e first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully,
however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.

For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of
suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to
love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete
one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God
everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving
God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His
creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so
long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God
Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our
soul is not free.

My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my
anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself.
And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from
me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have
compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the
compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and
reveals to me the universal misery.

And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected
pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes
of others and in the exercise of charity?

When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God
within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad
in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in
the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we
experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what
Teresa de Jesus, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering"
(_dolor sabroso_), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is
as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of
making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity
consists, is the work of suffering love.

We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds
within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity
when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of
universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For
we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having
no common r