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Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God.  Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes the Universe itself as well—­for the Universe also suffers—­and it discovers God to us.  For God is revealed to us because He suffers and because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the eternal and infinite anguish.

This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to be so, even among Christians themselves—­the scandal of a God who becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and death.  And this truth that God suffers—­a truth that appals the mind of man—­is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying.  It was the revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is divine.

And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God—­that is, of a God who suffers—­it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer—­a God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person.  Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man—­he who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and brings to life again—­will never know the Father, and can know nothing of the suffering God.

He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not live, is that logical and frozen ens realissimum, the primum movens, that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a pure idea.  The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person.  And how is the world to derive its origin and life from an impassive idea?  Such a world would be but the idea of the world.  But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of reality; it is the spirit’s sense of its mass and substance; it is the self’s sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.  And suffering is universal, suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the universal or divine blood that flows through us all.  That which we call will, what is it but suffering?