One moves toward a thing because one believes it is good, and one remains chained to it because it has become necessary. Sensible things are real as sensible things, but unreal as goods. Appearance has the fullness of reality, but as appearance. As something other than appearance, it is error. The illusion concerning the things of this world does not concern their existence, but their value. The image of the cave refers to value. We possess only shadows of imitations of good. It is also in relation to good that we are captive, chained (attachment). We accept the false values that appear to us, and when we believe we are acting, we are in reality motionless, for we remain in the same system of values. Acts effectively carried out and yet imaginary. A man attempts suicide, survives, and is no more detached afterward than before. His suicide was imaginary. Suicide is no doubt always imaginary, and that is why it is forbidden. Time, strictly speaking, does not exist (except the present as a limit), and yet it is to this that we are subject. Such is our condition. We are subject to what does not exist. Whether it is a matter of passively endured duration — physical pain, waiting, regret, remorse, fear — or of time handled — order, method, necessity — in both cases, that to which we are subject does not exist. But our subjection exists. We are really bound by unreal chains. Time, being unreal, veils all things and ourselves in unreality. The treasure, for the miser, is the shadow of an imitation of good. It is doubly unreal. For a means (money) is already, as such, something other than a good. But taken outside its function as a means, erected as an end, it is even further from being a good. It is in relation to value judgments that sensations are unreal; it is as values that things are unreal for us. But the attribution of a false value to an object also removes reality from the perception of that object, for it drowns perception in imagination. Thus perfect detachment alone allows one to see things bare, outside that fog of lying values. This is why Job needed boils and a dunghill for the beauty of the world to be revealed to him. For there is no detachment without pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred and without falsehood without there also being detachment. The soul that has passed its head beyond heaven feeds on being. The one inside feeds on opinion. Necessity is essentially foreign to the imaginary. What is real in perception and distinguishes it from dreams is not sensations; it is the necessity enveloped in those sensations. "Why these things and not others?"
"It is so." In the spiritual life, illusion and truth are distinguished in the same way. What is real in perception and distinguishes it from dreams is not sensations; it is necessity. Distinction between those who remain in the cave, close their eyes, and imagine the journey, and those who make it. Real and imaginary in the spiritual realm too, and there too necessity makes the difference. Not suffering simply, for there are imaginary sufferings. As for inner feeling, nothing is more deceptive. How does one distinguish the imaginary from the real in the spiritual domain? One must prefer real hell to imaginary paradise. What distinguishes higher states from lower ones is, in higher states, the coexistence of several superimposed planes. Humility aims to abolish the imaginary in spiritual progress. There is no harm in believing oneself far less advanced than one is: the light operates its effect no less, whose source is not in opinion. There is great harm in believing oneself more advanced, for then opinion has an effect. A criterion of the real is that it is hard and rough. One finds joys in it, not pleasantness. What is pleasant is daydream. To try to love without imagining. To love the bare appearance without interpretation. What one loves then is truly God.
After having passed through the absolute good, one finds again the illusory and partial goods, but in a hierarchical order such that one permits oneself the pursuit of a given good only within the limits allowed by concern for another. This order is transcendent in relation to the goods it connects and is a reflection of the absolute good.
Already discursive reason (the intelligence of relations) helps to dissolve idolatries by considering goods and evils as limited, mixed, and flowing into one another.
To recognize the point where good passes into evil insofar as, to the extent that, with regard to, etc.
To go further than the rule of three.
It is always a matter of a relationship with time. To lose the illusion of possessing time. To become incarnate.
Man must perform the act of becoming incarnate, for he is disincarnated by imagination. What proceeds from Satan in us is imagination.
Remedy against imaginary love. To grant God within oneself the strict minimum, what one absolutely cannot refuse him — and to desire that one day, and as soon as possible, this strict minimum become everything.
Transposition: to believe one is rising because, while keeping the same base inclinations (for example: the desire to prevail over others), one has given them elevated objects.
One would on the contrary rise by attaching elevated inclinations to base objects.
There are prodigies in all passions. A gambler is capable of keeping vigil and fasting almost like a saint; he has premonitions, etc. It is a great danger to love God as a gambler loves gambling. To watch over the level at which one places the infinite. If one places it at the level where only the finite is fitting, it matters little by what name one calls it. The lower parts of myself must love God, but not too much. It would not be God. Let them love as one thirsts and hungers. Only the highest has the right to be satisfied. Fear of God in Saint John of the Cross. Is it not the fear of thinking about God when one is unworthy of it? Of defiling him by thinking of him badly? Through this fear, the lower parts withdraw from God. The flesh is dangerous insofar as it refuses to love God, but also insofar as it indiscreetly meddles in loving him. Why is the will to combat a prejudice a sure sign that one is steeped in it? It necessarily proceeds from an obsession. It constitutes an entirely sterile effort to rid oneself of it. The light of attention in such matters alone is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention. Freudianism as a whole is steeped in the prejudice it sets itself the mission of combating, namely that what is sexual is vile.
There is an essential difference between the mystic who turns toward God the faculty of love and desire whose physiological foundation is sexual energy, and the false imitation of the mystic who, leaving this faculty its natural orientation and giving it an imaginary object, stamps upon that object the label of God's name. The discrimination between these two operations, the second of which is even lower than debauchery, is difficult, but it is possible.
God and the supernatural are hidden and formless in the universe. It is good that they be hidden and nameless in the soul. Otherwise one risks having the imaginary under that name (those who fed and clothed Christ did not know it was Christ). Meaning of the ancient mysteries. Christianity (Catholics and Protestants) speaks too much of holy things.
Morality and literature. Our real life is more than three-quarters composed of imagination and fiction. Rare are true contacts with good and evil.
A science that does not bring us closer to God is worthless.
But if it brings us close to him badly, that is to say to an imaginary God, it is worse...
What nature operates mechanically in me, it is bad to believe I am the author of. But it is even worse to believe the Holy Spirit is the author. That is even further from the truth.
Different types of correlations and passages between contraries:
Through total devotion to a great thing (including God), to give full license within oneself to baseness. Through contemplation of the infinite distance between oneself and what is great, to make the self an instrument of greatness. By what criterion can one distinguish them? The only one, I believe, is that the bad correlation makes unlimited what ought not to be so. Among men (excepting the supreme forms of saintliness and genius), what gives the impression of being true is almost necessarily false, and what is true almost necessarily gives the impression of being false. It takes work to express the true. Also to receive it. One expresses and receives the false, or at least the superficial, without work. When the true seems at least as true as the false, it is the triumph of saintliness or genius. Thus Saint Francis made his listeners weep just as much as a vulgar and theatrical preacher. Duration — whether centuries for civilizations, or years and decades for the individual — has a Darwinian function of eliminating the unfit. What is fit for everything is eternal. In this alone resides the value of what is called experience. But falsehood is an armor by which man often allows the unfit in himself to survive the events that, without this armor, would kill it (thus pride survives humiliations), and this armor is as if secreted by the unfit to ward off danger (pride, in humiliation, thickens the inner falsehood). There is in the soul a kind of phagocytosis; everything that is threatened by time secretes falsehood in order not to die, and in proportion to the danger of death. That is why there is no love of truth without an unreserved consent to death. The cross of Christ is the only gateway to knowledge.
To look upon each sin I have committed as a favor from God. It is a favor that the essential imperfection hidden at the bottom of me has partly manifested itself to my eyes on such a day, at such an hour, in such a circumstance. I desire, I implore that my imperfection manifest itself entirely to my eyes, as much as the gaze of human thought is capable of. Not so that it may be healed, but even if it were never to be healed, so that I may be in the truth.
Everything that is without value flees the light. Here below, one can hide beneath the flesh. At death, one can no longer. One is delivered naked to the light. That is, depending on the case, hell, purgatory, or paradise.
What makes one recoil from efforts that would bring one closer to the good is not the reluctance of the flesh before effort. It is the reluctance of the flesh before the good. For a bad cause, if the stimulus is strong enough, the flesh will accept anything, knowing it can do so without dying. Even death, undergone for a bad cause, is not truly death for the carnal part of the soul. What is mortal for the carnal part of the soul is to see God face to face.
This is why we flee inner emptiness, because God might slip into it.
It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion to effort that produce sin, but the fear of God. One knows that one cannot see him face to face without dying, and one does not want to die. One knows that sin very effectively prevents one from seeing him face to face: pleasure and pain provide us only with the slight push indispensable toward sin, and above all the pretext, the even more indispensable alibi. Just as pretexts are needed for unjust wars, false goods are needed for sin, for one cannot bear the thought of going toward evil. The flesh is not what distances us from God; it is the veil we place before us to screen God from us. Perhaps this is so only from a certain point onward. The image of the cave seems to indicate this. At first it is the movement that hurts. When one reaches the opening, it is the light. Not only does it blind, but it wounds. The eyes revolt against it. Can it be true that from this moment on one can commit only mortal sins? To take the flesh to hide from the light — is that not a mortal sin? Horrible thought. Rather leprosy. I need God to take me by force, for if now death, removing the screen of the flesh, placed me before him face to face, I would flee.