THE MEANING OF GRACE

As for me, I believe that the quintessential form of love is that between a man and a woman, not only sexuality but a rich net-work of affective states. Has anyone ever committed suicide in the name of God, nature, or art? Love grows in intensity when it fastens on the concrete; one loves a woman for what makes her different, unique in the world: nothing can replace her at the height of passion. All other forms of love, though tending toward

The enthusiast heeds no criteria, makes no calculations; he is all abandon, restlessness, and devotion. The joy of achieving and the ecstasy of efficiency are the essential characteristics of the man for whom life is a leap toward heights where destructive forces lose their negative intensity. We all have moments of en- thusiasm, but they are too rare to stamp us permanently. I am referring to people in whom enthusiasm is predominant and constitutes the essential mark of their personality. They do not
know defeat, because it is not the goal but the initiative and pleasure of acting that attracts them; they throw themselves into action not because they have meditated upon its consequences but simply because they cannot help it. Although not altogether impervious to success, the enthusiast is neither stimulated by it nor defeated by its absence. He is the last one to fail in this world.

Life is more mediocre and fragmentary than we think: isn’t this the reason for our decline, the loss of our vivacity, the hardening of our inner rhythms, the gradual slowing down of our vital flow?

This process of waste destroys our receptivity and our willingness to embrace life generously and enthusiastically. The enthusiast alone preserves his energy until old age; all others, if not already born dead like most people, die before their time. How rare the true enthusiast! Can we imagine a world in which everybody will love everything, a world of enthusiasts?

Such an image is even more alluring than the image of paradise, because its excesses of generosity surpass any of those in Eden. The enthusiast’s ability to be constantly reborn raises him above life’s demoniacal temptations, the fear of nothingness, and the torments of agony.

His life has no tragic dimension, because enthusiasm is the only form of life totally opaque to death. Even grace—so similar to enthusiasm—has less of this irrational ignorance of death.

 

 

In grace, life is a flux of pure vitality, never breaking the harmony of its own rhythms. Life becomes dream, disinterested play, expansion contained in its own borders. Thus it creates a pleasant illusion of freedom, spontaneous abandon, dreams wrought in sunlight. Despair is the paroxysm of individuation, a painful and unique interiorization.

Grace, on the other hand, leads to harmony and naive fulfillment, and the graceful being never experiences feelings of loneliness and isolation. Grace is an illusory state in which life negates its antinomies and transcends its demonic dialectic, in which contradictions, fatality, and the consciousness of the irrevocable temporarily vanish. Light and airy, grace sublimates but never purifies, because it never reaches the heights of the sublime. Ordinary experiences never carry life to heights of delirious tension or to the edge of inner abyss, nor do they free it from that symbol of death, the law of gravity. Grace, however, is emancipation from the law, emancipation from subterraneous temptations, from life’s demonic claws, its negative tendencies. Transcending negativity is the essential characteristic of grace. It is not surprising, then, that in a state of grace, life appears more luminous, draped in sparkling rays. By transcending all negatives and demons through harmony and lightness of being, grace ascends to a state of well – being faster than religious faith, which attains it through suffering and strife. What diversity there is in this world, for right next to grace there is permanent fear, the torture of many.

He who has not experienced absolute fear, universal anxiety, cannot understand struggle, the madness of the flesh and of death. He who has known only grace cannot understand the anxiety of the sick.

Only sickness gives birth to serious and deep feelings. Whatever is not born out of sickness has only an esthetic value. To be ill means to live, willingly or not, on the heights of despair. But such heights presuppose deep chasms, fearful precipices—to live on the heights means to live near the abyss. One must fall in order to reach the heights.

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The Meaning of Grace

There are many ways to transcend our blind attachment to life, but only through grace do we not break with its irrational forces; it alone is a futile leap, a disinterested elan which does not spoil life’s naive charm. Grace is the joy of soaring upward. 

The undulations of graceful movements bespeak light and immaterial flight. They have the spontaneity of wings beating in the air, of smiles, of pure young dreams. Isn’t dance grace’s best form of expression?

In grace, life is a flux of pure vitality, never breaking the harmony of its own rhythms. Life becomes dream, disinterested play, expansion contained in its own borders. Thus it creates a pleasant illusion of freedom, spontaneous abandon, dreams wrought in sunlight. Despair is the paroxysm of individuation, a painful and unique interiorization. Grace, on the other hand, leads to harmony and naive fulfillment, and the graceful being never experiences feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Grace is an illusory state in which life negates its antinomies and transcends its demonic dialectic, in which contradictions, fatality, and the consciousness of the irrevocable temporarily vanish. Light and airy, grace sublimates but never purifies, because it never reaches the heights of the sublime. Ordinary experiences never carry life to heights of delirious tension or to the edge of inner abyss, nor do they free it from that symbol of death, the law of gravity.

Grace, however, is emancipation from the law, emancipation from subterraneous temptations, from life’s demonic claws, its negative tendencies. Transcending negativity is the essential characteristic of grace. It is not surprising, then, that in a state of grace, life appears more luminous, draped in sparkling rays. By transcending all negatives and demons through harmony and lightness of being, grace ascends to a state of well-being faster than religious faith, which attains it through suffering and strife. What diversity there is in this world, for right next to grace there is permanent fear, the torture of many.

He who has not experienced absolute fear, universal anxiety, cannot un- derstand struggle, the madness of the flesh and of death. He who has known only grace cannot understand the anxiety of the sick.

Only sickness gives birth to serious and deep feelings. Whatever is not born out of sickness has only an esthetic value. To be ill means to live, willingly or not, on the heights of despair. But such heights presuppose deep chasms, fearful precipices—to live on the heights means to live near the abyss. One must fall in order to reach the heights.

But grace is a state of contentment, even happiness, and it knows neither abyss nor agony. Why are women happier than men?

Is it not because in them grace and innocence are more common than in men?

They too are affected by sickness and dissatisfaction, but grace predominates. Their naive grace confers on them a state of superficial equilibrium, which never leads to tragic and dangerous tensions. Women are safe on the spiritual plane because in them the dualism between life and the spirit is less intense than in men. A graceful sense of existence does not lead to metaphysical revelations, to a vision of truth, to the sense of an ending which poisons every moment of life. Women are ciphers: the more you think about them, the less you understand them. In front of women one is silent just as one is silent in contemplation of the world’s secret essence. But where the latter is unfathomable infinity, the former is simple mystery, in other words, void. Not greatly disjoined from life, woman is a temporary salvation for those on the heights of despair, because through her a return to life’s unconscious and innocent pleasures is still possible. Grace, if it has not saved the world, has saved its women.