Simone Weil is hard to understand. That’s a reason for reading her. Simone Weil was weird and one of those people who give saints a bad name. But what do we expect of people whose sanctity offends our most cherished presuppositions? Holiness isn't temperamentally tidy or comfortably predictable, and often is not remotely familiar. Her biographer describes Simone Weil as ‘unclassifiable’, someone who believed that ‘to be always relevant you have to say things that are eternal’.
Her lived anguish over the agonies of the world, (she died in 1943) the spiritual importance she placed on uncompromising self-immolation, the coalescence in her of supreme individualism and determined asceticism, made her , well, weird. But such characteristics generated in her laser lights of insight into the meaning of love – the love of God both terrible and tender; the call on human personality to learn to dwell in deepest Hades and highest Heaven and find God in love is indeed there, or not; and love for others, neighbour and enemy, and both with their humanity claiming forgiveness, atonement, compassion and service.
I’ve just been reading Nancey Murphy’s essay again, ‘Agape and Nonviolence’,[i] and she explores some of Weil’s thought on this. Here are a couple of extracts from Weil, via Nancey Murphy:
“To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death...To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.” Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1992) 6.
That isn’t the stuff you come across in any ‘how to’ book I know. It isn’t the stuff that feeds our hunger for ways to increase our self-esteem. The opposite. The aim of nonviolence is to ensure we do not diminish the other person. I guess what she is saying is that a Christian doesn’t try to make someone ‘pay’ for what they have done to us. I told you she was weird, and hard to understand.
But sometimes her uncompromising, unreasonable so called wisdom reminds me of someone who understood the foolishness of the cross.
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