Simone Weil: Powerlessness

Who is Simone Weil?
French, died in 1943 in England, when she was only thirty-four years old. Her many writings were translated into English and published after World War II. Gustave Thibon, who knew her well, wrote that “a limpid mysticism emanated from her.” He also wrote that she knew how to laugh. T.S. Eliot has written that readers of her work find themselves “confronted by a difficult, violent and complex personality.” One must simply expose oneself “to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Her writing is full of paradox, but the sublimity of it is breathtaking. If you want to have your heart and mind expanded, read Simone Weil’s books.

Many think that the essay, “The Iliad, Poem of Force,” is Simone Weil’s most impressive writing. The work was first published in two parts, in December 1940 and January 1941, in the Cahiers du Sud. The poem was the Iliad, perhaps the most influential work in the whole of Western literature. Simone Weil begins by stating that:

The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force. The force that men wield, the force that subdues men, in the face of which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul seems ever conditioned by its ties with force, swept away, blinded by the force it believes it can control, bowed under the constraint of the force it submits to. Those who have supposed that force, thanks to progress, now belongs to the past, have seen a record of that in Homer’s poem, those wise enough to discern the force at the center of all human history, today as in the past, find in the Iliad the most beautiful and flawless of mirrors.

One could go on and on and end by quoting all of the essay, for there is an inimitable wisdom throughout her writing. But that is not the purpose of what I want to do, namely, see what she says about powerlessness. To do this one may begin with what she says about power, as in the example given. But first one can see what she says about the nature of contradiction, for contradiction is the criterion, she maintains. She further says:

All true good carries with it conditions which are contradictory, and as a consequence is impossible. He who keeps his attention really fixed on this impossibility and acts will do the good. In the same way all truth contains a contradiction.

She goes on to say that “Contradiction experienced to the very depths of the being tears us heart and soul: It is the cross. The mystery of the cross of Christ lies in a contradiction, for it is both a free-will offering and a punishment which he endured in spite of himself.”

As one approaches the cross of Jesus Christ, one gets close to Simone Weil’s thoughts and the reality itself of her powerlessness. Perhaps one can say that all her thought and life are mirrored in the cry of Jesus Christ: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27.46) For her, this was truly great poetry. Poetry which struggles to express pain and misery can be great only if the cry of Jesus Christ sounds through every word. This is an incredible cry, a question that will forever remain unanswered on this earth.

She says: “Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.” Here Simone Weil shows the either-or character of the choice every believing person must make: either violence or the cross, or endless suffering. As there are many ways to be violent, so there are many ways to suffer.

She sees: “The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!” Then she expresses the powerlessness of her life: “I have to know that as a thinking, finite being I am God crucified. I have to be like God, but like God crucified.”

Her thoughts on the Roman Empire and its effect on the Church are one of the most telling aspects of powerlessness. She believed that one of the principal difficulties of the Church was that it strove to imitate the Roman Empire as empire, as an all-powerful entity. Every believer who embraces the glory and power of the Church abandons Jesus Christ. A hard saying — but this is what she believed. She thought that the Church should imitate Jesus in his poverty, in his nothingness. But there is more . . .

One finds in Simone Pétrement’s biography what she calls the “terrible prayer” of Simone Weil:

Father, in the name of Christ grant me this. That I may be unable to will any bodily movement, or even any attempt at movement, like a total paralytic. That I may be incapable of receiving any sensation.

And she goes on, concluding: “But all these spiritual phenomena are absolutely beyond my competence.”

It may be that her thoughts on decreation can help one to see her powerlessness. She says:

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual. At each moment our existence is God’s love for us. But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being.

It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time, and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.

We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

May God grant that I become nothing.

Finally, it is necessary to admit that anything related to Simone Weil, her life of study, teaching, political agitation, her beliefs in religion, philosophy and politics, her mysticism and perhaps her sanctity is enormously complicated and it is often hard to put all this together in a consistent way.

One can find in her writing and in her life a total lack of power. As she said, when confronted with the possibility of baptism, I want to be obedient. In this case, she wanted to be obedient to God. God did not command her to accept baptism, and she conformed herself to this.

But the final word is found in the Gospel. There it says that “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert.” (Mt. 4.1) He fasted for a long time and when breaking the fast he was hungry. The devil then appeared. After two temptations, the devil produced a third. The Gospel says that “the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this will I give you.” (Mt. 4.8-9)

It seems the devil was truthful — he did own all the world, all that was worldly, and it was his to give. This is the emptiness that Simone Weil chose; she wanted nothing of the world and its riches. She chose to be radically poor.

Lee Hoinacki

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