Simone Weil and the Iliad Today

Many believe that Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, Poem of Force,” published in Cahiers du Sud (Marseilles) in December 1940 and January 1941, is her most impressive writing; through Mary McCarthy’s translation it was also her first work to reach the English-speaking world.

In a sense, Simone Weil herself sums up her interpretation in the essay’s first paragraph:

The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is force. That force which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man’s flesh cringes. The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with force, swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers. Those who dreamt that force, thanks to progress, belonged henceforth to the past, have been able to see its living witness in this poem: those who know how to discern force throughout the ages, there at the heart of every human testament, find here its most beautiful, most pure of mirrors.

According to the opinion of her friend and biographer Simone Petrement, the principal concern of Simone Weil was to understand the Iliad. Throughout the essay comments are interspersed with her translation of Homer’s Greek verses. Petrement believes that no translation had ever before adequately grasped the human tenderness and pity that pervades the Iliad. Further, Simone Weil strongly emphasized the “incurable bitterness” of the poem. As she wrote:

It is this which makes the Iliad a unique poem, this bitterness, issuing from its tenderness, and which extends, as the light of the sun, equally over all men. Never does the tone of the poem cease to be impregnated by this bitterness, nor does it ever descend to the level of a complaint. Justice and love, for which there can hardly be a place in this picture of extremes and unjust violence, yet shed their light over the whole without ever being discerned otherwise than by the accent. [This word refers to her knowledge of Greek.]

A Catholic reading her essay today is especially struck by her references to the Gospels, and to the relationship she sees between Greek thought and the Evangelists. She wrote:

The Gospels are the last and most marvelous expression of Greek genius, as the Iliad is its first expression. The spirit of Greece makes itself felt here not only by the fact of commanding us to seek to the exclusion of every other good “the kingdom of God and his righteousness” but also by its revelation of human misery, and by revealing that misery in the person of a divine being who is at the same time human. The accounts of the Passion show that a divine spirit united to the flesh is altered by affliction, trembles before suffering and death, feels himself at the moment of deepest agony separated from men and from God. The sense of human misery gives these accounts of the Passion that accent of simplicity which is the stamp of Greek genius.

Simone Weil refers to the Agony in the Garden and to the terrible cry of Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27.46 and Mk. 15.34) In the writings gathered in the book, Gravity and Grace, she interpreted this utterance: “There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine.”

Although affliction is always metaphysical, it can also penetrate the soul through physical sufferings and humiliation. Christ’s affliction, for example, was a real affliction, from which he uttered his immortal outcry, a question that will always remain unanswered. The poetry expressing affliction is great only when that cry sounds through every word. Simone Weil believed this occurred in the Iliad.

Through a careful look into Homer’s Greek epic, she reached far beyond ancient Greece in her understanding of history and the human heart. Her essay is as pertinent today as when she wrote it over sixty years ago. She recognized that the Iliad is a beautiful poem because it is truthful, based on lucid thought, justice and charity.

Each of us can hope to reach into the truth so wonderfully elaborated by Simone Weil. In her Notebooks she points the way:

Impossibility—that is, radical impossibility clearly perceived, absurdity—is the gate leading to the supernatural. All we can do is to knock on it. It is another who opens.

I was particularly struck by her feeling -- personal feeling for the reality of human misery. I suspect this sensibility came out of her experience of affliction. How much all of us are in her debt!

Lee Hoinacki

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