Simone Weil: suffering, attention and compassionate thought

Dr Stuart JessonDepartment of Theology and Religious Studies

York St John UniversityLord Mayor’s Walk

YorkYO31 7EX

s.jesson@yorksj.ac.uk

Abstract:

This article explores Simone Weil’s account of the relationship between human

suffering and intellectual life, with reference to the issues raised by the allegation

that as an enterprise theodicy evinces a failure to ‘take suffering seriously’. The

article shows how Weil’s understanding of the relationship between suffering and

attention gives a clear and powerful account of the way that compassion – which

involves an uncompromising acceptance of suffering - can be discerned in patterns

of thought. Nevertheless, it is less clear in her work how these convictions might

serve as a guide for theological statements. Weil’s understanding of the Christian

conception of life is centred on the experience of finding God present in and through

suffering, and this leaves her with the problem of how to reconcile her commitment

not to ‘sweeten what is bitter’ with consolations or compensations with her intuition

that the truth of creaturely existence is made available through suffering. Through

an analysis of the inner contours of this conflict, it is argued that Weil’s central

problem is of how to articulate spiritual reality in such a way as to encourage

undivided attention, which is the only ground for the hope that truthful,

compassionate thought about suffering might be possible.

Key words: suffering, compassion, attention, Simone Weil,

argument from evil, theodicy, moral argument.

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1. Introduction: ‘taking suffering seriously’

The experience of suffering, in oneself or another, demands

attention, and compassion could well be understood as

attentiveness to suffering.1 In many cases it might be said

that the attention suffering demands is very simple: relief

from pain, hunger, loneliness or fear. Before it is anything

else, compassion must be food, water, proximity, or relief.

But the way in which suffering may be given intellectual attention

is far less obvious. Simone Weil’s later work, contained in

short essays and fragments kept in notebooks, is one attempt

to pay attention to the experience of suffering, and to form

thought out of the experience. It is a sometimes brilliant,

frequently paradoxical body of work, and the interaction

between suffering, compassion and attention is one of the most

crucial threads running through it; the struggle to speak of

suffering meaningfully whilst continuing to pay attention

honestly. My primary concern here is with the way that Weil

links compassion with belief, or intellectual life more

generally. The issues I am trying to uncover seem to me to be

relevant not simply to the question of how to interpret Weil’s

life and work but, perhaps more importantly, to the question

of what a theological response to human suffering can or

should look like.

Even more specifically, the issues I intend to explore are

relevant to an area of debate on the fringes of contemporary

philosophy of religion. One important strand in discussions

1 See Steve Bein, Compassion and moral guidance (Honolulu: University ofHawai’i Press, 2013) for an exploration of compassion in these terms,esp. pp.16, 90-96.

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of ‘the problem of evil’ in recent years has been the ‘anti-

theodicies’ put forward most notably by Kenneth Surin,

Terrence Tilley and D. Z. Phillips, whose conclusions and the

assumptions they proceed from seem to be fairly widely shared,

such that it is not uncommon to encounter the view that there

is something morally problematic with the very project of

theodicy.2 There are a number of arguments and perspectives

here, which may not always sit entirely comfortably together,

but for the sake of simplicity here I will assume that Nick

Trakakis’ summary expresses the heart of the matter well

enough: that ‘the theodicist’s way of proceeding evinces a

failure to take suffering seriously’.3 The ‘moral argument

against theodicy’ now has a place alongside the ‘evidential

argument from evil’.4

There is not the space in this discussion for a thorough

exploration of these arguments, but I do want to use the

central issue at stake in these debates as a starting point

for an exploration of Weil’s thought. If the central problem

that has been found in a great many forms of ‘theodicy’ is the

2 For the purposes of this discussion, I will make no distinction between a ‘defence’ against the argument from evil, and ‘theodicy’, although I am well aware than in some discourses this distinction is significant. 3 Nick Trakakis, ‘Theodicy: The solution to the problem of evil, or part of the problem?’ in Sophia 47:2 (2008), pp. 166-67. This article provides a helpful summary of the arguments put forward by Surin, Tilley and Phillips.4 The discussion between Atle O. Søvik and Robert Simpson is a good illustration of the way in which these issues have been incorporated into the broader debate around theodicy. See Robert Simpson, ‘Moral antitheodicy: prospects and problems’ in International journal for philosophy of religion, 65: 3 (2009), pp. 153-69; Atle O. Søvik, ‘Why almost all moral critique of theodicies is misplaced’ in Religious studies, 44: 4 (2008), pp. 470-84; Robert Simpson, ‘Some moral critique of theodicy is misplaced, but not all’ in Religious Studies, 45: 03 (2009), pp. 339-46. See also William Hasker’s review of D. Z. Phillips’ The problem of evil and the problem of God in International journal for philosophy of religion, 61: 3 (2006), pp. 151-60.

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‘failure to take suffering seriously’, it seems important to

ask what it actually means to take suffering seriously. How is

such seriousness manifested, or recognised? Of course, it is

usually quite easy to take one’s own suffering, the suffering

of those one loves, or suffering one witnesses first-hand

seriously. But what does it mean to take suffering as such

‘seriously’?

That this is a crucial issue can be illustrated through one

of the discussions included in the second edition of Encountering

evil: live options in theodicy, an influential collection of reflections

on the problem of evil from both philosophers and theologians.

Stephen T. Davis’ chapter on the ‘free will defence’ makes use

of a fairly trivial example (concerning an embarrassing

episode from his youth) to illustrate the way in which

genuinely upsetting experiences may later be recalled without

any suffering. This example is meant to show that it is

coherent, at least, to say that a future state of wholeness or

harmony can change the way in which one assesses the

significance of a traumatic experience. In response, John K.

Roth argues that in comparing relatively trivial examples with

horrific instances such as the Holocaust, one ‘comes

dangerously close to’ trivialising human suffering. In fact,

the lack of recognition involved in such comparisons can be

interpreted as a ‘soft denial’ of the existence of such evil.

Davis, in response, claims that he in no way fails to

recognise the enormity of such crimes, but just has a

different philosophical assessment of the bearing they have

upon the reasonability of claims about the eschaton, and the

‘reasons’ that God may have for allowing such things. It is

assumed, then, that moral sensibility and theoretical

reasoning are distinct and unrelated. In his book The problem of

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evil and the problem of God, D. Z. Phillips takes issue with this

assumption, and questions whether argumentative moves and

moral sensibility can be separated so easily:

What Davis does not see, however, is that his philosophical

argument would deny him the moral attitude to the Holocaust

that he says he shares with Roth and myself. What a moral

attitude towards an evil is shows itself in what one is prepared to say about it.

Roth and I are not prepared to speak about it in the way

Davis does when he philosophizes. . . . Davis, logically,

cannot claim to share the same attitude to the Holocaust,

while at the same time talk differently about it (emphasis

mine).5

Phillips is making a basically Wittgensteinian observation

here; it makes no sense to talk about an attitude towards

something that is not shown when one is actually talking about

that thing. If one finds the existence of certain events

horrific and mystifying, this attitude will be shown in how

one talks about such events, and any significant differences

in the way that people are prepared to discuss such events

must count as differences of attitude; that is part of what it

means to have an ‘attitude’ (as is apparent in the phrase ‘he

has a bit of an attitude’, which more often than not is used

to comment upon on how someone speaks).6 In other words, a

lack of attentiveness to human suffering can be recognised in 5 D. Z. Phillips, The problem of evil and the problem of God (London: SCM, 2004), p. 39.6 Slavoj Zizek’s critique of the film Zero Dark Thirty takes a similar position; to portray torture in a ‘cool, disinterested’ tone is already to acquiesce in the ‘normalisation’ of torture. See Slavoj Zizek, ‘Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood's gift to American power’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable, last accessed 08/07/2013.

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forms of argument, lines of thought, and the way that both are

expressed.

What Phillips does not explore, however, is what kind of

talk would be evidence of a morally appropriate attitude

towards horrendous evils, and why; or how a morally sensitive

attitude towards human suffering might be manifested in

speech. Perhaps more interestingly, he does not ask what the

relationship may be between the moral sensitivity that ‘takes

suffering seriously’, and the ability to show compassion, in

practice, to actual sufferers. If the judgement that certain

forms of argument, which have been regarded by some as

perfectly sensible, are to be regarded as morally suspect even

to engage in, it seems reasonable to ask these questions.7

My aim in what follows is to show that some of the

paradoxical and at times, tortuous, intellectual moves that

Simone Weil makes, especially in her late notebook, may shed

valuable light on this set of issues. Weil was deeply

critical of beliefs that appear to express a failure to attend

to the reality of suffering, but by the same token, was quite

prepared to advance highly speculative and abstract statements

concerning the religious significance of suffering, and at

times this makes for an uncomfortable mix. Central to the

discussion that follows is the question of how compassion is

related to thought. If ‘compassion’ is the attention that

suffering calls for, and is, as Weil believed it to be, the

criterion of the presence of the love of God ‘here below’, how

does compassion enter into thought, and what kind of thought

7 Whilst it does not appear to me to do justice to the argument of the book (especially the last chapter), this is exactly what EleonoreStump takes Kenneth Surin to imply in his Theology and the problem of evil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). See Eleonore Stump, Wandering in darkness (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 490, n.47.

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is necessary for compassion? On the reading I will put

forward, the essays and notebooks that make up Weil’s late

work constitute an insightful yet deeply flawed attempt to

articulate compassion as a thought, to think so as to produce

compassion, and, ultimately, to make thought itself

compassionate.

2. Suffering and compassion

If Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in darkness has been hailed as the

most thought-provoking and important contribution to debate

about theodicy to appear for some time, this is undoubtedly

because of the depth and sensitivity it shows in articulating

the actual experience of sufferers. The central conviction

here is that if one wants to show how God is justified in

allowing suffering, it must be suffering as it is actually

experienced and lived through that is thereby justified, and

despite a commitment to the practice of analytic forms of

argument, Stump admits that analytic discussions of the

problem of evil have been sorely lacking on this front.8

Similarly, a good part of the merit and fertility of Simone

Weil’s work consists in the profundity of her descriptions of

human suffering, whether of the experience of mechanised

labour,9 the violent futility of war,10 or simply the experience

8 Eleonore Stump, Wandering in darkness, pp. 23-27. 9 See ‘Factory journal’ in Formative writings, ed. and trans. Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness (Oxford: Routledge, 2010).10 See ‘The Iliad, poem of might’ in Intimations of Christianity among the ancient Greeks (Oxford: Routledge, 1998). E. Jane Doering’s recent bookexplores this aspect of Weil’s thought, see Simone Weil and the spectre of self-perpetuating force (Notre Dame: University of Indiana Press, 2010).

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of intense regret.11 Weil’s comments about how one should think

and speak about suffering are intimately entwined with her

understanding of what it is actually like to suffer.

One of Weil’s central convictions is expressed very simply:

‘thought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as

an animal flies from death’.12 As a result, we seldom, if

ever, contemplate the worst suffering – in ourselves, or in

others - honestly or willingly. Drawing on the book of Job,

Weil stresses the human tendency to despise the afflicted, to

‘attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred which

our reason attaches to crime, to affliction.’13 To contemplate

total humiliation in another is to risk contemplating it in

oneself, and so the sight of affliction repels the intellect,

because it makes us aware of our ‘almost infinite fragility.’14

The body can be left in permanent pain by the simplest of

physical changes, and the soul and social personality are

equally subject to unpredictable forces and dependent upon all

sorts of external objects, themselves temporary and

unpredictable.15 To consider the reality of the afflicted in

another is to face the thought that we too are entirely at the

mercy of circumstance; that no deep principle or existential

right – nothing, in fact, other than the workings of ‘blind

necessity’ - distinguishes my well-being from another’s

poverty, sickness or sorrow.16

11 Weil, First and last notebooks, tr. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 148.12 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Crauford (London: HarperCollins, 2nd edition, 1977), p. 62.13 Ibid., p. 65.14 Simone Weil, On science, necessity and the love of God (trans. Richard Rees; London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 185.15 Ibid., p. 184.16 Weil, Gateway to God, ed. David Raper (London: Fontana, 1974), p. 91.

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In affliction, one is subject to contradictory forces:

suffering consumes one’s attention and brings it back

repeatedly to the present, but at the same time produces the

desire for a future, any future, in which there is no trace of

this suffering. When articulating the experience of this kind

of temporal conflict, Weil makes a point that will be

particularly important for the discussion that follows. She

notes that often two thoughts concerning the duration of

suffering appear to ease the burden a little: that it will

stop immediately in the very next moment, or that it will

continue for ever. ‘We can think of it as impossible or

necessary, but we can never think that it simply is. That is

unendurable.’17 The hope that suffering is going to stop in

the very next instant is linked to the thought ‘I cannot bear

it, therefore it is going to cease’, and gives rise deception,

insofar as one begins to believe that the world is structured

according to one’s desires. 18 However, to gloomily suppose

that suffering is destined to last for ever may be to seek for

comfort in despair, which is at least fixed and final, and

therefore potentially subject to control. If suffering,

however horrific, can be relied upon, or predicted, then the

element of chance and senselessness is diminished, so that one

does not have to contemplate the fact that no deep principle

governs its distribution. The point here seems to be that

false forms of hope may not be all that different from

despair; both seek an escape from the tension that suffering

produces, and the contingency that characterises it.19

17 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace trans. Emma Crauford and Mario von derRuhr (London: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2002), p. 82. 18 Weil, Notebooks, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 157.19 See Weil’s comments on the way that devotion may be substituted for obedience in situations of extreme servitude in First and last

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For all of the reasons above, the act of showing compassion

to the afflicted is, for Weil, a supernatural act, because it

involves contemplating senselessness with those who suffer,

without ceasing to love the world that produces such

suffering. The contemplation of suffering is a kind of

secondary level of suffering, an expenditure of energy with no

reward. One suffers not only through acknowledging another

individual’s affliction, but simply through acknowledging the

possibility of such affliction. In her study of her own

recovery from a brutal rape and attempted murder, philosopher

Susan Brison noted a similar tendency in the responses of

others to her suffering. She found that even those closest to

her seemed to respond to her attack with a certain level of

denial, manifested as an impulsive need to find ways to

mitigate the senselessness of the experience, the way in which

there was nothing, really, for her to learn from it. She also

notes that this tendency extended even to her own response to

what had happened:

I watched my own attempts to find something for which to be

grateful, something to redeem the unmitigated awfulness: I

was glad I didn’t have to reproach myself (or endure other’s

reproaches) for having done something careless, but I wished

I had done something I could consider reckless so that I

could simply refrain from doing it in the future. . . .

Those who haven’t been sexually violated may have difficulty

understanding why women who survive assault often blame

themselves, and may wrongly attribute it to a sex-linked

trait of masochism or lack of self-esteem. They don’t know

that it can be less painful to believe that you did

notebooks, pp. 41-42.10

something blameworthy than it is to think that you live in a

world where you can be attacked at any time, in any place,

simply because you are a woman.20

Brison was amazed to find all kinds of people – even those

working at rape counselling services - ask her questions like

“were you alone? was it dark?” as if, were the answer “yes,

yes” instead of “no, no”, this would give more sense to the

crime, or inject some faint semblance of order to what

happened. Brison here testifies to the tendency that Weil

judges to be an almost instinctive reaction; to see patterns

and principles governing the distribution of suffering. In

the most extreme cases, such as Brison's, part of the

experience of suffering is its senselessness, and as a

consequence, compassion requires on give up one's demand for

sense.

To give one’s attention to the suffering of others, on this

reading, involves sacrifice. We have the ability to ‘sweeten

what is bitter’, that is, to throw a veil over reality by

seeing lessons, explanations, compensations where there are

none, but this possibility must be renounced so that the

suffering neighbour may be loved as they are, their past

contemplated unredeemed. The deepest compassion, then, is

supernatural, and differs from most acts of pity, which are

frequently a kind of necessary guard against the impact of

affliction when one can no longer avoid encountering it. One

usually offers help to someone so as to discharge the

obligation to think of their suffering, or else to enjoy the

feeling of power that comes through observing the effect that

20 Susan Brison, Aftermath: violence and the re-making of a self (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 9-12.

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one’s efforts can have upon those less fortunate than oneself,

whereas compassion involves treating the other as oneself, and

may mean a reduction in one’s sense of power and life. This

painful identification is not necessarily made any easier by

one’s relative experience or innocence: those who have not

suffered may dread it, and so be unwilling to think of the

possibility; those who have suffered rightly hate it and may

wish only to forget it. It is also opposed to any kind of

fascination or love of suffering. Despite the fact that

because of what one knows about her life and manner of death,

one may read in many of her more extreme comments an unhealthy

preoccupation with suffering, Weil is perfectly clear that the

seeking out of suffering is mistaken, and wrong.21 To seek

suffering because of what it may, somehow, give or produce is

to fail to recognise the destructive nature of affliction, and

fail to value the life it destroys.

3. Compassionate thought

There is, of course, a great deal more that could be said

about Weil’s understanding of suffering, but the comments

above may serve as a survey of some of the most salient

aspects of that understanding. In what follows I would like

to focus on Weil’s understanding of how the reality of

suffering may be accepted, and how that acceptance is

manifested. The important question for Weil is not so much of

how to ‘take suffering seriously’, but of how to accept ‘with 21 Weil, Science, necessity and the love of God, p. 184 and First and last notebooks, p. 3. On Weil’s account it is impossible seek out suffering– one would only seeking something else, held to be of benefit, underthat name.

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one’s whole soul’ the existence of suffering.22 It is clear that

for Weil compassion begins with the recognition and acceptance

of suffering, and that she has quite a distinct understanding

of what this means. As we will see, Weil is clear that

compassion is quite possible without a conscious understanding

of its inner meaning, but it is also clear that she believed

that this quality could be displayed at the level of one’s

conceptual understanding, and that conceptual understanding

itself can be compassionate, or lacking in compassion.

Her essay on the Iliad contains some of her clearest comments

on what it means to recognise the suffering human, and the

frequency of reference to this poem in her notebooks indicates

its importance within her thought. It is the tone, or accent

of the poem that Weil admires above all:

Justice and love, for which there can hardly be a place in

this picture of extremes and unjust violence, yet shed their

light over the whole without ever being discerned otherwise

than by the accent. Nothing precious is despised, whether or

not destined to perish. . . . This accent is inseparable

from the idea which inspired the Gospels; for the

understanding of human suffering is dependent upon justice,

and love is its condition. . . . Particularly rare is a true

expression of misfortune: in painting it one almost always

effects to believe, first, that degradation is the innate

vocation of the unfortunate; second that a soul may suffer

affliction without being marked by it, without changing all

consciousness in a particular manner which belongs to itself

alone.23 22 This phrase appears throughout Weil’s notebooks. See, for example,Notebooks, pp. 51 and 365. 23 Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the ancient Greeks, pp. 48–53.

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This last point is particularly important. The presentation

of human suffering, whether fictional, theological or

philosophical, tends in two directions: one is to seek to

learn too much from it, to begin to suggest that its

distribution manifests some kind of intelligible pattern

(hence the need to ask “was it dark? were you alone?”); the

other is to downplay the extent of its influence on the human

person (and this is where Weil, despite many important

similarities, breaks from a Stoic conception of the person: we

do not have all the resources necessary to bear any amount of

suffering).24 In other words, one technique of avoidance is to

refuse to contemplate meaninglessness, the other is to refuse

to contemplate fragility.

For Weil, both are necessary to truly comprehend the

suffering of the innocent: that which is most precious is also

most exposed; that to which what is most precious is exposed

does not obey any principle of desert or operate according to

any teleology. A ‘true’ expression of misfortune implies the

acceptance of an almost unbearable tension, produced by

contingency: that this particular suffering is neither

necessary, nor illusory; it just is, for its own limited, but

terrible duration.25 An authentic recognition of suffering,

then, is one which is prepared to love that which is both

infinitely precious and completely vulnerable, without seeking

to diminish this tension. The stance necessary to do this is 24 See Eric Springsted and Diogenes Allen, Spirit, nature and community: issues in the thought of Simone Weil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 97-110 for a comparison between Epictetus and Weil’s conceptions of the effect of suffering on the person.25 Elsewhere Weil links sin with the failure to accept time: ‘All sins are an attempt to escape from time. Virtue is to submit to time,to press it to the heart until the heart breaks.’ Weil, First and last notebooks, p. 102. See also Notebooks, p. 23.

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also that which is required to really love another; to love

the person in front of you ‘without wishing them immortal, or

dead.’26

Nevertheless, if Weil has a sensitive and developed account

of what the authentic recognition of suffering looks like, she

also has an enormous amount to say about how and what one

should learn from suffering; the contemplation of suffering is

also the opportunity to be confronted by reality, and learn.

This is expressed with particular force and clarity in the

following remark:

Let us suppose a man whose entire family has perished amidst

tortures, and who himself was long exposed to torture in a

concentration camp; or an American Indian of the sixteenth

century who was the sole survivor of his people. Such men as

these, if they ever believed in God’s mercy, either believe

in it no longer, or else conceive it in an entirely

different fashion from that in which they did before. I

myself have not gone through such things. But I know that

they exist; hence what difference is there? It comes, or

must come, or should come to the same thing.27

Just as the friends in the book of Job are judged lacking,

because their conception of God fails to include Job’s

exceptional experience, so Weil suggests here that there is

something wrong with any conception of God that could not be

shared by someone who had been through the most extreme

affliction, or communicated to them without insult. This

would be to exclude them from one’s moral or spiritual

26 Weil, Notebooks, p. 40.27 Ibid., p. 432.

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universe, or to deny their existence (and for Weil, to love is

to feel ‘with one’s whole soul’ the existence of another

being).28 In the discussion between Stephen T Davis and John K

Roth noted above, Davis makes a rather troubling statement

which illustrates almost exactly the point that Weil is trying

to make here. Davis asks himself whether he is in theory open

to evidence that might challenge his belief in a loving, all-

powerful God that makes the magnitude of suffering

intelligible and acceptable. He notes that there could indeed

be:

And contrary to Roth’s pointed query, yes, there are

conceivable events that if they occurred would make me

change my beliefs. For example, if human suffering became

massive, universal, and destructive of morality and the

practice of religion, it would be extremely difficult for me

to continue believing in a good and all-powerful God. But I

can hardly be faulted for the fact that such an event has

not yet occurred.29

Weil’s question to Davis would be why he does not already find

the existence of the sufferings of ‘such men as these’ (which,

on Weil’s analysis, may well be both massive and destructive

of morality) a traumatic fact, impossible to simply

assimilate? Why would an increase in the proportion of the

human population who suffer destructive atrocities make any

philosophical difference? The final line of this train of

thought is an accusation: why do we not give these realities

28 Weil, First and last notebooks, p. 10.29 Stephen T. Davis, Encountering evil: live options in theodicy (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press., 2001), p. 104.

16

the kind of significance we would give to them if we were ‘such

men’?

To show real compassion is, at some level, to recognise the

extreme fragility of human existence, the contingency of well-

being, etc., whilst at the same time loving this existence and

the possibilities – some of which are terrible – it contains.

For Weil, there is a sense in which this recognition,

acceptance and love, resonates at every level of the human

person, and every level of thought, and is a diffused presence

in every aspect of the person. In her judgement, it is

possible to discern that the author of the Iliad had recognised

human suffering through the tone or accent of the poem, and

she analyses the practice of giving to those who are afflicted

in a similar way. In reference to the parable of the sheep

and the goats in Matthew 25, she writes:

Those whom Christ recognised as his benefactors are those

whose compassion rested upon the knowledge of affliction.

The others give capriciously, irregularly, or else too

regularly, or from habit imposed by training, or in

conformity with social convention, or from vanity or

emotional pity, or for the sake of good conscience – in a

word, from self-regarding motives. They are arrogant, or

patronizing or tactlessly sympathetic, or they let the

afflicted man feel that they regard him simply as a specimen

of a certain type of affliction. In any case, their gift is

an injury. . . . Their contact with the afflicted must be a

false one, because the true understanding of afflicted

implies knowledge of affliction. Those who have not seen

the face of affliction, or are not prepared to, can only

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approach the afflicted behind a veil of illusion or

falsehood.30

The ways in which one can give to the afflicted badly are

legion, and easily described, but it is much more difficult to

describe what it is that constitutes genuine compassion. Here

Weil relies again upon the idea that there the genuine

recognition of suffering can be intuitively recognised or

felt, this time by those who are themselves suffering.

In summary, for Weil, it seems as though the ability to show

compassion is intimately linked not just with recognition of a

particular person’s suffering, but with the acceptance of

something which is more like a philosophical truth about the

world in general, and with an underlying attitude towards it,

a way of being oriented. And all of this is linked to her

understanding of the acceptance of death, because, for all the

reasons above (and more), to face suffering seriously and

honestly is akin to facing death: ‘to be able to face

affliction with steady attention when it is close to him a man

must be prepared, for the love of truth, to accept the death

of the soul.’31 Compassion, the love of truth, and the

acceptance of death are all of a piece.

However, what is far less clear in her work is how this

actually works out in the relationship between conceptual

thought and intuitive behaviour or affective response. In

other words, it is not clear whether these insights provide

any guide to actually judging concrete theological statements.

It is clear that compassion cannot be understood fully without

reference to the way that we respond, in thought, to the

30 Weil, Gateway to God, p. 93.31 Ibid., p. 92.

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reality of suffering, but what is not clear is how far, and in

what ways, we are to use this insight. The comments above

about the ‘two thoughts’ concerning the duration of suffering

show that for Weil the character of thoughts formed in

response to the phenomenon of suffering is not simply a matter

of their content, because thoughts that seem to be opposed -

that suffering will end immediately; that suffering will never

end - may arise from the same kind of evasive response. For

Weil, thoughts are responses, and as a result they should be

judged as responses. But is the business of discerning

whether any particular attempt to comment on the relationship

between God and the human condition ‘takes suffering

seriously’ simply a matter of intuitive discernment, or is

there more that can be said here?

4. Secrecy and architecture

In what follows I want to argue that in fact, despite the

ideas introduced so far, there is a parallel tendency in

Weil’s work to introduce distinctions that in fact distance

the business of forming abstract concepts from one’s

disposition towards others, particularly those who suffer. A

good part of Weil’s work is concerned to articulate her sense

that Christianity is, most essentially, the belief that

despite the destructiveness of affliction, God is

paradoxically present through it. This is an enormously

complicated issue in her work, and has been discussed

comprehensively by many others.32 It is sufficient here simply

32 For a discussion of these in relation to Weil’s metaphysics, see Miklos Veto, The religious metaphysics of Simone Weil (Albany: State

19

to note that Weil does, in various ways, express the basic

thought that affliction is paradoxically, ‘a marvel of divine

technique’,33 and contains, if we know how to look for it, ‘the

truth about our condition’.34 It is not just that, given the

existence of suffering, Christianity proposes a way of making

the best of it; for Weil, the possibility of affliction is

sewn into the act of creation itself, and there is no way for

the soul to be sanctified without learning the secret that

affliction has to teach. To experience affliction is to

experience the distance that constitutes creation as creation,

it is to experience the absence of God, which, again

paradoxically, is also God’s presence. There is a sense in

which suffering reveals the truth of creaturely existence.35

This conviction gives rise to an extraordinary tension with

her work: how to remain true to the senselessness and

destructiveness of much human suffering, whilst at the same

time affirming that this same suffering is, considered in the

right way, the most precious gift that has been bestowed on

creation. In a number of key passages in her notebooks she

wrestles with similar problems, and it is her attempts to

negotiate them that I want to explore in what follows.

A good example of the kind of internal tension I am

interested in is found in a cluster of remarks from her New

York notebook. She begins: ‘If one is hungry one eats, not

for the love of God but because one is hungry. If an unknown

man lying hungry in the road is hungry one must give him food,

University of New York Press, 1994), ch. 4; for a discussion of how these convictions may have a bearing on the discussion of ‘the problem of evil’, see Diogenes Allen, ‘Natural evil and the love of God’ in Religious Studies 16: 4 (1980), pp. 439-56. 33 Weil, Waiting on God, p. 75.34 Weil, Gateway to God, p. 98.35 See Weil, Waiting on God, pp. 66-70

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even if one has not enough for oneself, not for the love of

God, but because he is hungry.’36 If one demands an

explanation of the suffering of the afflicted before one is

prepared to give them one’s attention, one will never get as

far as compassion. Compassion involves feeling and responding

to another’s need as naturally as one feels one’s own, without

consideration of outcomes, or need for supplementary

motivations. Or in other words, compassion involves seeing

only the current reality of suffering, not some future

resolution or significance, not something one’s action would

be ‘for’. Compassion is perfectly simple, and corresponds to

completely undivided attention.

However, on the next page, and when reflecting in a more

speculative mode about goodness and God, Weil appears to

affirm the exact opposite:

Every thinking being is worthy of love solely in so far as

he has received existence by God’s creative act , and

possesses the right to renounce that existence for the love

of God. It is solely on this account that I have the right

to love myself or another. Only God is the good, therefore

only he is a worthy object of care, solicitude, anxiety,

longing, and efforts of thought.

In this case, the attempt to describe the deeper metaphysical

structure within which compassion has its place seems to

compromise the immediacy that it supposed to characterise it:

how can one be compassionate if one believes that only God is

worthy of attention? The sense that compassion is sacred leads

Weil to articulate what is meant by ‘the love of God’, and to

36 Simone Weil, First and last notebooks, pp. 123-24.21

suggest a more abstract framework which incorporates this

sense, but at the risk of being unfaithful to the actual state

of soul which gave rise to the insight. Weil is not unaware

of this, as another nearby comment indicates: ‘There are some

truths which one must not know, or not too much. E.g. that the

final outcome of obedience to God is undoubtedly beatitude.’37

One cannot know that obedience has an outcome ‘too much’

because projecting a scheme in which one’s obedience leads,

steadily, to ‘beatitude’, encourages one to present the world

as an ordered whole, which only requires one’s reasoned

participation, and such a scheme would not challenge one’s

basic tendency to treat everything as valuable and meaningful

primarily in reference to oneself.

Weil goes on to say that the value of some representations

is dependent on their use (the example given is the notion of

hell, which should only be considered in relation to

oneself),38 and then suggests that this implies the need for a

subtle structuring of thought:

In the domain of the transcendent there is architecture of

representation and ideas. Some are to be put in the

foreground and others in the silent, secret part of the

soul, unknown to consciousness. Some should be in the

imagination, others in the completely abstract intelligence,

others in both places, etc.

37 Ibid., p. 122.38 Ibid., p. 122. Weil says that the notion of hell should be accepted when it is a case of accepting the will of God for oneself when one feels on the verge of damnation, but not when one feels close to salvation, because in that case one is accepting it for other people.

22

This complex and refined architecture, which is operative

even in those who are called simple, if they are close to

sanctity, is what builds a soul ready for salvation.39

Weil does not explicitly link this point with her comments on

compassion, self-love and the love of God, but there does seem

to be a link, and their proximity within her flow of thought

demands that we consider it. On Weil’s account, in

compassion, there is in the foreground the simple need of

another person, which exerts a pressure without further

reference, just as one’s hunger is itself the reason for

satisfying it – we do not eat because of the thought ‘I want

to live’, but in a sense we might say that hunger is the thought

‘I want to live’. However, as a response to extreme

suffering, real compassion is rare and seemingly unnatural,

and so if it exists, it needs explaining. One way of

expressing this miracle involves an understanding of the good

of created beings, which is of a more abstract nature. An

‘architecture’ is then required, one which will harmonise

conceptual insight with one’s sense of duty and connection to

others, so that one can form in the intelligence the idea that

it is the goodness of God which makes love of self and

neighbour-as-self legitimate, whilst keeping this insight

sufficiently secret, so that it may exert its influence

without being noticed, in such a way that compassion arises as

if it were instinctive. Just as one gives in secret, so that

the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, so

one understands religious metaphysics in secret, so that one’s

relational self does not know what one's philosophical self is

doing.

39 Ibid., p. 122.23

This may seem rather cumbersome, but a similar kind of

‘architecture’ can be found in a number of Weil's most

important ideas. Elsewhere, she makes a similar point in terms

of different levels or planes of reality, and here the

difficulty in articulating and affirming certain ideas is

linked to the possibility of something being true at one level

but not at another:

To enumerate the truths which are of such a nature that by

affirming them one destroys them (e.g. the grace included in

sin), because they are not true on the same plane on which

the opinions one is affirming are found (on that plane, the

reverse is true), but on a higher plane. They are only able

to be perceived as true by such minds as are capable of

conceiving on several vertical, superposed planes

simultaneously; to other minds they remain completely

incommunicable.40

It is difficult to know precisely what Weil means by ‘planes’

here – the context here suggests that they can be taken to

refer both to some kind of hierarchical conception of reality,

and to different aspects of the human person and experience.

The conflict between levels arises because of Weil’s basic

conviction that suffering, especially in its most extreme

forms, is both a brutal reality that means nothing, gives

nothing, and sheds no light, and at the same time a ‘marvel of

divine technique’, the means of engaging in a transforming

experience of God.41 Weil’s account of the redemptive ‘use’ of 40 Weil, Notebooks, p. 163. See also pp. 62-63, and First and Last Notebooks, p. 179.41 This is evident right from the start of her first notebook, whichcontains very little explicitly religious material: ‘Value of suffering – I believe in the value of suffering, so long as one

24

suffering (which we do not have the space to explore here) is

pervaded by her consciousness of the paradoxical demand to

learn the value of suffering whilst recognising that suffering

is unredemptive.42 In speaking about redemptive suffering, she

is prepared to say that it has a purpose, that it bears fruit,

and more than this, that this process can in some way be

grasped and expressed as an intelligible process. As a result,

it contains an astonishing internal tension, and is infused

with a philosopher’s desire to comprehend and represent the

world according to its underlying principle, whilst remaining

faithful to two basically opposing experiences: ‘Suffering,

thou art evil, but he who is thine author is One that is only

good and is only the author of good.’43

The upshot of all this is that the conceptual truth that

expresses an experience may be at odds in some way with the

experience itself. To articulate the truth of the higher

plane too soon, or in the wrong way, may be to destroy the

truth of the lower plane; suffering may never be accepted in

its destructive reality, because conceptual formulations that

strive to describe this miracle become an opportunity to evade

through imagination the truth that blind, destructive

suffering is real. Suffering can never become redemptive if

it is never accepted as it is. The attempt to make an

experience more intelligible may be to block access to the

experience, or falsely avoid it: one must not speak too much

or too soon, because experience is changed as it is spoken of.

However, as we have seen, in other ways Weil supposes a more

peaceful continuity between levels of reality, and a more makes every [legitimate] effort to escape it.’ First and last notebooks, p.3.42 See for example, the discussion in ‘Additional pages on the Love of God and affliction’ collected in Gateway to God, pp. 93-102.43 Notebooks, pp. 342 and 352.

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organic interaction between thought and action, concept and

experience.

Two observations can be made on this point that relate to

the remaining discussion. Firstly, when criticising modes of

thinking which, on her account, fail to display compassion,

Weil tends to stress the continuity between abstract thought and

responsive behaviour. This is one of the main concerns

expressed in her ‘Letter to a priest’, in which she writes:

‘[o]ne may lay down as a postulate: All conceptions of God

which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are

false. All other conceptions of him, in varying degrees, are

true.’44 In an important sense, then, the ability to recognise

some suffering as intolerable, unexplained and unjustified

becomes a criteria for judging beliefs; any belief which

allows or encourages one to throw a veil over suffering is itself

a lack of compassion, an ‘expression of submission to the

Great Beast.’45 As the capacity to genuinely pay attention is

both intellectual and ethical (see in particular the essay

‘Reflections on the right use of school studies’ in Waiting on

God), there is continuity between concept and behaviour.

Those who acknowledge undeserved suffering in theory will be

more likely to recognise and respond to it practice, and only

those who recognise it in practice will be able to recognise it

in theory. Any conception of God which emerges from a failure

to recognise suffering, or which produces or reproduces this

failure, is incompatible with a movement of pure charity, and

so false. In this sense, thought and behaviour are condemned

or affirmed with the same judgement. Kindness produces truth

by nourishing one’s capacity for attention, just as cruelty

44 Weil, Gateway to God, p. 135. 45 Weil, Notebooks, p. 351.

26

reaffirms one’s incapacity to recognise suffering and the real

existence of the other.46 However, by the same token, beliefs

reproduce and spread the blindness or cruelty in which they

were conceived: those who believe that the order of the world

clearly communicates the existence of a merciful God must

become increasingly blind, deaf and pitiless in order to

remain committed to this correspondence.47 As a simultaneously

intellectual and ethical capacity, attention is the capacity

and willingness to contemplate the world without lying to

oneself or deliberately looking away from unwelcome facts, the

capacity to ‘wait’: ‘[a]bove all our thought should be empty,

waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its

naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.’48 Evidence of

this spiritual virtue is found at all levels or aspects of the

human person. One can be compassionate in thought, word, and

deed.

One way of summing up the demand that Weil makes here is in

terms of attention: she wanted to articulate spiritual truth

46 Ibid., p. 357.47 Ibid., p. 438. I am indebted here to Philip Goodchild’s article ‘The logic of sacrifice in the book of Job’ in Cultural Values 4: 2 (2000). Responding to Rene Girard’s reading of Job, Goodchild emphasises the economic stakes in the background of the dialogues, the way in which ‘the principle of temporal retribution emerges from economic conduct’ (178) and the systematic blindness towards the exception necessary to affirm this principle and the economic aspirations that found it: ‘The principle of reward and retribution becomes contagious through a similar pattern (i.e. Girardian mimetic contagion): one moves from envy of Job’s rewards, through imitation of his righteousness, to the imitative principle of reward for righteousness, symbolic reunification. Finally, in the face of Job’s misfortunes, the credibility of Job’s piety is sacrificed in favour of the abstract principle of temporal retribution which substitutes for it.’ (170) Job learns to speak rightly of God through occupying a‘chaotic interval’ in which premature judgements concerning wickedness and innocence are suspended. In many respects Goodchild’s account of the ‘chaotic interval’ experienced by Job relates to the reading of Weil’s notions of waiting and void being explored here.48 Weil, Waiting on God, p. 58.

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in such a way that would foster undivided attention, and was

extremely sensitive to the way that religious concepts tend

often to divide attention. 49 Attention should not be

consciously directed towards God or the prospect of spiritual

benefit when responding to the needs of another, or rather, if

it is, one is not really responding to the needs of another,

but acting with another purpose in mind (the service of God,

the sanctity of one’s own soul). The attention demanded by

the affliction of others is such that there is no room for any

other object, so that if one believes, as Weil did, that the

love of neighbour is somehow one with the love of God, this

knowledge must be hidden away at the highest level, beyond

comprehension.50 One must love one’s neighbour as one’s

neighbour, and nothing more, before this love can be found to

be secretly the love of God. It is not too difficult to love

God, but too easy, because as a thought detached from human

interaction, ‘God’ is almost infinitely malleable, and can be

shaped to fit our desires exactly.51 As a result, one can only

think about, or love God, through thinking of the world in a

particular way.52 For Weil, spiritual treasure, reward, life,

etc. are found at a qualitatively different level from their

earthly counterparts, and any conceptual framework that allows

such notions to be treated as straightforward goals that could

be attained by particular means, or that can be used as an

excuse to direct attention away from the present, should not

be known ‘too much’, and only believed ‘secretly’.

49 To the extent that she is prepared to say ‘God is attention without distraction.’50 Weil, First and last notebooks, p. 179.51 See ‘Some thoughts on the love of God’ and ‘Some reflections on the love of God’ in Science, necessity and the love of God.52 Weil, Notebooks, p. 25.

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Secondly, then, when attempting more positively to

articulate stages of spiritual development, or the way that

‘supernatural bread’ fills the void after one has waited, Weil

tends to allow for a certain discontinuity between thought or

belief and attitude or behaviour, so as to make room for a

wary, delicate form of affirmation, as well as experiments in

religious metaphysics. It is true that in a certain sense,

the love of the world is the love of God, but one has to know

how to know this, and this is itself part of the ‘movement of pure

charity’. Certain truths are known only asymmetrically; one

learns – miraculously - to read reality differently, so that

one’s suffering and one’s ease are both taken as the touch of

God, signs of God’s love,53 but this truth has to be held in

such a way that it never becomes a lens through which reality

can be viewed with less discomfort. Somehow, religious truth

has to be articulated, and held, in such a way as to respect

the ‘order of discovery’,54 and in such a way as to encourage

rather than discourage the giving of undivided attention.

5. Conclusion

The issues at stake here are far too large and complex to be

cleared up by a discussion as limited as this one must

necessarily be. Nevertheless, I do hope to have shown,

firstly, how Weil’s many reflections on the nature of

53 See Weil, First and last notebooks, p. 129.54 I have adopted this phrase from James Alison, who uses it in connection with attempts to articulate a logic of atonement. See, in particular, The joy of being wrong: original sin through Easter eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998) pp. 64-111, and, more simply On being liked (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 2003) pp. 20-22.

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suffering and compassion, and their relation to thought might

be used to give a clearer expression of the intuition that

failures to ‘take suffering seriously’ can indeed be felt not

just in practice, but also in theory. In some respects, Weil

may be taken to be articulating more clearly the basic

intuition than runs through a number of the ‘anti-theodicies’

that have been put forward in recent decades. There may, of

course, be a number of problems with the particular form that

this rejection of theodicy takes. It has been said, for

example, that the moral critique of theodicy is question-

begging, since the critique is only justified if the question

that theodicies begin by asking is already presumed to have

been answered in a certain way; in other words, it would only

be morally abhorrent to consider whether there are any morally

sufficient reasons for God to allow suffering if there were,

in fact, no such reasons.55 It has also been said that there

is something hypocritical about the charge of ‘moral

insensitivity’, insofar as it pours moral scorn on the very

idea of attempting to discuss the philosophical significance

of the great evils of history, whilst implicitly relying on

philosophical premises and attempting to score philosophical

points.56 But what Weil tries to show, successfully in my

view, is that compassion and abstract intellectual life really

are intimately linked, so that thoughts about suffering are

responses to suffering; one might even say that thought itself

can be compassionate, or lacking in compassion.

55 See Robert Simpson ‘Moral antitheodicy: prospects and problems’, and Atle O. Søvik, ‘Why almost all moral critique of theodicies is misplaced’.56 See for example, Peter Van Inwagen, ‘The problem of evil’ in The Oxford handbook of philosophy of religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 189-91.

30

Secondly, however, I hope to have shown that Weil’s work

also provides ample reason to think that the nature of this

connection is very difficult to articulate coherently and

consistently, so that it is not clear what one should do with

this insight. This is, perhaps, what is problematic about

Weil’s comment about the victim of torture and the belief in

divine mercy. It is a powerful challenge to any conventional

language concerning the goodness of God, a challenge to allow

abstractions to encounter reality, and see how they fare after

being tested. But at the same time it appears to demand a

task which cannot be fully carried through or finished; it is

far easier to see how any particular religious concept is

incompatible with ‘a movement of perfect charity’ than it is

to show the reverse. ‘Such men as these, if they ever

believed in God’s mercy, either believe in it no longer, or

else conceive it in an entirely different fashion from that in

which they did before.’ But this is, of course, the whole

problem: how would they conceive of it? Would the difference be

in the concept, or in their manner of conceiving it - the

potentially infinitely complicated way in which that

conception is part of their life? If there is a way of

believing in divine mercy which is somehow ‘compatible’ with

such experiences, in the sense of being formed and held

without desperately searching for ‘false consolations’, its

coherence and compatibility can never appear so as to be

judged or ratified, because the compatibility is never fully

visible, and not known in advance. The difference between the

belief of ‘such men as these’ and myself would not be found

simply in the conceptual form of the beliefs we each hold, so

that this difference could be presented for critical

comparison; the difference would be between us, in our human

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lives, where concepts, beliefs, experience, instinct,

character and actions are mysteriously united. More than

this, Weil appears to suggest here that one’s conception of

God should seek to go ahead of one’s own experience: ‘[i]t

comes, or must come, or should come to the same thing’; that

is, one should be able to think of the mercy of God as if one

had been through ‘such things’ oneself, to have one’s concepts

tested by these experiences in advance. That one knows that

‘such men as these’ exist should be enough. But this comes

close to disregarding the actual testimony of sufferers, such

that one could decide in advance which conceptual idols their

suffering would smash, or which insights the fire of their

testimony would purify.57 And this undercuts a conviction that

Weil expresses forcefully elsewhere: ‘[t]he love of neighbour

in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him:

“What are you going through?’58

In place of a conclusion, and with this question in mind, I

offer a suggestion. If Weil’s central intuitions are right,

it follows that one can best learn the truth about suffering

through attention that is undivided and honest; the first

condition of truth is the refusal of falsehood.59 These

intuitions can be discerned in Janet Martin Soskice’s

memorable words, which make explicit the promise that

underlies all of the above: ‘attention is rewarded with

reality’.60 Perhaps, then, Weil’s reflections are best thought

57 I am indebted to the suggestion made at the end of Surin’s Theology and the problem of evil here; that the willingness to be interrupted by thestories of victims may be act as a criteria of theological affirmations. See pp.149-51.58 Weil, Waiting on God, p. 6059 Weil, Gateway to God, pp. 75 and 85.60 Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Love and attention’ in Feminist philosophy of religion: critical readings, ed. P. S. Anderson and B. Clack (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 206.

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of as forming the basis, not of a rationale of judgement, such

that one might judge how ‘seriously’ suffering is taken in

this or that argument, but rather as the basis of a hope: the

hope that through the giving of attention one might learn to

be compassionate, in thought as well as deed.

33