Album Cover Photo, "The Death of Simone Weil"
Simone Weil by Susan Hanson
Considered by Nobel laureate André Gide and others to be “the most truly spiritual writer” of the 20th century, Simone Weil would no doubt be confounded by all the fuss. “I never read the story of the barren fig tree without trembling,” she confessed in a letter to her friend and mentor Father Joseph-Marie Perrin in 1942. “I think that is a portrait of me.”
Indeed, Weil wanted nothing so much as to lose her self altogether. “May God grant that I become nothing,” she wrote in a notebook entry that would later be included in Gravity and Grace. “We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread.”
An unlikely candidate for sainthood by anyone’s standards, Simone Weil was paradox embodied: she considered herself a Christian — a Catholic, to be more precise — she came from a secular Jewish home and was never baptized; she was a pacifist but fought in the Spanish Civil War; she was a brilliant intellectual known for her anti-intellectualism, a member of the bourgeoisie who worked on a French assembly line for a year, a person who loved life and yet longed for– some would say hastened — her own death.
Born in Paris in 1909, Simone Weil was “peculiar,” to use biographer David McLellan’s term, almost from birth. At the age of three, for example, she supposedly refused a cousin’s gift of an expensive ring by saying, “I do not like luxury.” And just two years later, with the outbreak of the war in 1914, she gave up sugar and other hard-to-find foods as an act of solidarity with the soldiers.
As Weil would later admit, her belief in the value of sacrifice was shaped in great part by a story she heard as a child. Sitting at the bedside of her three-and-a-half-year old daughter, who was in the hospital recovering from surgery for appendicitis, Selma Weil entertained Simone with the tale “Marie in gold and Marie in tar.” As Weil friend and biographer Simone Pétrement explains,
The heroine of this fairy tale, who was sent by her stepmother into the forest, reaches a house where she is asked whether she wants to enter by the door in gold or the door in tar. ‘For me,’ she replies, ‘tar is quite good enough.’ This was the right answer and a shower of gold fell on her. When her stepmother saw her bring back gold, she then sent her own daughter into the forest. But when asked the same question, her daughter chose the golden door and was deluged with tar.”
For Weil, “tar” — whether in the form of physical suffering or intellectual obscurity — was always “quite good enough.”
A precocious child who was memorizing passages from Cyrano de Bergerac at the age of five and calling herself a Bolshevik by age ten, Simone Weil nevertheless saw her own abilities as mediocre compared to those of her mathematically gifted brother, André, who was older by almost three years. “The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me,” she wrote in a letter to Father Perrin shortly before leaving France in 1942. “I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides.”
This lack of self-esteem notwithstanding, Weil was a brilliant student of philosophy, becoming an academic legend even before completing her work at the École Normale Supérieure in 1931. It was also during her years at the university that Weil became politically active, particularly on issues of peace and economic justice. So intense was her commitment, in fact, that many of her classmates found her “extremely off-putting.” As an illustration, David McLellan cites the following comment from a fellow student: “We tried to avoid her in the corridors because of the blunt way she had of confronting you with your responsibilities by asking for your signature on a petition . . . or a contribution for some trade union strike fund.” Though remembered by many for her humor and kindness, Simone Weil was nonetheless seen as a misfit—socially inept, physically awkward, and given to a style of dress that confirmed this negative image.
Following her graduation, Weil worked sporadically as a teacher of philosophy at a series of girls’ lycées. Her career was short-lived, however, not only because of her unorthodox—and largely unsuccessful—teaching methods, but also because of her passion for workers’ rights; between 1933-1937, she took an extended leave of absence, first to experience life as a factory worker and then to join a group of anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In Aragon, too, her ungainliness quickly became an issue. Because of her poor marksmanship, she was assigned to the camp cook, with whom she served until accidentally stepping into a pot of hot grease and being sent away from the front for treatment.
It was during the following year, which she spent on sick leave, that Weil traveled to Italy, a country whose art and music brought her great joy. Spiritually, too, she was feeling a new sense of life. As she put it to Father Perrin following her visit to a chapel in Assisi, “Something stronger than I has compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.” Equally powerful was her chance meeting in Solesmes, France, with a young English Catholic who introduced her to 17th century metaphysical poetry, most specifically George Herbert’s poem “Love.” Memorizing the lines, she would recite them again and again as a prayer. “It was during one of these recitations,” she later wrote to Perrin, “that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”
LOVE by George Herbert (1593-1632)
LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.
Meanwhile, Weil’s health, fragile since childhood, continued to deteriorate. Years of self-deprivation, her chief means of identifying with the poor, had left her weak and increasingly vulnerable to illness. Rather than lamenting her condition, however, she considered her suffering to be a necessary step in her quest for truth. By renouncing the “I,” she believed, she was making room in her soul for God, the ultimate truth.
With the German occupation of France, and the mounting pressure on the Jews, Weil and her family immigrated to New York in 1942. As Leslie Fiedler put it, though, “America proved intolerable to her; simply to be in so secure a land was, no matter how one tried to live, to enjoy what most men could not attain.” Longing to serve with the French Resistance, Weil finally succeeded in being assigned to the office of the Free French in London, where once again she showed her compassion for the suffering of Europe by refusing to eat. Collapsing in April 1943, Weil was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium to recuperate. Though doctors were confident that she could recover, Weil ignored their recommendations of food and rest, essentially dying of starvation that August.
In the last years of her life in particular, Simone Weil increasingly found comfort in a God whom she described as “absent,” and in a consolation that wore the guise of suffering. “God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him,” she wrote in Gravity and Grace. “[H]e who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being.” Like John the Baptist before her, Weil believed that “[h]e must increase, but I must decrease.”
Spiritual pilgrim though she was, Simone Weil remained outside the church to the end. Even in her attraction to Catholicism, she could not limit God to any dogma or creed; the very certainty of faith was for her a luxury to be shunned. For Weil, it was enough to gaze toward the empty place left by a God who was always just out of sight. “Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices,” she wrote in “Forms of the Implicit Love of God.” “[L]ooking is what saves us.” Not possessing, not consuming, not controlling, but simply watching and waiting, expecting nothing, surrendering all.
What may be most admirable — and challenging — about Simone Weil is the ability she had to forego many of the assurances most of us demand. Content to live without certainty, she sought God in the darkness of faith, claiming nothing for herself. To Weil, what mattered was not finding or even seeking God, but simply waiting with open eyes, “looking” into the void.
I have no doubt that were she alive today, Simone Weil would be considered emotionally disturbed. Highly gifted, yet insecure, she often acted compulsively — and seldom in her own best interest. Rather than enjoying the life of privilege to which she was born, she chose to live in the midst of poverty and war; instead of fleeing from danger, she let herself be drawn into its heart, into a place where she could know the suffering wrought by injustice, violence, and hate.
Was she anorexic? By today’s standards, that would seem to be the case. Did she hasten her own death? To think otherwise would be to discount the facts. Psychologically healthy or not, however, Simone Weil also knew in some organic way that to desire God without the safety of dogma was to be possessed by God in return. Suffering for its own sake was debasing and cruel, but suffering with others was a means of encountering the divine.
John Marson Dunaway on Simone Weil
From all accounts, Weil was not an easy person to live with. And she is a decidedly difficult writer, in that she demands so much of her readers. One of the principle reasons for this rigid, inflexible, demanding character in both her writings and her interpersonal relationships is that she was so intolerant–toward herself as well as others–of any discrepancy between one’s beliefs and one’s way of life. Above all else she hated compromise, and her devotion to truth and obedience were significant contributing elements of her philosophy of vocation.
From Casablanca in 1942 she wrote to Father Jean-Marie Perrin: “My vocation imposes upon me the necessity of remaining outside the Church, without so much as engaging myself in any way, even implicitly, to her or to the dogmas of Christianity, in any case for as long as I am not quite incapable of intellectual work. And that is in order that I may serve God and the Christian faith in the realm of the intelligence.” (WG 40) There is an unusual clarity of vision that shines through these letters. This, of course, was well after the watershed moment when “Christ himself came down and took her” in the autumn of 1938 while she was reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love.” But I think we may trace an unusual clarity of calling growing in Simone Weil, even from quite early in her youth.
The immediately following passage from the letter to Father Perrin would apply almost equally well to the sense of calling evident even in her Marxist student days: “The degree of intellectual honesty that is obligatory for me, by reason of my particular vocation, demands that my thought should be indifferent to all ideas without exception, including for instance materialism and atheism; it must be equally welcoming and equally reserved with regard to every one of them.”
Now one could easily question how well Weil lived out that intellectual honesty in regard to her own Jewish heritage or the legitimate contributions of the Roman Empire to world civilization. There she was certainly guilty of a certain prejudice or closed-mindedness. Yet even as she studied with Alain, she was already dedicated to achieving the kind of intellectual honesty that would be required for becoming the exemplary witness to the truth that she remains for us today. Alain’s Cartesian skepticism as a fundamental method of philosophical inquiry provided a check on Weil’s youthful impulsiveness and led her to discipline her thinking with much the same kind of rigid stoicism that characterized her physical regimen. Hence her strong emphasis on the purifying effect of atheism on the soul of the searcher for truth.
Here, as in all areas of life, Simone Weil adhered to obedience as the supreme virtue. “The carrying out of a vocation,” she writes to Father Perrin, “differed from the actions dictated by reason or inclination. … The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses such as I have just mentioned, and where there is never any room for choice.” No room for choice, actions being pre-determined. One gets here the impression of the beauty of the inevitability of suffering that shines through Greek tragedy, the heroic serenity of martyrdom. No wonder she envied the cross of Christ.
She explained her painful decision to leave occupied France in these terms. “It seems as though the decision to stay would be an act of personal will on my part. And my greatest desire is to lose not only all will but all personal being. It seems to me as though something were telling me to go. As I am perfectly sure that this is not just emotion, I am abandoning myself to it.”
Her radical need to obey makes it easier for us to understand why she began to feel such torment and despair in 1943 when it became increasingly clear that she would never get back to her homeland to take part in the resistance effort. Francine du Plessix Gray writes that Weil “felt misunderstood and totally rejected, and had great doubts as to whether her writings were being heeded by anyone in London.” She wrote to Maurice Schumann that her work for the Free French movement would most certainly be ended soon not only by her physical fatigue, but also by “a moral limit … the ever-increasing sorrow caused by the sense that I’m not in the right place.”
Her writings were not being widely circulated, and now her attempts to obtain a sacrificial mission in the resistance were falling on deaf ears. Her need for heroic action was being utterly frustrated.
Weil’s strong emphasis upon obedience provides a healthy counterweight to the tendency among some contemporary writers on vocation, who might lead us to understand it as an issue only for the privileged elite. After all, most people in the world even today quite clearly do not enjoy the luxury of contemplating which career path might fulfill their deep gladness. Instead, they desperately hope for whatever menial job that might come available as a means to put bread on the table. And later in this paper we shall look at how her unique vision of the mystique of labor seeks to suffuse all levels of work–from manual labor to corporate management–with meaning and fulfillment.
As in all good vocation literature, Weil talks about two different kinds of callings. If her specific purpose in life was to serve God with pure honesty in the intellect, such a goal was seen in the larger context of a general or universal call to perfection. What is unique in her description of this general vocation is that she takes great pains to divorce it from the concept of belonging to the mystical Body of Christ, the importance of which is in her eyes “one of the most serious signs of our degeneration. For our true dignity is not to be parts of a body, even though it be a mystical one, even though it be that of Christ. It consists in this, that in the state of perfection, which is the vocation of each one of us, we no longer live in ourselves, but Christ lives in us; so that through our perfection Christ, in his integrity and in his indivisible unity, becomes in a sense each one of us, as he is completely in each host. The hosts are not a part of his body.”
This state of perfection to which we all are to aspire would result in “une nouvelle sainteté,” a phrase that, while she did not borrow it from Maritain, she acknowledged him as having called for before her. Like the older Thomist philosopher for whom she had little sympathy, Weil saw that the moral complexities of the twentieth century called for a new kind of saintliness. And even though she used the word “exiger” (or “demand”), it was clearly a calling, a vocation.
Maritain’s originality had been to show that the call to saintliness was not limited to specially favored heroic exceptionality; it was a universal call, somewhat in the sense of the priesthood of all believers. But for Simone Weil, the new saintliness was not just on a different scale, but also of a different order. It was to involve a miraculous dose of genius.
A new type of sanctity is indeed a fresh spring, an invention. … It is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny. It is the exposure of a large portion of truth and beauty hitherto concealed under a thick layer of dust. More genius is needed than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvelous invention. … The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
One is reminded here of Weil’s insistence that all true artistic genius necessarily entails sainthood. Wherever there is celestial beauty she believed it was produced in saintliness. At first blush one might wonder how the necessity of genius for this new saintliness can square with the notion of its universality. Not all of us are called to be geniuses, one might object. However, we must also recall her conviction that genius is a realm where absolutely any one may have access simply by dint of genuine desire. So in that sense, we might say that Weil’s philosophy of vocation is universally applicable.
In many ways, The Need for Roots can be said to represent the most mature thinking of Simone Weil’s short life, having been written, as it was, in the final days in England that led up to her singularly stoic death in Ashford, Kent. It is there, at the conclusion of that book, that she gives her mystique of labor one of its most articulate forms. “Physical labour willingly consented to is, after death willingly consented to, the most perfect form of obedience,” she writes. She assails the interpretations of Genesis 2 in which labor is seen as a curse, a punishment for Adam’s sin, insisting that the passage implies no disdain for work. Instead, she says “the belief in direct instruction in the various trades by God implies the memory of a time when the exercise of these trades was above all a sacred activity.”
“Labor,” she writes at the conclusion of The Need for Roots, (and she had physical labor particularly in mind) “should be the spiritual core of a well-ordered society.” And in her meditation upon Christianity and agricultural life she elaborated some details of how she envisioned such a society. “Manual labor is either a degrading servitude for the soul or a sacrifice. In the case of working in the fields, the link with the Eucharist, if only it is felt, is sufficient to make of it a sacrifice.” She recalls the innumerable comparisons in Jesus’ teachings between the life of the spirit and the daily life of the planter. The comparisons are extended to all professions and trades in her philosophy, but particularly to manual labor. The manual laborer, whether on a farm or in a factory, burns or consumes his or her flesh and transforms it into energy as a machine burns fuel, thus giving one’s body and blood to be transformed into the fruits of one’s labor (crops, livestock, manufactured goods).
In each trade, Weil identifies the relation to the Gospel in this rich biblical anagoge of work. “What is needed is … to find and define for each aspect of social life its specific link with Christ. … Thus, as religious life is distributed in orders corresponding to vocations, so in like manner would social life appear as an edifice of distinct vocations converging in Christ. … It is a question of transforming, in the largest possible measure, daily life itself into a metaphor with a divine significance, a parable.” Those of us who are teachers should remember that Jesus was the master teacher and read the Gospels from that perspective as a guide. Doctors can model their careers after the Great Physician. Builders can see him as the carpenter’s apprentice. Others can look for the many lessons in the Gospels concerning business, finance, the military, and so on. “Christianity should contain all vocations without exception since it is catholic.”
Simone Weil’s vision of a just society, then, was fundamentally structured upon this mystique of work, of labor, and of vocation. A significant influence in this regard was Alain, who had an unusually strong belief in the spiritual power of labor. Near the end of her life, she was seeking the most effective ways of causing the inner core of the Gospel to suffuse her world. Again in “Christianity and Agricultural Life,” she writes: “In a general manner, Christianity will only impregnate society if each social category has its specific, unique, inimitable link with the Christ.”
Her own unique individual calling, she believed, was to intellectual life, to a perfect, unswerving devotion to truth. Yet her witness entailed brutal manual labor in factories, in the fields, and in non-combatant military service. Given her delicate health and physical weakness, these forays into manual labor could only hasten the coming of her premature demise. “Physical labour is a daily death,” she wrote in The Need for Roots, and how prophetic that comment became!
And her famous prayer of self- immolation (recorded in La Connaissance surnaturelle, 204-205) was even more excruciatingly and ironically prophetic when it painted the vision of utter decreation which she resembled at the hour of her passing: “that I may be a paralytic, blind, deaf, a senile idiot.” This woman whose ultimate calling was to the intellectual life prayed to be bereft of her intellect. It was the closest she could come to experiencing the cross of Jesus, for which she so often expressed a deep envy.
The deepest significance of Simone Weil’s philosophy of vocation, ultimately, shines forth in the organic unity of her thought and her life. In one who prized obedience above all and for whom there could be no more dreadful failing than not to live according to one’s convictions, this should hardly be a surprising discovery. “The universe, compact mass of obedience with luminous points. Everything is beautiful,” she writes in La Connaissance surnaturelle. From this understanding of the world in terms of amor fati, which characterized her life and thought up to the moment of her encounter with Christ, she moved in her last four years ever more deeply into the way of mediation, of logos, of work as sacrament.
“That which in man is the very image of God is something that in us is attached to the fact of being a person but is not the person. It is the faculty of renunciation of personhood. It is obedience.” She goes on to explain that in human relationships, the obedience of a slave does not make him resemble his master. Rather, it makes him all the more unlike the one who commands him. Yet in one’s relationship with God, the more perfectly obedient one becomes, the more one resembles the Almighty, like a son resembles a father or an image resembles a model.
“This knowledge,” she affirms, “is supernatural (Cette connaissance est surnaturelle).” Weil must have been particularly attached to the great Kenosis passage in the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, as well as verses such as Hebrews 5:8, in which Jesus, even though he was the Son of God, is said to have “learned obedience from the things which He suffered.” So for us, to expend our energy in labor with a view toward transforming our efforts into the fruit of the vine and the staff of life, the blood and body of Jesus, is the model of obedience in this sacramental understanding, not just of manual labor in the fields, but of all human work, thanks to the insights of supernatural knowledge.
It also subsumes affliction along with work in this all-encompassing theological vision of calling. “Supreme mediation, harmony between the why of Christ (repeated ceaselessly by all souls in affliction) and the silence of the Father. The universe (including us) is the vibration of that harmony.”
In her “Letter to Joë Bousquet,” which was written in May of 1942 in London and was first published in Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu, Simone Weil explores the mystery of affliction in particularly luminous terms. For her, Bousquet was not just an unusually dear friend, he was also an extraordinarily powerful example of living redemptively with affliction. In her letter she writes that because of his paralysis, produced by wounds inflicted in war, he has the privilege of being very close to a breakthrough in supernatural knowledge. This breakthrough she describes in parabolic language with the myth of the chick hatching from inside its egg.
“The egg is the visible world,” she writes. “The chick is Love, the Love which is God Himself and lives deep inside all men, first as invisible germ. When the shell is pierced, when the being is outside, it still has this same world as its object, but it is no longer inside. Space has been torn open. The spirit, leaving the miserable body abandoned in a corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, from which there is no perspective, from which this visible world is seen in its reality, without perspective. Space has become — in relation to what it was in the egg — an infinity to the second or rather third power. The instant is immobile. All of space is filled — even if there are sounds being heard — by a dense silence, which is not an absence of sound, which is a positive object of sensation, more positive than a sound, which is the secret word, the word of Love that since the beginning has held us in his arms.” (Pensées 74-75)
Later in this same letter, Weil notes that it is only through affliction — or sometimes through beauty — that one is enabled to pierce through the egg into this kind of perspectiveless outer space where one sees the visible world in a way somewhat analogous to that in which an astronaut views it from the spacecraft. The suffering of affliction makes one cry out “Why?” just as the Christ did from the cross. Beauty can also elicit a “Why?” … “Why is this beautiful?”
“But rare are those who are capable of pronouncing within themselves this why for several straight hours. The why of affliction lasts for hours, days, years; it only ceases with exhaustion. He who is capable not only of crying out but also of listening hears the response. That response is silence. It is the eternal silence for which Vigny bitterly reproached God. But he did not have the right to say what is the response of the just to that silence, for he was not one of the just. The just love. He who is capable not only of listening but also of loving hears this silence as the word of God.” (Pensées 128-129)
The Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny — who fancied himself isolated by tragic exceptionality like Moses on Mount Pisgah and denied entrance into the Land of Promise — was indeed not one of the just. To Vigny, God’s silence was evidence of his absence, an absence which the poet was simply obliged to bear stoically in his own particular incarnation of the Romantic hero. The refrain of Vigny’s poem about Moses’s conversation with God on Mt. Pisgah reads: “Laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre (Let me sleep the sleep of the earth).” God’s silence leads for Vigny to death — and not the death of the Hebrew leader who will rest in the bosom of Abraham, but only the extinction of rotting in the cold, hard earth.
For Simone Weil, the call of God was at least in some measure a silent call. But that silence spoke a rich world of wisdom. Obedience required the patience of living over an extended period of time with the why of affliction, as well as listening to the silence of God’s response. So her philosophy of vocation leads us ultimately to the sound of silence, and that silence requires supernatural knowledge for those who would hear it with understanding. “Necessity here below is the vibration of the silence of God.” (Pensées 129)
The Quoted Weil
By Fr. Edward Oakes
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, full of charm, while imaginary good is tiresome and flat. Real evil, however, is dreary, monotonous, barren. But real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
By Fr. Neuhaus
Everything was going just right for Christian Wiman. He writes in American Scholar that he had found a reliable publisher for his poetry, moved into a good teaching position, and then moved on from that to assume the prestigious post of editor of Poetry. “But there wasn’t a scrap of excitement in any of this for me. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life rather than living it, an old silent movie, no color, no sound, no one in the audience but me.” For reasons he did not understand, he had given up the writing of poetry, or maybe, as he says, it had been taken from him. And with that loss was a loss of being alive. “I think most writers live at some strange adjacency to experience, that they feel life most intensely in their reaction to it.”
He recalls Simone Weil’s description of two prisoners in solitary confinement, separated by a stone wall. In time they found a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall separates and unites them. “It is the same with us and God,” writes Weil. “Every separation is a link.” But Christian Wiman was quite unlinked. Then he fell in love. Then he was married. And then he found out he had a mysterious cancer of the blood for which there was neither cure nor certain prognosis. “In those early days after the diagnosis, when we mostly just sat on the couch and cried, I alone was dying, but we were mourning very much together. And what we were mourning was not my death, exactly, but the death of the life we had imagined with each other.” “Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be.”
What began that Sunday morning continues: “So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any ‘existential anxiety’ I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again.
But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am.”
We are all uncertain about what God wants us to do. That is to say, we do not know for sure. Of course it seems silly, when you’re well past middle age and have spent your life doing what you believe you’ve been given to do, to always be getting up in the morning or suddenly stopping in the middle of the day’s work to ask, “Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?” I mentioned this to a young man who is discerning whether he has a call to the priesthood, and he was shocked, perhaps scandalized. He said, in effect, “You mean after all these years of being a priest, of writing books, of editing and lecturing, of organizing so many projects, you still aren’t sure you’re doing what God called you to do? How am I ever to know that God is calling me to the priesthood?”
The answer is that we act in the courage of our uncertainties. I am fond of pointing out that the word decide comes from the Latin decidere, “to cut off.” You face choices — whether to be a priest, whether to go to this school or that, whether to marry a certain person, whether to pursue this line of work or another — and then you decide. And, in deciding, you have cut off the alternatives and pray you have decided rightly. But you do not know for sure. Or else you are trapped in the tangled web of indecision.
In this connection, I have had frequent recourse, both homiletically and personally, to one of the most liberating passages from Saint Paul — 1 Corinthians 4. He has been trying to explain himself and his apostolate to the Christians in Corinth. He doesn’t know whether he has succeeded, and then he says this: “But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. . . .
Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.” Do not judge before the time! I do not even judge myself! These are the words of a life set free from the tangled web of introspection and indecision.
I was thinking about the above while reading a recent and splendid book by John Peter Kenney on Augustine’s Confessions. The book is The Mysticism of Saint Augustine, and, in Kenney’s “rereading” of Augustine’s classic text, the emphasis is on the inescapably Christocentric character of Augustine’s experience. This is against the frequent reading of the Confessions as a psychological thriller, which downplays the specifically Christian and theological in Augustine’s story.
Augustine was, as everybody knows, a Neoplatonist, but a Neoplatonist with very important differences. In Neoplatonism, the ascending soul discovers its intelligible and “undescended” self in the eternal world of being as it moves from dialectical reasoning in time into pure intellect. Kenney writes: “After this transformative discovery, embodiment has no charm [for Plotinus]. But Augustine countenances no such direct access to an unfallen self. His helplessness, his habituation to sins, his tears of self-betrayal have taught him otherwise. And so have the importunity of divine grace and the providential emergence of Christ in his life, whose power effects the conversion of his wholly fallen soul.
Thus the contemplative soul cannot discover its real self within eternal wisdom, for there is no eternal self there to be recovered. Contemplation can only be an exercise in hope, the discernment of where the self may one day rest, if it should achieve its salvation. Thus, for Augustine, contemplation is inherently eschatological and, unlike in Plotinus, that eschatological hope is never realized by the embodied soul. It can only be actualized after death.” Precisely. Let no one judge before the time!
And Finally…
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.
