Necessity is the veil of God. God has entrusted all phenomena without exception to the mechanism of the world. As there is in God the analogue of all human virtues, so also of obedience. This is the play he allows necessity in this world. Necessity, the graspable image of the indifference, the impartiality of God. Thus the ordinary notion of miracle is a kind of impiety (a fact that would have no secondary cause, but only a first cause). The distance between the necessary and the good is the very distance between the creature and the creator. The distance between the necessary and the good. To be contemplated endlessly. The great discovery of Greece. The fall of Troy had no doubt taught them this. Every attempt to justify evil by anything other than: it is, is a fault against this truth. We aspire only to cast off the intolerable burden of the couple good-evil, the burden assumed by Adam and Eve. For this, one must either confuse "the essence of the necessary and that of the good" or leave this world.
To purify evil, there is only God or the social beast. Purity purifies evil. Force also, quite differently. To whoever can do everything, everything is permitted. Whoever serves an omnipotent being can do everything through him. Force delivers from the couple of contraries good-evil. It delivers the one who wields it, and even the one who suffers it. A master has complete license; a slave also. The sword, at the hilt and at the point, delivers from the obligation that is the intolerable weight. Grace also delivers from it, but one reaches grace only through obligation. One escapes the limit only by ascending toward unity or descending toward the unlimited. The limit is the testimony that God loves us. The expectation of the imminent end of the world shaped the behavior of the primitive Church. This belief produced in them "the forgetting of the immense distance that separates the necessary from the good." The absence of God is the most marvelous testimony of perfect love, and this is why pure necessity, necessity manifestly different from good, is so beautiful. The unlimited is the test of the one. Time, of the eternal. The possible, of the necessary. Variation, of the invariant. The value of a science, a work of art, a morality, or a soul is measured by its degree of resistance to this test.