Suffering: the superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority would not be scandalous. I must not love my suffering because it is useful, but because it is. To accept what is bitter; the acceptance must not reflect back upon the bitterness and diminish it, otherwise the acceptance diminishes proportionally in strength and purity. For the object of acceptance is what is bitter insofar as it is bitter and nothing else. — To say, like Ivan Karamazov: nothing can compensate for a single tear of a single child. And yet to accept all the tears, and the innumerable horrors that lie beyond tears. To accept these things, not insofar as they might entail compensations, but in themselves. To accept that they are simply because they are. If there were no affliction in this world, we could believe ourselves in paradise. Two conceptions of hell. The ordinary one (suffering without consolation); mine (false beatitude, believing by error that one is in paradise). Greater purity of physical pain (Thibon). Hence, greater dignity of the common people. Not to seek not to suffer or to suffer less, but not to be altered by suffering.
The extreme greatness of Christianity comes from the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy against suffering, but a supernatural use of suffering. One must strive as much as possible to avoid affliction, so that the affliction one encounters may be perfectly pure and perfectly bitter. Joy is the fullness of the feeling of reality. But to suffer while preserving the feeling of reality is better. To suffer without sinking into nightmare. Let pain be, in one sense purely external, in another sense purely internal. For this, it must reside in the sensibility alone. It is then external (as being outside the spiritual parts of the soul) and internal (as concentrated entirely upon ourselves, without reflecting back on the universe to alter it). Affliction forces one to recognize as real what one does not believe possible. Affliction: time carries the thinking being against his will toward what he cannot bear and which will come nonetheless. "Let this cup pass from me." Each second that passes carries a being in the world toward something he cannot bear. There is a point of affliction where one is no longer capable of bearing either that it continue or of being delivered from it. Suffering is nothing, apart from the relation between past and future, but what is more real for man than this relation? It is reality itself. Future. One thinks it will come tomorrow until the moment one thinks it will never come.
Two thoughts lighten affliction somewhat. Either that it will cease almost immediately or that it will never cease. Impossible or necessary. But one cannot think that it simply is. That is unbearable. "It is not possible." What is not possible is to think of a future in which affliction would continue. The natural impulse of thought toward the future is halted, the being is torn in his feeling of time. "In a month, in a year, how shall we suffer?" The being who can bear to think neither of the past nor of the future: he is brought down to the level of matter. White Russians at Renault. One can thus learn to obey like matter, but doubtless they fabricated for themselves near and false pasts and futures. Fragmentation of time for criminals and prostitutes; it is the same for slaves. This is therefore a characteristic of affliction. Time commits violence; it is the only violence. Another shall gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go; time carries us where we do not wish to go. Let me be condemned to death, I shall not be executed if, in the interval, time stops. Whatever terrible thing may happen, can one desire that time should stop, that the stars should stop? The violence of time tears the soul: through the tear enters eternity. All problems come down to time. Extreme pain: time without direction: the way to hell or to paradise. Perpetuity or eternity. It is not joy and pain that are opposed, but the species of each. There is an infernal joy and an infernal pain, a healing joy and a healing pain, a celestial joy and a celestial pain. By nature, we flee suffering and seek pleasure. It is solely in this respect that joy serves as an image of the good and pain as an image of evil. Hence the imagery of paradise and hell. But in fact, pleasure and pain are inseparable couples. Suffering, teaching, and transformation. What is needed is not that the initiates learn something, but that a transformation take place in them which renders them apt to receive the teaching. Pathos means both suffering (especially suffering unto death) and modification (especially transformation into an immortal being). Suffering and enjoyment as sources of knowledge. The serpent offered knowledge to Adam and Eve. The sirens offered knowledge to Ulysses. These stories teach that the soul is lost in seeking knowledge through pleasure. Why? Pleasure is perhaps innocent, provided one does not seek knowledge in it. It is permitted to seek knowledge only in suffering. The infinite that is in man is at the mercy of a small piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without abruptly reducing the infinite that is in man to a point at the tip, a point at the handle, at the price of a tearing pain. The entire being is affected for a moment; there remains in it no room for God, even in Christ, where the thought of God is no longer at least anything but that of a deprivation. One must reach that point for there to be incarnation.
The entire being becomes deprivation of God; how can one go further? There is nothing after that but the resurrection. To go that far, one needs the cold contact of naked iron. One must, at the contact of iron, feel separated from God as Christ did, otherwise it is another God. The martyrs did not feel separated from God, but it was another God, and it was perhaps better not to be a martyr. The God in whom the martyrs found joy in tortures or death is close to the one who was officially adopted by the Empire and then imposed through exterminations. To say that the world is worth nothing, that this life is worth nothing, and to offer evil as proof, is absurd, for if it is worth nothing, of what does evil deprive us? Thus suffering in affliction and compassion for others are all the purer and more intense the better one conceives the fullness of joy. Of what does suffering deprive the one who is without joy? And if one conceives the fullness of joy, suffering is to joy as hunger is to food. One must have had, through joy, the revelation of reality in order to find reality in suffering. Otherwise life is only a more or less bad dream. One must manage to find a reality even fuller in suffering, which is nothingness and void. Likewise one must love life greatly to love death still more.