Intime should twice have made use of the Spanish word nada, nothing, doubtless because he found none more expressive in any other language?  And nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of delight—­that is to say, the element of personal consciousness.  The soul allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity.

A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling.  And hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal glory as a place of eternal boredom.  And it is useless to despise feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous.

It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note of the fact that man’s highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying consciousness.  Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of learning.  In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge.  Man’s pleasure, his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation.  And hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted.  There is a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Nunez de Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic and the Pacific are visible.  On beholding the two oceans the old man fell on his knees and exclaimed, “I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not let me die without having seen so great a wonder.”  But if this man had stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful, and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished.  His joy was the joy of discovery.  And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness continually active.

It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the absence of shock, of difference—­in a word, of activity.

May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with God thinkable destroys our longing?  What difference is there between being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself?  Is it the stream that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream?  It is all the same.