Gide's Good Read

     Piano-practice. It is useless, even harmful, to persist in working too long at one time over the same passage. It is better to return to it often; this is what constitutes real patience. Nothing is less romantic. To a vehement capture by assault, it prefers a slow and methodical siege.
     Likewise, for profound difficulties in artistic creation. Likewise in piety and knowledge of God: the apparently most sudden revelation is preceeded by a gradual, slow preparation. The work of art is always the result of an unsatisfied perseverance.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide: Volume II: 1914-1927, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 1916, p. 129.

     What do I care about the controversies and quibbles of the doctors? In the name of science they can deny the miracles; in the name of philosophy, the doctrines; and in the name of history, the facts. They can cast doubt on His very existence, and through philological criticism throw suspicion on the authenticity of the texts. It even pleases me that they should succeed in doing so, for my faith in no wise depends on that.
     I hold this little book in my hand, and no argument either suppresses it or takes it away from me; I hold it fast and can read it when I will. Wherever I open it, it shines in quite divine fashion, and anything that can be brought against it will do nothing against that. This is where Christ escapes the very ones who have come to lay hold of Him, and not through cunning or force and where they, back among the chief priests, when the chief priests and Pharisees ask them: Why have ye not brought him? — Quare non adduxitis illum? — reply: Nunquam sic locutus est homo. — Never man spake thus — sicut hic homo — like this man. (John, vii, 46.)
     I read, in the preface to the Gospels in my Vulgate, that if "instead of making of the apostles witnesses who are reporting what they have seen and heard, one tried to make of them, as the rationalists suppose, writers who are inventing what they say, it would be appropriate to say with Rousseau that the inventor is much more surprising than the hero." I did not know that Rousseau had said that, but I think it also, and that it is not so much a question of believing in the words of Christ because Christ is the Son of God as of understanding that He is the Son of God because His word is divine and infinitely above everything that the art and wisdom of man offers us.
     This divinity is enough for me. My mind and heart are satisfied with this proof. Anything you contribute in addition obscures it.
.... O Lord, it is not because I have been told that you were the Son of God that I listen to your word; but your word is beautiful beyond any human word, and that is how I recognize that you are the Son of God.
— André Gide, Ibid., from Numquid et tu...? (1916-1919), pp. 169-170.

     Et nunc ...
     It is in eternity that right now one must live. And it is right now that one must live in eternity.
     What care I for eternal life without awareness at every instant of the duration?
     Just as Jesus said: I Am the way, the truth, He says: I am the resurrection and the life.
     Eternal life is not only to come. It is right now wholly persent in us; we live it from the moment that we consent to die to ourselves, to obtain from ourselves this renunciation which permits resurrection in eternity. He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto eternal life. (John, xii, 25.)
     Once more, there is neither prescription nor command here. Simply it is the secret of the higher felicity that Christ, as everywhere else in the Gospels, reveals to us.
     If ye know these things, happy are ye, says Christ later. (John, xiii, 17.) Not: Ye shall be happy — but: happy ARE ye. It is right now and immediately that we can share in felicity.
     What tranquillity! Here truly time stops. Here breathes the Eternal. We enter into the Kingdom of God.
— André Gide, Ibid., from Numquid et tu...? (1916-1919), pp. 172-173.