Cross as balance, as lever. Descent, condition of the ascent. Heaven descending to earth raises earth to heaven. Lever. To lower when one wishes to raise. It is in the same manner that "he who humbles himself shall be exalted." There is also a necessity and laws in the domain of grace. "Even hell has its laws" (Goethe). Heaven too. A rigorous necessity that excludes all arbitrariness, all chance, governs material phenomena. There is, if possible, even less arbitrariness and chance in spiritual things, though free. One, the smallest of numbers. "The one which is the only wise." It is the infinite. A number that grows thinks it draws near to the infinite. It moves away from it. One must lower oneself to rise. If 1 is God, infinity is the devil. Human misery contains the secret of divine wisdom, and not pleasure. Every pursuit of pleasure is pursuit of an artificial paradise, of an intoxication, of an increase. But it gives us nothing, except the experience that it is vain. Only the contemplation of our limits and our misery places us on a plane above. "He who humbles himself shall be exalted."
The upward movement in us is vain (and worse than vain) if it does not proceed from a downward movement. Statera facta corporis. It is the crucified body that is a just balance, the body reduced to its point in time and space. Not to judge. In the manner of the Father in heaven who does not judge: through him beings judge themselves. To let all beings come to oneself, and let them judge themselves. To be a balance. One will not be judged then, having become an image of the true judge who does not judge. When the universe weighs entirely upon us, there is no other possible counterweight than God himself — the true God, for false gods are powerless, even under the name of the true one. Evil is infinite in the sense of the indeterminate: matter, space, time. Over this kind of infinite, only the true infinite prevails. That is why the cross is a balance in which a frail and light body, but which was God, lifted the weight of the entire world. "Give me a fulcrum, and I will lift the world." That fulcrum is the cross. There can be no other. It must be the intersection of the world and of what is not the world. The cross is that intersection.