The sun shines on the just and on the unjust. God makes himself necessity. Two faces of necessity: exercised and undergone. Sun and cross. To accept being subject to necessity and to act only by handling it. Subordination: economy of energy. Thanks to it, an act of heroism can be accomplished without either the one who commands or the one who obeys needing to be heroes. To come to receive orders from God. In which cases does the struggle against a temptation exhaust the energy attached to good, and in which cases does it raise that energy on the scale of qualities of energy? This must depend on the respective importance of the roles of will and attention. One must deserve, through love, to undergo constraint. Obedience is the supreme virtue. To love necessity. Necessity is what is lowest in relation to the individual (constraint, force, a "hard necessity"), but universal necessity delivers us from it. There are cases where a thing is necessary solely because it is possible. For example, eating when one is hungry, giving water to a wounded man dying of thirst when water is close by. Neither a bandit nor a saint would refrain from it.
By analogy, to discern the cases where, though it does not appear so clearly at first sight, possibility implies necessity. To act in those cases and not in others.
The pomegranate seed. One does not commit oneself to loving God; one consents to the commitment that has been made within oneself without oneself.
To perform only, by way of virtuous acts, those one cannot help performing, those one cannot not do, but to increase ceaselessly through well-directed attention the number of those one cannot not do.
Not to take a single step, even toward the good, beyond what one is irresistibly driven to by God, and this in action, in speech, and in thought. But to be ready under his impulse to go anywhere, to the very limit (the cross...). To be ready to the utmost is to pray to be driven, but without knowing where.
If my eternal salvation were on this table in the form of an object and I had only to reach out my hand to seize it, I would not extend my hand without having received the order to do so.
Detachment from the fruits of action. To withdraw from that fatality. How?
To act, not for an object, but by a necessity. I cannot do otherwise. It is not an action, but a kind of passivity. Non-acting action.
The slave is, in a sense, a model (the lowest... the highest... always the same law). Matter too.
To transfer outside oneself the motives of one's actions. To be driven. Motives that are entirely pure (or the vilest: always the same law) appear as external.
For every act, consider it from the aspect not of its object, but of its impulse. Not: to what end? But: where does it come from?
"I was naked and you clothed me." This gift is simply the sign of the state in which those who acted thus found themselves. They were in a state such that they could not help feeding those who were hungry, clothing those who were naked; they did not do it in any way for Christ; they could not help doing it because the compassion of Christ was in them. Just as Saint Nicholas, going with Saint Cassian across the Russian steppe to a meeting with God, could not help missing the appointed hour in order to help a peasant free his cart stuck in the mud. The good accomplished thus almost in spite of oneself, almost with shame and remorse, is pure. All absolutely pure good entirely escapes the will. Good is transcendent. God is the Good.
"I was hungry and you helped me." When, Lord? They did not know. One must not know.
One must not help one's neighbor for Christ, but through Christ. Let the self disappear in such a way that Christ, by means of the intermediary constituted by our soul and our body, helps one's neighbor. To be the slave whom his master sends to bring such help to such an unfortunate person. The help comes from the master, but it is addressed to the unfortunate person. Christ did not suffer for his Father. He suffered for mankind by the will of the Father.
One cannot say of the slave who goes to bring help that he does it for his master. He does nothing. Even if, to reach the unfortunate person, he walked on nails with bare feet, then he suffers, but he does nothing. For he is a slave. "We are unprofitable slaves," that is to say: we have done nothing. In general, for God is a bad expression. God must not be put in the dative. Not to go to one's neighbor for God, but to be driven by God toward one's neighbor as the arrow toward the target by the archer. To be only an intermediary between uncultivated land and plowed field, between the data of a problem and the solution, between the blank page and the poem, between the hungry wretch and the satisfied wretch. In all things, only what comes to us from outside, gratuitously, by surprise, as a gift of fate, without our having sought it, is pure joy. Correspondingly, true good can only come from outside, never from our effort. In no case can we manufacture something better than ourselves. Thus the effort truly directed toward the good must not succeed: it is after a long and sterile straining that ends in despair, when one expects nothing more, that from outside, a marvelous surprise, the gift comes. This effort has destroyed a part of the false fullness within us. The divine void, fuller than fullness, has come to dwell in us. The will of God. How to know it? If one makes silence within oneself, if one silences all desires, all opinions, and thinks with love, with all one's soul and without words: "Thy will be done," what one then feels without uncertainty that one must do (even though, in certain respects, it might be an error) is the will of God. For if one asks him for bread, he does not give stones.
Convergent criterion. An action or an attitude in favor of which reason finds several distinct and convergent motives, but which one feels exceeds all representable motives.
One must have no particular thing in view in prayer, unless one has received supernatural inspiration for it. For God is the universal being. Certainly he descends into the particular. He descended, he descends in the act of creation; likewise the Incarnation, the Eucharist, Inspiration, etc. But it is a descending movement, never an ascending one, a movement of God, not of us. We can only bring about such a connection insofar as God dictates it to us. Our role is to be turned toward the universal.
This is perhaps the solution to Berger's difficulty about the impossibility of connecting the relative to the absolute. It is impossible by an ascending movement, but possible by a descending movement.
One can never know that God commands a given thing. The intention oriented toward obedience to God saves, whatever one does, if one places God infinitely above oneself, and damns, whatever one does, if one calls God one's own heart. In the first case, one never thinks that what one has done, is doing, or will do could be a good.
The use of temptations. It is bound up with the relationship of the soul to time. To contemplate a possible evil for a long time without carrying it out brings about a kind of transubstantiation. If one resists with a finite energy, this energy is exhausted in a given time, and when it is exhausted, one yields. If one remains motionless and attentive, it is the temptation that exhausts itself — and one harvests the upgraded energy. If one contemplates in the same way a possible good — motionless and attentive — a transubstantiation of energy also takes place, by which one carries out this good. The transubstantiation of energy consists in this: that, for the good, there comes a moment when one cannot not accomplish it. From this also follows a criterion of good and evil. Each creature who has attained perfect obedience constitutes a singular, unique, irreplaceable mode of presence, knowledge, and operation of God in the world. Necessity. To see the relations of things, and oneself, including the ends one carries within oneself, as one of the terms. Action follows naturally from this. Obedience: there are two kinds. One can obey gravity or the relation of things. In the first case, one does what the void-filling imagination pushes one toward. One can attach to it, and often with plausibility, all labels including good and God. If one suspends the work of the void-filling imagination and fixes one's attention on the relation of things, a necessity appears that one cannot not obey. Until then, one has neither the notion of necessity nor the feeling of obedience.
Then one cannot be proud of what one accomplishes, even if one accomplished wonders. The words of the Breton cabin boy to the journalist who asked him how he could have done that: "Had to be done!" The purest heroism. It is found among the common people more than elsewhere. Obedience is the only pure motive, the only one that does not enclose to any degree the reward of the action and leaves all care of the reward to the Father who is in secret, who sees in secret. On condition that it is obedience to a necessity, not to a constraint (terrible void in slaves). Whatever one gives of oneself to others or to a great object, whatever suffering one endures, if it is through pure obedience to a clear conception of the relation of things and to necessity, one commits to it without effort, though one accomplishes it with effort. One cannot do otherwise, and there results no recoil, no void to fill, no desire for reward, no resentment, no abasement. Action is the indicating needle of the scale. One must not touch the needle, but the weights. It is exactly the same for opinions. From that point, either confusion or suffering. Foolish virgins. — This means that at the moment one becomes aware that there is a choice to be made, the choice is already made — in one direction or the other. Much truer than the allegory of Hercules between vice and virtue. When in man nature, being cut off from all carnal impulse and deprived of all supernatural light, performs actions in conformity with what supernatural light would impose were it present, that is the fullness of purity. This is the central point of the Passion. The right relationship with God is, in contemplation, love, and in action, slavery. Do not mix them. To act as a slave while contemplating with love...