The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction PDF
Preview The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction
Lissa McCullough is an independent scholar who has taught religious studies at Muhlenberg College, Hanover College, and New York University. Previous books she has edited are Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer (with Brian Schroeder), The Call to Radical Theology, and Conversations with Paolo Soleri. “The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil is a beautifully written exposé of one of the most spiritually intense thinkers of the twentieth century. Shunning the cult of personality, McCullough delves deeply into Weil’s thought, offering the reader a lucid exposition of a spiritual path sustained by profound philosophical wisdom. The writing of this book, and the reading it demands, are exemplary of the kenosis that is at the core of Weil’s mystical vocation. We are all indebted to the author for this labor of love.” —Elliot R. Wolfson, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Judaic Studies, New York University “This book is a page-turner. It is totally compelling in the service of making available a religious thinking on the border between Judaism and Christianity, and also on the border between Platonism and Christianity; a thinking of God that continually troubles Christian orthodoxy while embracing it passionately; a thinking of God beyond the idolatries of divine presence. This is an extraordinarily readable text. The author’s meticulously close attention to Weil’s own texts makes for the appearance of the stark beauty of Weil’s thought.” —Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame THE RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF SIMONE WEIL An Introduction L M C ISSA C ULLOUGH Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2014 Lissa McCullough The right of Lissa McCullough to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cover photo(s) from the personal collection of Sylvie Weil, used with her kind permission. ISBN: 978 1 78076 795 6 (HB) 978 1 78076 796 3 (PB) eISBN: 978 0 85773 679 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India C ONTENTS Abbreviations and Textual Notes Introduction 1. Reality and Contradiction 2. The Paradox of Desire 3. God and the World 4. Necessity and Obedience 5. Grace and Decreation 6. Conclusion: Weil’s Theological Coherence Notes Selected Bibliography A T N BBREVIATIONS AND EXTUAL OTES FLN First and Last Notebooks GG Gravity and Grace IC Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks LP Lectures on Philosophy N The Notebooks of Simone Weil NR The Need for Roots OC Oeuvres complètes OL Oppression and Liberty PSO Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu SE Selected Essays SL Seventy Letters SNL On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God SWL Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life SWR The Simone Weil Reader RM Miklos Vetö, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil WG Waiting for God The bibliography contains full details for all references. An equal sign (“=”) in parenthetic citations indicates that the same passage appears in two texts available in English. At points I have slightly altered the English translations for accuracy or readability. Italicization is always in the original text unless otherwise indicated. Citations of the Oeuvres complètes are by tome, volume, and page (for example, OC 6.4.184), or tome and page (OC 1.72) for one-volume tomes; all unpublished translations from the French are mine. Since the generic masculine is present in Weil’s own French usage, I have allowed it to stand as historical and have not attempted to avoid it in my commentary. All biblical quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible. Weil’s extensive notebooks are the major primary source for her religious thinking. The Oeuvres complètes published in 16 volumes by Gallimard (1988–2006) has made them available in the original French in a superb critical edition (Cahiers, tome 6, vols. 1–4). In English, the closest parallel we have is The Notebooks of Simone Weil (2 vols., Routledge, 1956), which spans 1940–2, combined with First and Last Notebooks (Routledge, 1970), which made Weil’s pre-war notebooks (1933–9) and final New York and London notebooks (1942–3) available in English for the first time many years later. Portions of Chapters 2 and 5 of this book were integrated into a presentation at the University of Amsterdam in March 2005 and published as “The Void: Simone Weil’s Naming of Evil,” in Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections, ed. Hendrik M. Vroom (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 25–42. I NTRODUCTION Where does religious feeling come from? From the fact that there is a world. (OC 1.402) Since her death in 1943, acute interest in Simone Weil’s maverick personality and intensely lived short life has tended to deflect attention away from sustained consideration of her thought, or at least has diluted the quality of attention directed to it as something standing in its own right. As Palle Yourgrau noted recently, “hagiography of Simone has provided a convenient excuse not to take her ideas seriously.”1 Serious exposition of her philosophical and religious thinking has in effect been in competition with her biography. There is reason to believe that Weil herself would have been intensely displeased with this, since she maintained that every human being embodies a unique perspective on the world, and it is the distinctive world-perspective, not the “personality,” that embodies a precious and irreplaceable value. “To recount the lives of great figures in separation from the oeuvre itself,” she observed, “necessarily ends up revealing their pettiness above all, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves” (OC 2.1.351). Weil felt that her perspective on the world was embodied most essentially in her writings, not in her actions, and certainly not in her personal biography. In life she would tolerate no attention to her person, for the personality (la personne), the natural self, “that which says I,” has a strictly negative value as something to be “decreated” and rendered transparent, in her view, the better to refract the love of God in the world without egoistic distortion. Yet the world is not—any more than the self who says “I”—an end in itself, in Weil’s thinking. Although it is to be loved with all possible loyalty, the world is but a sign or metaphor of a reality that is more ultimately sacred: “The order of the world is providential […]. The world is God’s language to us” (N 480). If we learn how to read the world as a sign or metaphor, having freed it from the distortion of all self-centered attachments, what the world signifies to us is an anonymous presence of love. The name “God” is only a convenience for speaking about this fundamental insight concerning reality. In Weil’s thought, God is never a reified concept of dogmatic religion, but a naming of reality that becomes increasingly all- pervasive and experientially certain as the dogmatic idea of “God” is dissolved as unreal. Only when all idolatrous preconceptions and illusions concerning “God” are revealed to be false does the hidden God emerge, the God encountered in the void. Indeed, the void is Weil’s primary image of God as the inexistent ground of all existence. Precisely because God is God, God does not exist (N 139, 127). If God existed as things in the world exist, God would be a creature. Everything that does exist is destined to travel into the nothingness of the void: the nothingness of the nonexistent God (FLN 310). Not only is it “God who fills the void” (N 491), but conversely also “the void is God” (N 82). Any image of God, therefore, that protects us from the truth of the void—suffering, loss, and death—is idolatrous and illusory, for “to love truth signifies to endure the void, and consequently to accept death” (N 161). But for the one who seeks it out, there is love in the void, a love that is the one true value, the supreme good. This anonymous God, encountered in the void, was to become the consuming center of Simone Weil’s thought from the time of her late twenties until her early death in 1943 at the age of 34. Earlier in her life she had professed agnosticism, and the subject of God was only infrequently and rather abstractly an issue for her. When she did refer to God in her early writings, it was the God of the philosophers—of Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant in particular— who was meant, not the gracious God about whom she was later to write with passionate firsthand knowledge: “When the guest is drunk, it is then that Christ gives him the best wine” (FLN 113). As a young lycée professor with Rousseau in her intellectual background, Weil noted that “God does not teach us anything about conscience; it is the conscience (liberty) that teaches us something about God” (OC 1.402, see LP 171). Later, with her religious turn, she would come to emphasize precisely the reverse order of determination: that supernatural grace is the prevenient source of all conscience, most often “secretly” or anonymously, because it is the sole source of all authentic and pure good (FLN 122). Biographical Groundings It was contact with the world—actually, a passion for the real—that effectively turned Weil to God. Earlier in her life, Weil wrote, “my only faith had been the Stoic amor fati as Marcus Aurelius understood it, and I had always faithfully practised it—to love the universe as one’s city, one’s native country, the beloved fatherland of every soul” (SL 140). At first glance Weil’s turn to God seems to be a metanoia, a change of mind marking a conversion from strict agnosticism. From a deeper standpoint, though, this change exhibited such underlying continuity as hardly to constitute a disjuncture at all. Weil’s commitment to amor fati simply deepened to take on a more all-encompassing and sacred cast, and as it did she turned to language of God and grace to articulate a love for the real—and for truth as the shining forth of the real— which could no longer be adequately expressed in secular or nonreligious terms. But at no point did Weil believe that overt religious language or “religious belief” are necessary to authentic faith or salvation. Even the name of God is dispensable. Everything that religious symbolism seeks to express is anonymously embodied in a pure, non-illusory love for the world, embraced in full awareness of its ambiguous good and evil: “Not to believe in God, but to love the universe, always, even in the throes of anguish, as a home—there lies the road toward faith by way of atheism. This is the same faith as that which shines resplendent in religious symbols. But when it is reached by this road, such symbols are of no practical use at all” (N 469). Weil recounted in an autobiographical letter, written near the end of her life in 1942, that
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