Dreaming the Future Closer

Lately, I have found myself thinking about Simone Weil quite a bit.  She’s one of those people whose work seems to have fallen between the cracks, in part I suspect because of her earnest refusal to separate her political and religious thought into separate boxes.

Her political work, though, forms one of the most legitimate ‘third ways’ to the capitalism vs. communism debates I have found.  Her spiritual work…well, it’s just some of the most rigorous, insightful, unrelenting stuff out there.  I recommend it unhesitatingly, but not without qualifications.  Much of this has to do with how thoroughly Christian her spiritual thought becomes.

I am unwilling to throw out her work because she is Christian, though.  The spiritual insights described by many Christians are real, are meaningful, and not just internal to their faith.  The dismissive attitudes of some of those Christians toward our faith does not diminish the truth of their writings.  Nor, of course, does it necessarily affirm them.

What follows after the cut is my effort to highlight some of the things Weil has to offer us non-Christians and to make sense of those qualifications.  All the citations in this piece come from the translation of Gravity and Grace published by Routledge.  I’m aware that the work is posthumous collections of her notes.  The unguarded nature of those makes it much more useful for this discussion.  I think this may be my longest post to date and definitely one of my more ‘academic,’ so be forewarned ;-).

The pomegranate seed. We do not pledge ourselves to love God, we give our consent to the engagement which has been formed within us in spite of ourselves. (39)

We give consent…yes.  This is something pagan religious thought is still struggling with.  Because so many pagan religions have emerged as people go back and reclaim old religions, religions in which they were not born and which do not receive a great deal of public affirmation, there is a lot of talk about choice.

Occasionally, the issue becomes more pronounced, such that we make selecting a religion akin to selecting a date for the evening.  I surely spent a spell flirting with different varieties of paganism, even as it was apparent to myself that I was just flirting with them.  I look back and wince at the times when I would have suggested someone work with a spirit solely on the basis of some perceived similarity in temperament.

It is, of course, fine to look around, fine to seek after your spiritual source when you do not find it in the religion to which you are born.  But that does not change that spiritual work is a matter of calling, a calling that exists regardless of whether you answer it or not.

You do not get to choose your calling.  You do not get to subsitute it for the calling you imagine yourself happiest in.  Your choice is to accept and affirm it within yourself or to deny it and deny yourself.

That is the hard nub of a spiritual life, to accept or deny your calling, even and especially when it makes your life more difficult.

Weil does more than affirm this, though, she proceeds to elaborate how we go about making sense of, and following, a duty that isn’t just a choice.

Convergency as a criterion.  An action or attitude for which reason affords several distinct and convergent motives, but which we feel transcends all imaginable motives. (41)

We know we are in the presence of our calling when we can 1)  produce many good and sensible reasons for taking up the calling and 2) feel that there remains something above and beyond those reasons that motivates us, a spiritual presence that we cannot reduce to our human conceptions.

Why this need for the excess we can’t understand?  Because the spiritual is bigger than us in all possible ways.  It exceeds our ideas because our ideas are merely human.  This is the truth of a spiritual humility.  We must accept that while we may align our conceptions of the divine with the divine, those conceptions do not exhaust the divine.

This notion of alignment is key.  We do not have the ability to choose our calling. We do not have the capacity to understand the calling in its entirety.  We do have the capacity to shape our reason in accordance with that calling so that we may engage with it more fully.

The myths and rituals of a faith are exactly the tools we use to achieve that alignment.  They do not exhaust the divinity they enable us to relate to, but they do allow us to relate to them in a more direct manner.  When they do not do so, that is one indication we may be off of our spiritual wire, the line that connects us to the heart of our calling.

Here, of course, Christian thinkers like Weil will suggest that this is why pagan conceptions of divinity are untrue and false, because they dwell in myths and stories that cannot but be inadequate to divinity.  They dwell in partial names that cannot but be aspects of a greater whole that is God.

Weil, in fact, is far more drastic in her statement of this idea.

Evil has to be purified—or life is not possible.  God alone can do that.  This is the idea of the Gita.  It is also the idea of Moses, of Mahomet, of Hitlerism….But Jehovah, Allah, Hitler are earthly Gods.  The purification they bring is imaginary. (70)

She not only excludes paganism, but most other brands of monotheism, condeming them to the same place as the Nazi cult of personality.  It’s Weil’s peculiar hubris that she is doesn’t seem able to overcome, but which we, as readers, can.

At the heart of Weil criticism is the projection of her personal experience into an absolute statement.  For Weil, an engagement with ‘Jehovah’ as a spiritual being is an imaginary engagement.  For Weil, an engagement with ‘Allah’ is an imaginary engagement.

I agree with Weil about Hitler not just because Hitler was a reprehensible person, but that is because ‘Hitler’ is (especially in the 1940’s when Weil is writing) nothing but a person, with all the limitations inherent in that.  A connection to ’spirit’ by way of him cannot be an imaginary swelling of him.

What, though, does Weil mean by imaginary?  Weil uses that term to refer to a tendency people have to substitute false knowledge for true knowledge.  The easiest thing for a person to do when confronted with confusion is to project their own ideas out into it, like how we see images in a Rorschach blot.

When we use our imagination, we are not seeing things as they are, but as we expect or wish them to be.  We can do this more or less deliberately, more or less intensely.  At its most extreme, it is the root of self-delusion.  At its most moderate, it is the root of intellectual laziness.

It becomes delusion when we actively ignore experiences that would contradict our idea of how things are, laziness when we passively don’t engage with the world so we don’t have to deal with being wrong.

Religion can be imaginary.  When we just go through the motions of the faith, disengaged, we have a lazy imaginary relationship.  When we try to inflate our experiences, when we try to make small signs into great portents of impending doom or salvation, we engage in delusion.  And there is a rich terrain of imaginary religion betwixt th two, where laziness and delusion lead to a soft medley of comfortable just-so stories about our lives.

What Weil can say is something like this: I have studied Judaism, explored its spiritual practices.  At each turn, those practices did not allow me to engage more deeply with my calling.  At each turn, they let me develop comfortable half-truths.

What she cannot say, if she is being honest is this: Judaism is a religion of half-truths, with no substance but that given to it by fantasy.  This substitution of her own judgment for an absolute judgment is exactly the sort of danger that she warns us about, and warns us about here by example.

It’s telling, too, that when Weil is confronted with becoming more involved in her own faith, with baptism, with all the rites of Catholicism, she hesitates and pulls back, afraid that these will foster her imagination rather than her calling.  She is, in short, eclectic in her own practice (hold that thought, I will want to come back to that).

The particular practices of a faith have truth only to the extent they give voice to a calling.  When they give voice to a calling, they bring a holy and sacrifying influence into a person’s life.  They exert a force counter to the natural entropy of life, of psyche, making it easier for the person to do good rather than no good, good rather than pass along harm.

Make it easier, though, does not mean that it makes it easy.  It’s hard to do good, it’s draining.  No matter how devoted, how much work we do, we are still material, limited beings.  We are subject to terrible harm and stress.  Religion does not prevent that.  It merely makes it easier to resist the downward movement.

Weil’s inability to see beyond her own intimations of the divine are one sign of this.  As unrelentingly intellectual and questioning as she was, she still succumbed to the temptation to see in her experience the model for religious experience.  Even though she knew better:

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there…to read in him that he is certainly something different…from what we read in him….Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

We read, but we are also read by others….Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery).  Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest).  A mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people. (121-22)

This is where Weil struggles the most in her work.  She is aware of the dialogue between the deaf, but doesn’t have a good sense of how to move beyond that frustrating place where everyone is just talking at and past each other.

I would suggest this is because she is not quite able to move beyond her own imaginary ideas of what a community looks like and its role.  She doesn’t quite have a full sense of how a calling, which seems so personal, meets the communal.

Here we need to think back to what she has shown the calling to be.  It isn’t mine but is addressed to me.  The calling is rarely just a calling ‘for me.’  It is addressed to me but for the sake of others.  Just as it opens me up to the divine that is before me, it opens me to the community in which it finds its realization.

This gives a way to fill out religious practice.  While it only finds truth in the way it facilitates a calling, each calling only requires a portion of the practices in order to become manifest.  Those who maintain the tradition maintain the fullness of the tradition’s practice, though, for the sake of others who will be called to it, for the sake of those whose calling will find fruition through the practices that another’s calling does not.

This is where Weil’s eclecticism comes back up.  Personal spiritual engagement is necessarily eclectic.  However, that eclecticism is possible only through a broader community that maintains the totality of the practice.  Weil’s work is possible because she has such a broad community of people, past and contemporary to her, that have built and maintained the religious structure through which she is able to readily develop her personal calling.

In order to move beyond conquest and slavery, we need to alter the way in which we understand and affirm spiritual practice.  We need to affirm spiritual practice in the plural.  We need to teach ourselves to recognize in other practices a truth available to practitioners whose calling is answered in it.  Simultaneously, we need to affirm our own practice when we find our calling answered in it.

That affirmation of our own practice is essential and only functional when applied to a practice that meets the standard of convergence.  Without those two elements, the affirmation dissolves into anyway-you-like-it relativism, which is the enemy of a calling.

Affirmation is not opposed to passing judgment, to making determinations of right and wrong.  It is a higher form of judgment, which we must struggle to maintain, even as we are sure to lose touch with it from time to time.  The truth of the calling becomes the weight, the standard, by which other so-called truths are judged, by which their relative value is established.

This sort of affirmation is the affirmation of the comparison.  It is also an affirmation of that affirmation on the part of others.  This should be most pointed, most intense, in relationship our experience of those closest to us.  We should affirm and weigh the spiritual decisions of those around us, offer counsel, listen to counsel, most because it is through that community that our own calling is able to manifest.

We should also affirm it more abstractly, of those further removed from us, even when the people we affirm are not able or willing to affirm it of us in turn.  By refusing to recognize the sincere spiritual calling of those different from us, we habituate ourselves to letting imagination into our lives.  If I think of every Christian I meet in terms of my own experience with Christian practice, I am engaging only with my own ideas of Christianity, not with the actual Christians earnestly carrying out their calling to the best of their (necessarily limited) abilities.

Of course, sometimes I am going to do just that.  I have limited resources of attention and often those will have to go toward more pressing matters.  But, at least with an intellectual acknowledgment of that, I leave the space open for a deeper engagement later.  I have the tools to weed out my errors when I come across them.

Through that intellectual process, we also lay the groundwork for another kind of habit, the habit of affirmation, judgment, and counsel.  That groundwork makes it easier to develop the real habits that would fulfill them later, when we are more capable of that.

When we have not found our calling, it is also leaves the mind open to its call.  When we affirm spiritual practice in the abstract, we affirm the potential for another practice that would better help us align with the calling.  By defusing imagination, by defusing the intellectual arrogane which allows us to to demean another practitioner, we encourage the sort of silence through which the voices of divinity most readily travel.

There is so much more that can be said, but I will save that for other work.  This is quite a lot of reading as is.