That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima, which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all existential—­that is, passional—­activity.  In material mechanics and in social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain.  And the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with the least happiness.  And it is necessary to choose between the one and the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme anguish.  And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery that kills.  “Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is,” said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his Dialogos de la conquista del reino de Dios (Dial. iii. 8).

And there is something still more anguishing than suffering.  A man about to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out:  “Can it be that I no longer exist?” Which would you find most appalling—­to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus pierced through without feeling any pain?  Have you never felt the horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears?  Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists; and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal.  Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.

To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him suffering, to pity Him.

It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering implies limitation.  Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.  And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him.  God suffers in each and all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him.  Religious anguish is but the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I suffer in Him.