All created things refuse to be ends for me. Such is the extreme mercy of God toward me. And that itself is evil. Evil is the form that the mercy of God takes in this world.
This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time, it is the way through.
Two prisoners in neighboring cells who communicate by knocking on the wall. The wall is what separates them, but it is also what allows them to communicate. So it is with us and God. Every separation is a link.
By placing all our desire for good in a thing, we make that thing a condition of our existence. But we do not thereby make it a good. We always want something other than to exist.
Created things have as their essence to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading to one another, and this has no end. They are intermediaries leading to God. To experience them as such.
The bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them. But we no longer know how to use them. We thought they were meant for building houses on. We have erected skyscrapers on them, to which we ceaselessly add more floors. We no longer know that they are bridges, things made to be crossed over, and that by crossing them one goes to God.
Only he who loves God with a supernatural love can regard means solely as means. Power (and money, that master key of power) is the pure means. For that very reason, it is the supreme end for all those who have not understood. This world, the domain of necessity, offers us absolutely nothing but means. Our will is ceaselessly bounced from one means to another like a billiard ball. All desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the one I love to love me. But if he is totally devoted to me, he no longer exists, and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me, he does not love me enough. Hunger and satiation. Desire is bad and deceitful, yet without desire one would not seek the true absolute, the true unlimited. One must have passed through it. Misery of beings from whom fatigue removes that surplus energy which is the source of desire. Misery also of those whom desire blinds. One must hitch one's desire to the axis of the poles. What is it sacrilege to destroy? Not what is low, for that is of no importance. Not what is high, for even if one wished to, one cannot touch it. The metaxu. The metaxu are the region of good and evil. To deprive no human being of his metaxu, that is to say, of those relative and mixed goods (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) that warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.
True earthly goods are metaxu. One can respect those of others only to the extent that one regards those one possesses merely as metaxu, which implies that one is already on the way toward the point where one can do without them. To respect foreign countries, for example, one must make of one's own country not an idol, but a stepping-stone toward God. All faculties playing freely and without mingling, proceeding from a single principle. This is the microcosm, the imitation of the world. Christ according to Saint Thomas. The Just Man of the Republic. When Plato speaks of specialization, he speaks of the specialization of faculties within man and not of the specialization of men; the same holds for hierarchy. The temporal having meaning only through and for the spiritual, but not being mingled with the spiritual. Leading to it through longing, through surpassing. This is the temporal as bridge, as metaxu. This is the Greek and Provencal vocation. The civilization of the Greeks. No worship of force. The temporal was only a bridge. In states of the soul, they did not seek intensity, but purity.