God can be present in creation only in the form of absence. The evil and the innocence of God. One must place God at an infinite distance in order to conceive him as innocent of evil; reciprocally, evil indicates that God must be placed at an infinite distance. This world, insofar as it is entirely empty of God, is God himself. Necessity, insofar as it is absolutely other than the good, is the good itself. This is why all consolation in affliction distances one from love and truth. This is the mystery of mysteries. When one touches it, one is safe. "In the deserted East..." One must be in a desert. For he whom we must love is absent. He who places his life in faith in God can lose his faith. But he who places his life in God himself will never lose it. To place one's life in what one cannot touch at all. This is impossible. It is a death. This is what is required. Nothing that exists is absolutely worthy of love.
One must therefore love what does not exist. But this object of love that does not exist is not a fiction. For our fictions cannot be more worthy of love than we ourselves, who are not worthy. Consent to the good -- not to any graspable, representable good, but unconditional consent to the absolute good. In consenting to what we represent to ourselves as being good, we consent to a mixture of good and evil, and this consent produces good and evil: the proportion of good and evil in us does not change. On the contrary, unconditional consent to the good that we cannot and will never be able to represent to ourselves -- this consent is pure good and produces only good, and it suffices that it endure for the entire soul eventually to become nothing but good. Faith (when it concerns a supernatural interpretation of the natural) is a conjecture by analogy based on supernatural experiences. Thus those who possess the privilege of mystical contemplation, having experienced the mercy of God, suppose that, God being mercy, the created world is a work of mercy. But as for directly observing this mercy in nature, one must make oneself blind, deaf, and pitiless to believe one can. This is why the Jews and the Muslims, who wish to find in nature the proofs of divine mercy, are merciless. And often Christians too. This is why mysticism is the only source of the virtue of humanity. For not to believe that behind the curtain of the world there is infinite mercy, or to believe that this mercy is in front of the curtain -- both of these make one cruel. There are four testimonies of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings and their compassion, which is divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth testimony is the complete absence of mercy here below. Incarnation. God is weak because he is impartial. He sends the rays of the sun and the rain upon the good and the wicked alike. This indifference of the Father and the weakness of Christ correspond to each other. Absence of God. The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed... God changes nothing in anything. Christ was killed, out of anger, because he was only God. If I thought that God sends me pain by an act of his will and for my good, I would believe I was something, and I would neglect the principal use of pain, which is to teach me that I am nothing. One must therefore think nothing of the sort. But one must love God through pain. I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something. To love my nothingness, to love being nothingness.
To love with the part of the soul that is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the soul perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness; it is horrified by it. If it believes it loves nothingness, what it loves is something other than nothingness. God sends affliction indiscriminately to the wicked and the good, like rain and sunshine. He did not reserve the cross for Christ. He enters into contact with the individual human being as such only through purely spiritual grace, which responds to the gaze turned toward him -- that is, in the exact measure in which the individual ceases to be one. No event is a favor from God; only grace is. Communion is good for the good and bad for the bad. Thus damned souls are in paradise, but for them paradise is hell. The cry of suffering: why? It resounds through the entire Iliad. To explain suffering is to console it; therefore it must not be explained. Hence the eminent value of the suffering of the innocent. It resembles God's acceptance of evil in creation, God who is innocent. The irreducible character of suffering, which makes it so that one cannot help being horrified by it at the moment one endures it, has as its purpose to halt the will, as absurdity halts the intelligence, as absence halts love, so that, having reached the end of human faculties, one stretches out one's arms, stops, looks, and waits. "He laughs at the affliction of the innocent." Silence of God. The noises of this world imitate that silence. They mean nothing.
It is when we need to the very depths of our being a noise that means something, when we cry out for an answer and it is not granted us, that we touch the silence of God. Usually our imagination puts words into noises, as one idly plays at seeing shapes in smoke. But when we are too exhausted, when we no longer have the courage to play, then we need real words. We cry out for them. The cry tears our very entrails. We obtain only silence. After passing through this, some begin to talk to themselves like madmen. Whatever they do after that, one should feel only pity for them. Others, few in number, give their whole heart to the silence.