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.