Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross. Christ healing the infirm, raising the dead, etc. — that is the humble, human, almost lowly part of his mission. The supernatural part is the sweat of blood, the unsatisfied desire for human consolation, the supplication to be spared, the feeling of being abandoned by God. The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides! "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" There is the true proof that Christianity is something divine. To be just, one must be naked and dead. Without imagination. That is why the model of justice must be naked and dead. The cross alone is not susceptible of imaginary imitation. A just man is needed to imitate so that the imitation of God may not be a mere word, but it is necessary, in order that we may be carried beyond the will, that we cannot will to imitate him. One cannot will the cross. One could will any degree of asceticism or heroism, but not the choice which is penal suffering. Those who conceive of the crucifixion only as an offering erase its saving mystery and its saving bitterness.
To wish for martyrdom is far too little. The cross is infinitely more than martyrdom. The most purely bitter suffering, penal suffering, as a guarantee of authenticity. Cross. The tree of sin was a real tree, the tree of life was a beam. Something that bears no fruit, but only vertical movement. "The Son of Man must be lifted up, and he will draw you to himself." One can kill in oneself the vital energy while preserving only the vertical movement. Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if one wishes only to ascend. Eve and Adam wanted to seek divinity in vital energy. A tree, a fruit. But it is prepared for us on geometrically squared dead wood on which hangs a corpse. The secret of our kinship with God must be sought in our mortality. God exhausts himself, across the infinite thickness of time and space, to reach the soul and seduce it. If it allows itself to be wrested, were it only for the duration of a flash of lightning, a pure and entire consent, then God conquers it. And when it has become a thing entirely his, he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone. And it must in its turn, but groping, traverse the infinite thickness of time and space, in search of the one it loves. Thus the soul retraces in reverse the journey God made toward it. And that is the cross. God is crucified by the fact that finite beings, subject to necessity, to space, and to time, think. To know that as a thinking and finite being, I am God crucified.
To resemble God, but God crucified. God almighty insofar as he is bound by necessity. Prometheus, the god crucified for having loved men too much. Hippolytus, the man punished for having been too pure and too loved by the gods. It is the bringing together of the human and the divine that calls down punishment. We are what is farthest from God, at the extreme limit from which it is not absolutely impossible to return to him. In our being, God is torn. We are the crucifixion of God. The love of God for us is passion. How could the good love evil without suffering? And evil also suffers in loving the good. The mutual love of God and man is suffering. For us to feel the distance between ourselves and God, God must be a crucified slave. For we feel distance only downward. It is much easier to put oneself by imagination in the place of God the creator than in the place of the crucified Christ. The dimensions of the charity of Christ are the distance between God and the creature. The function of mediation, in itself, implies being torn apart... That is why one cannot conceive of God's descent toward man or man's ascent toward God without being torn apart. We have to traverse — and God first, to come to us, for he comes first — the infinite thickness of time and space. In the relations between God and man, love is the greatest. It is as great as the distance to be crossed. For love to be as great as possible, the distance must be as great as possible. That is why evil can go to the extreme limit beyond which the very possibility of good would vanish. It is licensed to touch that limit. It sometimes seems that it exceeds it. This is in a sense exactly the opposite of Leibniz's thought. It is certainly more compatible with the greatness of God, for if he had made the best of all possible worlds, it is because he could do little. God traverses the thickness of the world to come to us. The Passion is the existence of perfect justice without any admixture of appearance. Justice is essentially non-acting. It must be either transcendent or suffering. It is purely supernatural justice, absolutely deprived of every sensible support, even the love of God insofar as it is sensible. Redemptive suffering is that which strips suffering bare and carries it in its purity to the point of existence. That saves existence. As God is present in the sensory perception of a piece of bread through the Eucharistic consecration, he is present in extreme evil through redemptive suffering, through the cross. From human misery to God. But not as compensation or consolation. As correlation.
There are people for whom everything that brings God closer to them is beneficial. For me, it is everything that distances him. Between me and him, the thickness of the universe — and that of the cross added to it. Pain is at once entirely external and entirely essential to innocence. Blood on snow. Innocence and evil. Let evil itself be pure. It can be pure only in the form of the suffering of an innocent. An innocent who suffers spreads over evil the light of salvation. He is the visible image of the innocent God. That is why a God who loves man, a man who loves God, must suffer. Happy innocence. Something also infinitely precious. But it is a precarious happiness, fragile, a happiness of chance. Apple blossoms. Happiness is not bound to innocence. To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw the counterweight. In emptying oneself, one exposes oneself to all the pressure of the surrounding universe. God gives himself to men as powerful or as perfect — at their choice.