it. It is a perfect receptivity to the internal impulse that animates it and a perfect impermeability to all external solicitations that would divert it from its course.

If the object of passion has infinite value, it must therefore, as philosophers say, be “an end in itself.” Then, it should not be a thing, as in avarice or ambition, nor an individual, as in love, nor an ideal, as in heroism, but a living absolute to which these terms are substituted and from which they provide us with a kind of image. However, it must be understood that they are only images.

Thus, passion cannot do without the collaboration of freedom and reason, but it must have them as allies and not as slaves. An animal has no passion.

8. Good passions and bad ones.

It is easily understood that passion can be both good and bad. But now we have a fairly good criterion for its value. It is that sometimes passion produces all its movements within itself, and other times outside of itself. Sometimes the self, in order to expand, directs itself toward an external object that is actually finite but appears infinite, and sometimes it only seeks to deepen itself by finding within the depths of its finite essence an infinite destination. Thus, one cannot find a dwelling place, as it tends with infinite movement toward an object that is finite and disappoints it as soon as it is attained, while the other finds it precisely in that same infinite movement that never fails it, since no finite object succeeds in limiting or suspending it. The fact that passion dwells within itself sufficiently proves that our life has discovered its true end within it, that the absolute has become present to it, illuminating, supporting, and nourishing it. For only the encounter with the absolute can explain the absoluteness of passion, which is enough to understand that the activity that tends toward it, but proceeds from it, can be both exercised and suffered, which is the nature of every true passion.

Passion is bad when it causes a disturbance of both the body and the soul, and the reflection that accompanies it only serves to increase it further. It is good when it heals their languor, when it gives them more movement, when it realizes their harmony.

Bad passion plunges us into darkness and distress, while good passion brings us only contentment and light.

Bad passion questions both the value of its object and its relationship to us, while the good passion concerns itself only with the latter.

The former always seeks to justify itself through reasoning, but fails to convince itself, and it lives only on sophistries. The latter has no need for them and rejects them; it is enough for it to contemplate its object to regain security. The former makes us slaves to ourselves, that is, to our bodies, while the latter, by delivering us, sets our souls free. The former deprives our existence of meaning, while the latter gives it to us. The former is destructive, and the latter is creative of both ourselves and the world.

9. Virtue of passion.

Passion is often spoken of as a fury that seizes us, disorganizes our life, and destroys our freedom. But each person seeks a passion of a different kind, one that overcomes the opposition between the movements of instinct and those of the will, that gives perfect unity to their consciousness, that gathers all their forces around a single point and liberates their initiative instead of enslaving it. The very word is admirable, as it denotes the most intense activity that we can engage in, even though it is entirely received—an activity so full that it excludes effort, which is only used to hold it back, and in which the perfection of movement and the perfection of repose are united: the perfection of movement, as it tends toward an infinite object that we never succeed in exhausting, and the perfection of repose, as within the very movement that animates it, it allows the being to both discover and fulfill itself.

Each person seeks an object worthy of arousing in them a passion that can fulfill their soul’s capacity entirely. As long as they have not encountered it, their existence knows no enthusiasm, joy, light, or worthy purpose; their life is a problem for them, for which they have not yet found the key. They feel lost in a world that does not offer them a supreme value to which they can dedicate themselves, that is, sacrifice themselves. True passion is characterized by selflessness and generosity; it seeks nothing to acquire but desires to reform the world.

Instead of tearing apart our souls and subjecting them to all the evils that accompany misery and helplessness, passion brings us inner certainty, balance, tranquility, and peace. It abolishes all internal disturbances, leaving them no opportunity to arise. It dispels doubt, hesitation, and boredom. It does not harbor anxiety about itself, as it has found the path and salvation, but about its object, to which it always fears not giving enough care. It alone allows the being to become aware of the power through which it realizes itself and of the identity of its destiny and calling.

No being is born with a passion already formed. Passion must arise after a long period of waiting, at the moment when our life reveals its own peak to us. And we tremble as soon as we begin to sense its approach. It is the sign that we have left behind our period of groping and experiments, that our existence is fully engaged and can no longer be divided or taken back. Perhaps one could say that there is passion within us only for this pure idea for which we bear responsibility and which we undertake to embody.

10. Wisdom, which is self-possession.

Wisdom is simultaneously a virtue of the intellect and a virtue of the will. It can be defined as a virtue of the will, imposing a measure on our desires and passions. But it is also a virtue of the intellect because it consists first of all in recognizing where the measure lies. It is the cure for this double error: that we can find happiness only by endlessly increasing our being in order to equal the being of the Whole, and that we must always abandon what we have in order to covet what we do not have, which always renders us equally dissatisfied whether we lack it or obtain it.

Wisdom is the discovery and love of our own essence, of the being given to us, and of the universe that is before our eyes, of the situation in which we are placed and the obligations to which we are bound. It abolishes envy and recognizes that this intimacy of the world, which each being enters at the moment it says “I,” is so precious that there is nothing in the world that can be worth more or constitute a higher desire. Only the use we make of it matters, and that use is entrusted to us.

It is evident that considering wisdom as a limitation of life, as a disinterest in great things that always involves a measure of mediocrity and indolence, is false. On the contrary, it is the courage that compels us to place immeasurable value on even the humblest things when they are entrusted to us as instruments of our destiny.

Wisdom is not about mastering oneself but about possessing oneself. It transforms the given being into a perpetually present and ever-increasing good. It is the subtle and powerful art that teaches us to find the infinite within the finite instead of leaving the finite in pursuit of the infinite. Far from separating me from the world, wisdom always discovers in the world new connections with myself—a response to an inner call or a call that it itself obliges me to answer.

The essence of wisdom is always accompanied by an infinitely delicate sensitivity that causes every object in the world to awaken some inner echo in me, bringing me some lesson or demand. In contrast to wisdom, blindness always remains isolated, and madness always acts out of sync.

11. Wisdom, heroism, holiness.

Wisdom is a difficult ease, a return to spontaneous and upright activity; it lives on the very light that illuminates it. It is adorned with pleasure, without indulging in it. It radiates benevolence.

It can be said that wisdom is both balanced and idealized nature. At first glance, it appears to contain more repose than movement, but that is because it dominates all particular passions and momentary impulses instead of yielding to them. It cannot be conceived without moderation, by which it governs all things, or without experience, which has taught it to know them. There is a false wisdom that is merely a lack of ardor, as seen in an overly obedient child or an elderly person whose life is beginning to fade. But true wisdom is always a restrained violence. It does not consist, as is often believed, in being content with what one has received and exhausting desire within oneself. Rather, it lies in finding within what one possesses, rather than what is lacking, the infinitude of desire. Because it asks for nothing, it never ceases to receive everything. With a minimum of material, it accomplishes the purest spiritual work.

Heroism rarely fills the entire duration of our lives like wisdom does. When it appears continuous, it is because it is constantly reborn. It is not, like wisdom, a harmony between nature and spirit, or between the temporal and the eternal. It is a victory of the spirit over a rebellious nature, a violent irruption of eternity into time. The satisfaction it gives us is contrary to pleasure, which it always resists. It never fails to evoke the idea of suffering imposed on the body, of sacrifice, and of death.

Sanctity is a serene certainty and a tranquil ardor that establish us in a world superior to the world of nature but in which nature is illuminated. It is often believed that sanctity achieves what it does in opposition to nature, but that is not true. Here, nature is not humiliated or destroyed as in heroism, nor disciplined and subdued as in wisdom. It is transfigured. It yields to sanctity and becomes its accomplice. It forgets its own demands. It multiplies its powers. It rises above itself, so to speak. It appears as if it is annihilated, but it becomes the living body of sanctity. Sanctity resembles a new nature—it is both renounced nature and fulfilled nature.

Chapter XII. Spiritual Space

1. Virtues of knowledge.

Knowledge is peculiar to man: it deifies him. It connects him with what surpasses him. By tearing him away from himself, it never ceases to enrich him. It elevates him from the momentary existence of the body to the eternal existence of ideas.

But the zeal with which self-love inflames itself for knowledge gives it too bright a luster that is an effect of covetousness rather than light. However, knowledge, which brings us face to face with the Whole, must abolish self-love instead of serving it; its essence is disinterestedness. Yet it enlarges the self in proportion to itself, although always distancing it from itself. There is a proportion between the knowing spirit and the knowledge it has managed to acquire. But just as one can say that the worth of the spirit determines the worth of the knowledge it imparts, one must also say the reverse.

There is no possession other than what knowledge brings us: it is the entirely inward and personal possession of what is beyond the self and yet which the self manages to embrace and contain. It is also true that in knowledge, the spirit goes beyond itself to make the world itself present and then returns to itself and brings the world back into itself. Knowledge is indeed a kind of boundary between the self and the world, but one that allows all communications and exchanges between them. It is initially only a spectacle that we give to ourselves, but in this spectacle, all paths of will and desire intersect. It is the end point of all activity: and even when it appears to be only a means in its service, it is because this activity seeks only to expand it. Man always protests against the command by which an attempt is made to chain his will: he doubts its worth and always suspects some self-interest in himself. He wants to act only in knowledge, and he would like knowledge to be sufficient to make him act.

But what is there to know? It would be contradictory for there to be knowledge of oneself, that is, of the possibility of knowing that is realized only through knowledge of what is not oneself. Therefore, all knowledge is knowledge of an object and, as such, is incapable of satisfying us: it is only a frivolous image that interests only our curiosity. But the object can acquire significance if it becomes an instrument of mediation between me and you, if through it we enter a world where we are no longer alone, where the encounter of a self that is not mine suddenly illuminates my own self in a spiritual world that can be described both as surpassing us and as being common to us. Then, knowledge, which is never more than relative, has become the path of a revelation that is absolute.

2. From the outside to the inside.

Only knowledge, in principle, encompasses everything that exists: only of it can we say that it contains everything, like light, which is also indifferent to what it illuminates. It is therefore universally destined, and one should not ask man to learn about himself but to know this world where, far from being himself an object among all others, he is nothing, except for that act of knowledge which has the world as its object and not itself.

But all knowledge must move from the outside to the inside, although for most people it stops at the object, that is, the outside. Thus, for the scientist, there is no inside: reality is reduced to an appearance that presents itself. He knows things only by their manifested form; he only thinks of removing from them that intimate initiative that makes them be in order to calculate the order in which they act upon each other, which gives him control over them and allows him to use them. Beyond all these always identical relationships between always different events, there is what the meshes of this fine network are unable to retain, that is, reality itself, which imposes itself on me in the present, with its own quality, in a unique and unrepeatable form. It always surpasses the science that surrounds it on all sides without being able to grasp it.

With knowledge of beings, as opposed to things, the situation is quite different. The outside is for me only a sign. Gestures, facial expressions are only testimonies, but I am only interested in their meaning. The laws of science leave me powerless with regard to the individual before me, who is the sole object of my attention, and of whom I know that he is subject to these laws, but not how he differs from other individuals who are subject to them as well. Now, what I seek when I look at him is not the influences he undergoes without mastering them and which express what he is not rather than what he is, but the free power that he exercises, sometimes without suspecting it, and without which I relegate him to the rank of things, ceasing, in both senses of the word, to consider him.

This rule, which applies to the knowledge of other men, that one must never stop at words or actions, but always go to their meanings and intentions, shows us well where we must seek the true reality everywhere: in all things, as here, it resides in the intimacy and spirituality that we only see in appearance, which often hides them from us and which almost always suffices for us.

3. Spiritual space.

Men are distinguished from each other by the extent and purity of the spiritual space they are capable of creating around them. Each of us is imprisoned by a wall of matter that makes him a slave and a solitary being. But desire never ceases to push it back and intelligence to penetrate it. Thus, little by little, this atmosphere of light expands around each of us, enabling us to see ourselves, freeing our movements and giving them both ease and freedom, revealing to us other beings like us, surrounded like us by the same clear and spacious horizon where they must first coexist in order to communicate afterwards, according to the ardor and selflessness of their thought and love.

It is a grave mistake to think that the world of bodies is a world common to all, while the world of the spirit is the secret of each individual. For one thing, the world of bodies is only a public world because it is a spectacle that our thought is capable of embracing, whereas our flesh, irreducibly separated from all other flesh, is always stirred by some quiver that belongs to it alone and that we can never fully master, reveal, or silence, know or ignore completely. On the contrary, thought, which is invisible, always transcends the limits of the body: it does not allow itself to be confined to it; and it is admirable that it is within the intimacy of thought itself that all individual beings become capable of communion and that they can acquire a knowledge of bodies that is true for all.

There are no other solitaries than those who are alone with their bodies: and it is the dialogue of each person with their own body that produces in them a solitude filled by self-love in which they have no companion. But the spirit is never alone: it is that perfect inner void capable of receiving the universe within it; it is the abolished obstacle, the dissolved preoccupation; it is the infinity of paths that open before us and that solicit our steps, the infinity of demands that ceaselessly assail us and that are already answers for us.

All beings are called to leave the material space, which is the realm of constraint, pain, and war, and must gradually learn to inhabit and live in a spiritual space where freedom, peace, and love reign: where everything is airy, mobile, and transparent. The gaze seizes objects without being held back by them. The breath of respiration calmly plunges into the furthest depths of Being. No object resists the hand that seeks to grasp it. It only surrenders itself in a contact that is both clear and gentle, devoid of any resistance. Our activity has broken its chains: an unlimited field opens before it and becomes its dwelling. From now on, all distinction is abolished between what we undergo and what we do, between desire and possession, between the reality offered to us and the creations of the will, between the states of our soul and the very configuration of things.

Just as movement allows our body to occupy all places in physical space and to take the place of other bodies, sympathy allows our soul to occupy all places in spiritual space and to take the place of other souls.

A spacious spirit has abolished all the barriers that held back its attention or desire. It embraces a limitless horizon, and in all the paths it undertakes, it encounters only stable and luminous objects that it feels neither anxiety in leaving nor vanity in rediscovering.

4. The two lights.

There is nothing, one might say, in the world that is beautiful, noble, and pure except light. Everything that it envelops, and even everything it touches, is immediately beautified, ennobled, and purified. It reveals all the horrors that fill nature, but it is not soiled by them.

We are attentive to light only because of the shadows that accompany it, and it is often in the shadow itself that we seek the benefits of light, both because it protects us from its brightness, because it reveals its proximity to us, and because it carries within it its diffuse presence. It is the light of day that makes the beauty of the night: it contains within it all the mystery of nature, which the day will reveal to us. But in the night, there is the memory and the promise of the day, and the obscure clarity that joins twilight to dawn. The night always gives us an incomparable emotion, and within it, there is a deep and secret life that gradually unfolds in the precision of forms and contours. Sensibility is like a night from which the day of thought never ceases to emerge. But who can think of separating them?

Now there are two kinds of light, one of which is, so to speak, only the shadow of the other, although most often it satisfies us. For it is enough for us that objects appear to the eye enveloped by the light of the sun, for us to forget another light that illuminates them from within, which we perceive by closing our eyes and which must be rediscovered through the other light in order to continually reveal to us the souls behind the bodies.

And if external light reveals to us the relationship of things to our body, internal light reveals to us their relationship to our soul, that is, their very soul, what they are and no longer what they appear to be: it is the light of love. In it, the very meaning of our life is discovered, the tasks that are proposed to us cease to constrain us, and the solutions present themselves to us before the problems. As soon as it illuminates us, we are even less sensitive to the objects it shows us than to the joy that it itself gives us.

5. Simplicity of the spiritual gaze.

“If your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light.” Already, any real communication with another person is an effect of simplicity. It alone can give intelligence and sensitivity that perfect delicacy which, by freeing the gaze from the film of covetousness, ensures its clarity.

Truth can never penetrate except into a conscience that proves itself worthy of it. This is already true of the knowledge of material things. But then, a certain application of attention is sufficient; when it comes to spiritual things, a certain purity of the will is also necessary. Therefore, it is a domain where the blind are more numerous. And one can say both that the one who rises highest is also the one who will know the clearest and most beautiful light, and that the one who has best emptied their soul of all the stains of self-love will have the most space to receive it.

The philosophers whom we consider the greatest often resemble industrious mechanics whose well-polished concepts are arranged in skillful combinations. There is a temptation here that neither Aristotle, nor Spinoza, nor Hegel were able to avoid. But in the simplest spirit, there is a straight and natural growth that is sufficient to elevate it above this apparent grandeur.

And there is a simplicity of the spiritual gaze that dissolves and surpasses all the subtleties and aporias of reason. So many tunnels that are unaware of each other become paths of light that multiply and all converge towards the same focal point.

6. Purity.

The purity of the gaze that reveals the entire being without needing to resort to any movement, any gesture, any sign, any word that would destroy its unity and replace its eternal essence with its temporary state or will, makes us aware, without any image or ulterior motive, of this kind of reciprocal and purposeless communication that is established between different beings in their participation in the same life and contemplation of the same universe.

The purity of the smile, by relaxing all features, not only ceases to express certain specific emotions or passions but rather testifies to their abolition: in us, there remains only the very welcome to life, an immobile movement where body and mind become one. The individual dissolves, ceases to be perceived, and brings us the revelation of a spiritual order of which they are both the instrument and the vehicle.

Purity attests to the natural flow of a being rooted in reality and fulfilling its assigned function with a tranquil ease that excludes both artifice and negligence. It overcomes the opposition between spontaneity and reflection, for it does not require reflection, so that everything in it appears to happen spontaneously. And yet, it resembles less that instinctive and constantly recurring movement than the immobile act of constant self-presence through which our very essence is realized.

Purity imparts a spiritual aspect to all material things: it ignores calculation, effort, and merit. It achieves a sort of coincidence between necessity and freedom, between grace and nature. It accompanies a tranquil joy, characterized by tranquility and consent, where the profoundness of existence is first measured, and where all the pain it may bring is already accepted.

7. Purification.

Purity is an act of being present to oneself and the world. There is no act that is more difficult to accomplish: any diversion that breaks the unity of our being is impure. It is an inclination of the soul towards what is foreign to it, towards what is perishable, and already a flight towards nothingness: it never receives from us a true consent. No one engages in diversion with perfect inner freedom and absolute sincerity: it is not love that leads us to it, but rather a lack of love.

Purity creates an active void in consciousness: it is both waiting and attention, trust and calling, and always leaves our hands free.

Impurity disrupts the clear connection between the will and our pure essence: it compels us to be seduced by external objects that are beneath us, which disrupt our spiritual activity and cloud it. To maintain purity means to know how to abstain, to preserve this pure essence of ourselves, that is, the will that God has for it, to prevent it from being corrupted—a beautiful, simple, and bare word that suffices to designate all forms of corruption.

We speak of pure nature and also of pure spirit, but the will that joins them always risks making both impure.

Purity is the virtue of innocence, but we never cease to lose it in order to reclaim it. And that is why our spiritual life always amounts to a work of purification. It can be conceived in two different yet converging forms: a negative form that leads us to turn our gaze away from everything within and outside us that is low and base, and that is sufficient to produce its positive form—to restore within us the best part, the spiritual impulse, the original innocence that was concealed by all this darkness. Thus, it transforms evil into good without forcing us to fight against it.

It does not banish evil thoughts, but it prevents them from coming to light. Not that they never show their face, but a better thought immediately blocks their path.

As Saint Francis de Sales said, nature produces “leaves and grapes at the same time, and it must be constantly pruned and defoliated.” There are two instruments of purification: pain, which compels us to detach ourselves from things, and memory, which, once they have left us, forces us to spiritualize them.

8. The clear source of life.

Purity penetrates into our deepest retreats: it dissolves the dregs of selfishness, the accumulation of false interests, the mixture of fear, suspicion, and baseness that prejudices formed in us almost against our will. Purity passes through them and goes beyond. The world no longer has dark depths for it: it descends to the clear source of life. Sometimes it reveals without blushing what we are accustomed to hiding without suspecting that it could be seen. Yet, it always imparts a sort of radiance to nature itself. It can be defined both as the absence and the pinnacle of modesty.

While most people admire that purity allows a being to reveal nothing but what could be seen as its own secret, the pure being would admire that it could be otherwise, or that there would be nothing in any being that could deserve the name of secret. Pure beings never show themselves, although only they reveal their depths. This is because for them, there is no difference between showing themselves and being. What they reveal to us is the perfection of their nature, whose balance is so precise that it renders it invisible, like God, water, light, and virtue. They do not show any particular thought, action, or feeling that could be opposed to others and could arouse in us the unease of limitation or insufficiency, the thought of a future and a past that could be different. Or at least, we forget them and perceive only the essence they bear witness to, and we no longer distinguish them.

The opposite of purity is worry, which always divides consciousness. But purity abolishes all conflicts within oneself. A pure being is always everything it is. Purity is the quality of a child who gives us all their powers before they are altered or repressed.

Most people could easily find within their hearts, if they paid attention, the purest movements. But they do not consent to see them, to admit them, or to follow them, for they naturally fear being seen as fools and being despised.

Purity is so perfect and so unified that it offers no opening for attack. It does not divide itself in order to know itself.

It only appears in the most ordinary events, in the simplest words, in the most natural thoughts. It reduces everything that happens to such clear and easy proportions that it seems to erase everything in the world that obstructs or protrudes. It transforms it into a clear mirror where all the desires of the spirit take shape and are realized.

Purity is easier to maintain in solitude. All contact risks soiling it. But the perfection of purity lies precisely in the fact that instead of seeking to preserve itself by separating from the world, it bears witness to its strength and effectiveness by passing through all the impurities of the world without being tarnished and leaving its own radiance in their midst. Even hostility must support it as a test that it constantly undergoes.

9. Seeing things being born.

Purity is a living transparency: it is the virtue of springs. When we see reality in a pure enough light, we see it being born.

Purity is indivisible: anything that tarnishes the purity of the heart also tarnishes the purity of thought and will. It annihilates personal bias: it frees us from all personal concerns, it lays bare the very existence of things, and enables us to participate in the profound act through which they come to fruition.

Purity is to will things to be as they are. Impurity is to will them to be otherwise and consequently to think of them in relation to ourselves, to introduce into them the worm of falsehood or the worm of desire.

Purity does not reject anything that is before it: it does not think of modifying it or adding to it. In the world, it perceives not only a diversity that astonishes it and prevents its reflection but also a hierarchy to which it feels attuned even before its will has to intervene.

Purity itself does not bring us anything. It allows everything to be brought to us. It trembles to introduce even the slightest breath that would disturb it into reality. It is silent and inquisitive.

The soul possesses nothing, but it can receive everything. Everything is an offering and a gift to it. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. But Narcissus wants to see only himself. When one has a pure heart, one receives all gifts. But Narcissus wants to receive only himself as a gift.

Impurity is to want to keep for oneself goods that are offered to all and, in the act of trying to hold onto them to prevent them from escaping, to actually make them escape.

10. Beauty of pure presence.

Purity is a simple and sublime virtue that produces in us the silence of passions and suddenly gives such transparency to the world that we hold our breath for fear of disturbing it. Purity is the miracle of the natural.

It causes appearances to fall like an unnecessary veil. It abolishes all distinction between reality and knowledge, as if even the most faithful knowledge were still impure; it gives us this strange impression of no longer needing it and of rendering reality itself present.

Purity is not distinct from light. And no object is pure except by the light that illuminates it. In it, we see everything else, and it seems that we cannot see it itself. That is because it is nothing more than the truth of all that is. Then it imparts such clarity to the atmosphere that the objects upon which our gaze rests appear to emanate from it, instead of breaking it.

In it, things and meaning become one. It gives them that familiar face that seems, nevertheless, to be discovered for the first time, and we experience a sense of wonder that any cause for wonder has been taken away from us in their presence. They regain the nakedness of their original innocence as if God, without revealing His own face, nevertheless becomes visible in the gift He has made of them.

Reality is always pure. It is only self-love, that is, the abuse we make of things, that can alter their natural end and render even the most beautiful impure. Purity reduces each thing to its essence alone; it lays bare what makes it be; it reveals its conformity with the will of God. Then it reveals to us a world so secret and so beautiful that we could scarcely have suspected its existence; it seems that it is sufficient to create it, and it dissipates the troubled world in which we thought we were living until then like a dark and inconsistent dream.

The most beautiful art is also the purest. It surpasses and abolishes all illusions; it makes the invisible truth visible; it imparts to the humblest things an incomparable spiritual depth, and to the deepest things, simplicity and naturalness.

There is no beautiful thing that is not pure. Purity beautifies everything. It is the very measure of its value. By stripping it of all foreign elements that cover and conceal it, purity reveals its fullness to us, as seen in expressions such as pure understanding, pure will, pure love. A pure soul is the only one that can receive in itself the beauty of light and love.

Purity excludes all mixture, not by taking anything away from reality, but on the contrary, because it grasps reality itself in its unity, without adding anything that, coming from ourselves, can only alter and corrupt it. Far from being abstract and always requiring choice and renunciation, it possesses that perfect unity that is a present infinity, resistant to all analysis.

11. The summit of the soul.

It is impossible to give meaning to life, and even to accept living, if one has not once discovered that high summit of consciousness where thought and will seek to establish themselves, and from which we should never let them descend, whose memory returns to us with both regret and hope, and continues to support us when we do not have the strength to climb it. No one can claim to make their dwelling there unless they have adopted as an inflexible rule to reject mediocre solicitations, useless and idle conversations, thoughts of self-love always associated with some burden that weighs us down, with some diversion that distracts us. Yet, this rule is not sufficient, and we could follow it faithfully and still remain in a state of indifference and aridity. The summit of consciousness is a brilliant pinnacle that only our purest activity is capable of reaching; the slightest speck of dust is enough to blunt and tarnish it; our soul finds no footing in this summit and quickly falls from it; yet, it is there that it finds the only equilibrium that suits it, which is both the most perfect and the most unstable.

Thus, paradoxically, the present moment is where the summit of our consciousness is located. But we do not know how to remain there; we excuse ourselves by saying that it could not provide enough material for our thoughts and actions, and that is why we always abandon it. But we want to forget that it demands too great an effort for our courage, and we turn away from it to give our waning activity a more fragile and accessible object that can distract it; we seek it in the past or the future, that is, in memory and dreams.

The present is a summit from which we discover the infinity of the world like an ocean without shores, where there is neither a haven that we can reach one day, nor a path to a mysterious distance that would always elude us. Infinity is the negation of an end and therefore also of a path. It is itself both the end and the path. For consciousness, balance and security are achieved only when it nourishes its gaze with the infinite, instead of constantly projecting it beyond.

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