Purification is the separation of good from covetousness.
To descend to the source of desires in order to tear the energy away from its object. It is there that desires are true as energy. It is the object that is false. But the tearing away within the soul when a desire is separated from its object is unspeakable.
If one descends into oneself, one finds that one possesses exactly what one desires.
If one desires a certain being (who is dead), one desires a particular, limited being; therefore necessarily a mortal, and one desires that being—that being who... that..., and so on—in short, that being who died on such a day, at such an hour. And one has him—dead.
If one desires money, one desires currency (an institution), something that can only be acquired under such and such conditions; so one desires it only insofar as... And to that extent, one has it.
Suffering and the void are in such cases the mode of existence of the objects of desire. Let the veil of unreality be pulled aside and one will see that they are given to us in this way.
When one sees this, one still suffers, but one is happy.
To come to know exactly what the miser has lost when his treasure was stolen: one would learn a great deal.
Lauzun and the post of captain of musketeers. He preferred being a prisoner and captain of musketeers to being free and not captain. These are garments. "They were ashamed of being naked." To lose someone: one suffers because the dead one, the absent one, has become imaginary, false. But the desire one has for him is not imaginary. Descend into oneself, to where the desire that is not imaginary resides. Hunger: one imagines foods, but the hunger itself is real: seize hold of the hunger. The presence of the dead is imaginary, but his absence is very real; it is henceforth his way of appearing. One must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God to count on supernatural bread to fill it. Nor must one flee from it. The void is the supreme fullness, but man does not have the right to know this. The proof is that Christ himself was completely ignorant of it, for a moment. One part of me must know it, but the other parts must not, for if they knew it in their base way, there would no longer be any void. Christ had all of human misery, except sin. But he had all that makes man capable of sin. What makes man capable of sin is the void. All sins are attempts to fill voids. Thus my life, full of stains, is close to his perfectly pure life, and so too with lives much more base. However low I fall, I shall not be far from him. But this, if I fall, I shall no longer be able to know. The handshake of a friend seen again after a long absence. I do not even notice whether for the sense of touch it is a pleasure or a pain: as the blind man directly feels objects at the end of his stick, I directly feel the presence of my friend. It is the same with the circumstances of life, whatever they may be, and God. This implies that one must never seek consolation for pain. For felicity is beyond the domain of consolation and pain. It is perceived with another sense, just as the perception of objects at the end of a stick or an instrument is other than the sense of touch properly speaking. This other sense is formed by the displacement of attention through an apprenticeship in which the whole soul and the body participate. That is why in the Gospel: "I tell you, those people have received their reward." One must have no compensation. It is the void in the sensibility that carries one beyond sensibility. The denial of Saint Peter. To say to Christ: I will remain faithful to you, was already to deny him, for it meant supposing the source of faithfulness to be in oneself and not in grace. Fortunately, since he was chosen, this denial became manifest to all and to himself. In how many others, such boasts are fulfilled—and they never understand. It was difficult to be faithful to Christ. It was a faithfulness in the void. Much easier to be faithful unto death to Napoleon. Much easier for the martyrs, later, to be faithful, for the Church already existed, a force, with temporal promises. One dies for what is strong, not for what is weak, or at least for what, being momentarily weak, retains an aura of strength. Faithfulness to Napoleon at Saint Helena was not a faithfulness in the void. To die for what is strong strips death of its bitterness. And, at the same time, of all its value. To supplicate a man is a desperate attempt to force one's own system of values into the mind of another, through sheer intensity. To supplicate God is the opposite: an attempt to make divine values pass into one's own soul. Far from thinking as intensely as one can about the values to which one is attached, it is an interior void.