Paying Attention To The Sky

Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Les deux mystres (The two mysteries) 1966, oil on canvas, 60 80 cm, private collection, London. With his incredible skill at painting realistic objects and figures Magritte decided to make each of his painting a visual poem. He said: “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.” This is not a pipe, but which one?

I can still recall my first encounter with Christian mystery. Finally being able to express a long-held doubt or spiritual confusion in a question: How does God’s sacrifice on the Cross come to mean my redemption? And then watching my Christian mentor pause, reflect and answer: “That’s all part of the paschal mystery…” Always the “mystery.” Look, I wanted to say, if you have no answers but only “mysteries” how does this come to mean religion. No, no, I don’t want to hear that answer.

Anyways as one who embraced the notion of mystery, the following is as near to an answer I have ever encountered – once again I am indebted to this little French girl a few generations back who seems to be able to speak to me and others. Sometimes just a line in one of her notebooks, but my God, such lines. Everything about her is endlessly fascinating to me. Even my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, seemed to be held in thrall by her.

Here Dr. Springsted reflecting on Simone Weil’s understanding of “mystery:”

I.

When St. Paul employs the term “mystery” in his writings he generally does so in order to discuss what is revealed in Christ. Common parlance, however, often inverts Paul’s sense of the term by making the mystery refer to what is opaque and yet to be revealed and understood. The twentieth century, though, has seen important work designed to recapture the original religious sense of mystery. Rudolf Otto, for example, in The Idea of the Holy, has argued that mysterium is “the wholly other, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible and the familiar… filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.” (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, London: Oxford University Press, 1970 p.26) It is thus an essential part of religion and not something to be eradicated by additional light at some later date.

Gabriel Marcel has further noted that a mystery needs to be distinguished from a problem. Problems, he says, are “subject to an appropriate technique…whereas a mystery by definition transcends every conceivable technique.” Mysteries are not an obstacle to thought, but are apprehended by “an essentially positive act of the mind.” (Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being South Bend: Gateway, 1978 p. 211)

Finally, Karl Rahner has also noted that mystery is not a lack of knowledge that will be solved in the beatific vision, but “rather [is] one of the positive attributes of such intuitive knowledge [of God].” (G.A. McCool, ed., A Rahner Reader, New York: Seabury, 1975 p.118) Mystery thus for all these writers is not a blank unknown, nor a puzzle to be solved, but is an enlightening and essential part of our knowledge of God.

Simone Weil is another writer who was also concerned with mystery and who refused to understand it as something unclear and problematic. Like these writers, she saw mystery as essential to religion. Weil’s contributions toward understanding the religious use of mystery, however, have not been noticed. This is largely because most of her references to mystery are buried in her notebooks. Yet if one searches these notebooks carefully, one will discover a well-defined sense of mystery. I will argue that once we uncover what mystery means for Weil we will see not only an additional contributor to the recovery of mystery, but will also be better able to understand Weil’s own use of mystery in her writing and her ideas on its application.

II.

In order to come to an understanding of Weil’s notion of mystery we must begin by considering her use of the more common philosophical term “contradiction.” Now what philosophers mean by contradiction is rather straightforward; they mean that any statement that can be put in the form “s is p & not-p” is a contradiction. Any statement that can be put thus is meaningless for it asserts at the same time two opposite predicates of one subject. Although Weil uses the term “contradiction” in this way, as we all do, she never spends time discussing it, with the exception of this comment in The Lectures on Philosophy: “At bottom, the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of grammar” (Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 78).

Since Weil did not believe that grammar is an infallible guide to reality, she clearly puts this philosophical use of “contradiction” to one side as something that will not provide any ultimate clue to reality. We, of course, wish at this point that she would explain exactly why contradiction does not provide this clue, but unfortunately she does not. Instead we find her using the term in such ways that it includes virtually any sort of opposition between two thoughts. In this regard “contradiction” for Weil signals not only our inability to think that “s is p” and “s is not-p” at the same time when “s” must logically be one or the other; it also includes opposing thoughts that are only a matter of being contraries, or incommensurates, or finally the elements of religious mystery such as the belief that God is One yet Three.

At first this use of terms seems careless. We are struck, nevertheless, by the frequency with which Weil uses “contradiction” and in ways that are equivalent with other terms such as “contrary,” “incommensurate,” and “mystery.” The insistence seems to token some more ultimate point. In fact it does, for we can discern three basic ways in which thoughts for Weil can be in opposition to each other. These are as paradox, as incommensuration, and finally as mystery.

Weil’s first sense of contradiction is a simple one. it is an opposition between perceptions, thoughts, ideas or the predication of terms that we need to solve in order to contemplate their truth. It is with this sense in mind that Weil says “every truth contains a contradiction” (Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 410). The formulation is clearly intended to be paradoxical but it is not nonsense. Rather what Weil means here is that “contradiction” occurs whenever our intellect comes up against an unforeseen obstacle that forces us to recast our thoughts in order to accommodate it. In this sense, “contradiction” is the sort of thing we set in front of our students’ minds in order to get them to think on their own by considering problems they have not previously seen.

Weil’s use of “contradiction” in this sense is revealed by her remark:

“Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true” (Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 93). The fact that this is a method of investigation for Weil is at least helpful in explaining why she deliberately wrote in such a paradoxical style. “Contradiction” is therefore for her a valuable heuristic device for “emerging from the point of view” (Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 46). In light of this understanding of contradiction we can also see that Weil intends “contradiction” as a means to a more inclusive and insightful way of conceiving our existence and its conditions. Contradiction can also be, in this special sense, a sign of our having met reality, for as Weil puts it in the Lectures on Philosophy, reality “is what method does not allow us to foresee” (Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 73).

We can order the world to our size, but we only understand its existence as independent of our thoughts when we find that it somehow manages to go its own way, despite our expectations. The mind that can accommodate shocks to its self-imposed order is therefore one that has emerged from a solipsistic dream and has begun to think in truth. Noting the opposition of “contradiction” between our mental order of the world and the way the world goes on its own can therefore be a gateway to a fuller encounter with reality.

In the final analysis, however, this sense of contradiction, no matter how helpful pedagogically, means no more by itself than “paradox” or “problem.” By itself it perhaps embodies no more than a truism or a philosophical triviality. The sorts of opposition that Weil intends by “contradiction” do not stop here, however; instead there are two increasingly stronger meanings, namely, incommensuration and mystery.

In Weil’s writings the philosophical meat of “contradiction” is essentially what we would normally call “incommensuration,” that is to say, the comparison of two things that have no common intellectual measure. In fact, that Weil usually means incommensuration when she speaks of contradiction is seen in that she often uses the two terms interchangeably. Here it is important to see the difference between incommensuration and apparent contradictions, for apparent contradictions can be resolved by analysis and proper predication of the opposing terms involved, whereas in incommensuration the terms cannot be so resolved.

For example, there is an apparent contradiction between our perceptions of the earth’s place in space and a heliocentric theory of the earth’s movement. That contradiction is resolved, however, by the heliocentric theory’s ability to explain both the anomalies of planetary motion presented by a theory developed solely in accordance with our perceptions and why we would have those perceptions in the first place. In incommensuration, however, the two incommensurate elements are both adequately conceived and understood. There simply appears to be no way to compare them, as we say of apples and oranges. Now we can do one of three things when faced with incommensurates: we can leave them uncompared; we can in a confused way try to compare them and then beg philosophy to help us, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, to show the fly the way out of the bottle and revert to the first option; or we can try to find some real unity to the set.

If we choose the last option, however, Weil points out, what we need to do is to discover the unity of the set on a “higher plane” than the one on which the elements are incommensurate. This can, in fact, be done and can be seen by help from an illustration from mathematics, one that Weil herself found enlightening. In early Greek mathematics, when numbers were represented by lines, each line could be expressed as a natural number by virtue of the ratio (logos) it has to another line when both have a common measure, no matter how small. This expressible logos was in fact for the Greeks the very definition of number and its applicability embraces all the natural numbers. However, it was discovered that not all lines do have a common measure, such as the sides of an isosceles right triangle and its hypotenuse. They therefore have no logos. These lines are incommensurate (alogos) and no amount of manipulating can discover a logos in the prescribed sense.

The consequence of having no logos threatens the rationality of the most rational science. But Eudoxus found that by extending the sense of logos to cover the relative magnitude of lines one could include the natural numbers and the irrationals in the one real number system. A logos/alogos (a ratio involving incommensurates) is not definitely expressible as we can see when we try to write the exact value of, say, the square root of two, but it is a perfectly rigorous relation between incommensurate numbers. The new theory of numbers does not in the least change the incommensuration between two numbers having no common measure, for they still have no common measure. What it does do, however, is transcend the limitations of the natural and irrational numbers by conceiving an order of numbers that incorporates both, but is not reducible to the definitions of either.

The applicability of this way of reasoning goes further than just the proportion between lines. It can also be extended to other incommensurate elements such as weight, time, and distance to yield important formulas in physics. Weight, time, and distance are all distinct things, but once we introduce an overriding concept of number they can be combined to yield equations in physics. Weil understood this, and introduced it as a principle of reasoning in many realms:

The system of Eudoxus, by which a ratio between weights can be equaled to a ratio between times, etc. — How is it we allow ourselves not to refer to it in education? If it is a case of rational ratios — 3 hours are to 2 hours as are 3 kilos to 2 kilos — at bottom the notion is the same but concealed by the numbers. . . . Since it is possible in this way to equalize the notions in the case of two completely different pairs of magnitudes one could hope to be able also to apply the notion of ratio to psychological and spiritual matters.
(The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 162)

When incommensurates are reconciled their unity can be a witness to aspects and dimensions of our existence of which we may not have been previously aware, or at least were confused about. We regard all sorts of entities as real, not because we see them but because they give a solution to problems we cannot solve otherwise. Weil believed this sort of understanding was also possible in psychological and spiritual matters wherein surd (vocab: A surd is a number or quantity that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers.) elements of our experience could bespeak a need for unity on a higher plane, a need that, if met, could give us a clearer understanding of our lives and thus a firmer grasp on them. It was on the basis of reasoning such as this, I believe, that Weil found incommensuration such a valuable tool. It led her to assert: “All veritable good involves contradictory conditions, and is therefore impossible. He who keeps his attention really and truly fixed on this impossibility, and acts accordingly, will carry out good” (The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 410).

There is a further sense of incommensuration that cannot be covered by the Eudoxean system and that is where two incommensurates are not only not of the same kind and are not possibly describable as being of the same kind. (Time and distance are obviously not of the same kind, but both can be described numerically, which for purposes of the equation does make them of the same kind.) This sort of incommensuration Weil thought can only be unified in infinity. Weil does not specifically note this kind of incommensuration, but indicates something of the sort when she says: “What is contradictory to natural reason is not so for supernatural reason, but the latter can only use the language of the former” (First and Last Notebooks, 109). Here is where Weil brings in the notion of mystery as the most absolute sense of what she means by contradiction. Mystery involves this final sense of incommensuration. It is not a notion, Weil thinks, that can be used for any and every opposition the mind encounters in thinking; instead, it is to be used only for incommensurates that seem inextricably linked, yet without our being able to comprehend that in which their unity lies.

Weil has definite criteria for legitimate and illegitimate uses of mystery. The use of mystery is legitimate when it involves three things:

1. when there are two clearly conceived terms that are in contradiction (incommensuration) with each other and are not resolvable into a unified system by the finite intelligence;
2. when suppression of either of these terms renders the other meaningless;
3. when suppression of the mystery that arises from taking the two terms together results in a loss of light shed upon the intelligence. The first criterion is essentially negative and defines mystery as something that is not merely another attempt of the intelligence to find unity. The last two criteria are more positive, for they indicate that the opposition in thought we encounter in mysteries is essential to the mystery.

Further, despite their opposition, those things we find opposed we are also obliged to hold as unified since the meaning of each element seems to depend on the other, as “contradictory” as the two may seem to each other. It is only together that the opposing elements give light. The apprehension of the supernatural is thus essentially a mystery, not its dissolution. Weil writes:

The notion of mystery is legitimate when the most logical and rigorous use of the intelligence leads to an impasse, to a contradiction which is inescapable in this sense: that the suppression of one term makes the other meaningless and that to pose one term necessarily involves posing the other. Then, like a lever, the notion of mystery carries thought beyond the impasse, to the other side of the un-openable door, beyond the domain of intelligence and above it. But to arrive beyond the domain of the intelligence one must have travelled all through it, to the end, and by a path traced with unimpeachable rigor…Another criterion is that when the mind has nourished itself with mystery, by a long and loving contemplation, it finds that by suppressing and denying the mystery it is at the same time depriving the intelligence of treasures which are comprehensible to it, which dwell in its domain and which belong to it.
 (First and Last Notebooks, 181)

An important example of how Weil applies this notion of mystery is her treatment of the “problem” of evil. The philosophical problem of evil concentrates on the supposed contradiction between asserting that evil exists and asserting that an omnipotent and wholly good God creates the world. Logically it appears that a good and omnipotent God either would not allow evil to exist in his creation, or would suppress it immediately should it arise. The fact that evil exists therefore calls into question either God’s goodness or omnipotence or both. We could deny that evil exists, of course, but that is strongly contrary to our intuitions. Thus there is a contradiction.

Weil, however, rather than trying to solve this as a problem, instead thinks the truth can only be found by accepting both God’s goodness and the existence of evil. In her analysis of affliction, for example, she uncovers an ultimate form of evil in which any thought or even dream of being ennobled by the experience is precluded. She refuses to assume that this counts against God’s existence, however, and instead seeks to see how an understanding of God’s love can help us to understand what affliction is and how an understanding of affliction can lead us to understand God’s goodness better.

Now if contradiction were taken in its formal logical sense, affliction would be sound evidence for God’s nonexistence. If, however, mystery is invoked, although the tension between God’s goodness and affliction is not weakened, the two may co-enlighten each other, as Weil thought they do on the cross, even if the finite intelligence cannot in fact or principle bridge the gap. Not to hold the mystery may therefore cause one either to deny the evil of affliction, which is real, or to deny God, in which case the evil of affliction is a permanent and unredeemable matter.

III.

When we have examined Weil’s various uses of “contradiction” we can see that her use of the term is not careless and equivocal but signals an important element in her thought. Contradiction in the way Weil uses it is important for at least three reasons.

1. First, insofar as it stands for something opposed to the way we would tailor the world to our size, it signals to us that there is, indeed, much more of the world we need to take into account,
2. Second, it beckons us to seek a higher and more complete unity to our understanding of the world.
3. Finally, it leads us to understand that the ultimate unity of all things in God is a mystery, not in the sense that the unity is opaque and obscure, but in the sense that that unity transcends our thoughts.

Weil’s understanding of contradiction and mystery is interesting enough on its own and is important as a further contribution to investigations into the concept of mystery. The context of Weil’s discussion of contradiction and mystery, however, indicates that she intended her ideas to be much more than a conceptual analysis. Instead of simply providing such, an analysis, she clearly wants to press these ideas into the service of spirituality in such a way that they can be understood as effective tools for our coming to understand the world and to apprehend the mystery which is its source. In this regard contradiction is an important device within spirituality, and, as she suggests when she notes that a method of investigation ought to discover contradiction, should be used in presenting any idea to our minds.

The application of such a method can quite clearly be far-ranging, for it can include our perceptions, thoughts, ideas and especially the way we use words to think. Weil herself does not shrink from such applications and, in fact, uses this method in an original way to describe what we would call the role of the imagination in both religion and literature. But before we reach that point it is necessary to consider a related idea that is a crucial bridge. The notion is that of “reading” (lecture).

Reading for Weil is in the first instance similar to what we mean when we use a phrase such as “How do you read it?” Reading is thus essentially an interpretation of what our senses present to us; we not only perceive but see. It is a phenomenon entirely natural to every thinking being. Weil, however, does not think that this reading is entirely arbitrary, nor is it casual. Instead, what we read is something suggested to us not only by our perceptions, but also by our conditioning. Further, for her, reading is a total interpretation engaging the whole person, and usually includes an impetus for action. As an example of reading, Weil cites the instance of a defeated king being led through the streets of Rome by the conquering Romans. His followers read in the sight their king; the Romans, a conquered man. Each reading, we understand, causes one to react in a different way to the sight, but it is clearly not arbitrary how each reading comes about (cf The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 39).

Despite the fact that readings are suggested by sensations and conditioning, they nevertheless can be more or less inclusive of reality, less or more self-centered and therefore better or worse. Throughout her notebooks when she is discussing reading, Weil constantly ponders the problem of how to avoid a false reading since there is a good deal of choice in our readings. Ultimately she sees that we need to read God’s hand behind all existence and also sees that this reading must include in a hierarchy all other good readings, even if they are limited. As she writes: “Superposed readings: To read necessity behind sensations, to read order behind necessity, to read God behind order” (Gravity and Grace 123). The questions that need to be answered, however, are how one transcends a limited reading and how one escapes a false reading. The answer for Weil lies in the process by which we come to understand that we are in fact reading, and then alter our readings.

At first we do not understand that we are reading. The Roman captives and the Roman conquerors hardly need to be supposed to be thinking they are “reading” the procession as anything — they are simply seeing it as it is, or so it seems to them. Yet the situation has also spawned two quite different readings; one group sees a king, the other sees a slave. There does not seem to be any meeting ground. Yet Weil suggests that a joint effort can allow both groups to arrive at a third reading that is the same for all. Clearly this third reading is one that is more inclusive than either of the two earlier readings and allows us to see the situation most clearly.

In her essay on the Iliad Weil praises Homer for being able to write with this sort of clear vision. It is a vision that allows him to side neither with the Greeks nor with the Trojans. Rather what he sees in that war is what is most pitiable in any war, the human soul subjugated by a blind and impartial force. In order to arrive at such a third reading, however, one must be able to take seriously somebody else’s reading. It is clear that Weil’s first two senses of contradiction are important for being able to do this, for somebody else’s reading is often in opposition to our own. But it is also clear from the Notebooks that Weil does not think it a bare intellectual exercise to take into consideration another person’s reading in order to arrive at a new one. Simply to entertain another perspective is rarely to give up your own, and unless one gives up one’s own limited reading, one cannot arrive at the unifying third reading.

It is often true that we believe we have arrived at a unifying third reading because we have considered other viewpoints and have synthesized them with our own. But such a synthesis can be flawed and a mere expansion of our own perspective. For example, it is relatively easy for an anthropologist to go into the field to observe a “primitive” tribe and even live with it closely and yet return to write a report that does little more than supply “data” that support the dominant intellectual view of the anthropologist. Such is not a good reading.

For Weil, a good reading occurs only when we realize that we are reading and when we realize the limited nature of our reading. In this sense the truth of a third reading comes about just as much by giving up our grasp on an earlier reading as it does by our arriving at a synthetic unity of opposed readings. As one commentator has put it: “The unity of several readings is not a juxtaposition of readings, it is a non-reading which transcends particular reading… It is the non-reading in which the particulars of the reading subject are denied.” (Farron-Landry, “Lecture et non-lecture chez Simone Weil,” csw 17/2 (Dec. 1980): 230.) In this sense, the unity of several readings cannot be forced or invented, but must be an apprehension of their own unity.

It is in apprehending the unity of several readings that Weil’s notion of mystery is most appropriate. Just as mystery involves two or more incommensurate thoughts that cannot be unified by the finite intellect, but cannot be separated either without losing an important light shed on the spirit, so too the ultimate reading cannot reduce what it reads to only a part of what is read. But mystery in its fullest theological sense is also appropriate here for another reason. The ultimate reading, which eschews reduction to limited readings, is in the final analysis, Weil thinks, a gift of grace essential to faith itself, for it is universal yet incarnate in a person.

The faith Weil is considering here, however, is not simple belief, but discernment in the spiritual realm, which she says is analogous to taste in the aesthetic realm. This faith is an ability to read not from one’s self-perspective, but from a universal perspective that encompasses even one’s own self-perspective and the reason for it. It is the mystery of love and being just and caring for all creation equally and without prejudice. It is “to read God in every manifestation, without exception, but according to the true manifestation relationship [sic] proper to each appearance. To know in what way each appearance is not God. Faith is a gift of reading” (The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 220).

IV.

There are two important results when we connect the notions of contradiction, mystery, and reading as Weil uses them. The first is a confirmation of Weil’s metaphysical doctrines wherein she sees a manifold diversity to the world that is unified and harmonized in the transcendent and divine. Rather than being a metaphysical dualist as some commentators have claimed, Weil instead holds to a “monistic mystery.” Mystery here stands as the locus of the harmony of the world and is an appropriate term to use for that harmony that must transcend any finite conception of it. It must transcend any and all finite conceptions for the simple reason that every finite conception is included in it.( This topic is treated more fully in my Christus Mediator: Platonic Mediation in the Thought of Simone Weil (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983).

The second result is that we must also see the connection of these notions as issuing in a method of spiritual development that faithfully reflects Weil’s metaphysical understandings. Contradiction is thus not only a sign of reality, it is also useful “for emerging from the point of view” and thus reading better. Ultimately, this method leads to a best reading that proceeds from apprehending the mysterious unity of all created being. The mystery encompasses the very density of life; the method is designed to discover

It is readily apparent that this method is something to which Weil adheres closely, especially when she is at her paradoxical and oracular best. But she is trying to be something other than clever when she does so, for she honestly thinks that this method does bring us closer to an apprehension of the mystery that holds the world together. Here we can give two major examples of how she thought this method could be applied. The first is one noted above, whereby Weil looks at the difficulties we encounter in thinking of affliction as being in any way connected to God’s love. There we suggested she finds the two to be co-enlightening of each other and rooted in the mystery of redemption. The second example is perhaps less grandiose, but is equally instructive because it shows the various levels at which Weil thought the method of contradiction could be applied. This is the example of Zen koans, to which Weil returns numerous times in the Notebooks and by which she was obviously fascinated.

Strictly speaking, koans do not conform to the definition Weil has of mysteries, i.e., two strictly conceived but finitely irreconcilable lines of thought. The koan of “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”, for example, does not conform since it is not the result of two opposed lines of thought; rather it is an incoherent question — clapping means two hands. Yet to force the koan into this strict form is to misunderstand both the koan and Weil’s ultimate point. The koan is useful for freeing us from a limited reading. In a certain sense, if it is not the clash of two opposed lines of analytic thought, it is nevertheless something that represents the clash of how we conceive the world to move and how it might be conceived on another plane. This is essentially a spiritual point and indicates how Weil’s ideas on contradiction, mystery, and reading cannot be reduced to solving an intellectual problem, though they do have intellectual ramifications in forcing us to see and reconstruct intellectual problems in a larger perspective.

There is also a certain value to understanding koans this way beyond exemplifying Weil’s method. They also illustrate the larger need to escape from a limited reading, and show our means of escape, namely, by revealing how we can be forced to entertain what seems to be impossible to our normal ways of thinking. Further, the light gained from pondering them and the contradictory form of questioning they employ together also reflect our ultimate goal, i.e., a mystery. But there is also a certain problem here: though koans might appear useful as a practical application of the method of contradiction, they remain embedded within the culture of the East. As such it is not really possible to think seriously that they could be imported — and Well did not think they could be. The shallow appreciation of Eastern religions in which the counterculture of the 1960s was awash is evidence of this difficulty. The problem is then whether we can find anything in Western culture that lends itself to this sort of spiritual use of words.

There are, in fact, two prime areas that might. The first is philosophy and theology. Insofar as they have a distinct spiritual element to them and deal with a unique object, God, they have always had an element of mystery to them. The second, however, is an area that is far more immediate in its import, and that is literature. Literature, as should be readily obvious, is not simply entertaining stories; it is at least an invitation to entertain possibilities and worlds we might never have envisioned had literature not enticed us into doing so. In this regard, it is often literature and not theology that first allows us to believe in a truly spiritual sense As John Coulson writes, following Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, “Religious belief originates in that activity we call imagination, and its verification thus depends now, as in the past, upon its first being made credible to imagination” [John Coulson, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 46].

Put in Weil’s terms, this is to say we do not simply decide to move to another reading — how could we, since the decision is the fruit of an earlier reading? — but embrace it because in some sense it has captured us. Religiously, however, what first captures our imagination is rarely analytic clarity; rather it is a mystery that Newman himself defines as “a statement uniting incompatible notions.” Thus Newman writes: “It is a property of depth to lead a writer into verbal contradiction; and it is a property of simplicity not to care to avoid them.” [John Coulson, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 46].

It is not difficult to find examples of how this sense of mystery can penetrate literature in metaphors that are striking, enticing, and reflective of the mystery that is their focus. T. S. Eliot provides a major example, as when he writes in “East Coker”:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Eliot continues this further by similar “contradictory” metaphors designed to awaken us and to show us the depth of the healing of redemption:

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
[T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963) l87-88]

It may be too much to say that what Eliot has done is to give the imagination the literary equivalent of a koan. What he has done, however, seen in the light of Weil’s understanding of contradiction and mystery, is to focus our attention on the mysterious quality of the redemption by painting it in “contradictory” terms that show its depth and uniqueness. And, as Coulson argues, he has done this not simply by preaching theological platitudes in a “worn-out poetical fashion,” but has actually engaged the imagination that it may entertain what it otherwise might not even consider. One can also see in prose similar metaphors of contradiction designed to awaken us, as when Flannery O’Connor uses violence to portray grace.

It is undoubtedly the recognition of the link between the religious imagination and the literary imagination that has led to the flourishing of a new field of studies relating religion and literature. With writers such as Eliot, O’Connor, and others, it would be remiss not to study these relations. But one must also be aware of a problem as well. The time is long past when, as Eliot noted of the Metaphysical poets, religious and literary sensibilities fit together in a “constant amalgamation of disparate experience.” Indeed, as he notes, “we have tacitly assumed for some centuries past, that there is no relation between literature and theology.”[T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays of T S Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 343] If this is true then we cannot assume automatically either that any and every bit of literary imagination opens onto a mystery. This was a problem of which Weil herself was well aware. Her comments are useful as a further specification of exactly how she thought contradiction and mystery ought to be applied.

V.

It may seem surprising to suggest that Weil would have linked the appropriation of mysteries with the literary imagination. In numerous places she not only vehemently attacks literary figures as diverse as Wilde, Hugo, Gide, and the Surrealists for being “in bondage to public taste” and thus keeping souls in the cave rather than freeing them, but she also inveighs heavily against “imagination” itself In her early philosophical works, she usually refers to the imagination as the “folle imagination” and in later works indicates that it leads us to live a “waking dream peopled by our fictions” (On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, 162). She even goes so far as to connect knowledge of our limited and contingent nature in relation to nature as a whole.

Despite this problem with fiction, however, Weil nevertheless sees that literature can awaken us to reality. Rather than calling such fiction imaginative, however, she thinks it is the fruit of having paid attention to the world. Attention for her is a sacrificial suspension of the ego that allows us to see the world as it is and not as we would like to see it. Good art is therefore something that reproduces this vision. Weil writes:

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius, or at least those with genius of the very first order and when it has reached its full maturity. They are outside the realm of fiction and they release us from it. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies (On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, 162).

Literature of a certain kind, therefore, can open us to reality. It may be only a matter of terminological preference whether we call good literature the result of the literary imagination or of attention. However, in order for literature to open us to reality and to the mystery that creates and redeems, it is not a matter of preference what we mean by the literary imagination. We can mean only that rare power to give us not a partial and incomplete “reading,” but the fullness of reality itself

VI.

Weil’s understanding of contradiction and mystery is capable of far-reaching application, for it is not only the result of her religious metaphysics, it is also a way of apprehending mystery. In this sense, understanding the proper use of mystery for Weil is not simply a bit of philosophical arcana; rather, it is a living option that Well bids us to act upon in thinking of either the world or God. This is well illustrated in some of her otherwise cryptic remarks in the essay “Human Personality” about the use of words in common parlance.

Weil argues in that essay that to use legitimately words such as “God,” “justice,” “love,” and “good,” “one must avoid referring them to anything humanly conceivable” (Selected Essays 33). This, she claims, is because “the proper use of these words involves not trying to make them fit any conception, [for] it is in the words themselves, as words, that the power to enlighten and draw upward resides” (Selected Essays 1933-34, 33). Weil does not naively assume here that such words have this power “ex opere operato.” Rather, they only have this power because they refer to the foci of mysteries that transcend our thought, and for them to have this power for us, we must maintain the sense of mystery that lies behind them.

It is not the words that save, but the mystery to which they refer. In this case, then, the illegitimate use of these words consists in the attempt to make them fit us when in reality love, justice, and goodness transcend us. It is fiction in the negative sense when we reduce them to our size. But does this mean we are not to have any conception of such words? Weil does not think so, and points out that if such words do not have some conception attached to them, “everyone quickly recognizes them for lies.” Indeed, we are “to associate with them ideas and actions which are derived solely and directly from the light which they shed” (Selected Essays 1933-34, 33).

What she means is that we learn to read mysteries by learning to read the mysterious qualities such as good with which we are actually confronted in the world. Just as Jesus tells the Pharisees to “call no one good except the Father,” so he also tells them: “If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10:37-38). Mysteries are not obscure; rather, when they are incarnate they show us reality. It is here that Weil gives a spiritual program for grasping mysteries by the use of words — they are to be attached to the good we do understand and are to open us to the good we do not understand.