Book Review - Gravity and Grace (Simone Weil)

Simone Weil - observe her handsome rather than beautiful appearance

This enigmatic figure draws heavily from Buddhism and Eastern philosophy in her mystical exploration of Christianity. Her accounts of grace often square closely with Christian orthodoxy, even if there are elements of Marcionism (gnosticism) in her treatment of the Old Testament and her repudiation of the sacred character of the Israeli nation, as an institution uniquely blessed and set apart by God for the redemption of the World.

She brings her considerable intellect to bear in this epic text "Gravity and Grace", which spans the gamut of her thinking on profound themes such as "Gravity and Grace", "Void and Compensation", "Decreation", "Necessity and Obedience", "Idolatry" and "Love". Her expositon of these themes is not organized, but one gets the impression of a text consisting, in the main of, a loose collection of difficult-to-understand aphorisms with a strong poetic quality.

"Gravity and Grace" by James Melinat

It is her tendency to make sweeping generalizations, however, that discredits her work. For instance, Weil writes the following in her chapter on Gravity and Grace: "All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention." There is hardly anything controversial in this Augustinian or Platonic account of grace, which is found in the scholastics and reeks everywhere of Aquinas, but is nowadays generally rejected by many Protestants and the Orthodox (who are outright semi-Pelagian). By denying the presence of intermediate or inferior means in nature that are themselves strictly speaking the result of Grace, she wholehandedly rejects the validity of the Church's experience, and the whole dialogue between the Word and the World. In her Manichean schema, there is no place for such a dialogue, no place for a process of "traditionizing" and "interpreting". Her's is literally a bipolar world, with unique binary oppositions, a nasty composite of duplexes.

Weil also writes: "The contemplation of human misery wrenches us in the direction of God, and it is only in others whom we love as ourselves, that we can contemplate it. We can neither contemplate it in ourselves as such nor in others as such." Again, one can immediately refute this from experience as out of hand. Affliction can both harden, leading to bitterness, or provide a ground of understanding and thus lead to empathy, as both Scripture and common sense attest to. The direction in which this contemplation takes us, depends precisely on the disposition of the person in question, and no generalization is possible. We are either calloused by suffering, or being chastised, our hard hearts are broken up. All depends on, of course, faith, the inexplicable gift of Grace.
She also writes rather enigmatically: "Everything which is gripped by our natural faculties is hypothetical. It is only supernatural love that establishes everything. Thus we are co-creators." Her book is riven throughout by indecipherable connections such as these, which seem to carry a kernel of isolated meaning and insight, but remain unconnected to the rest of the text. It is easy to understand how "everything gripped by our natural faculties is hypothetical" but what relation this bears to the "supernatural love that establishes everything" and how this implies "co-creation" is unexplained. Elliptical verses like these are perhaps part of the reason why philosophy is easier than it is made out to be, much of the difficulty arises from the ambiguity of the philosopher on the said concept, rather than a defect of the reader's intelligence. And her gnomic hodge-podge of aphorisms is shot through with ellipses like these.

On Contradiction, however, she astutely observes: "All true good carries with it conditions that are contradictory, and as a consequence, impossible. He who keeps his attention fixed on this impossibility and acts will do what is good." There is a point at which an analysis of good and evil in terms of their fundamental exponents, quite apart from one's feeling-sentiments, leads one to a disturbing point where one's cherished values seem so arbitrary. Anyone who has engaged himself beyond his natural capacities or beyond the limits of prudence, in the serious pursuit of God, of Truth and of Goodness, stumbles into what theologians call the "dark night of the soul", where everything seems meaningless, even futile. As the Jews were the first to truly understand, the Holy is the dangerous, and approaching the Numinous on our own initiative can be lethal.

On the role of the intellect in the mystical life, she avers that it is not to be shunned, but rather cultivated: "Intelligence can never penetrate the mystery, but it, and it alone, can judge the suitability of the words which express it. For this task, it needs to be keener, more discerning, more precise, more exact and more exacting than any other." As a non-mystic myself (except in occasional moments of prayer and meditation on the Word as become an ordinary Christian), I cannot assess the validity of this assertion, other than to say that Christian meditation is a thing different from Eastern meditation. As Foster, my favourite Puritan says: "Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to empty the mind in order to fill it." It is precisely the second limb, which Simone Weil, in my humble opinion, seems to lack, and which makes her putatively Christian faith (which she describes as the least of the lies in a world full of Lies) sometimes seem like a trendy fusion between Christianity and Buddhism. Whatever one's position on the matter (and mine is firmly entrenched in the Apostolic Tradition), Simone Weil cannot be accused of inconsistency. She literally worked herself to death for the sake of the Other, and during the invasion of France by Germany, finally perished from consumption. Her stringently ethical character are perhaps the only perceptible traces of Jewish ascetism that has been taken over by an abstracted voided form of "Platonic Christianity" shorn of its forms, references and ultimate ends, and with a yogic accent.