Plato has seen—he develops it in his Phaedrus—that all great things are somehow done in a state of madness (the term meaning here, not of course a pathological condition of insanity, hut our being entranced by something greater than we are). Then we thrust off or become enchanted away, as it were, from the secure base which we have laboriously established for ourselves and on which we have built our ordinary life.

These are the moments, then, in which a great thing bursts into our life and shakes its hitherto solid framework. The firm ground on which we have formerly moved securely, able to govern and to order rationally all our affairs, is drawn from under our feet. We no longer have, as we had before, a sense of sovereignty over the situation. That is why Plato attributes a specific value to being in love: for being in love essentially implies a kind of soaring above the normal level of our life, a certain rapture.

Whenever anything thus causes us to soar above the habitual plane of our life, whenever we are possessed by something that overwhelms us not by its mere dynamism but by its objective superiority, we also become delightfully aware that it is precisely this renunciation of our sovereignty which makes us really free.

Only, we must carefully maintain here a keen distinction between two things which resemble each other superficially but in reality are separated by an immense difference. One is a state of mind towering above our normal level of life, the other a condition in which we sink beneath that level.

This is not the only instance of men’s aptness to mix up the supra-normal with what is in fact inferior to normality. Thus, there are not a few who fail to see the difference between purity and lack of sensuality. So also some cannot discern the difference between the peaceful serenity of a saint and the emotional obtuseness of a Stoic—only because they are both opposed to the unstable type, swinging to and fro between the poles of jubilation and of excessive grief. And yet the two are much farther from each other than either is from the normal temperament of a person of warm emotions.

Possession by God is the opposite of abandonment to passion or to mass psychosis

To return to our topic, an essential distinction must be established between one’s being swept off one’s feet by the impact of a dynamic passion as such, and one’s being possessed by something not only stronger but intrinsically higher than oneself. An untrained mind, it is true, will easily overlook that difference.