Creation: the good broken into pieces and scattered throughout evil. Evil is the limitless, but it is not infinite. Only the infinite limits the limitless. Monotony of evil: nothing new; everything in it is equivalent. Nothing real; everything in it is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays such a great role. Many women (Celimene), or men (Don Juan), etc. Condemned to false infinity. Therein lies hell itself. Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything must be drawn from oneself. But man is not given the power to create. It is a bad attempt to imitate God. Not to know and accept this impossibility of creating is the source of many errors. We must imitate the act of creating, and there are two possible imitations — one real, the other apparent — to preserve and to destroy. No trace of "I" in preservation. There is in destruction. "I" leaves its mark on the world by destroying. Literature and morality. Imaginary evil is romantic, varied; real evil is dreary, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore "imaginative literature" is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of the two). It escapes this alternative only by passing, as it were, by sheer force of art, to the side of reality — which only genius can do.
A certain inferior virtue is a degraded image of good, of which one must repent, and of which it is harder to repent than of evil. Pharisee and publican.
Good as the contrary of evil is in a sense equivalent to it, like all contraries.
What evil violates is not the good, for the good is inviolable; one violates only a degraded good.
What is directly contrary to an evil is never of the order of the higher good. Barely above evil, often! Examples: theft and bourgeois respect for property; adultery and "respectable woman"; savings account and squandering; lying and "sincerity."
Good is essentially other than evil. Evil is multiple and fragmentary; good is one. Evil is apparent; good is mysterious. Evil consists in actions; good in non-action, in non-acting action, etc. Good taken at the level of evil and opposing it as a contrary to a contrary is a good of the penal code. Above this is a good that, in a sense, resembles evil more than it resembles this low form of good. This makes possible much demagoguery and tedious paradox.
The good that defines itself in the way one defines evil must be denied. Now evil denies it. But it denies it badly.
Is there a union of incompatible vices in beings devoted to evil? I do not think so. Vices are subject to gravity, and that is why there is no depth, no transcendence in evil. One has the experience of good only by accomplishing it. One has the experience of evil only by forbidding oneself to accomplish it, or, if one has accomplished it, by repenting. When one accomplishes evil, one does not know it, because evil flees the light. Does evil, as one conceives it when one does not do it, exist? Does not the evil one does seem something simple, natural, self-evident? Is not evil analogous to illusion? Illusion, when one is its victim, is not felt as an illusion, but as a reality. Likewise, perhaps, evil. Evil, when one is in it, is not felt as evil, but as necessity, or even as duty. As soon as one does evil, evil appears as a kind of duty. Most people have a sense of duty in certain bad things and other good ones. The same man feels it a duty to sell as dearly as he can and not to steal, etc. The good in them is at the level of evil, a good without light. The sensibility of the innocent who suffers is like sensible crime. True crime is not sensible. The innocent who suffers knows the truth about his torturer; the torturer does not know it. The evil that the innocent feels within himself is in his torturer, but there it is not felt. What in the criminal is not felt is the crime. What in the innocent is not felt is the innocence. It is the innocent who can feel hell. The sin that is in us goes out of us and spreads outward, exerting a contagion in the form of sin. Thus when we are irritated, those around us become irritated. Or again, from superior to inferior: anger provokes fear. But at the contact of a perfectly pure being, there is transmutation, and sin becomes suffering. Such is the function of the just one of Isaiah, of the lamb of God. Such is redemptive suffering. All the criminal violence of the Roman Empire struck against Christ, and in him became pure suffering. Evil beings, on the contrary, transform simple suffering (for example, illness) into sin. It follows perhaps that redemptive suffering must be of social origin. It must be injustice, violence exercised by human beings. The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering. Expiatory suffering is the backlash of the evil one has done. And redemptive suffering is the shadow of the pure good one desires. The wicked act is a transfer onto another of the degradation one carries within oneself. That is why one inclines toward it as toward a deliverance. Every crime is a transfer of evil from the one who acts to the one who suffers it. Illegitimate love, like murder. The apparatus of criminal justice has been so contaminated by evil for centuries, through contact with criminals without compensating purification, that a conviction is very often a transfer of evil from the penal apparatus to the condemned, even if he is guilty and even if the penalty is not disproportionate. Hardened criminals are the only ones on whom the penal apparatus can do no harm. On the innocent, it does terrible harm. When there is a transfer of evil, evil is not diminished but increased in the one from whom it proceeds. A phenomenon of multiplication. The same is true of the transfer of evil onto objects. Then where to put evil? One must transfer it from the impure part into the pure part of oneself, thus transmuting it into pure suffering. The crime that is in oneself, one must inflict it on oneself. But one would quickly defile the point of inner purity in this way if one did not renew it through contact with an inalterable purity placed beyond all reach. Patience consists in not transforming suffering into crime. This alone is enough to transform crime into suffering. To transfer evil onto external things is to deform the relations of things. What is exact and determinate — number, proportion, harmony — resists this deformation. Whatever my state of vigor or weariness, in five kilometers there are five milestones. That is why number hurts when one suffers: it opposes the operation of transfer. To fix one's attention on what is too rigorous to be deformed by one's inner modifications is to prepare within oneself the appearance of an invariant and access to the eternal.
To accept the evil done to us as a remedy for the evil we have done. It is not the suffering one imposes on oneself, but the suffering one undergoes from outside that is the true remedy. And moreover, it must be unjust. When one has sinned through injustice, it is not enough to suffer justly; one must suffer injustice. Purity is absolutely invulnerable as purity, in the sense that no violence makes it less pure. But it is eminently vulnerable in the sense that any touch of evil makes it suffer, that any sin that touches it becomes suffering within it. If someone does me harm, to desire that this harm not degrade, out of love for the one who inflicts it, so that he may not truly have done harm. The saints (the near-saints) are more exposed than others to the devil, because the real knowledge they have of their wretchedness makes the light almost intolerable to them. The sin against the Spirit consists in knowing a thing as good and hating it as good. One experiences the equivalent of it in the form of resistance every time one turns toward the good. For every contact with the good produces a knowledge of the distance between evil and good and a beginning of painful effort of assimilation. It is a pain, and one is afraid. This fear is perhaps the sign of the reality of the contact. The corresponding sin can only occur if a lack of hope makes the consciousness of the distance intolerable and changes pain into hatred. Hope is a remedy in this regard. But a better remedy is indifference to oneself, and to be glad that the good is the good, even though one is far from it, and even on the supposition that one were destined to move infinitely farther from it.
Once an atom of pure good has entered the soul, the greatest, most criminal weakness is infinitely less dangerous than the slightest betrayal, even if this betrayal were reduced to a purely interior movement of thought, lasting only an instant, but consented to. It is participation in hell. As long as the soul has not tasted pure good, it is separated from hell as from paradise.
An infernal choice is possible only through attachment to salvation. Whoever does not desire the joy of God but is satisfied to know that there is real joy in God falls but does not betray.
When one loves God through evil as such, it is truly God that one loves.
To love God through evil as such. To love God through the evil that one hates, while hating that evil. To love God as the author of the evil one is in the act of hating.
Evil is to love what mystery is to intelligence. As mystery compels the virtue of faith to be supernatural, so does evil for the virtue of charity. And trying to find compensations for, justifications of evil is as harmful to charity as trying to set forth the content of mysteries on the plane of human intelligence.
Ivan's speech in the Karamazovs: "Even if this vast factory were to produce the most extraordinary marvels and cost only a single tear of a single child, I refuse."
I adhere completely to this sentiment. No motive of any kind that could be given me to compensate for a child's tear can make me accept that tear. None at all that the intelligence can conceive. Only one, but one that is intelligible only to supernatural love: God willed it. And for this motive I would accept a world that were nothing but evil just as readily as a child's tear. The agony is the supreme dark night of which even the perfect have need for absolute purity, and for this it is better that it be bitter. The unreality that removes good from good — that is what constitutes evil. Evil is always the destruction of sensible things in which there is a real presence of good. Evil is accomplished by those who have no knowledge of this real presence. In this sense it is true that no one is willingly wicked. The relations of force give absence the power to destroy presence. One cannot contemplate without terror the extent of the evil that man can do and suffer. How could one believe it possible to find a compensation for this evil, since because of this evil God suffered the crucifixion? Good and evil. Reality. What is good is what gives more reality to beings and things; what is evil is what takes it from them. The Romans did evil in stripping Greek cities of their statues, because the cities, the temples, the life of those Greeks had less reality without the statues, and because the statues could not have as much reality in Rome as in Greece.
The desperate, humble supplications of the Greeks to keep a few statues: a desperate attempt to convey to the mind of another one's own notion of values. Understood in this way, it has nothing base about it. But it is almost necessarily ineffective. The duty to understand and weigh the system of values of another, together with one's own, on the same scale. To forge the scale. To let one's imagination dwell on what is evil implies a kind of cowardice; one hopes to enjoy, to know, and to grow through the unreal. Even to dwell in imagination on certain things as possible (which is something quite different from clearly conceiving their possibility, an essential thing for virtue) is already to commit oneself. Curiosity is the cause of it. To forbid oneself (not to conceive, but to dwell on) certain thoughts; not to think about. One believes that thought does not commit, but thought alone commits, and the license to think contains every license. Not to think about — the supreme faculty. Purity, a negative virtue. Having dwelt in imagination on a bad thing, if one meets other people who make it objective through their words and actions and thus remove the social barrier, one is already nearly lost. And what could be easier? There is no breaking point; when one sees the ditch, one has already crossed it. For the good, it is the exact opposite; the ditch is seen when it is to be crossed, at the moment of tearing away and rending. One does not fall into the good. The word baseness expresses this property of evil. Even once accomplished, evil retains this character of unreality; hence perhaps the simplicity of criminals — everything is simple in a dream. A simplicity that parallels that of the highest virtue.
Evil must be made pure — or life is impossible. God alone can do this. This is the idea of the Gita. It is also the idea of Moses, of Muhammad, of Hitlerism... But Jehovah, Allah, Hitler are earthly gods. The purification they accomplish is imaginary. What is essentially other than evil is virtue accompanied by a clear perception of the possibility of evil, of evil appearing as a good. The presence of illusions abandoned but held present to thought is perhaps the criterion of truth. One cannot have horror of harming others unless one has reached the point where others can no longer harm us (one then loves others, at the limit, as one's own past self). The contemplation of human wretchedness tears one toward God, and it is only in others loved as oneself that one contemplates it. One cannot contemplate it either in oneself as such or in others as such. Extreme affliction that seizes human beings does not create human wretchedness; it only reveals it. Sin and the prestige of force. From the fact that the whole soul has not been able to know and accept human wretchedness, one believes there is a difference between human beings, and thereby one fails in justice, either by making a distinction between ourselves and others, or by showing favoritism among others. This comes from not knowing that human wretchedness is a constant and irreducible quantity, as great in every man as it can be, and that greatness comes from a single God, so that there is identity between one man and another. One is surprised that affliction does not ennoble. That is because when one thinks of an afflicted person, one thinks of his affliction. But the afflicted person does not think of his affliction: his soul is filled with any insignificant relief he can covet. How could there not be evil in the world? The world must be foreign to our desires. If it were foreign to them without containing evil, then our desires would be entirely bad. That must not be so. There are all degrees of distance between the creature and God. A distance at which love of God is impossible. Matter, plants, animals. Evil is so complete there that it destroys itself; there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. We are at the point where love is just barely possible. It is a great privilege, for the love that unites is proportional to the distance. God created a world that is not the best possible, but one that contains all degrees of good and of evil. We are at the point where it is the worst possible. For beyond is the degree where evil becomes innocence.