Simone Weil, Affliction and the healing of the Triune God

Z0927253 Double Dissertation, 2014

Undergraduate Final-Year Double Dissertation

In Theology and Religion,

For Joint Honours in Philosophy and Theology,

2014

‘How does Simone Weil believe that healing cancome about in the face of affliction?’

This Dissertation is a result of my own work.Material from the work of others has beenacknowledged and quotations and paraphrasessuitably indicated. The dissertation is 11,989words long.

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Table of Contents

Abbreviations 3

Introduction 4

How to Read Weil 7

Affliction 10

Christology 16

Pneumatology 22

The life of the Trinity29

Conclusion 37

Bibliography 39

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Abbreviations

Simone Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’: FLG

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace: GG

Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks: IC

Simone Weil, Notebooks: NB

Simone Weil, On science, necessity, and the love of God: SNL

Simone Weil, ‘The Love of God and Affliction’: LGA

Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad, Poem of Force’: PF

Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader: SWR

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Introduction

Simone Weil’s work is dominated by her thoughts on the nature of themost profound human suffering and how this damages the human person.She calls this profound suffering ‘affliction’. This dissertationwill look at how Weil thinks that the effects of affliction on thehuman person can be reversed. I’ve referred to this reversal as‘healing’.

I will start by briefly outlining the current state of scholarshipon the question; this will help to show how this paper hopes toextend the current scholarly understanding of the question. Theinterpretation of Weil’s notion of affliction plays a foundationalrole in how one reads the healing which follows it. There has been atendency in the secondary literature on Weil to read her as arguingthat affliction leads the human being into union with God (Brueck,1995 and Vetö, 1995). I will argue that this reading of afflictionnot only misreads Weil, but distorts the central core of herthought. Furthermore, in reading Weil’s notion of affliction in thisway it has prevented discussion on Weil’s understanding of healing,which to my knowledge no writer has explicitly focused on.

Secondary commentators who see affliction as that, which leads theindividual into what it is to be truly human, often suggest that,for Weil, human beings are capable of leading themselves fromaffliction into union with God (Brueck, 1995: 38). Weil explicitlyrejects this approach writing that ‘we cannot take a step toward theheavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us’ (LGA: 79).Furthermore, they often see Weil’s notion of decreation –the process

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we go through to move from broken humanity into the image of God(IC: 103) as requiring a renunciation and a sacrifice (Vetö, 1995:73). I propose that these writers miss a fundamental component ofWeil’s notion of affliction; that it leaves the human beingincapable of healing herself because it damages the very facultyneeded for healing –the capacity to give of oneself. Furthermore, inreading Weil’s concept of affliction and human personhood in thisway, these writers miss the very nature of the healing Weildescribes. This healing cannot be brought about by human effort, butis found in the grace of God.

This misreading of Weil is often driven by an attempt to resolve theopposition these scholars see in Weil’s work between human autonomyand divine action (Williams, 1993: 53). To respond to this problem,I try to situate Weil’s work in an explicitly Trinitarian context.This grounds a reading of Weil, in which the deeper the divinepenetration of the human being, the more human they become, hencedissolving the opposition. This idea remains untouched in much ofthe secondary literature, however, Gabellieri, in his work on Weiland metaxu comes close to it. A metaxu is that which can lead thehuman into the divine life. Gabellieri sees the supreme metaxu asthe Cross, ‘because it fulfils through an event the essence ofPythagorean mediation, as the capacity to unify absolute distantterms’ (2004:149). Not only does this have important implications tothe idea of healing in Weil, but it also helps to set Weil’sdiscussion of affliction in her Christology.

My claim is that, for Weil, healing is brought about by enteringinto the Trinitarian life of God. In doing so the afflicted selfwhich has become unable to love, through an inability to becomevulnerable and to give of itself, is taken up into an infiniteeconomy of the Trinity. As the individual participates in the divinelife she is transformed in love, and becomes able to pour herselfinto the human other, mirroring the divine kenosis within theTrinity. To account for how this is possible I will build onGabellieri’s reading of Weil’s Christology, and also provide anaccount of Weil’s pneumatology.

I will start by briefly looking at how I plan to read Weil. In thispaper I will not attempt to claim that Weil is intentionallyconstructing a Trinitarian theology. However, I will suggest that

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her work becomes more intelligible and indeed more unified when weread her through this lens. From this I will go on to look at Weil’snotion of affliction, stressing its capacity to destroy personhoodand how it cannot be thought of as something constructive. I willthen turn to look at Weil’s Christology, arguing that she reads theChrist event as that which brings the afflicted into the life ofGod, making union possible. I will then look at how the afflictedare drawn into the life of God, examining Weil’s pneumatology.Finally I will look at how being brought into the life of God bringshealing to the afflicted, proposing that it’s through being broughtinto the infinite giving of the Trinitarian relations, which allowsthe human person to imitate this giving in human relations.

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How to Read Weil

I plan to read Weil as a Christian theologian. All Weil scholarsrecognise that Weil writes with passion; indeed she does not writeas a systematic theologian. Hollingsworth writes that Weil thinks‘poetically’ (2013: 208). To add to this interpretive issue, many ofWeil’s works are unfinished, and some which take a central place inWeil scholarship are notebooks which cannot be approached in thesame way as her more ‘academic’ pieces. Having said this I thinkthat Weil’s work has the capacity to enrich the systematic debate;especially concerning the nature of human suffering. Few writers arecapable of showing such sensitivity to suffering as Weil does. Oneof the real strengths of Weil’s understanding of healing is the waythat it does not reduce the afflicted to a dependent. Itsimultaneously recognises the severity of the trauma and thecapacity or even need for the afflicted to serve others.Furthermore, despite recognising the potentially annihilating impactof suffering on the self, Weil is equally sensitive to the movementof God in this suffering. This is captured when she writes that:

Only God, present in us, can really think the human qualityinto the victims of affliction, can really look at them with alook differing from what we give to things, can listen totheir voice as we listen to spoken words. Then they becomeaware that they have a voice, otherwise they would not haveoccasion to notice it. (FLG: 93)

In this paper I seek to show how Weil’s thought, passion and life,which together with her writings make up her corpus (Tracy, 2004:229), might enrich the systematic discussion. Throughout this paperI propose a reading of Weil which is explicitly Trinitarian, thiswill seem surprising for a writer whose commitment to the Trinitysome have doubted. However, while not trying to show that this wasthe guiding motive under Weil’s thought I will seek to show thatmany elements of her thought becomes more coherent and indeed more

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Weilian, when viewed in this manner. In addition there are placeswhere I suggest how Weil might have gone on to develop herTrinitarian theology, drawing on Sergius Bulgakov and Von Balthasarto do so. This is appropriate because both these fellow 20th Centurytheologians compliment and indeed share Weil’s kenotic understandingof human personhood. This allows us to turn to them to elucidatestrands of Weil’s thought which are more prominent in theirtheologies. Furthermore they also provide solutions to problems weencounter in Weil’s thought, which because of the brevity of herlife, dying during World War II at the age of 34, she didn’t havetime to properly address. It should be stressed that I am notclaiming that Bulgakov and Balthasar intentionally develop Weil’swork, only that there is a similarity in theological approach whichallows us to turn to them for a developed kenotic theologicalanthropology. Furthermore, in doing so, I hope to draw out the deepTrinitarian logic which is present in Weil’s thought.

Scholars, in particular Brueck, who have focused on Weil’s notion ofaffliction without looking at her commitment to the Trinity, havefailed to notice the way that the human and the divine interact.Nearly all misreadings of Weil come from a failure to see how thehuman is naturally orientated to the divine, with many scholarsinstead constructing an opposition between the two in her thought.This is most explicitly seen in Vetö’s understanding of humanautonomy as opposed to God’s movement in the human being, which Ichallenge below. In reading Weil in this way the sheer dynamism ofher thought is lost. This leads to a mischaracterisation ofaffliction as something which can lead the human being into ameaningful existence. The idea that affliction is meaningful inhuman experience will be explicitly challenged in this piece. Ipropose that this runs contrary to the very core of Weil’s thought.

Pivotal to my reading of Weil is an understanding of her idea ofcontradiction. For Weil the contradiction between God’s love and ourexperience of affliction creates an existential contradiction whichwe feel at the very core of our being. This cannot be resolvedthrough an intellectual theodicy. Rather this contradiction can onlybe lived in through God’s love (Springsted, 1996: 19). For Weil,contradiction thus marks the limit of human understanding; however,there is a form of existence, which goes beyond this. Contradictionallows us to recognise that there is a ‘unity in creation which

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surpasses our understanding… leading us towards the source of thismystery’ (ibid: 20). Weil proposes that in not trying to reduce thecontradiction of affliction, we allow God to move in us, and bringus into a reality which is beyond our human comprehension and whichbrings healing to our affliction. The book of Job is the archetypeof this kind of experience, in which Job cannot comprehend thesource of his affliction, but in petitioning God he receives anencounter with God’s healing. Job says ‘you asked, ‘who is thisthat obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of thingsI did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know’ (Job,43:3) and goes on to say ‘my ears had heard of you but know my eyeshave seen you’ (Job, 43:5). Weil’s notion of contradiction will beused throughout this paper t help to interpret her thought.

Affliction

In this section I will outline what Simone Weil means by afflictionand the impact that it has on the human being. In order to properly

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understand the nature of healing in Weil’s thought, it isfoundational that we establish the nature of affliction. I willstress three ways in which affliction damages the human self: thepsychological impact, the way the self relates to human beings andfinally to God. Understanding affliction in this way is pivotal tounderstanding why it is only the love of God drawing the soul intothe life of God that can heal the soul, and also to understandingthe way the soul is dawn into this reality. This is emphasised byWeil’s discussion of ‘void’. I will stress that this void is humandesire for the transcendent and specifically for God. In particularI will highlight that this void cannot be filled by humanity, indeedthe human has to resist filling it with the imaginary so that Godcan move into it and draw the human into Godself. Finally I willlook at how this reading of Weil is different from the readingssuggested by Brueck criticising his understating of Weil’s conceptof affliction as a divine educational tool. This will set the stagefor a discussion of Weil’s Christology and Pneumatology.

For Weil, affliction is the state which epitomises existence withoutGod. Without contact with divine grace we base our reality aroundthe dominating notion of force. The strong human being begins tobelieve that this strength is her identity, and the weak human beingbelieves the absence of strength is her identity. The truth is thatboth are enslaved by force, ‘power contains a sort of fatality whichweighs on those who command as those who obey; nay more, it is in sofar is it enslaves the former that through their agency, it pressesdown upon the latter’ (SWR: 134-5). In this economy of scarcity thesoul is trapped in a cycle of violence and hate, where to be trulyhuman becomes unthinkable; for in order to participate in thisviolence the soul is required ‘to destroy the part of itselfimplanted by nature’ (PF: 42). That is the part of the soul that ismost human, that which is meant to give to others and ultimately toopen itself up to receive God’s giving of Godself.

This has a damaging impact on human psychology. For Weil, to be thevictim of force is to suffer ‘affliction’ and there is universalityto this plight, she writes that ‘all men by the act of being born,are destined to suffer violence’ (PF: 34). The event in which onesuffers this violence has a distinct psychological impact.Affliction produces a sense of ‘self-hatred and sense of guilt anddefilement’ in the individual though logically it should produce

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this in the afflicter (LGA: 70). This damages the self in such a waythat the self cannot properly interact with the created universe.Weil writes that ‘If through excessive weakness we can neither callforth pity nor do harm to others, we attack what the universe itselfrepresents for us. Then every good or beautiful thing is like an insult’(original emphasis, GG: 50). Instinctively the individual seeks outnot a cause but a purpose for why they are suffering in a flawedattempt to obtain healing (Allen and Springsted, 1994: 102);however, this is exactly the ‘finality’ which is lacking inaffliction (Loades, 1993: 279). Unable to interact with the universeas anything good or beautiful, the human being’s attempt to findthis purpose only furthers the cycle of violence and pain. Weilwrites that this search for ‘equilibrium’ is misguided. In pursuinghealing through revenge one remains trapped in the kingdom of forceand this serves to destroy the self rather than to heal it. Anyhealing or satisfaction we gain remains ‘imaginary’ (GG: 51).Healing cannot come from within the human being, whose world isdominated by force; it must come from something outside, somethingexterior to the kingdom of might.

Weil suggests that to obtain healing from affliction we mustencounter a real relationship, one not dominated by the gravity offorce but instead permeated by grace and love. Vetö captures thissentiment when he writes that the afflicted desire to be looked at;however, ‘this is impossible, for those who are non-decreated;attention violently turns away from wretchedness because it revealsour own nothingness in the fragility and vulnerability of anotherhuman being’ (Vetö, 1995: 83). There is a strong sense here that thehuman being cannot escape her own suffering and affliction bymuscular effort. Rather they must receive their personhood throughgrace.

Tragically though affliction damages the faculty required to receivehealing. That is this ability to open oneself up to receive graceand love which affliction has damaged. This is because, for Weil,affliction has the capacity to close the soul up and make itincapable of forming the relationships characterised by mutualvulnerability. Speaking of those who have suffered affliction, shewrites that ‘In their days is no give and take, no open field, nofree road over which anything can pass to or from them’ (PF: 28). Theindividual becomes an island, indeed as such they are not truly

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human and become a thing ‘between a man and a corpse’ (PF: 29). Thisreflects a reading of personhood which is deeply linked torelationships. For Weil, affliction prevents the self from formingrelationships, and in reducing the self to a thing ‘between a manand a corpse’ prevents the self from being truly human. This isbecause the self is not meant to be an island, rather the human ismeant to be dynamically giving, overflowing with love into others,and in doing so allowing them to overflow in a similar manner. Forceprevents humanity from engaging in these activities because thewound of force prevents the vulnerability needed for this dynamiclove. The afflicted individual falls victim to the lie of force;that the only way to retain what is left of personhood is by closingthe self off from the potentially damaging impact of humancommunion. This is actually what prevents healing. This reading ofWeil, while not explicit in her writings (she rarely uses the termkenosis for instance) is implicit in her understanding of the selfand allows us to makes sense of the unsystematised concepts Weilemploys.

Furthermore while this might be implicit in Weil’s writings thereare passages in which this theme comes to fore. Such as when Weilasks ‘Christ emptied himself of his divine nature and took uponhimself that of a slave. He humbled himself unto the cross- untoseparation from God (My God, My God…) How ought we to imitate him?’(NB: 208). Here we have a hint that Weil understands the human beingas essentially kenotic, following Christ as an exemplar. This ideawill be important in understanding Weil’s Christology.

Affliction also impacts the way in which humanity relates with God.This is significant in understanding why Weil sees healingadministered in the way that it is. Weil writes that ‘afflictionmakes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a deadman, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell’ (LGA:70). Weil names this sense of absence ‘void’. Void is bestunderstood as humanity’s absolute and universal need for God(Springsted, 1986: 13). As has been mentioned above, we cannot fillthis space with the imaginary but must let real (and possiblypainful) healing come to the soul. Weil writes that throughaffliction and through the void the soul must keep on loving God.She says that ‘what is terrible is that if, in this darkness wherethere is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence

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becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or atleast go on wanting to love, though it may only be with aninfinitesimal part of itself’ (LGA: 70).

Thus for Weil we cannot reduce evil to a theodicy, but must hold intension the apparent paradox between the fact that God is love andthe reality of our own affliction and the affliction of others. ForWeil, ‘the extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact thatit does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but asupernatural use for it’ (GG: 132). Directing the human being tovoid –our need for God, is this use of affliction. For void directsus to our infinite need for God, which is the only thing that canlead us into the life of God, without which human beings can neverbe truly human. Weil is explicit on this ‘If there were noaffliction we would be able to believe ourselves in Paradise. HorridPossibility’ (NB: 294). Though this does not mean that afflictionhas any positive or productive role, it remains intensely damaging.Nevertheless it is undeniable, for Weil, that affliction reveals thetruth of humanity: that humanity is fragile, broken and deeply inneed of the love of God. Already in the very nature of affliction,is the source of healing suggested; the love of God.

This reading of Weil challenges that put forward by Brueck. There isa tendency in the literature on Weil’s idea of affliction to stressthe educative and enlightening role that affliction can have on thehuman being. Brueck for instance writes ‘pure love of God, then, forthe Christian mystic, a love which is identical with perfectknowledge of God, can be attained only by experiencing the same kindof torment that Christ suffers on the cross’ (1995: 6). Weildistinctly challenges this when she writes that ‘affliction issomething quite distinct from a method of God’s teaching’ (LGA: 79).Indeed, for Weil affliction is something horrendous which can doterrible things to both oneself and the people one loves. Springstedreads the tension in Weil’s thought well when he writes that ‘theopportunity that affliction provides for a pure love between us andGod does not mean that we can desire affliction; that would beperverse. Neither does it mean that affliction automatically leadsto a pure experience of God’s love’ (Springsted, 1986: 43). Toreduce affliction to a divine educational method is to seek the kindof compensation which in the face of affliction Weil explicitlyrejects. Instead Weil proposes a different path, writing that:

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We must love God through the evil that occurs, solely becauseeverything that occurs is real and behind all reality standsGod. Some realities are more or less transparent, others arecompletely opaque. (SNL: 154)

To deny the evil of affliction is to deny the reality in which theafflicted person lives and contributes to the very mutenessaffliction brings (Vetö, 1995: 83). The paradox that Weil maintainsbetween the love of God and the reality of affliction will becomesmore apparent as we look at it in the light of Trinitarian theology,especially her Christology; a Christology dominated by the afflictedChrist on the Cross.

In this section I characterised Weil’s understanding of afflictionas having a severe impact on the individual’s capacity to formmeaningful relationships. At the same time I claimed that for Weil,it is only through a relationship with something exterior to thekingdom of force which will draw the human being out of it intohealing. Yet the afflicted still perceives every relationshiprequiring mutual vulnerability as a threat to their security. Indeedthe afflicted person sees all sources of the Good or the Beautifulas an insult to their own hardship. This led Brueck to suggest thataffliction itself must lead us towards healing. I suggested thatthis ran contrary to Weil’s rejection of theodicy. Weil cannotaccept the idea that affliction is part of a divine education. Tosee how Weil can maintain that affliction is that which damages thevery capacity which healing requires, and that healing is possibleit is necessary to look at her Christology.

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Christology

In this section I will look at the role that Weil thinks that theChrist event plays in the healing of the afflicted. I will focus mydiscussion on Weil’s idea of the crucifixion because this dominatesher Christology. I will start by stressing how Weil, despitegrounding her Christology in the crucifixion, sees the life of Godas wholly distinct from violence and the kingdom of force. Indeed,it is this belief which causes her to focus on the crucifixion.Having argued this I will move on to look at the Trinitarian

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foundation of her Christology, focusing on the relationship betweenthe Father and the Son. I will argue that for Weil, the crucifixionjoins the afflicted to God. Through Christ’s affliction thecrucifixion can act as what Weil terms a metaxu (a bridge) betweenthe afflicted and the Trinitarian life. Indeed Christ takes on acosmic significance as ‘the lamb slain from the foundation of theworld’. Finally I will look at how my reading of the crucifixiondiffers from Vetö’s and from Brueck’s, using this as an opportunityto stress the importance of my interpretation of Weil’s account ofaffliction.

I will start by looking at one key passage on Weil’s understanding of the crucifixion. She writes:

God created through love and for love. God did not createanything except love itself, and the means to love. He createdlove in all its forms. He created beings capable of love fromall possible distances. Because no other could do it hehimself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinitedistance. This infinite distance between God and God, thissupreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, thismarvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be furtherfrom God than that which has been made accursed.

This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond ofsupreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in themidst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet meltinginto one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is theWord of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration.When human music in its greatest purity pierces our soul, thisis what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear thesilence, this is what we grasp most distinctly through it.(LGA: 72)

Weil here is attempting to show how God is distinct from force. Weilsees this as essential if the love of God is to provide a realalternative and healing from force and the affliction it causes. Theway in which Weil writes here bears a similarity to Girard’s ThingsHidden from the Foundation of the World, and indeed Girard cites Weil as athinker who seeks to reveal the workings of the scapegoat mechanismand the damaging nature of sacrifice (Girard, 1987: 244). Weil, inthe passage quoted above, seeks to show that far from the victims of

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society being those from whom God has withdrawn himself or eventhose whom God has chosen to punish (Job, 15), the victims are thoseGod chose to join Godself to that they might share in the life ofGod. This is the meaning of the crucifixion. For Weil, God is theGod of victims, ‘when we have learned to hear the silence, this iswhat we grasp most distinctly through it’. She sees it as pivotalthat, the life of God is wholly distinct from force and violence,‘God did not create anything except love itself, and the means tolove’. When affliction damaged God’s creation God himself went tothe infinite distance from God to provide a way for the afflicted toreturn to God.

Weil is clear that supernatural love cannot be touched by might andyet God consents to force on the Cross (IC: 118). Rather than thismeaning that violence becomes part of the Trinitarian life, Christon the cross demonstrates what it is to live separately from force,to live by love and thus to be truly human. Weil writes that ‘[God]is withdrawn from all contact with might, neither can man berighteous except by preserving himself equally from contact withmight, and he cannot preserve himself except by love’ (IC: 120).Christ is the ‘absolute person’ in the kenosis that he demonstrateson the cross, and the filial love he demonstrates to the Father.Christ reveals a human personhood ‘made real in and through kenosis’(Chau, 2011: 7).

The love that Christ demonstrates is not merely exemplary, but thereis something supernatural about it. In his kenosis on the cross,Christ allows us to live in the same way and hence to become trulyhuman. This is because ‘he himself went to the greatest possibledistance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between Godand God’. As Weil says above, Christ became ‘accursed’ so that therewould be nothing further from God than Christ and that the love ofGod which links the Father and Son could pass through and saturateeverything in the universe. Christ ‘accepts affliction so that nocondition on earth, including affliction, may be removed from God’slove. Because Christ has accepted afflictionnot for his own usebut ours- God’s love can be present in our lives’ (Springsted, 1986:47). For Weil it was pivotal that Christ suffered affliction not inorder to enact a substitutionary atonement but in order that Christmight unite himself to the afflicted and hence allow them to betaken up into Godself.

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To understand Weil’s comments on ‘distance’, ‘separation’ and‘union’ one must study her Christology in its Trinitarian context.For Weil it is the crucifixion that enables the afflicted soul tomove into the Trinitarian life and thus receive healing. Weil seesthe crucifixion as embodying the distance between the divinepersons, a distance which still allows union. Drawing on Balthasar’sthought we can see an example of how God might take up afflictioninto Godself without it becoming part of God. Here I use Balthasar’sthought as an example of how the core of Weil’s kenotic theologymight have developed to deal with this problem. While not claimingthat she proposed this, I do think we can use Balthasar to show thatthere is logic to the Trinitarian core of Weil’s theology.

For Balthasar, like Weil, Christ becomes sin on the Cross.Importantly, for Balthasar, this does not happen as the sinnerexperiences sin ‘but it takes place in the profound depths of therelations between the divine hypostases- which are inaccessible toany creature’ (1988-98: 336). Thus the Son becomes infinitely Otherto the Father, but he remains ‘infinitely Other of the Father. Thus heboth grounds and surpasses all we mean by separation, pain andalienation in the world and all we can envisage in terms of lovingself-giving, interpersonal relationship and blessedness’ (ibid: 325).This means that affliction only influences the relationship betweenthe Father and Son. To draw a parallel with Weil, this is why sherefers to ‘distance’ as a spatial metaphor for the relation betweenthe Father and the Son. It is vital to understand that Weil does notthink that affliction determines what it is to be the Son, whichwould be grotesque. This would mean that to imitate the son would beto become afflicted. This distinction will play an important rolelater in defending Weil’s idea of kenosis in my final section.

For Weil, the crucifixion has cosmic ramifications- it influencesthe very fabric of reality. In the light of the crucifixion ‘supremelove places the bond of supreme union’ over supreme separation. Thisleads her to refer to the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of theworld’ (IC: 93). Hollingsworth helps to clarify what this might meanwhen she says that, for Weil, the cross is an ‘on-going reality’(2013: 223). This means that the crucifixion is not merely ahistorical event but rather something which resonates throughouthistory from Golgotha. It is that which allows for us to move from

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the scarcity of affliction into the infinite life of God. Weilwrites that:

Evil is infinite in the sense of being indefinite: matter,space and time. Nothing can overcome this kind of infinityexcept the true infinity. That is why on the balance of thecross a body which was frail and light, but which was God,lifted up the whole world. ‘’Give me a point of leverage and Iwill lift up the whole world’’. This point of leverage is thecross. There can be no other. It has to be at the intersectionof the world and that which is not the world. The cross is theintersection. (GG: 146)

This has healing potential for Weil because ‘heaven coming down toearth raises earth to heaven’ (GG: 145).The crucifixion bringsheaven into suffering and begins to raise it into the life of God.For Weil there is no suffering in the life of God, and so thisamounts to a sanctifying process of healing (LGA: 80). Thecrucifixion thus establishes a metaxu from affliction into thehealing love of the Trinity. It is in this vein that Weil writes,‘it is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes thesame journey that God made toward it. And that is the cross’ (GG:141).

My reading of Weil’s Christology has stressed the role of thecrucifixion as driven by an act of divine love which allows theafflicted to be transformed by God and led into the inner life ofthe Trinity. This is especially different from the reading employedby Vetö, who argues that ‘the state in which one participates in theCross of Christ through redemptive suffering is called affliction’(Vetö, 1995: 77). In my previous chapter I outlined how afflictioncannot be seen as something which either teaches or grows the self.Instead I argued the opposite, that it was fundamentally destructiveto human flourishing. It seems that Vetö’s misreading of afflictionas that which ‘alone helps us to surmount the distance back to God’(1995: 74) has led to a misreading of the role that Christ’saffliction plays in the crucifixion.

This mistake is also seen in the work of Brueck. She makes themistake of reading Weil as viewing the suffering of Christ as anexemplar for human personhood. Brueck writes that ‘by acceptingnecessity, the source of affliction, man may realize a God-like

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love’ (1995: 38). Not only does Brueck make the same mistake asVetö, implying that affliction can bring healing but in doing so shealso fails to recognise the transformative power of God’s love. Bylocating the source of transformation in ‘accepting necessity’Brueck actually implies that the afflicted are capable of anepistemic shift by their own power, through which healing isbrought. This is wholly opposed to Weil’s reading of the crucifixionand indeed her whole theology, which stresses humanity’s utterdependence on God’s love and grace. For Weil, only through the powerof God’s love can the human be led into healing. The centrality ofGod’s love in this process will becomes more apparent in the nextsection, where I look at Weil’s pneumatology.

In this section, I looked at Weil’s Christology. I proposed thatWeil read the crucifixion as the cosmic event, grounded inhistorical actuality, in which the afflicted were brought into thelife of God. For Weil, because God is wholly distinct from thekingdom of force, this amounts to a sanctifying process of healing.This interpretation ran contrary to the interpretation offered byboth Vetö and Brueck who saw the acceptance of affliction as thatwhich offered healing. I rejected this as failing to account for howWeil regards affliction as inherently damaging. It also failed toaccount for the fact that Weil sees healing as having to come fromGod. Why being brought into the life of God brings about healingwill become evident in my final section. Before looking at this,it’s appropriate to turn to look at how Weil thinks that the humanbeing is led from a state in which they are incapable of formingrelationships into one that gives healing. To do this I will turn tolook at Weil’s pneumatology.

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Pneumatology

In this section I will look at how Weil believes the afflicted areled into the life of God, the place where healing occurs. I willstart by outlining how Weil’s thought on the Spirit can best beunderstood as the love between the Father and Son. I will focus onWeil’s claim that God loves Godself through the human being,responding to critics who claim that this damages human personhood.In order to defend Weil I will look at her concept of decreation,arguing that when properly understood as the process by which thesoul moves into union with God, far from destroying humanpersonhood, participating in the love of the Spirit for Godself iswhat allows the individual to receive the gift of human personhood.

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From this, I will go on to look at how the process of decreationtakes place, proposing that it is by the self waiting on God totransform it. From this I will look in detail at Weil’s concept ofthe implicit love of God as that which, through the Spirit, drawsthe individual from affliction into the life of God. This willprovide the foundations for looking at Weil’s idea of theTrinitarian life and why residing in this can bring healing to theafflicted.

Weil’s pneumatology can only be properly understood as Trinitarian.Throughout Weil’s work we can see the traditional idea that the HolySpirit is the love between the Father and the Son. This hasparticular relevance to the crucifixion, where the Spirit, Christhaving united himself to the afflicted, leads the afflicted intohealing. Weil explicitly links the Spirit with the crucifixion andthe healing made possible by it, writing that 'the Love which unitesChrist abandoned on the Cross to his Father at an infinite distance[The Holy Spirit] dwells in every saintly soul’ (SWR: 433).

For Weil, Christ unites himself to the afflicted, providing thefoundation for union with God, and the Spirit brings the afflictedhuman being into union with the life of God, drawing the afflictedinto the culmination of this union. Weil writes that ‘the lovebetween God and God, which in itself is God [The Holy Spirit], isthis bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two beings soclosely that they are no longer distinguishable and really form asingle unity and the bond that stretches across distance andtriumphs over infinite separation’ (LGA: 74). For Weil, the Spiritdwells in the human being in the sense that ‘it is God who loves andbeholds himself through him’ (NB: 264).

It is important to understand that, for Weil, God loving God throughGodself doesn’t destroy human personhood as Rowan Williams hassuggested. Williams argues that this kind of participation in God isdetrimental to a meaningful understanding of what it is to be human.He writes that in proposing that the human loves God throughGodself, Weil identifies ‘loving consciousness with no consciousnessat all. And I cannot see how this can conceivably be a way oftalking about an ideally receptive mode of consciousness’ (Williams,1993: 68). Indeed Williams goes further arguing that requiring thehuman to take the perspective of the creator in love undermines what

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we mean by personal love (ibid: 74). There is a fundamental elementof love which requires the saying ‘I’ to another (ibid: 76). Williamsargues that Weil fails to recognise this. Allen repeats thiscriticism, proposing that for Weil ‘decreation involves a non-reading’ (Allen, 1993: 113) of reality. Indeed there are passages inWeil which seem to support such a reading, for instance when Weilwrites that ‘what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal inhim. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothingelse’ (SWR: 317).

Looking at this criticism is helpful because it helps to clarifywhat Weil calls the process of decreation. This is the process thatthe human needs to go through to become truly human and to enterunion with God. It explains how the human moves from affliction intohealing. Contradicting Williams’ and Allen’s reading, I read Weil asproposing that we are not decreated into something impersonal andshallow, but we remain in a very real sense personal and human. Ofcourse if Williams is right then Weil’s idea of healing would bepaltry, but passages such as the following suggest a differentreading.

Perhaps: to have a personal relationship with an impersonalGod? Not to say ‘I’ to God; nor to say ‘thou’ to I. ‘I’ and‘thou’ separate me, and this separation forces them to mounthigher. Without ‘I’ or ‘thou’, let the relationship be closerthan any human form of union. (NB: 173)

For Weil the ‘I’ (personal identity) is grounded in the ‘thou’(God). Constructing a dichotomy of ‘thou’ and ‘I’ is impossible,because it implies that there is an ‘I’ without God, but for Weilthere is only an ‘I’ because there is a God; a ‘thou’. Moving toparticipate deeper in God is best thought of as a completion of theindividual rather than as a destruction of human personality. Inthis completion there is no ‘I’ nor ’thou’. Indeed there never was aseparation between them.

This way of thinking is affirmed in a passage in which Weil usesimago dei language. She writes that ‘we also have originally been, andmust again become, images of God’ (IC: 103). It is true that thisprocess, as the term decreation suggests, may require the death ofelements of our character. These things which die though are notthat which makes us who we are. The difference between the loss

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experienced in decreation and that experienced in affliction is thatwhile affliction produces brokenness, the presence of the Spirit,and the decreation it produces, is that which safeguards the‘absolute value’ (Allen, 1993: 113) of the human being.

This contradicts the reading of Weil offered by Vetö. Vetö proposesthat Weil’s ‘entire philosophy rests on a God suffering from beingseparated from himself by the obstacle of human autonomy’ (1995:73). Vetö is mistaken to read Weil as proposing that human autonomypresents an obstacle to God. Instead, I read Weil as arguing thatthe gap between God and the humanity is not human autonomy but thefailure for humans to be truly autonomous; to act out what it is tobe created in the image of God. Vetö in claiming that it is humanautonomy that sets a gap between humanity and God is stuck in thekind of dialectical thinking that Weil is trying to undo. For Weilthe human and divine are not opposed to each other, rather the humancan only be properly understood in its relation to the infinite. Itis similar to St Thomas’ notion that we are naturally predisposedtowards grace, the deification of humanity does not expunge ourhumanity but rather is its greatest culmination (S-T III, 9, 3.). Toturn directly back to Weil’s thought, this sentiment is expressed inher idea that we only become truly human when we engage with thedecreating love of God –the Holy Spirit. This reveals to us what ourhumanity is, she writes that ‘my ‘’I’’ is hidden for me (andothers); it is on the side of God, it is in God, it is God’ (GG:85). For Weil, human personhood is a gift, which we receive throughsurrendering ourselves to God. Only in doing so do we becomeourself.

For Weil only God can accomplish the process of decreation necessaryfor healing, ‘one cannot pass from nothing to nothing withoutpassing through God. God is the unique path. He is the Way’ (IC:196). Though God cannot do this without consent, the presence of theSpirit, the presence of decreation, requires the union of divine andhuman will (Gabellieri, 2004: 149). Such is the nature of lovewithout force. This strand of Weil’s thought is best captured in herimage of the seed. She writes that:

We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses theuniverse and comes to us… He comes at his own time. We havethe power to consent to receive him or to refuse. If we remain

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deaf, he comes back again and again like a beggar, but also,like a beggar, one day he stops coming. If we consent, Godputs a little seed in us and he goes away again. (LGA: 79)

It is the Spirit that plants this seed- indeed the Spirit is the seedthat draws the individual into Christ through which the individualparticipates in the Trinity; loving God with the love of God.Decreation removes obstacles to the passage of this love, and movesthe individual into what it is to be truly human.

The manner in which God approaches the soul deserves attention. Theseed planted in the soul of the afflicted draws the soul into theimplicit love of God. God can appear in no other way to the soul whohas suffered affliction. As mentioned above, to the afflicted soul,the good and the beautiful appear as an insult. However, thesoftening of the soul which occurs in the planting of the seed,allows for the Spirit to begin to lead the soul into Godself. Thishappens through the implicit love of God, one instance of which isthe beauty of the world.

Weil writes that ‘the beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smilefor us coming through matter.’ (FLG: 104). For Weil this longing forbeauty is the ‘longing for the incarnation’ (FLG: 109), but itappears as a longing for beauty because to the afflicted soul Godappears (though never is) utterly absent. This point deserves to bestressed, while the soul may feel abandoned by God, God neverabandons the afflicted, nor is the afflicted completely destroyed byaffliction, this is why healing is possible. Thus the beauty of theworld is able to act as ‘a snare’ (IC: 3) to draw the soul from theimplicit love of God into the explicit love of God.

As stressed above it is not through human effort that the soul movescloser to God but solely through waiting for God (FLG: 126). Throughlooking upon beauty the individual moves into the labyrinth in which‘God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he willbe changed, he will have become different, after being eaten anddigested by God’ (FLG: 103). This image, while unusual for unionwith God, is quite fitting for Weil. It shows that union to God canbe a difficult process for the afflicted but also that the union isabsolute, we move completely into God, and are transformed in doingso.

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Given the relational nature of both healing and affliction it isvital, for Weil, that the implicit love of God also takes the formof friendship. In friendship the divine and human meet in a specialway. Weil writes that friendship is ‘a personal and human lovewhich is pure and which enshrines an imitation and a reflection ofdivine love’ (FLG: 131). Indeed she goes further to say that ‘purefriendship is an image of the original and perfect friendship thatbelongs to the Trinity and is the very essence of God’ (FLG: 137).Here Weil indicates that by participating in the implicit love ofGod we are drawn into the self-loving of the Trinity; this willbecome explicit later on. It is important to stress that for Weilfriendship is a miraculous occurrence, which is only possiblebecause of the presence of Christ. For her ‘these kinds of love aresupernatural’ (FLG: 137).

For Weil the implicit love of God, which is a meeting point of thedivine and the human, and which the Spirit draws us into, speaks ofthe soul’s desire for transcendence. Just as beauty was the desirefor the incarnation. The afflicted’s need announces itself a cryfrom the soul in which ‘the reality of its hunger is not a belief itis a certainty’ (FLG: 138). Moreover, as highlighted above, forWeil, this implicit love leads us into the fullness of God’s love.She writes:

During the period of preparation these indirect lovesconstitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of theeyes, not without some effort, towards higher things. AfterGod has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he doesfor a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transportits centre to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken hascracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the world. Thesefirst loves continue, they are more intense than before, butthey are different. He who has passed through this adventurehas a deeper love than ever for those who suffer afflictionand for those who help him in his own, for his friends, forreligious practices, and for the beauty of the world. But hislove has become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in thelight of God. (FLG: 138)

The implicit love by which God shows himself to the afflicted souldraws us into a greater reality in which we come to participate in

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God and become ‘a ray merged in the light of God’. Springsted makesan important clarification as to the noetic quality of this love. Heargues that while the Spirit drawing the individual into thisreality represents a shift in world view, the reality that theindividual is drawn into is more than this. It is participation inthe very life of God (Springsted, 2004: 223). Furthermore it isreality in which we are drawn further into as we live out ‘a deeperlove than ever for those who suffer affliction and for those whohelp him in his own, for his friends’. This serves to draw us backto the idea of personhood, grounded in kenosis that we mentionedabove. For as we grow ‘in relations of love and freedom, theprecondition for which is a kenosis, a self-emptying in order toreceive the other, the effects of nonpersonhood are reversed’(Papanikolaou, 2003: 57). This will be the focus of my last chapter.

In this section I looked at how Weil thinks the afflicted soul wasled into the life of God, the place where healing takes place. Iargued that for Weil, the crucifixion allows the Spirit to dwell inthe soul of the afflicted, drawing her into the life of God. Iproposed that this did not lead to an annihilation of personhoodbecause for Weil the human being has a natural predispositiontowards supernatural grace. As we come to love God with the love ofGod, that is the Holy Spirit, we become more, not less personal.This is mirrored in Weil’s notion of decreation in which we aretransformed into being more ourselves. From this I turned to look athow Weil thought that the Holy Spirit manifested itself. I read Weilas proposing that to the afflicted soul the Spirit could only appearas the implicit love of God. As the human being engaged in theimplicit love of God, she is gradually led into the explicit love ofGod and the healing contained within this. Given the relationalnature of this healing it was significant that Weil understandsfriendship as an example of the implicit love of God. This alsoshows that while relational personhood is damaged by affliction, itcan never be extinguished. God constantly draws us into relationalexistence.

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The Life of the Trinity

In this section I will look at the nature of healing in Weil’sthought. I will argue that, for Weil, it is through participating inthe life of God, in the mutual giving of the Trinitarian persons,that the afflicted human being is healed. From this I will look atthe form this healing takes, proposing that participating in theself-giving of the Trinity allows the afflicted person to give ofthemselves in human relationships. This reverses the effects ofaffliction, which crippled the individual’s capacity to formrelationships that required a degree of vulnerability and openness,reducing her to a thing between a human and a corpse. Havingestablished this, I will clarify that this does not lead to atriumphalist proclamation of the invulnerability of the humanperson.

For Weil, through entering into the Trinity the afflicted self isbrought into personhood and hence healing. Drawn into the divinelife through the Son by the Spirit, the self participates in themutual giving of the divine persons within the infinite economy ofthe Trinity. Thus the inability to give of the self which afflictionbrings is countered by the kenotic nature of God.

To understand why this brings healing to the afflicted it isnecessary to start by saying a little more on Weil’s idea of thehuman person to which we have given an outline above. As was hintedat in our discussion of decreation, the human person only becomestruly human by coming into the transformative love of the Trinity.Weil writes that ‘one is never oneself. One is always somethingelse. There is no egoism. But this something else has got to be God.Only in this way can one really be oneself’ (NB: 483). In this claimwe can also see the idea of theosis in Weil’s theology. For Weil,only by being transformed into God’s image, through entering unionwith God do we truly become ourselves, the divine-human.

Weil is explicit about the relational impact this has on the humanbeing, and the link this has in healing the afflicted. As was quotedat the beginning of this piece Weil thinks that being taken into thelife of God allows us to look on and listen to other afflicted humanbeings, as human beings with a voice (FLG: 93), rather than see themas that which force reduces them to, a thing between a human and a

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corpse (PF: 29). For Weil this healing of relations cannot be oneway, but rather God must be present in both the afflicted and theindividual, who through the love of Christ, provides therelationship to draw the afflicted out into God’s love.

Recognising the difficulty of the afflicted in engaging with thiskind of relationship is essential if Weil’s theology is not tocontribute to the muting of the afflicted. She sees this clearly,writing that as ‘difficult as it is really to listen to someone inaffliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassionis listening to him’ (FLG: 93). For Weil this is only possiblethrough God’s presence in the relationship (FLG: 91-2). In thisrelationship the objectifying force of affliction is reversed as wegive our attention to the victim as a being and not a thing (FLG:95). Without the presence of God’s love ‘each man imagines he issituated at the centre of the world’ (FLG: 99) but throughdecreation we are able to recognise the mutual relations we sharewith others, and both our own and their need in these relationships.

It is important to understand the mutuality of these relationships;failure to do so has led some commentators to miss why they bringhealing. This will become more evident when we look at Springsted’swork below though it can also be seen in Panichas’ work, whichcharacterises the love between individuals, grounded in God, as animpersonal love. Panichas writes that ‘the highest things areimpersonal and anonymous’ (Panichas in SWR: 313). There isundoubtedly some truth in this, for their relationships are notcharacterised by a personally, possessive love, rather they areformed in the image of the relationships between the persons of theTrinity.

This does not mean that these relationships lack either the warmthor the affection contained in what we normally think of as apersonal love; nor does it mean that it necessarily lacks a personalelement. Weil captures the contradiction when she writes the love ofGod is impersonal, until God touches the soul, then ‘it ought to beboth personal and impersonal again, but this time in a higher sense’(FLG: 131). This kenotic love, which is both personal andimpersonal, is beyond the understanding of a fallen nature. ForWeil, we still conceive of reality in terms of force. It is only inand through participating in the noetic love of the Trinity that the

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kenotic love of God as personal and impersonal becomes intelligible.Through this we can begin to live in the truth of kenosis that ‘weonly possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes us.In this sense we cannot possess anything whatever unless it passesthrough God’ (GG: 80).

Contradiction continues in Weil’s idea of the kenotic self. Thehuman, for Weil, is composed of a fundamentally kenotic self inwhich we become truly human when we step outside of our self andpour into another soul. This reality is hidden by the kingdom offorce which teaches us that to invest in another is to exposeoneself to hurt and pain, and only to contribute to the downfall ofthe self. However, participation in the reality of the crucifixionshows this to be an illusion. Kenosis is revealed to be an act ofcourage and not shame, something which affirms, rather than deniespersonhood (Papanikolaou, 2003: 56). Furthermore our personhood is agift from God, an ‘“excess” that is not only unable to be containedin thought, but which results in an over ow of additional gifts offlpersonhood’ (ibid: 57). Refusing to let it ‘overflow’ only serves todamage it, just as refusing to exercise a muscle will cause it towither away. Here ‘self-emptying, and not self-assertion becomes thefundamental creative principle’ (Brueck, 1995: 38).

For Weil, the Trinity provides both the ground and the culminationof the kenotic self, and this is why it is so suited to bringinghealing to it. It is the foundation in that kenosis is the essentialcomponent of God’s creation. Weil writes that all of creation isnothing more than the ‘vibration’ (LGA: 72) of the divine kenosis,of the lamb slain since the foundation of the world. For Weil ‘thepassion is not separable from Creation. The creation itself is akind of Passion’ (SNL: 154). Just as we are brought into existencethrough an act of divine kenosis, so we return into the Trinitythrough human kenosis, made possible and grounded in the divine act.Weil writes that ‘God gave me being that I should give it back tohim’ (GG: 87). Weil stresses the impact this has on ourrelationships with others. As we reside in the divine life and self-giving of the Trinitarian relations, our own life becomes an imageof this, and one in which we become oriented to the other(Gabellieri, 2004: 148). Indeed for Weil in imitating, throughparticipation, the love of the Trinity, we imitate a love which has

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the ability to create; to reverse the damage of affliction (NB:442).

We have now come to the crux of my claim, we will now to turn tolook at how being drawn into the Trinity can heal the afflictedsoul. For Weil the very essence of the Trinity is relationality, amaking space for and giving of self into another. She writes that‘God’s love consists in an act of God upon God which is at oncecontemplation and communion. God eternally feeds upon Himself andcontemplates Himself. Those are two relationships in God. This isthe Trinity’ (IC: 149). Therefore as the human person enters theTrinity, the relational faculty which is destroyed by affliction isrestored as she comes to participate in the kenosis and thereceiving which happens between the persons of the Trinity. Bulgakovprovides a helpful way of understanding this. By defining theTrinity as tri-hypostases, he emphasises that it is grounded in arelational giving, whereas the human person, as uni-hypostases,tends towards self-obsession. By being taken into the Trinity, thehuman self is expanded and is healed becoming truly human –divinely-human (Bulgakov, 2008: 105).

A key element of this is love, indeed love is what grounds therelationality of the Trinity in one nature (NB: 442). In a centralpassage on affliction and God already looked at above, Weil commentsthat ‘God created though love and for love. God did not createanything except love itself, and the means to love. He created lovein all its forms. He created beings capable of love from allpossible distances’ (LGA: 72). At the centre of the Trinity is love,and it is an experience of and life lived in this which ultimatelyheals affliction. Springsted’s work expresses this clearly. Hewrites that love ‘is redemptive because ultimately [God’s] love,even when God is absent, is in no way diminished. Undiminished, itreunites the Father and Son, even though one is in heaven and theother is in the depths of affliction’ (Springsted, 1986: 45).Indeed we only learn to love by participating in the Trinity, indoing so we learn to love God with the soul's uncreated love, withGod's love (Allen and Springsted, 1994: 106).

Ultimately this comes through the Spirit, which brings us intoloving God with God’s love and thus brings us into a kenotic statein which our economy of scarcity is replaced with an economy of

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infinity. No longer do we shield ourselves from others, clinging tothe resources that the self has at its disposal but rather findingour identity in God (FLG: 92) we are able to give of ourselves toothers and as such enter into what it is to be truly human. This iswhy Weil can write that ‘pure friendship is an image of the originaland perfect friendship that belongs to the Trinity and is the veryessence of God’ (FLG: 137). Indeed as the very essence of God itbecomes the very essence of what it is to be human.

Despite Springsted’s reading of Weil being so helpful in manyplaces, he fails to see the importance of friendship in Weil’swriting and thus misses how healing is brought about through anopening up of the self to relationship. I would suggest that this isbecause he doesn’t recognise the Trinitarian grounding of allrelationships in Weil’s theology. Springsted proposes thatfriendship requires a kind of ‘sacrifice’ and a ‘renunciation’ ofthe self (Springsted, 1986: 95). There is some truth in this, justas there is a withdrawal of God in creation which allows ‘’space’’for humanity. However, just as creation does not represent asacrifice of God but an outworking of the Trinitarian kenoticnature, so relationships do not require a renunciation of ourself.For Weil, because reality is grounded in the Trinitarian relations,in a mutual giving and loving, this ‘renunciation’ or ‘sacrifice’ isonly true on a very shallow level.

This mischaracterisation of Weil affects Springsted’s reading of thehealing of affliction. He writes that healing ‘involves accepting asour own the suffering and affliction of the world in all its pain,distress and destroyed aspirations. If genuine, it does not seekredemption for the self, but only the redemption of others; in fact,to accept the affliction of others means to accept theirhopelessness’ (Springsted, 1986: 89). However, this misses thefundamental thrust of Weil’s theology, and remains in the dialecticshe attempts to replace. In separating the self and the Other in theway that Springsted does, he settles into the logic of force inwhich the good of the Other is opposed to the good of the self. ForWeil, because our human personhood is grounded in the Trinitarianrelations, our redemption does not have to be forsaken for the sakeof the Other. Rather in pursuing the redemption of the Other, webecome truly human and find a kind of sanctifying healing from ourown affliction. Indeed, I think that this is the mistake that Rowan

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Williams makes too. In pitting the desire of the self against thatof the Other, Williams reads Weil as arguing that we need to take onGod’s impersonal view (1993: 53). The personal in Williams’ readingof Weil becomes shrunken, incapable of real altruism. This shows howfundamental to Weil’s theology the Trinitarian grounding ofrelationships and the healing this brings is. In failing torecognise this, one fails to recognise the alternative to thekingdom of force that she attempts to provide. Indeed, this was whyit was so important to be clear about the nature of therelationships described above as being mutual relationships. Theseare the only human relationships which constitute friendships andthat can heal.

For Weil, it is because we are essentially relational beings,grounded in the Trinitarian relationality that ‘our being loved bysomeone that enables us to love. That someone may be God, if it isno one else. If it is someone else, the source of that love remainsin God, ultimately’ (Chau, 2011: 12). Thus being drawn into the loveof God, not only allows us to love ourself (GG: 111), and thus thinkourself worthy of communion with another, but also repairs thefaculties which were damaged by affliction and essential for theformation of relationships. Thus being drawn into the relationallove of the Trinity we can enter into ‘the fullness and joy of“becoming human”’ (Chau, 2011: 8).

This is not a triumphalist proclamation, and it does not deny thatan individual will suffer pain or indeed the collapse ofrelationships. Weil writes that grace cannot prevent the mark ofsuffering ‘as though grace could do more for a human being than itcould for Christ… Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him,but it cannot spare him the wound’ (PF: 36). Christ’s call tokenotic love, is not a call to invulnerability but a call to beradically and truly human, to live in love. This may mean that oneis hurt more than living in the kingdom of force where one isarmoured. Weil is explicit on this issue writing that ‘supernaturallove has no contact with force, but at the same time it does notprotect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness ofsteel… Armour like the sword, is made of metal’ (GG: 112). However,it does promise that the soul will not be corrupted by force; thoughthe wound may be very real.

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This lack of a complete solution to the problem of affliction is avital component to understanding Weil’s thought. She does not offera theodicy and she certainly does not think that coming into thelove of the Trinity leads to a worry free life. As always herthought turns to the crucifixion and she writes that ‘whoever takesup the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take upthe sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross’ (GG: 139). Thisis not a call for universal martyrdom, or for affliction, as washighlighted in my section on Weil’s Christology. Rather it is a callfor child-like obedience to God’s love. In giving of oneself toanother, one takes on the role of Christ who gives of himself to hisBody –the Church. Just as the Eucharist is life giving, so can thisgift of oneself. Weil writes that:

It is the benefactor himself, as a bearer of Christ, whocauses Christ to enter the famished sufferer with the bread hegives him. The other can consent to receive this presence ornot, exactly like the person who goes to communion. If thegift is rightly given and rightly received, the passing of amorsel of bread from one man to another is something like realcommunion.’ (FLG: 84)

In this section I outlined why Weil thinks that it is throughparticipating in the Trinitarian life of God that the human being ishealed. I proposed that participating in the infinite giving betweenthe persons in the Trinity transforms the individual in such a wayas to allow them to give in human relationships. This processstarted in the implicit love of God through friendship, reaches itsculmination in participating in the life of God. I proposed that tounderstand the notion of healing which Weil put forward it was vitalto understand the nature of the human relationships she thoughtcontributed to this. I rejected Springsted’s understanding, whichsuggested that there was a sacrifice of self needed for the good ofthe Other. I argued that this was the opposition which Weil wastrying to move out of. For Weil, because of the Trinitariangrounding of relationships, there is no opposition between the goodof the self and the other, rather It is through pursuing the good ofthe Other that one becomes most truly oneself and receives healingfrom affliction.

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Conclusion

Having established that I would read Weil as a Christian theologian,and proposing that Weil’s notion of healing is best understood in anexplicitly Trinitarian context I turned to look at how Weilunderstood affliction. I proposed that, for Weil affliction cannotbe understood as something which leads the human being into unionwith God. It cannot be thought of as a divine education technique(LGA: 79). Instead, for Weil, affliction is inherently damaging to

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the soul, yet it can still be said to have a ‘use’ which is that itpoints us to our ‘void’ our inherent need for God. This stresses thefact that Weil, contra Brueck, does not think that humanity canovercome affliction by their own means. Weil sees humanity as inneed of God’s grace.

I then turned to look at Weil’s Christology, proposing that Weil sawthe Christ event as creating the possibility of healing fromaffliction. Christ, in going the ultimate distance from the Father,brought the afflicted into the life of God. Once again I stressedhow Weil does not see Christ’s suffering as evidence that afflictionleads us closer to God. Rather, Christ’s crucifixion shows theopposite. It shows that despite the damaging nature of affliction,God’s love is great enough to triumph over that distance.

This was further developed in my section on Pneumatology, where Ilooked at how the afflicted person was led into the life of God,through the implicit love of God. I argued, contra Williams andAllen, that Weil’s notion of human personhood did not require theexpunging of human autonomy and the personal. I proposed that inentering the life of God and being decreated by the love of theSpirit the afflicted entered into what it meant to be truly human. Ithen looked at how the Spirit led the afflicted person into the lifeof God, reading Weil as arguing that the implicit love of God beganto restore the capacity for relationship which affliction haddamaged. The role that friendship, grounded in Trinitarianrelationality, played in this was fundamental.

Finally, I looked at how coming into the life of God providedhealing for the afflicted person. I located this most importantly inentering into and being transformed by the infinite kenosis andgiving of the Trinitarian relations. This teaches humanity how andenables humanity to live with the same love in human relations. Animportant component of this, is the idea that all relations aregrounded in the Trinitarian relationality. Thus entering intorelationships does not entail a sacrifice or renunciation asSpringsted argued. Entering into relationships far from impinging onwho we are, is what allows us to enter into what it is to be human.This is the crux of why Weil thinks that participating in the divinelife brings healing to the afflicted. Affliction prevents us fromforming meaningful relationships; however, entering the divine life

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enables this again because it brings us into the ground of allrelationality. Furthermore, in engaging in this giving, in beingtruly human we draw others into who they truly are. In a wonderfullyparadoxical fashion, Weil thinks this is what provides healing forus too.

Bibliography

Works of Simone Weil

Weil, S. ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’ in Simone Weil, Waiting for God¸ Leslie Fielder (ed.), Emma Craufrod (trans.), (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), pp.83-142.

-- Gravity and Grace, Emma Craufrod (trans.), (London: Routledge, 2002).

-- Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, Elizabeth Geissbuhler (ed. & trans.), (London: Routledge, 1998).

-- ‘The Iliad, Poem of Force’ in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, Elizabeth Geissbuhler (trans.), (London: Routledge, 1998) pp.24-55.

-- ‘The Love of God and Affliction’ in Simone Weil, Waiting for God¸ Leslie Fielder (ed.), Emma Craufrod (trans.), (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), pp.67-82.

-- The Simone Weil Reader¸ G. Panichas (ed.), (New York : Dorset Press, 1981).

-- The notebooks of Simone Weil, 2 vols, Arthur Wills (trans.), (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).

-- On science, necessity, and the love of God, Richard Rees (ed. & trans.), (London: Oxford U.P., 1968).

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Secondary Texts

Allen, D. and Springted, E. Spirit Nature and Community: Issues in the thought of Simone Weil, (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1994).

Allen, D. ‘The concept of reading and the ‘Book of Nature’’’ in R. Bell (ed.) Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.93-115.

Bell, R. (ed.) Simone Weil’s Philosophy of culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Balthasar, H. Theo-Dram, vol. IV, Graham Harrison (trans.), (SanFrancisco: Ignatius Press, c1988-c1998).

Brueck, K. The Redemption of Tragedy: the literary vision of Simone Weil, (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1995).

Bulgakov, S. The Lamb of God, Boris Jakim (trans.), (Cambridge: WilliamB. Eerdmans, 2008).

Caranfa, A. “The Luminous Darkness of Silence in the Poetics of Simone Weil and Georges Rouault”, Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 23, isssue 1, 2011, pp. 53–72.

Chau, C. ‘“What could possibly be given?”: Towards an exploration ofkenosis as forgiveness—continuing the conversation between Coakley, Hampson, and Papanikolaou’ in Modern Theology Vol. 28, Issue 1, 2012, pp.1-24.

Doering E. and Springsted, E. The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).

Dunway, J. and Springsted, E. (eds.) The beauty that saves: essays on aesthetics and language in Simone Weil, (Macon, Ga. : Mercer University Press, 1996).

Gaballieri, E. ‘Reconstructing Platonism, the Trinitarian Metaxologyof Simone Weil’ in E. Doering and E. Springsted (eds.), The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004),pp.133-158.

Hollingsworth, A. ‘Simone Weil and the Theo-Poetics of Compassion’ in Modern Theology, vol. 29, Issue 3, 2013, pp. 203–229.

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Girard, R. Things Hidden since the foundations of the World, (Stanford Stanford University Press, 1987).

Loades, A. ‘Simone Weil and Antigone: innocence and affliction’, in R. Bell (ed.), Simone Weil’s Philosophy of culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.277-294.

Papanikolaou, A. ‘Person, Kenosis and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies in Conversation’ in Modern Theology, Vol. 19, Issue 1, 2003, pp. 41–65.

O’Regan, C. ‘Countermimesis and Simone Weil’s Christian Platonism’ in E. Doering and E. Springsted (eds.), The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp.181-209.

Springsted, E. ‘Contradiction, Mystery and the Use of Words in Simone Weil’ in J. Dunway and E. Springsted (eds.) The Beauty that Saves,(Macon, Ga. : Mercer University Press, 1996), pp.13-30.

--. Simone Weil and the suffering of love, (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1986).

The Bible (RSV).

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York : Benziger Brothers, 1948).

Tracy, D. ‘Simone Weil: The Impossible’ in in E. Doering E. Springsted (eds.), The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004) pp.229-242.

Vetö, M. Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil (New York: State University ofNew York Press,1994).

Williams, R. ‘The necessary non-existence of God’ in in R. Bell (ed.) Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.52-76.

Winch, P. Simone Weil: The Just Balance (Cambridge : CUP, 1989).

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Simone Weil, Affliction and the healing of the Triune God

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