Contradiction

The contradictions the mind comes up against are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in the imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity. Contradiction experienced to the depths of one's being is tearing apart, is the cross. When attention fixed on something has made the contradiction within it manifest, a kind of detachment occurs. By persevering along this path, one arrives at detachment. The representable correlation of contraries is an image of the transcendent correlation of contradictories. Every genuine good involves contradictory conditions and is therefore impossible. Whoever keeps attention truly fixed on this impossibility and acts will do good. Likewise, every truth contains a contradiction. Contradiction is the tip of the pyramid. The word good does not have the same meaning as a term in the correlation good-evil and as designating the very being of God. Existence of contrary virtues in the souls of saints. The metaphor of elevation corresponds to this. If I walk along the side of a mountain, I can see first a lake, then, after a few steps, a forest. I must choose: either the lake or the forest. If I want to see both the lake and the forest at once, I must climb higher.

Only the mountain does not exist. It is made of air. One cannot climb: one must be pulled.

Experimental ontological proof. I have in myself no principle of ascent. I cannot climb through the air to heaven. It is only by directing my thought toward something better than myself that this something pulls me upward. If I am truly pulled, that something is real. No imaginary perfection can pull me upward, even by a millimeter. For an imaginary perfection is automatically at the level of the self that imagines it, neither higher nor lower.

This effect of the direction of thought has nothing in common with suggestion. If I tell myself every morning: I am courageous, I am not afraid, I may become courageous, but with a courage that will conform to what, in my present imperfection, I understand by that name and which, consequently, will not go beyond that imperfection. It will be a modification on the same plane, not a change of plane.

Contradiction is the criterion. One cannot procure incompatible things for oneself through suggestion. Only grace can do this. A tender person who becomes courageous through suggestion hardens, often even amputates their own tenderness with a kind of savage pleasure. Only grace can give courage while leaving tenderness intact, or tenderness while leaving courage intact.

The great sorrow of human life, which begins in childhood and continues until death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where looking is eating.

What one looks at here below is not real; it is a stage set. What one eats is destroyed, is no longer real. Sin has produced this separation in us. Natural virtues, if one takes the word virtue in its authentic sense, that is, excluding the social imitations of virtue, are possible as permanent dispositions only for the one who possesses supernatural grace within. Their duration is supernatural. Contraries and contradictories. What the relation of contraries can do to touch the natural being, contradictories thought together can do to touch God. A person inspired by God is one whose behaviors, thoughts, and feelings are linked by a bond that cannot be represented. Pythagorean idea: good is always defined by the union of contraries. When one advocates the opposite of an evil, one remains at the level of that evil. When one has experienced it, one returns to the first. This is what the Gita calls "the bewilderment of opposites." Marxist dialectics is a very degraded and entirely falsified view of this. Bad union of contraries. Worker imperialism developed by Marxism. Latin proverbs on the insolence of newly freed slaves. Insolence and servility aggravate each other. The sincere anarchists, glimpsing through a fog the principle of the union of contraries, believed that by giving power to the oppressed one destroys evil. An impossible dream. What then is specific to the bad and the good union of contraries?

The bad union of contraries (bad because mendacious) is the one that takes place on the plane where the contraries exist. Thus, granting domination to the oppressed: one does not leave the couple oppression-domination.

The good union of contraries takes place on the plane above. Thus, the opposition between domination and oppression is resolved at the level of law, which is equilibrium.

Likewise, pain (and this is its proper function) separates contraries that were united in order to reunite them on the plane above that of their original union. Pulsation of pain-joy. But joy always prevails mathematically.

Pain is violence; joy is gentleness; but joy is the stronger.

The union of contradictories is a tearing apart: it is impossible without extreme suffering.

The correlation of contradictories is detachment. An attachment to a particular thing can only be destroyed by an incompatible attachment. That is why: "Love your enemies... He who does not hate his father and his mother..."

Either one has mastered the contraries, or one is mastered by the contraries.

Simultaneous existence of incompatibles in the behavior of the soul; a scale that tips both ways at once: this is holiness, the realization of the microcosm, the imitation of the order of the world.

Simultaneous existence of contrary virtues in the soul as pincers for reaching God.

To find and formulate certain laws of the human condition of which many profound observations illuminate particular cases.

Thus: what is entirely superior reproduces what is entirely inferior, but transposed.

Kinship of evil with force, with being, and of good with weakness, nothingness.

And at the same time, evil is privation. To elucidate the way contradictories are true.

Method of investigation: as soon as one has thought something, seek in what sense the contrary is true.

Evil is the shadow of good. Every real good, provided with solidity and thickness, casts evil. Only imaginary good casts none.

Since every good is attached to an evil, if one desires good and does not want to spread the corresponding evil around oneself, one is obliged, since one cannot avoid this evil, to concentrate it upon oneself.

Thus the desire for entirely pure good implies the acceptance for oneself, to the utmost degree, of affliction.

If one desires only good, one is in opposition to the law that binds real good to evil as an illuminated object to its shadow; being in opposition to the universal law of the world, it is inevitable that one falls into affliction.

The mystery of the cross of Christ resides in a contradiction, for it is at once a willing offering and a punishment he suffered very much against his will. If one saw in it only the offering, one could wish as much for oneself. But one cannot wish for a punishment suffered against one's will.