Not all griefs exalt us and add to us. There are some that are sterile,
withering, unconfessable.
Such griefs bring only misery and impoverishment. In the moral order
they stand for debts and failures. However great may be our blind
indulgence for ourselves, we cannot, on principle, impute them to
ourselves. They do not bear the stamp of destiny but of our own
baseness.
Who, indeed, would wish to share them with us, when we do not even let
them appear?
Who would wish to associate himself with our weaknesses, our shames,
our jealousies, our betrayals? Who can feel sympathy for a grief that
disavows everything pure and generous that exists in us? No mention is
made of these griefs in the Beatitudes.
Christ himself might ask us to kiss the face of a leper. But what
charity could so sacrifice itself as to embrace our shame and our
degradation?
That is the cup we must put away from our lips.
V
The stoics pursue their strange happiness with an impassibility that
is worse than death. Epictetus writes: “If you love an earthen vessel,
tell yourself that you love an earthen vessel, for then if that vessel
is broken you will not be troubled by it. If you love your son or your
wife, tell yourself that you love a mortal being, for then if that
being chance to die you will not be troubled by it.”
Comes our wisdom at such a price? If so, I renounce and abhor it.
Better trouble and sorrow than this inhuman serenity!
Certainly I willingly renounce the earthen vessel; the sound of its
breaking will never be loud enough to interrupt the conversation our
souls pursue. But those dear faces that are my horizon, my heaven and
my homeland, can I think without anguish of losing them forever? How
irreparably I should despise myself if, on that condition, I succeeded
in winning my own salvation!
This philosophy is poor, forsaken, desperate, rather than truly wise.
It renounces, by degrees, everything, for the sake of an ironical
peace. It withdraws from life the least debatable motives for
continuing it. It seeks to close the heart to sorrow. But since that
remains inevitable, it is better to love it, better to make an ally of
it, better to conquer it by main strength and possess it intimately.
Dryness of heart cannot be a good thing. What, is everything to be
taken away from me, even my grief, even that grief which remains to us
when all other blessings have been ravished away?
The resources of philosophy are poor and destitute unless the heart
can anoint them, sanctify them, and invest them with its own supreme
authority.