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The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction
The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, remains in every way a thinker for our times. She was an outsider, in multiple senses, defying the usual religious at once atheistic and religious; mystic and realist; sceptic and believer. She speaks therefore to the complex sensibilities of a rationalist age. Yet despite her continuing relevance, and the attention she attracts from philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies, spirituality and beyond, Weil's reflections can still be difficult to grasp, since they were expressed in often inscrutable and fragmentary form. Lissa McCullough here offers a reliable guide to the key concepts of Weil's religious good and evil, the void, gravity, grace, beauty, suffering and waiting for God. In addressing such distinctively contemporary concerns as depression, loneliness and isolation, and in writing hauntingly of God's voluntary 'nothingness', Weil's existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke. This is the first introductory book to show the essential coherence of her enigmatic but remarkable ideas about religion.
272 pages, Paperback
First published February 27, 2014
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INTRODUCTION:
"Where does religious feeling come from? From the fact that there is a world." (OC 1.402)
CHAPTER 1 REALITY AND CONTRADICTION
"The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything [...]. That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why pure joy and the feeling of reality are identical. Everything that is grasped by the natural faculties is hypothetical. It is only supernatural love that posits. In this way we become co-creators." (N 309)
“God is attention without distraction” (FLN 141).
When attention is pure, its motivating energy is pure love. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Another form of freedom than that of choice is bound up with it, [...] namely, grace” (N 205). Conversely, as well, supernatural love and prayer are nothing else but the highest form of attention (N 311).
This is the essential difference between will and attention: will keeps us bound within the determinations of ourselves, whereas attention is a grace that releases us from those bounds.
Genius is distinct from talent, to my mind, by its deep regard and intelligence for the common life of common people—I mean people without talent. The most beautiful poetry is the poetry that can best express, in its truth, the life of people who can’t write poetry. Outside of that, there is only clever poetry; and mankind can do very well without clever poetry. Cleverness makes the aristocracy of intelligence; the soul of genius is caritas, in the Christian signification of the word; the sense that every human being is all-important. (SL 104–5)
The contradictions that the mind is brought up against form the only realities, the only means of judging what is real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test on the part of necessity. (N 329)
Cases of true contradictories: God exists; God doesn’t exist. Where lies the problem? No uncertainty whatever. I am absolutely certain that there is a God in the sense that I am absolutely certain that my love is not illusory. I am absolutely certain that there is not a God in the sense that I am absolutely certain that there is nothing real that bears a resemblance to what I am able to conceive when I pronounce that name, since I am unable to conceive God—But that thing, which I am unable to conceive, is not an illusion—This impossibility is more immediately present to me than is the feeling of my own personal existence. (N 127, see 150–1, 421
For just as the intelligence finds nothing in the music of J. S. Bach or Gregorian melody to affirm or to deny, but something to feed on, should not faith, Weil asks, be an adherence of this kind? “The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made a subject of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be a subject of contemplation” (N 245). This means a prayer-like adherence of attention.
CHAPTER 2 THE PARADOX OF DESIRE
The foundational basis of universal respect and love in Weil’s thought is not that all human beings are good, or lovable, or “deserve” love, but that all equally and without exception long for good, and this longing for good—which is the impersonal, transcendental element actually embodied in every person—is what is universally to be honored as sacred.
“Instead of loving a human being for his hunger, we love him as food for ourselves. We love like cannibals. To love purely is to love the hunger in a human being. Then, since all men are always hungry, one always loves all men” (FLN 284)
"Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in his life when he has definitely acknowledged to himself that there is no final good here below [...]. Men feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our ego. In order to bear it we have to love truth more than life itself [...]. It is for [those who do] to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what." (WG 211)
"Really to die, in the moral sense, means consenting to submit to everything whatsoever that chance may bring. Because chance can deprive me of everything that I call “I”. To consent to being a creature and nothing else. It is like consenting to lose one’s whole existence. We are nothing but creatures. But to consent to be nothing but that is like consenting to be nothing. Without our knowing it, this being that God has given us is non-being. If we desire non-being, we have it, and all we have to do is to be aware of the fact." (FLN 217–8)
“If love finds no object, the lover must love his love itself, perceived as something external” (FLN 260).
In the end, we do not become absolutely detached, for that would be to cease to love altogether, to extinguish desire. Rather, what we do is universalize the object of our attachment: “We must attach ourselves to the All” (N 21).
Faith is a gift of reading: a reading of the natural world in a supernatural light.
"One does not testify so well for God by speaking about Him as by expressing, either in actions or words, the new aspect assumed by the creation after the soul has experienced the Creator [...]. It is not the way a man talks about God, but the way he talks about things of the world that best shows whether his soul has passed through the fire of the love of God. In this matter no deception is possible. There are false imitations of the love of God, but not of the transformation it effects in the soul, because one has no idea of this transformation except by passing through it oneself." (FLN 144–5)
CHAPTER 3 GOD AND THE WORLD
In willing the creation as an object of love, God freely consents to renunciation of power and the evil that is its consequence: “This universe [...] is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are the distance. Everything that we call evil is only this mechanism” (WG 127).
As will become clearer in the chapters that follow, the world is neither good nor evil intrinsically, but is both at once dialectically. The infinite distance of the world from God is evil, but inasmuch as it actualizes the will of God to create, giving himself to a godless other, it is good. The evil within creation is a dialectical vehicle of good.
Original sin is a sin committed before any sin; it is outside time, transcendental (N 192). Weil is therefore consistent in her deep heterodoxy when she situates the fall of Adam outside the beginning of time, before existence has come into being. The original sin of Adam did not erupt in breaking a taboo or commandment; this traditional account, Weil maintains, is only a “translation of the real sin into human language”; rather, to her thinking, “time proceeded out of the sin and did not precede it” (FLN 127).
What value is there in thinking of God, the omnipotent primordial reality, as impotent in relation to creation? From Weil’s viewpoint, the gain is love. For the key duality in Weil’s thought is the universal dichotomy between power (force, gravity) and love: it distinguishes nature from grace; necessity from the good.
Grace is God’s means of “begging” for action from a human being and “waiting” for our consent and obedience, given that he cannot directly alter the machinations of necessity.
We must remember that for Weil theological language is never strictly true, and this includes language of the Trinity. Supernatural truths as set forth in verbal figures of expression are ever subject to the risk of falsification by a too direct and univocal understanding. This danger can be minimized by the use of paradox, which holds the truth above the reach of language and direct affirmation. Transcendent inspiration alone can “grasp” the reality toward which the language of religious paradox gestures.
We must view ourselves in relation to the passion, not the passion in relation to ourselves. The passion expresses and enacts God’s relation to God; it is not something God has done for us, except insofar as we “are” him through the decreation of our will.
The beauty of this good, the joy we take in it, is unintelligible (N 221). Faith alone can embrace it, consent to it, and feel joy in spite of suffering. This is a joy that redeems the sorrow of the world; it can only be encountered in immediate experience, and cannot be communicated outwardly except through the paradoxical conjunction of contradictory meanings. It is a complex supernatural joy—a joy available in the midst of the deepest anguish. It is a joy in the knowledge that, even in the greatest possible abyss of separation, love is stronger than separation. Love redeems every stringency of the void.
CHAPTER 4 NECESSITY AND OBEDIENCE
"Obedience is the very essence of the brute force inherent in Necessity itself. Everything that hurts me, everything that weighs upon me is obedient to God. Everything that smiles upon me also. The tree that covers itself with blossom also." (N 600)
“In this way, necessity becomes related to man, not as master to slave, or as an equal, but as a picture that is looked at. It is in this looking that the supernatural faculty of consent comes to birth. It is not to force as such (because it compels) that consent is given, but to force as necessity.” (FLN 89)
“Beauty seizes upon the finality in us and empties it of all ulterior end; seizes upon desire and empties it of all ulterior object, by presenting it with an object actually present and thus preventing it from launching out toward the future” (N 553).
Beauty is reality without attachment (N 319).
“It is the beauty of the world that permits us to contemplate and to love necessity. Without beauty this would not be possible” (IC 190). Because beauty alone makes contemplation of necessity possible, it follows for Weil that contemplation, not pleasure, is the aesthetic criterion (N 260).
The scandal that must be grasped in tandem with beauty is suffering; for if the beautiful is the contact of the good with the faculty of sense (FLN 98), then suffering is surely the contact of evil with the faculty of sense. Both are forms of contact with the real, the necessary, the providential.
Indeed, Weil conceives “heaven” and “hell” as essentially the same thing, the same nothingness; the difference between them depends entirely on the refusal or the acceptance of nothingness as a destiny by the soul. “Hell is a flame that burns the soul. Paradise also. It is the same flame. But depending on the orientation of the soul, this single and unique flame constitutes either infinite evil or infinite good” (N 468).
Silence dissolves our question why? into the absence of a because.
As for Spinoza, true freedom is a matter of acting in accord with the necessary relationships between things. For Weil and Spinoza alike, to grasp the essential relationship between God and necessity is the sole means of liberation of the individual toward effective action.3 There can be no question of a liberation from things as they are but only a liberation of one’s thinking in relationship to things: “Everything that is in this world is conditional. The only thing in us that is unconditional is acceptance” (FLN 112).
In the grip of gravity and its illusions, the torturer does not know the evil he is doing, for truly to know would be to do everything possible to prevent this infinite harm.
Everything in nature is both good and evil together, as we have noted; in a relative sense, mixed, in an absolute sense, dialectical.
The fact that we are able to consent at all is itself, for Weil, a proof of the reality of God: “The world is only beautiful for him who experiences amor fati, and consequently amor fati is, for whoever experiences it, an experimental proof of the reality of God” (N 242)
We wait for God because waiting is our paradoxical way of holding the good in time.
CHAPTER 5 GRACE AND DECREATION
“What is generally named egoism is not love of self, it is a defect of perspective [...]. Finite creatures only apply the idea of legitimate order to the immediate neighbourhood of their hearts” (IC 133).
Weil cites an example: from the perspective of such finite creatures in Europe, the massacre of 100,000 Chinese hardly alters the order of the world as they perceive it, whereas if a fellow worker receives a slightly higher raise in pay, the order of the world is turned upside down.
We must not struggle against moral gravity by means of action, which would be willful, but by means of thought (N 419) or nonactive action.
“To remit debts is to remain halted in the present, to acquire the feeling of eternity. Then, indeed, sins are remitted” (N 212).
From our point of view, there is no difference between annihilation and eternal life, except light. If our joy is in God, not in ourselves, our annihilation into God is nothing else but eternal life; conversely, if our joy is in ourselves, not in God, our annihilation apart from God is none other than eternal death.
“Void, when there is nothing external to correspond to an internal tension” (N 147).
“Even though I die, the universe continues. That does not console me if I am anything other than the universe. If, however, the universe is, as it were, another body to my soul, my death ceases to have any more importance for me than that of a stranger. The same is true of my sufferings” (N 19)
This marvel consists in the presence of the “unconditioned in the conditioned,” the unmoved causing movement in a certain direction, and this is the “nonactive action” that Weil so deeply embraced in the Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual traditions; that is, “acting not on behalf of a certain object, but as a result of a certain necessity” (N 124).
Virtuous action in a sense “creates” the transcendent here below by incarnating it; virtue then becomes in every respect analogous to artistic creation: “That poem is good which one writes while keeping the attention orientated toward the inexpressible, qua inexpressible” (N 417).
"To imitate divine Love, no force must ever be exercised.” (IC 120)
“Work makes us experience in a distressing way “the phenomenon of finality being shot back and forth like a ball” (N 496). Because all actions can only be means, not ends in themselves, seeking to grasp the nature of work makes us recognize that the truth lies in the cycle: “It is just when man sees himself as a squirrel revolving in a cage that, provided he doesn’t lie to himself, he is close to salvation” (N 496).
One does not labor “in order to”; one labors because one must do something, because one is in time. The best solution is to do something in time timelessly, which is to say, endlessly, because this is the closest imitation, within time, of eternity.
“By the continual presence of the Spirit in us, each of our movements is ceremony” (OC 1.71).
CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: WEIL’S THEOLOGICAL COHERENCE
The proposal here is not the anachronistic one that Weil “is” a Jansenist, but that a pervasive residual Jansenism in twentieth-century France—rather than Gnosticism, Catharism, Platonism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, or any other intellectual tradition—is the primary background influence informing the basic structure of Weil’s religious thinking, most specifically her dialectical reflections on nature and grace, God and the world.
But for Weil, as for the seventeenth-century Jansenists—who were themselves commonly charged with being crypto-Protestants—the “nature” awaiting dialectical transformation by grace is conceived not as Scholastic philosophy pictured it, nor as Luther or Calvin did, but rather as Cartesian science imaged it: a material universe “governed inflexibly by a few mechanical laws,” “soulless and godless,” with no final causes and no moral qualities (Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing, 88). Nature is precisely such a Cartesian realm in Weil’s thought.
Recognition of necessity—“consent” to it in Weil’s language—alone makes a human being free. Both Weil and Spinoza affirm that every other notion of freedom is illusory. Human consciousness feels that it is free in pursuing this or that action, but to explain this Spinoza employs the well-known example of the falling stone: if a stone were conscious of its own action in falling, it would imagine that it “continues in motion for no other reason than that it so wishes”; so, similarly, “men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined.” We have seen (in Chapter 4) that Weil works with this metaphor from the other direction: a human being who turns away from God, though he may believe that he can decide and choose, simply gives himself up to the law of gravity: he is “only a thing, a stone that falls” (WG 128, IC 193).
The change—the transfiguration—is not in the thing read but in the manner of reading, with the eyes of supernatural love. Weil makes clear that a concerted struggle of mind and body is needed to carry off such a radical transformation of our capacity to read; even if the new reading is a gift of illumination, a sustained effort is required to incorporate it fully into our being (N 23).
By drawing out the transcendental workings of intellect in Spinoza’s realism, and by refiguring Plato’s idealism within a Christian scheme of creation–incarnation– crucifixion, she manages to interpret both Spinoza and Plato as forms of what can only be called a transcendental realism.
In order to see the universe as a home, thought aspires to conceive the world as analogous to a work of art, to architecture, or dance, or music; it needs to find harmony within the limitless multiplicity of the world, to grasp the proportions that govern it (SL 125).
She sought the outlines of a new fully universal religion: a transformed Christianity that would be catholic in an unreserved sense, “not bound by so much as a thread to any created thing, unless it be to creation in its totality” (WG 98). Only the universe as a whole is a proper object of loyalty, since indeed, “only the universe is true” (FLN 122). No partiality is permissible in the exercise of love.
“It is one and the same thing, which with respect to God is eternal Wisdom; with respect to the universe, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; with respect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; with respect to our flesh, brute force” (NR 295).
"Where does religious feeling come from? From the fact that there is a world." (OC 1.402)
CHAPTER 1 REALITY AND CONTRADICTION
"The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything [...]. That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why pure joy and the feeling of reality are identical. Everything that is grasped by the natural faculties is hypothetical. It is only supernatural love that posits. In this way we become co-creators." (N 309)
“God is attention without distraction” (FLN 141).
When attention is pure, its motivating energy is pure love. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Another form of freedom than that of choice is bound up with it, [...] namely, grace” (N 205). Conversely, as well, supernatural love and prayer are nothing else but the highest form of attention (N 311).
This is the essential difference between will and attention: will keeps us bound within the determinations of ourselves, whereas attention is a grace that releases us from those bounds.
Genius is distinct from talent, to my mind, by its deep regard and intelligence for the common life of common people—I mean people without talent. The most beautiful poetry is the poetry that can best express, in its truth, the life of people who can’t write poetry. Outside of that, there is only clever poetry; and mankind can do very well without clever poetry. Cleverness makes the aristocracy of intelligence; the soul of genius is caritas, in the Christian signification of the word; the sense that every human being is all-important. (SL 104–5)
The contradictions that the mind is brought up against form the only realities, the only means of judging what is real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test on the part of necessity. (N 329)
Cases of true contradictories: God exists; God doesn’t exist. Where lies the problem? No uncertainty whatever. I am absolutely certain that there is a God in the sense that I am absolutely certain that my love is not illusory. I am absolutely certain that there is not a God in the sense that I am absolutely certain that there is nothing real that bears a resemblance to what I am able to conceive when I pronounce that name, since I am unable to conceive God—But that thing, which I am unable to conceive, is not an illusion—This impossibility is more immediately present to me than is the feeling of my own personal existence. (N 127, see 150–1, 421
For just as the intelligence finds nothing in the music of J. S. Bach or Gregorian melody to affirm or to deny, but something to feed on, should not faith, Weil asks, be an adherence of this kind? “The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made a subject of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be a subject of contemplation” (N 245). This means a prayer-like adherence of attention.
CHAPTER 2 THE PARADOX OF DESIRE
The foundational basis of universal respect and love in Weil’s thought is not that all human beings are good, or lovable, or “deserve” love, but that all equally and without exception long for good, and this longing for good—which is the impersonal, transcendental element actually embodied in every person—is what is universally to be honored as sacred.
“Instead of loving a human being for his hunger, we love him as food for ourselves. We love like cannibals. To love purely is to love the hunger in a human being. Then, since all men are always hungry, one always loves all men” (FLN 284)
"Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in his life when he has definitely acknowledged to himself that there is no final good here below [...]. Men feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our ego. In order to bear it we have to love truth more than life itself [...]. It is for [those who do] to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what." (WG 211)
"Really to die, in the moral sense, means consenting to submit to everything whatsoever that chance may bring. Because chance can deprive me of everything that I call “I”. To consent to being a creature and nothing else. It is like consenting to lose one’s whole existence. We are nothing but creatures. But to consent to be nothing but that is like consenting to be nothing. Without our knowing it, this being that God has given us is non-being. If we desire non-being, we have it, and all we have to do is to be aware of the fact." (FLN 217–8)
“If love finds no object, the lover must love his love itself, perceived as something external” (FLN 260).
In the end, we do not become absolutely detached, for that would be to cease to love altogether, to extinguish desire. Rather, what we do is universalize the object of our attachment: “We must attach ourselves to the All” (N 21).
Faith is a gift of reading: a reading of the natural world in a supernatural light.
"One does not testify so well for God by speaking about Him as by expressing, either in actions or words, the new aspect assumed by the creation after the soul has experienced the Creator [...]. It is not the way a man talks about God, but the way he talks about things of the world that best shows whether his soul has passed through the fire of the love of God. In this matter no deception is possible. There are false imitations of the love of God, but not of the transformation it effects in the soul, because one has no idea of this transformation except by passing through it oneself." (FLN 144–5)
CHAPTER 3 GOD AND THE WORLD
In willing the creation as an object of love, God freely consents to renunciation of power and the evil that is its consequence: “This universe [...] is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are the distance. Everything that we call evil is only this mechanism” (WG 127).
As will become clearer in the chapters that follow, the world is neither good nor evil intrinsically, but is both at once dialectically. The infinite distance of the world from God is evil, but inasmuch as it actualizes the will of God to create, giving himself to a godless other, it is good. The evil within creation is a dialectical vehicle of good.
Original sin is a sin committed before any sin; it is outside time, transcendental (N 192). Weil is therefore consistent in her deep heterodoxy when she situates the fall of Adam outside the beginning of time, before existence has come into being. The original sin of Adam did not erupt in breaking a taboo or commandment; this traditional account, Weil maintains, is only a “translation of the real sin into human language”; rather, to her thinking, “time proceeded out of the sin and did not precede it” (FLN 127).
What value is there in thinking of God, the omnipotent primordial reality, as impotent in relation to creation? From Weil’s viewpoint, the gain is love. For the key duality in Weil’s thought is the universal dichotomy between power (force, gravity) and love: it distinguishes nature from grace; necessity from the good.
Grace is God’s means of “begging” for action from a human being and “waiting” for our consent and obedience, given that he cannot directly alter the machinations of necessity.
We must remember that for Weil theological language is never strictly true, and this includes language of the Trinity. Supernatural truths as set forth in verbal figures of expression are ever subject to the risk of falsification by a too direct and univocal understanding. This danger can be minimized by the use of paradox, which holds the truth above the reach of language and direct affirmation. Transcendent inspiration alone can “grasp” the reality toward which the language of religious paradox gestures.
We must view ourselves in relation to the passion, not the passion in relation to ourselves. The passion expresses and enacts God’s relation to God; it is not something God has done for us, except insofar as we “are” him through the decreation of our will.
The beauty of this good, the joy we take in it, is unintelligible (N 221). Faith alone can embrace it, consent to it, and feel joy in spite of suffering. This is a joy that redeems the sorrow of the world; it can only be encountered in immediate experience, and cannot be communicated outwardly except through the paradoxical conjunction of contradictory meanings. It is a complex supernatural joy—a joy available in the midst of the deepest anguish. It is a joy in the knowledge that, even in the greatest possible abyss of separation, love is stronger than separation. Love redeems every stringency of the void.
CHAPTER 4 NECESSITY AND OBEDIENCE
"Obedience is the very essence of the brute force inherent in Necessity itself. Everything that hurts me, everything that weighs upon me is obedient to God. Everything that smiles upon me also. The tree that covers itself with blossom also." (N 600)
“In this way, necessity becomes related to man, not as master to slave, or as an equal, but as a picture that is looked at. It is in this looking that the supernatural faculty of consent comes to birth. It is not to force as such (because it compels) that consent is given, but to force as necessity.” (FLN 89)
“Beauty seizes upon the finality in us and empties it of all ulterior end; seizes upon desire and empties it of all ulterior object, by presenting it with an object actually present and thus preventing it from launching out toward the future” (N 553).
Beauty is reality without attachment (N 319).
“It is the beauty of the world that permits us to contemplate and to love necessity. Without beauty this would not be possible” (IC 190). Because beauty alone makes contemplation of necessity possible, it follows for Weil that contemplation, not pleasure, is the aesthetic criterion (N 260).
The scandal that must be grasped in tandem with beauty is suffering; for if the beautiful is the contact of the good with the faculty of sense (FLN 98), then suffering is surely the contact of evil with the faculty of sense. Both are forms of contact with the real, the necessary, the providential.
Indeed, Weil conceives “heaven” and “hell” as essentially the same thing, the same nothingness; the difference between them depends entirely on the refusal or the acceptance of nothingness as a destiny by the soul. “Hell is a flame that burns the soul. Paradise also. It is the same flame. But depending on the orientation of the soul, this single and unique flame constitutes either infinite evil or infinite good” (N 468).
Silence dissolves our question why? into the absence of a because.
As for Spinoza, true freedom is a matter of acting in accord with the necessary relationships between things. For Weil and Spinoza alike, to grasp the essential relationship between God and necessity is the sole means of liberation of the individual toward effective action.3 There can be no question of a liberation from things as they are but only a liberation of one’s thinking in relationship to things: “Everything that is in this world is conditional. The only thing in us that is unconditional is acceptance” (FLN 112).
In the grip of gravity and its illusions, the torturer does not know the evil he is doing, for truly to know would be to do everything possible to prevent this infinite harm.
Everything in nature is both good and evil together, as we have noted; in a relative sense, mixed, in an absolute sense, dialectical.
The fact that we are able to consent at all is itself, for Weil, a proof of the reality of God: “The world is only beautiful for him who experiences amor fati, and consequently amor fati is, for whoever experiences it, an experimental proof of the reality of God” (N 242)
We wait for God because waiting is our paradoxical way of holding the good in time.
CHAPTER 5 GRACE AND DECREATION
“What is generally named egoism is not love of self, it is a defect of perspective [...]. Finite creatures only apply the idea of legitimate order to the immediate neighbourhood of their hearts” (IC 133).
Weil cites an example: from the perspective of such finite creatures in Europe, the massacre of 100,000 Chinese hardly alters the order of the world as they perceive it, whereas if a fellow worker receives a slightly higher raise in pay, the order of the world is turned upside down.
We must not struggle against moral gravity by means of action, which would be willful, but by means of thought (N 419) or nonactive action.
“To remit debts is to remain halted in the present, to acquire the feeling of eternity. Then, indeed, sins are remitted” (N 212).
From our point of view, there is no difference between annihilation and eternal life, except light. If our joy is in God, not in ourselves, our annihilation into God is nothing else but eternal life; conversely, if our joy is in ourselves, not in God, our annihilation apart from God is none other than eternal death.
“Void, when there is nothing external to correspond to an internal tension” (N 147).
“Even though I die, the universe continues. That does not console me if I am anything other than the universe. If, however, the universe is, as it were, another body to my soul, my death ceases to have any more importance for me than that of a stranger. The same is true of my sufferings” (N 19)
This marvel consists in the presence of the “unconditioned in the conditioned,” the unmoved causing movement in a certain direction, and this is the “nonactive action” that Weil so deeply embraced in the Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual traditions; that is, “acting not on behalf of a certain object, but as a result of a certain necessity” (N 124).
Virtuous action in a sense “creates” the transcendent here below by incarnating it; virtue then becomes in every respect analogous to artistic creation: “That poem is good which one writes while keeping the attention orientated toward the inexpressible, qua inexpressible” (N 417).
"To imitate divine Love, no force must ever be exercised.” (IC 120)
“Work makes us experience in a distressing way “the phenomenon of finality being shot back and forth like a ball” (N 496). Because all actions can only be means, not ends in themselves, seeking to grasp the nature of work makes us recognize that the truth lies in the cycle: “It is just when man sees himself as a squirrel revolving in a cage that, provided he doesn’t lie to himself, he is close to salvation” (N 496).
One does not labor “in order to”; one labors because one must do something, because one is in time. The best solution is to do something in time timelessly, which is to say, endlessly, because this is the closest imitation, within time, of eternity.
“By the continual presence of the Spirit in us, each of our movements is ceremony” (OC 1.71).
CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: WEIL’S THEOLOGICAL COHERENCE
The proposal here is not the anachronistic one that Weil “is” a Jansenist, but that a pervasive residual Jansenism in twentieth-century France—rather than Gnosticism, Catharism, Platonism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, or any other intellectual tradition—is the primary background influence informing the basic structure of Weil’s religious thinking, most specifically her dialectical reflections on nature and grace, God and the world.
But for Weil, as for the seventeenth-century Jansenists—who were themselves commonly charged with being crypto-Protestants—the “nature” awaiting dialectical transformation by grace is conceived not as Scholastic philosophy pictured it, nor as Luther or Calvin did, but rather as Cartesian science imaged it: a material universe “governed inflexibly by a few mechanical laws,” “soulless and godless,” with no final causes and no moral qualities (Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing, 88). Nature is precisely such a Cartesian realm in Weil’s thought.
Recognition of necessity—“consent” to it in Weil’s language—alone makes a human being free. Both Weil and Spinoza affirm that every other notion of freedom is illusory. Human consciousness feels that it is free in pursuing this or that action, but to explain this Spinoza employs the well-known example of the falling stone: if a stone were conscious of its own action in falling, it would imagine that it “continues in motion for no other reason than that it so wishes”; so, similarly, “men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined.” We have seen (in Chapter 4) that Weil works with this metaphor from the other direction: a human being who turns away from God, though he may believe that he can decide and choose, simply gives himself up to the law of gravity: he is “only a thing, a stone that falls” (WG 128, IC 193).
The change—the transfiguration—is not in the thing read but in the manner of reading, with the eyes of supernatural love. Weil makes clear that a concerted struggle of mind and body is needed to carry off such a radical transformation of our capacity to read; even if the new reading is a gift of illumination, a sustained effort is required to incorporate it fully into our being (N 23).
By drawing out the transcendental workings of intellect in Spinoza’s realism, and by refiguring Plato’s idealism within a Christian scheme of creation–incarnation– crucifixion, she manages to interpret both Spinoza and Plato as forms of what can only be called a transcendental realism.
In order to see the universe as a home, thought aspires to conceive the world as analogous to a work of art, to architecture, or dance, or music; it needs to find harmony within the limitless multiplicity of the world, to grasp the proportions that govern it (SL 125).
She sought the outlines of a new fully universal religion: a transformed Christianity that would be catholic in an unreserved sense, “not bound by so much as a thread to any created thing, unless it be to creation in its totality” (WG 98). Only the universe as a whole is a proper object of loyalty, since indeed, “only the universe is true” (FLN 122). No partiality is permissible in the exercise of love.
“It is one and the same thing, which with respect to God is eternal Wisdom; with respect to the universe, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; with respect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; with respect to our flesh, brute force” (NR 295).
July 16, 2022
Probably the best commentary I've read on Weil's religious thought. McCullough's range here is exhaustive, and she ties together a number of debates and themes in Weil's work which to me seemed unrelated, or at least haphazardly related. I am unconvinced by McCullough's argument that for Weil the relation between God and world is dialectical, but I am also unconvinced by the main alternative to McCullough's reading, that Weil is a pantheist, so this is probably more my problem than McCullough's.
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