Question 8.133

8.133 “In every man, at every hour, there are two solicitations, one toward God, the other toward Satan. The call toward God or spirituality is a desire to ascend in rank; the one toward Satan or animal instincts is a joy to descend.” Does this reflection by Charles Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil) seem enlightening to you?

That great poet agrees with the remarks of Saint Paul about the difficulty of doing good. Remember that the apostle said: “I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom 7:22-23). In man there is a nostalgia for God, a connatural attachment and an aspiration to go toward the Father. However, man still has two sides; he is divided between his search for the good and the power of darkness. Every day the devil seeks to trap us in the nets of temptation. Man looks toward heaven, but the heaviness of the devil attracts him incessantly. From this perspective, prayer, supplemented by penance, is an act of resistance, a sign of not submitting to the prince of this world. I think that the Christian philosopher Simone Weil was right when she said in her book Gravity and Grace: “Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil. Evil is limitless, but it is not infinite. Only the infinite limits the limitless.” This reflection states the truth of our earthly condition. In the same way, she fittingly concluded with this promise about the outcome of our combat: “To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value, and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?”¹

In the history of mankind, God promised us that evil would not have the last word. Through the tribulations of this great struggle, we need to know that we are not alone. Without the help of grace, we are lost children; man is a vine that seeks to climb toward the sun, but it needs a firm tree. For mankind, the Church is that tree; and for the Church, this tree around which to wind, in order to make her children climb to heaven, is Christ.