Decreation: to make the created pass into the uncreated. Destruction: to make the created pass into nothingness. A guilty substitute for decreation. Creation is an act of love, and it is perpetual. At every instant our existence is the love of God for us. But God can love only himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus he who gives us being loves in us the consent not to be. Our existence is made solely of his waiting, of our consent not to exist. Perpetually, he begs from us this existence that he gives us. He gives it to us in order to beg it from us. Inflexible necessity, misery, distress, the crushing weight of need and of labor that exhausts, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, terror, illness—all this is divine love. It is God who out of love withdraws from us so that we may love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiation of his love, without the protection of space, time, and matter, we would be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough I in us to surrender the I out of love. Necessity is the screen placed between God and us so that we may be. It is for us to pierce the screen in order to cease to be. There exists a "deifugal" force. Otherwise everything would be God.
Man has been given an imaginary divinity so that he may strip himself of it like Christ stripped himself of his real divinity.
Renunciation. Imitation of the renunciation of God in creation. God renounces—in a sense—being everything. We must renounce being something. This is the only good for us.
We are bottomless barrels as long as we have not understood that we have a bottom.
Elevation and abasement. A woman who looks at herself in a mirror and adorns herself does not feel the shame of reducing herself, this infinite being who beholds all things, to a small space. Likewise, every time one raises the self (the social, psychological self, etc.), however high one raises it, one infinitely degrades oneself by reducing oneself to being only that. When the self is abased (unless energy tends to raise it in desire), one knows that one is not that.
A very beautiful woman who looks at her image in the mirror may very well believe that she is that. An ugly woman knows she is not that.
Everything grasped by the natural faculties is hypothetical. Only supernatural love posits. Thus we are co-creators.
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
One possesses only what one renounces. What one does not renounce escapes us. In this sense, one cannot possess anything without passing through God.
Catholic communion. God did not only once become flesh; he becomes matter every day to give himself to man and to be consumed by him. Reciprocally, through fatigue, misfortune, death, man is made matter and consumed by God. How can one refuse this reciprocity? He emptied himself of his divinity. We must empty ourselves of the false divinity with which we were born. Once one has understood that one is nothing, the goal of all efforts is to become nothing. It is to this end that one suffers with acceptance, it is to this end that one acts, it is to this end that one prays. My God, grant me to become nothing. As I become nothing, God loves himself through me. What is below resembles what is above. Thereby slavery is an image of obedience to God, humiliation an image of humility, physical necessity an image of the irresistible thrust of grace, the abandonment of saints to the day-by-day an image of the fragmentation of time among criminals and prostitutes, and so on. On this account, one must seek what is lowest, as an image. Let what is base in us go downward so that what is high may rise upward. For we are inverted. We are born thus. To re-establish order is to undo the creature in us. Reversal of the objective and the subjective. Likewise, reversal of the positive and the negative. This is also the meaning of the philosophy of the Upanishads.
We are born and live in the wrong direction, for we are born and live in sin, which is a reversal of the hierarchy. The first operation is the reversal. Conversion. Unless the grain dies... It must die in order to release the energy it carries within itself so that new combinations may be formed. Likewise, we must die in order to release the attached energy, to possess a free energy capable of conforming to the true relation of things. The extreme difficulty I often find in carrying out the slightest action is a favor granted to me. For thus, with ordinary actions and without attracting attention, I can cut the roots of the tree. However detached one may be from opinion, extraordinary actions contain a stimulus one cannot remove from them. This stimulus is entirely absent from ordinary actions. To find extraordinary difficulty in performing an ordinary action is a favor for which one must be grateful. One must not ask for this difficulty to disappear; one must implore the grace to make use of it. In general, do not wish for the disappearance of any of one's miseries, but for the grace that transfigures them. Physical suffering (and deprivations) are often for courageous men a test of endurance and strength of soul. But there is a better use for them. Let them not be that for me. Let them be a sensible testimony to human misery. Let me undergo them in an entirely passive way. Whatever happens, how could I ever find misfortune too great, since the bite of misfortune and the degradation to which it condemns enable the knowledge of human misery, a knowledge that is the gateway to all wisdom?
But pleasure, happiness, prosperity, if one knows how to recognize in them what comes from outside (from chance, from circumstances, etc.), also bear witness to human misery. Make this use of them too. And even of grace, insofar as it is a sensible phenomenon...
To be nothing in order to be in one's true place in the whole.
Renunciation requires that one pass through anguish equivalent to that which would be caused in reality by the loss of all beloved beings and of all goods, including faculties and acquisitions in the order of intelligence and character, opinions and beliefs about what is good and what is stable, and so on. And all this one must not take from oneself, but lose—like Job. But the energy thus cut off from its object must not be squandered in oscillations, degraded. The anguish must therefore be still greater than in real misfortune; it must not be fragmented over time nor directed toward a hope.
When the passion of love reaches down to the vegetative energy, then one has cases like Phaedra, Arnolphe, and so on. "And I feel deep inside that I shall have to die of it..."
Hippolytus is truly more necessary to Phaedra's life, in the most literal sense, than food.
For the love of God to penetrate so low, nature must have undergone the ultimate violence. Job, the cross...
The love of Phaedra, of Arnolphe, is impure. A love that would descend so low and that would be pure...
To become nothing down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread. If we consider ourselves at a determinate moment—the present instant, cut off from past and future—we are innocent. We cannot at that instant be other than what we are: all progress implies duration. It is in the order of the world, at that instant, that we should be such as we are. To isolate an instant thus implies forgiveness. But this isolation is detachment. There are only two instants of perfect nakedness and purity in human life: birth and death. One cannot worship God in human form without sullying the divinity except as a newborn and as one in agony. Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for the access to eternity. If one finds the fullness of joy in the thought that God is, one must find the same fullness in the knowledge that oneself one is not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to the sensibility only through suffering and death. Joy in God. There is truly perfect and infinite joy in God. My participation can add nothing, my non-participation can take away nothing from the reality of this perfect and infinite joy. From then on, what does it matter whether I should have part in it or not? No importance at all. Those who desire their salvation do not truly believe in the reality of joy in God. The belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to represent the soul as truly incorporeal. Thus this belief is in fact belief in the prolongation of life, and it removes the use of death. Presence of God. This must be understood in two ways. Insofar as he is Creator, God is present in everything that exists, from the moment it exists. The presence for which God needs the cooperation of the creature is the presence of God, not insofar as he is the Creator, but insofar as he is the Spirit. The first presence is the presence of creation. The second is the presence of decreation. (He who created us without ourselves will not save us without ourselves. Saint Augustine.) God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but him. Holiness must therefore also be hidden, even from consciousness to a certain degree. And it must be hidden in the world. Being and having. Man does not have being; he has only having. The being of man is situated behind the curtain, on the side of the supernatural. What he can know of himself is only what circumstances lend him. I is hidden from me (and from others); it is on the side of God, it is in God, it is God. To be proud is to forget that one is God... The curtain is human misery: there was a curtain even for Christ. Job. Satan to God: Does he love you gratuitously? It is a matter of the level of love. Is the love situated at the level of sheep, of wheat fields, of many children? Or further, in the third dimension, behind? However deep this love may be, there is a moment of rupture at which it succumbs, and it is the moment that transforms, that tears from the finite toward the infinite, that makes the soul's love for God transcendent in the soul. It is the death of the soul. Woe to the one for whom the death of the body precedes that of the soul! The soul that is not full of love dies a bad death. Why must such a death fall indiscriminately? It must. Everything must fall indiscriminately. Appearance clings to being, and only pain can tear them apart. Whoever has being cannot have appearance. Appearance chains being. The course of time tears seeming from being and being from seeming, by violence. Time reveals that it is not eternity. One must uproot oneself. Cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then carry it every day. One must not be I, but still less must one be we. The city gives the sense of being at home. Acquire the sense of being at home in exile. Be rooted in the absence of a place. Uproot oneself socially and vegetatively. Exile oneself from every earthly homeland. To do all this to others, from without, is a substitute for decreation. It produces unreality. But in uprooting oneself, one seeks greater reality.