But are there sins that are not forgiven? Especially if one has brought them into the light of consciousness, if one has seen their causes and one has created contrary causes that will give rise to good deeds when their hour of realization has sounded?
And I summoned other bad deeds into the light. They all had a family resemblance. They resembled one another by virtue of the egotism with which they were imprinted, by the self-love that they had manifested.
What is known as the Guardian of the Threshold is not a redoubtable monster, the sight of which cannot be borne because of the hideousness of its face.29 It is oneself; it is one’s own soul. It is necessary to look it in the face in order to take account of its pitiless pride and its faculty of annihilating everything that happens to encounter it in one’s life—a faculty that is developed in the image of divine nature.
For nature wants the expansion of beings and never ceases to give to the strongest, who are also the most pitiless, recompenses of beauty and power. But only up to a certain limit! There is a point at which it is necessary to stop, to render what one has received, to abdicate one’s former royalty. One drop more and the vase overflows! There is a solemn evening of the recapitulation of acts and thoughts. It is necessary to take up oneself the trumpet of God, make it resound and awaken one’s own dead.
Emerge from the shadow in which you repose, base deeds, secret thoughts of evil, unexpressed jealousies and impure intentions! Appear with your double attached to you, the remorse that you must some day bring into the daylight! Push before you the brother with the poisoned body, the tenebrous larva, in order that it can be dissolved by the virtue of the light. Come, all of you, from the depths of the past in order that I judge you!
It is sufficient for me to see you, to reduce you to nothing with the cortege, which I have been told is infinite, of your effects. This evening I am closing the immense book in which the effects and the causes are inscribed, the former born from the latter, with the fidelity of a mathematical law. The long series is concluded. I am stopping the birth of evil by my redemptive will. I am turning the last page and I am tracing at the bottom a cross, the most ancient sign employed on the planet by humans, the cross of the spirit.
THE EXPLANATION OF PAIN
The presence on earth of evil and pain remains inexplicable. Those who have made the most profound researches in order to provide an explanation of it have been obliged to declare, as a last resort, that it is a problem surpassing the comprehension of the human mind.
Now, there is in William James’ book The Varieties of Religious Experience an astonishingly suggestive page in which an explanation, and even a legitimation, of pain might perhaps be found, resulting not from a hypothesis but from direct experience.
William James reproduces the story of a woman who recounts what she has sensed under the influence of ether taken before a surgical operation.
“I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured... I became unconscious again... A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway... He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short consciousness only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied... He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw... The angle was an obtuse angle and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or an acute angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ more...
“He went on and I came to... I did not see God’s purpose. I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine... And yet, on waking, my first feeling was…that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before... I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what not to whom, and that, to the extent of my capacity for suffering.”30
It is known that ether has an inexplicable property of evocation and metaphysical lucidity. Under its influence, great problems are clarified; everything appears luminous, easy and veridical. But that extraordinary effect disappears after a very short time and one cannot recover the verity that one had seized, and which has fled.
William James’ experimenter has remembered. Her story is gripping and it becomes atrocious because it is plausible. In the general economy of the world, in which we know that nothing is wasted, it seems that only pain is wasted. According to this, it is not. On the other plane it takes a geometrical form; it is transformed in order to serve for unknown operations, the secret of which escapes us.
That a being of a divine character, terrible by virtue of its indifference, considers our pain as an angle to be flexed, over which it slides with ease, even if that image is only a symbol, nevertheless has an appearance of verity. And a proof of that verity is given by a reaction of spiritual elevation that pain procures for the person who experiences it, if not always, at least in certain cases, in accordance with personal capacities.
For it happens that pain debases without compensations of any sort. But perhaps there are pains that serve the gods, and bad pains that have no profit whatsoever. How, then, can they be recognized? What is the touchstone of human pain?
And if we recognize that our pain is of the kind that is useful to the gods, there remains the matter of knowing in what measure it is just that we suffer in order to permit them to run over angles that are more or less acute or obtuse. The protestations that we might raise, although futile in appearance, are perhaps registered as mysteriously as the service rendered by our pain. They might serve as a counterweight in an unknown balance. Perhaps our non-acceptance diminishes the sum total of pain.
Consciousness is the great purifying spring. If we can measure our suffering and imagine its unknown utility, perhaps we can even succeed in transforming it into enjoyment. The person who suffers for nothing has a right to despair and to curse the unknown cause of his pain. But if he knew that he was participating in a sublime endeavor, he would doubtless accept it and request to suffer more.
Pain remains the greatest secret of the earth.
PRAYER TO THE SUN
O paradigm of luminous essences, source of subtle emanations, you who change into light the compact darkness of infinity. O Sun, you are surely the only God to whom it is necessary to return, after having toured the circumference of possible gods! Perhaps you are only a spark in a vaster and higher spray, but for us you are the ultimate end and the supreme beginning. And before the mystery that envelops all Powers, it is you to whom I address myself, as the sole visible Power, generous and eternal.
I know full well that you cannot respond directly to human pleas, but you respond indirectly by making wheat grow for the person who is hungry, vines for the person who aspires to intoxication, appearing in the morning for the person who is afraid, and descending behind the horizon for the person who aspires to nocturnal repose. For you give the appearance of rising and descending, and there is no better wisdom for humans than that image of decline and rebirth.
O Sun, I am one of those who has need of the continual presence of your radiance. I sense life drawing away from me in the lands where our fiery silver circle is not seen. Moreover, I cannot explain why the Earth has that strange inclination on its axis, and why, in certain unfortunate regions, so many opaque larvae called mists and so many liquid humors of the air called rain intercept you in our eyes. The tissues of my body perish from not having your warmth in their substance, and far from you my soul is sick, no longer having the energy to launch forth.
I please myself believing that there are solar spirits that live in you, creatures with bodies with a marrow of fire, wh
ich move in your oceans of incandescence and enjoy delightedly the continuity of flame. By the same token, there must be an unimaginable opacity of darkness elsewhere that must absorb beings that are voluntarily blind and infatuated with their own ignorance.
O Sun, remove me from the formidable celestial current that, according to the ancient philosophers of India, bears humans toward their ancestors. Deliver me from the lunar attraction that summons the dead, by the law of their gravity, toward that planet of frozen volcanoes and valleys of extinct metal, in order to mineralize them in the hardness of new forms.
O Sun, summon me to you, enable me to rise toward your light, stripped and purified. Let nothing remain of the stone of my bones and the moist matter of my flesh but a light gas, a vapor so transparent that even the wing of a butterfly could not trace a design thereon. Bring back to an imponderable essence everything within me that is terrestrial. Dissolve, volatilize, and annihilate all the elements to which I have attributed the virtues of a separate being, in order that I will be nothing but a drop of the element of fire in the bosom of your radiant intelligence.
IN PRAISE OF THE SPIRITUAL FORCES
I thank the spiritual forces that came to settle upon me when I appeared in the terrestrial light in a modest house in the Rue du Taur in Toulouse, not far from Saint Sernin. It was shortly before noon in the month of March, and, as the astrologers put it, under the sign of Pisces.31
I thank the spiritual forces for having recognized in my mother’s face a similitude that pleased them and directed them to the narrow Rue de Taur, far from sunlit spaces since the morning that had been floating and playing, passing under the shadow of the steeple of Saint Sernin.
Once they were called fays or godmothers. Sometimes they were distinguished around cradles. There were large ones and small ones. People had difficulty understanding that it was the gift of themselves that the godmothers gave to their godson. In any case, people ceased to perceive them, and even to believe in them.
The house in the Rue du Taur was old and dark, the soul of the child they came to inhabit was rebellious, vivacious, avid for enjoyment. A harsh law, the one of that descent! Harsher still is the one of the slow transformation through the blood of an unstable body! There was one of them whose name I knew from the very beginning, and which I have never forgotten; she was called Obstinate Hope, and I have always sensed her presence.
I thank them for their patience. They are neighbors of evil creatures, almost faceless larvae, hideous inhabitants of interior sewers. They have witnessed struggles; they have seen me stumble and fall. I thank them for having permitted me to get up again. I am only thanking them now because, at the time, I was ingrate and could only incline before myself.
I can render testimony that twice, I sensed that my hour had come, and that my forehead had been touched by the secret golden wand that marks the term of lives. I can render testimony that twice, that term was postponed by the intervention of spiritual forces that I had within me, the ones that had once come to the Rue du Taur, after having played in the midday air around the steeple of Saint Sernin.
Why did they exercise that protection, if it was one, and not a punishment? Doubtless they were anticipating some unspecifiable task on my part. There was a role to be played, a battle to be won, I do not know on what field and in what order of facts and ideas. Perhaps I have not understood what it was necessary to do or, in the darkness, have mistaken the road. I know today that signs are never lacking, that there is no darkness so thick that glimmers do not mark out the path for the person who knows how to look within him for the correspondence of those glimmers, but I was a poor ignoramus, I betrayed myself, I lost the battle every day and I marched without counting the dead.
And now the evening has come and I see the glory of God!—of that which people have called God, and which can bear other names: life in motion; the terrible and resplendent transformation; order and chaos; innumerable evil and invincible bounty; the mystery in the golden mask; and the beauty that envelops all things in her solar crimson robe.
I have attained the true knowledge of the invisible world, that which comes from nature. Whoever has penetrated the secret of things has penetrated the secret of gods. For the spirit moves over the waters and in the forms of the earth. It is sufficient, in order to glimpse it, to have seized an Ariadne’s thread, which is perhaps a drifting thread of spider-silk, or to have understood a password, perhaps transmitted by a bird.
Have I seized the thread of spider-silk that is necessary or have I stumbled, one evening when the moon was beginning to rise, over an enchanted scarab that touched me with its antenna? In the depths of the pond I have seen beyond the gaze of the frog and I have understood the relationship that unites the spider with the root of the aquatic reed. In the damp silt I have contemplated the birth of protozoa.
On the hill, walking among the old men that the vine stocks are, I have sensed the future intoxications of the wine rising through the ligneous channels of the wood and expanding in the grapes. I have contemplated the virginity of the rose on which the moth with the death’s-head has just settled. I have understood the message of the cypress and the prophecy of the eucalyptus.
I have seen the glory of God and I am stirred thereby in the marrow of my being. I do not know why it has been given to me to have access to that splendor, since the battles have been lost, and I have not realized that which I had a right to expect of myself, which the spiritual forces had designated to me. I would have liked to sing hymns, to struggle in competition with savage animals, to be rolled in the clouds by the wind, driven by strange cries like marine birds over the masts of ships.
Perhaps the least deserving are those that are recompensed. Perhaps it is sufficient to have once understood a mother’s gaze to have seen the spirit is its serene glory. But why is there something to comprehend? Is it not sufficient to allow oneself to be borne along by the water of the river, with one’s face turned toward the sky?
Praise be to the spiritual forces that give wings to humans! Praise be to what is known as Obstinate Hope, which enables triumph over discouragement; to what is known as the Love of Visible Nature, and which enables the invisible world to be understood; to what is known as the Delight of Detachment, which is the smallest, the most fragile and the only one that sometimes abandons me. They are what permits one to live, and put benevolence on the face of death.
INVISIBLE BEAUTY
Whoever has seen dolor has seen beauty. It exists behind the features of the poorest people, and in the depths of the most distraught eyes. Let the wretched be consoled by the idea that they carry within them a veiled light that brightens down below and is perceptible at a great distance.
The most perfect beauty inhabits hovels and haunts prisons and labor camps. It is in the icy alignment of hospital beds, it is exhaled in the blood and sweat of slaves, those who are enchained to labor, to alcoholism, to remorse for the evil they have done. But it is necessary to be able to recognize that beauty; it is necessary to have interior eyes to perceive it, for it is invisible.
Those who sacrifice their days to care for the sick, those who climb sordid stairways to diminish poverty, are those in search of beauty. They know where it is hidden, without being sure of enabling it to spring forth. The missionaries who go to the accursed islands to which lepers are exiled, are lovers of beauty. They sense that the deformities, the stupor of gazes beneath swollen and dead eyelids conceal a divine mystery. For whoever has seen dolor has seen beauty—but they do not always understand what they have seen.
None of the rites of life have the importance that is accorded to them. Duties are almost all masks that have been painted by the most skillful, and behind their deceptive austerity hides pitiless egotism. Some give the pretext of social duties, others proclaim loudly that they have founded a family, and others say that they have found God. They are deceiving themselves, either by design or unconsciously, in order to enjoy pleasure with more avidity. But there is no other real objective
on earth than to discover the beauty of the world. Beauty is stronger than laws, than morals, than virtues. It is the secret law of nature, the virtue of God.
One does not discover it in serenity. Torment is the privilege of elevated souls, and woe betide those who have yielded themselves to the profit of a facile peace. The person who, by means of his meditations, his disinterest and his quotidian wisdom, has finally merited drinking the unintoxicating wine of the tranquility of the evening, must mingle a drop of poison with that wine himself: the poison of the torment and the eternal dolor of human beings, of which he must demand his share.
For it is an unfathomable mystery that nature has created a resplendent beauty with landscapes with tranquil lines, serene statues and ideal virgins reflecting the ardor of pure hearts, but has wanted that the highest sentiment of perfection to spring from the utmost degree of dolor and participation in that dolor. Dante spoiled his paradise for having made too many angelic wings palpitate there; a little sickening stupidity remains attached to innocence.
Beauty is not picked like a flower on the side of a road. It is necessary to wrench it harshly from a muddy matrix. It is like the mandrakes engendered by the tragic semen of hanged men, for which it is necessary to go in search under the gibbet by night, which moan when one extracts them from the earth, but which become an amorous little creature whose suavity is made of its former misery.
All those who have burned with the fire of true beauty are those who have descended into the infernos of the soul and have known the anguish of pathos. They have embraced dolor with the same desperate joy that one would have in embracing the phantom of one’s mother on the day after her death. They have felt pity. They have measured the cruel indifference of the gods. They have revolted and blasphemed.
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