The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

CHAPTER IV MYSTERIES OF PERVERSITY Human equilibrium is composed of two attractions, one towards death, the other towards life. Fatality is the vertigo which drags us to the abyss; liberty is the reasonable effort which lifts us above the fatal attractions of death. What is mortal sin? It is apostasy from our own liberty; it is to abandon ourselves to the law of inertia. An unjust act is a compact with injustice: now, every injustice is an abdication of intelligence. We fall from that moment under the empire of force whose reactions always crush everything which is unbalanced. The love of evil and the formal adhesion of the will to injustice are the last efforts of the expiring will. Man, what- ever he may do, is more than a brute, and he cannot abandon himself like a brute to fatality. He must choose. He must love. The desperate soul that thinks itself in love with death is still more alive than a soul without love. Activity for evil can and should lead back a man to good, by counter- stroke and by reaction. The true evil, that for which there is no remedy, is inertia. The abysses of grace correspond to the abysses of per- versity. God has often made saints of scoundrels; but He has never done anything with the half-hearted and the cowardly. Under penalty of reprobation, one must work, one must act. Nature, moreover, sees to this, and if we will not march on with all our courage towards life, she flings us with all 256