We must rediscover the idea of the metaphor which is real.
— First and Last Notebooks
Gravity and Grace (tr. Crawford):
– Any attempt to gain this deliverance by means of my own energy would be like the efforts of a cow which pulls at its hobble and so falls onto its knees.
– The source of man’s moral energy is outside him, like that of his physical energy (food, air etc.). He generally finds it, and that is why he has the illusion—as on the physical plane—that his being carries the principle of its preservation within itself. Privation alone makes him feel his need. And, in the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible. There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light. Not to judge. All faults are the same. There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible. ‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.’
– Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.
– Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls.
– Like a gas, the soul tends to fill the entire space which is given it. A gas which contracted leaves a vacuum—this would be contrary to the law of entropy.
– A rock in our path. To hurl ourselves upon this rock as though after a certain intensity of desire had been reached it could not exist any more. Or else to retreat as though we ourselves did not exist. Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails (once its energy has been used up) the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.
– The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give. But if, doing violence to this necessity, we leave a vacuum, as it were a suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if we receive other wages: it is this vacuum which makes it come.
– To come out of the cave, to be detached, means to cease to make the future our goal.
– Let the whole universe be for me, in relation to my body, what the stick of a blind man is in relation to his hand. His sensibility is really no longer in his hand but at the end of the stick.
– In affliction the vital instinct survives all the attachments which have been torn away, and blindly fastens itself to everything that can provide it with support, like a plant fastens its tendrils.
– Affliction, from this point of view, is hideous as life in its nakedness always is, like an amputated stump, like the swarming of insects.
– This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
– The bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them but we do not know how to use them. We thought they were intended to have houses built upon them. We have erected skyscrapers on them to which we ceaselessly add storeys. We no longer know that they are bridges, things made so that we may pass along them, and that by passing along them we go towards God.
– Power (and money, power’s master key) is means at its purest. For that very reason, it is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.
This world, the realm of necessity, offers us absolutely nothing except means. Our will is for ever set from one means to another like a billiard ball.
– The existence of opposite virtues in the souls of the saints: the metaphor of climbing corresponds to this. If I am walking on the side of a mountain I can see first a lake, then, after a few steps, a forest. I have to choose either the lake or the forest. If I want to see both lake and forest at once, I have to climb higher. Only the mountain does not exist. It is made of air. One cannot go up: it is necessary to be drawn. An experimental ontological proof. I have not the principle of rising in me. I cannot climb to heaven through the air. It is only by directing my thoughts towards something better than myself that I am drawn upwards by this something. If I am really raised up, this something is real. No imaginary perfection can draw me upwards even by the fraction of an inch. For an imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.
– Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the handle or the point. For him who loves, its metallic coldness will not destroy love, but will give the impression of being abandoned by God. Supernatural love has no contact with force, but at the same time it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection from the coldness of steel. Armour, like the sword, is made of metal. Murder freezes the soul of the man who loves only with a pure love, whether he be the author or the victim, so likewise does everything which, without going so far as actual death, constitutes violence. If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God. Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.
– The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken on the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is no more at least than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.
– The cross. The tree of sin was a real tree, the tree of life was a wooden beam. Something which does not give fruit, but only vertical movement. ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up and he will draw all men unto himself.’ We can kill the vital energy in ourselves while keeping only the vertical movement. Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise.
– God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightning flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
– The cross as a balance, as a lever. A going down, the condition of a rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift. In the same way ‘he who humbleth himself shall be exalted’.
– The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to catch hold of God.
– Evil is the shadow of good. All real good, possessing solidity and thickness, projects evil. Only imaginary good does not project it.
– Necessity is God’s veil.
– The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. We do not, however, see what is transparent. We see that which is opaque through the transparent – the opaque which was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. We see either the dust on the window or the view beyond the window, but never the window itself. Cleaning off the dust only serves to make the view visible. Reason should be employed only to bring us to the true mysteries, the true undemonstrables, which are reality. The uncomprehended hides the incomprehensible and should on this account be eliminated.
– Others. To see each human being (an image of oneself) as a prison in which a prisoner dwells, surrounded by the whole universe.
– The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands. But except for souls which are fairly near to saintliness, the victims are defiled by force just as their tormentors are. The evil which is in the handle of the sword is transmitted to its point. So the victims thus put in power and intoxicated by the change do as much harm or more, and soon sink back again to where they were before.
– Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity — the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious.
– The spirituality of work. Work makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work. If we regard one of the two as an end, or the one and the other taken separately, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth. A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere — extreme misery and extreme grandeur.
when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.
Waiting for God (tr. Craufurd [translator’s name spelled differently in this publication])
– The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.
(‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’)
– When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time. Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center. The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album.
(‘The Love of God and Affliction’)
First and Last Notebooks (tr. Rees)
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. We are experiencing this. The root which, mixed with faith, has produced this fruit, ought to be torn up.
Man is like a castaway, clinging to a spar and tossed by the waves. He has no control over the movement imposed on him by the water. From the highest heaven God throws a rope. The man either grasps it or not. If he does, he is still subject to the pressures imposed by the sea, but these pressures are combined with the new mechanical factor of the rope, so that the mechanical relations between the man and the sea have changed. His hands bleed from the pressure of the rope, and he is sometimes so buffeted by the sea that he lets go, and then catches it again.
But if he voluntarily pushes it away, God withdraws it.
Seventy Letters (tr. Rees)
— To Joë Bousquet, 1943
The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love – the Love which is God himself, and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.
The spirit, leaving the miserable body in some corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, which has no perspective, but from which this world is seen as it is – unconfused by perspective. Compared to what it is inside the egg, space has become an infinity to the second or rather the third power.
The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence – not an absence of sound, but a positive object of sensation. It is the secret word, the word of Love, who holds us in his arms from the beginning.
You, once you have emerged from the shell, will know the reality of war – which is the most precious reality to know, because war is unreality itself. To know the reality of war is the Pythagorean harmony, the unity of opposites; it is the plenitude of knowledge of the real.
That is why you are infinitely privileged, because you have war permanently lodged in your body, waiting for years in patient fidelity until you are ripe to know it. Those who fell beside you did not have time to collect their thought from its frivolous wandering and focus it upon their destiny. And those who came back unwounded have all killed their past by oblivion – even if they have seemed to remember it – because war is affliction, and it is as easy to direct one’s thought voluntarily towards affliction as it would be to persuade an untrained dog to walk into a fire and let itself be burnt.
To think affliction, it is necessary to bear it in one’s flesh, driven very far in like a nail, and for a long time, so that thought may have time to grow strong enough to regard it – to regard it from outside, having succeeded in leaving the body and even, in a sense, the soul as well.
Body and soul remain not only pierced through but nailed down at a fixed point. Whether or not affliction imposes literal immobility, there is always enforced immobility – in the sense that a part of the soul is always steeped, monotonously, incessantly, and inextricably, in pain.
Thanks to this immobility, the infinitesimal seed of divine love placed in the soul can slowly grow and bear fruit in patience – the divinely beautiful Gospel expression. Translators say in patientia, but hypomonē is quite another thing. It means to remain where one is, motionless, in expectation, unshaken and unmoved by any external shock.
Notes from a Room 