Dreaming the Future Closer

[Just to get the rough outline of this out of my head] 

In her essay on human rights, Weil makes this astounding statement about what defines a person.  She says in clear terms that she cannot imagine an account of ethics that would make a person’s body merely incidental to their person.  She speaks clearly about how gauging out someone’s eyes does not merely change their body, but assaults their very person.

Yet, how much ethical thought is charged with making our body incidental to our self?  Carried further, how much religious thought is charged with making the physical manifestations of an object incidental?  How often does someone reply that this holy object was *just* an object when they are confronted with its destruction?

When we look at ritual, at the work that goes into investing holy objects, I can’t help but think we wander far astray if we see those rituals, those objects, as merely symbolic.  While I do not want to underestimate the importance of meditation, of inward work, nor do I want to underestimate the inherent value in sacred objects, value that resides outside of our ideas of them. 

Through sacred things, the world of spirit and the world of things enter into communion.  The destruction of them, while it may never ‘kill’ the world of spirit, does real damage to the divine, to its mingling with the world.  We do not simply honor what is ever present, but through our actions secure a place for it in the world, secure a channel through which it may flow.

This is not a one-sided argument for never destroying sacred things ever.  In fact, the whole question of being sacred gets bound up with the question of sacrifice, with its potential destruction.  But what it does point toward is a mindfulness to the sacred that sees its real presence in particular things and takes actions in regard to that sacred thing with that real presence in mind.

The tibetan sand mandala may be one of the most well-known exemplars to draw upon.  The mandala is sacred, made sacred through the ritual process of its creation.  At the same time, its creation is bound up with the sacrifice of it at the conclusion of the process, but that destruction is itself part and parcel of its sacred character. 

In a similar way, we might consider a soldier who, mindful of the incredibly precious body that they are, still offers up that body to damage and destruction for the sake of another, hopefully more profound, sort of sacredness. 

It’s not always about preserving the sacred at all costs, but acknowledging its presence wherever we find it, and attending to it.  So that, to the best of our very limited abilities, we come to secure a greater place for the sacred throughout life, destroying according to deeper rhythms than purely selfish hungers.

I just finished working my way through Simone Weil’s Letter to a Priest. It, like so much of that writing at the end in which she seems to be desperately racing against her own mortality, glows with insight and honesty.  It does not erase her shortcomings, but quite the opposite throws them up into clear relief.

Her account of Judaism, her distrust of it, is nowhere more elaborated.  It’s even understandable, but it’s shot through with ignorance.  She has no understanding of the complex apparatus of commentary in which the Tanakh is situated, no awareness of the mystical dimension of the Jewish religion that is not so far from her own, that is not a mere expression of ethnic nationalism.

I think of another soul swallowed up by that war, Walter Benjamin, and wish so much that they could have crossed paths.  His personal approach to the Jewish notion of the messiah, his Marxism, is different from Weil’s republican leftism, her Christian charity, in just the right way.  They both might have thrown light upon each other.

This is one of those things that drives me forward intellectually, the hope that through my own intellectual work I might be able to foster the encounter between the ideas of great thinkers that were not to be in their life.  There’s optimism there but it’s tinged with melancholy because any staged encounter I can manage is only the play of ideas, not of their persons. 

So there is this beautiful passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in which he describes the orbits of the gods about the Good, each accompanied in train by the souls they have chosen for their retinue.  It’s a beautiful passage and, sadly, I don’t have a copy of the work ready to hand to quote. 

But I was always struck by how that seemed to parallel the notion in many African diaspora faiths that the orisha or loa chose heads.  The metaphor seemed nearly identical, right up to the notion that the orsha/loa were in turn oriented toward Olodumare or Bon Dieu, the greater Good.

So, let me share this little bit I came across in Simone Weil’s Intimation of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks:

The image of the man as a plant whose root penetrates heaven is linked in the Timaeus to a theory of chastity….This plant is sprinkled by celestial water, a divine semen, which enters the head.  In that man who continually exercises the spiritual and the intellectual part of himself…in him the whole contents of the head, including the divine semen, is propelled by circular movements like those which govern the rotation of the heavens, the stars and sun.  This divine semen is what Plato calls the divine being lodged with us, in us, and whom we must serve. (98-99)

How well this parallels the whole notion of initiation and worship in many of the African diaspora faiths!  It’s interesting to think of that in evolutionary terms, as indication perhaps that the two share a common ancestor.  If naught else, it’s interesting to consider in terms of parallel development.

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 ;-). 

(more…)

This is the ethico-spiritual corollary of the last few posts:

“An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence.  A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.”—Simone Weil

It is a relentless truth, that must at all costs be prevented from swerving into misplaced masochism.  True humility is the royal road.  That is not to say I am without value, but that I cannot appreciate or judge that value. 

The effort to gauge and strengthen my self-esteem opens up to a deadly spiral.  The isolation of the ‘I’ is empty, takes it away from all the objectivities that define and compose it.  As I dwell upon the empty ‘I,’ I am compelled to inflate with boasting or succumb to despair. 

More often than not, I waver between the two.  I keep myself from nihilism by telling myself how good I am.  Then, full of myself, I turn to admire myself, only to find my own empty boasting, which sends me toward despair again.

Looking out, I summon the fullness of my situation, in which my obligations and my efforts to fulfill them, bring true goodness into the world.