Sometimes to be strengthened, sometimes to falter

Posted on May 16, 2025 | Comments Off on Sometimes to be strengthened, sometimes to falter

And our Lord’s next showing was a supreme spiritual pleasure in my soul. In this pleasure I was filled with eternal certainty, strongly anchored and without any fear. This feeling was so joyful to me and so full of goodness that I felt completely peaceful, easy and at rest, as though there were nothing on earth that could hurt me. This only lasted for a while, and then my feeling was reversed and I was left oppressed, weary of myself, and so disgusted with my life that I could hardly bear to live. There was no ease or comfort for my feelings but faith, hope and love, and these I had in reality, but I could not feel them in my heart. And immediately after this God again gave me the spiritual rest and comfort, certainty and pleasure so joyful and so powerful that no fear, no sorrow, no bodily or spiritual pain that one might suffer could have distressed me. And then the sorrow was revealed to my consciousness again, and first one, then the other, several times, I suppose about twenty times. And in the moments of joy I might have said with Paul, ‘Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.’ And in the moments of sorrow I might have said with Saint Peter, ‘Lord save me, I perish.’

This vision was shown to me, as I understand, to teach me that it is necessary for everybody to have such experiences, sometimes to be strengthened, sometimes to falter and be left by himself. God wishes us to know that he safely protects us in both joy and sorrow equally, and he loves us as much in sorrow as in joy. And to benefit his soul, a man is sometimes left to himself, though not because of sin; for at this time I did not deserve by sinning to be left alone, neither did I deserve the feeling of bliss. But God gives joy generously when he so wishes, and sometimes allows us sorrow; and both come from love. So it is God’s will that we should hold on to gladness with all our might, for bliss lasts eternally, and pain passes and shall vanish completely. Therefore it is not God’s will that we should be guided by feelings of pain, grieving and mourning over them, but should quickly pass beyond them and remain in eternal joy, which is God almighty, who loves and protects us.

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, the Short Text (tr. Spearing)

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Weil writes to Bernanos

Posted on May 16, 2025 | Comments Off on Weil writes to Bernanos

1938 letter from Weil to Bernanos about what she witnessed in Spain:

However ridiculous it may be to write to a writer, who is always, due to the nature of his profession, inundated with writing, I can’t keep myself from doing so after reading The Great Cemeteries Beneath the Moon. Not that this is the first time a book of yours has touched me; The Diary of a Country Priest is in my opinion the most beautiful, at least of those I have read, and truly a great book. But, although I may have loved others of your books, I had no reason to bother you by writing to you. For this last one, it’s another matter: I have had an experience corresponding to yours, although it was briefer, not as profound, situated elsewhere, and in appearance – in appearance only – undergone in a very different spirit.

I am not Catholic, although—what I am going to say is going to seem presumptuous to any Catholic, coming from a non-Catholic, but I cannot express myself otherwise—although nothing Catholic, nothing Christian has ever seemed foreign to me. I have sometimes told myself that, if only they were to put up a sign on the doors of churches that entrance is forbidden to anybody enjoying an income higher than such-and-such an amount (not very elevated), I would at once convert. From childhood, my sympathies have been turned toward associations claiming a connection with the despised strata of the social hierarchy, until I realized that these associations are of a nature to discourage all sympathies. The last one to inspire my confidence was the Spanish C.N.T. I had traveled a bit in Spain – a small bit – before the civil war, but enough to feel the love it is difficult not to feel towards this people; I had seen in the anarchist movement the natural expression of its grandeurs and its vices, of its most and least legitimate aspirations. The C.N.T., the F.N.I., were an amazing mixture, where absolutely anybody was allowed in, and where, consequently, you found jostled together immorality, cynicism, fanaticism, cruelty, but also love, the spirit of brotherhood, and above all the most beautiful demand for honour amongst humiliated men; it seemed to me that those who had come there inspired by an ideal outnumbered those who were impelled by a taste for violence and disorder. In July 1936 I was in Paris. I don’t like war; but what has always horrified me the most in war is the situation of those behind the lines. When I found that, despite my efforts, I couldn’t keep myself from participating emotionally in this war, that is, from desiring every day, every moment, the victory of one side and the defeat of the other, I said to myself that Paris was behind the lines, and I took the train for Barcelona with the intention of enlisting. It was the beginning of August 1936.

An accident made me shorten perforce my stay in Spain. I spent several days in Barcelona; then, in the middle of the Aragonese countryside, on the banks of the Ebro River, fifteen kilometres from Saragossa, at the precise spot where recently Yaguë’s troops crossed the Ebro; then in the palace at Sitges, transformed into a hospital; then once again in Barcelona; in all about two months. I left Spain against my will and intending to return there; subsequently I made no attempt to do so. I no longer felt the inner necessity to participate in a war that was no longer what it had appeared to be in the beginning, a war of starving peasants against landholders and a clergy in cahoots with them, but rather a war between Russia, Germany, and Italy.

I recognised that odour of civil war, blood, and terror your book gives off; I had breathed it. I saw nothing, and heard nothing, I have to say, that quite reaches the shameful horror of certain of the stories you tell – the murders of old peasants, the balillas hitting old men with clubs to make them run. What I heard nonetheless sufficed. I almost witnessed the execution of a priest; during the minutes spent waiting, I asked myself if I was just going to watch, or get myself shot by trying to intervene; I still don’t know what I would have done if a lucky chance had not prevented the execution.

So many stories pressing to be told… But it would take too long, and what would be the point? A single one will suffice. I was at Sitges when the militiamen of the expedition to Majorca returned, defeated. They had been decimated. Out of forty young boys who had started out from Sitges, nine were dead. We learned it only when the thirty-one others returned. The very next night, nine punitive expeditions were made; they killed nine Fascists – so-called – in this little town where, in July, nothing had taken place. Among these nine was a baker about thirty years old, whose crime, I was told, was having belonged to the local militia; his aged father, whose only child and only support he was, went mad. Yet another: in Aragon, a little international group of 22 militiamen of every country, after a light engagement, captured a young boy of fifteen, who was fighting as a Phalangist. As soon as he was captured, all atremble from having seen comrades killed around him, he said that he had been enrolled by force. He was searched, a medal of the Virgin and a Phalangist’s card was found on him; he was sent to Durrutti, the chief of the column, who, after expounding for an hour on the beauties of the ideal anarchist, gave him the choice between dying at once and enrolling at once in the ranks of those who had made him a prisoner, against his comrades of the night before. Durutti gave the child twenty-four hours to reflect; when these twenty-four hours were up, the child said no and was shot. Durrutti was nevertheless in certain regards an admirable man. The death of this little hero has never ceased weighing on my conscience, although I learned about it only after the fact. This too: in a village that reds and whites had taken, lost, retaken, relost I don’t know how many times, the red militiamen, having retaken it definitively, found in the caves a handful of haggard souls, among whom were three or four young men. They reasoned thus: if these young men, instead of going with us the last time we retreated, stayed and awaited the fascists, it was because they were fascists. So they shot them at once, then fed the others and considered themselves very humane. A final story, this one from behind the lines: two anarchists told me how, with some comrades, they had captured two priests; they killed one on the spot, in the other’s presence, with a gunshot, then they told the other he could leave. When he was twenty paces away, they shot him down. The one who was telling me the story was very surprised when he didn’t see me laugh.

In Barcelona they killed on average, on these punitive expeditions, about fifty people a night. It was proportionally much less than at Majorca, since Barcelona is a city of more than a million inhabitants; what’s more, a deadly street battle took place there that lasted three days. But the numbers are perhaps not the essential thing in such a matter. The essential thing is the attitude about murder. I never saw, either amongst the Spanish, or amongst the French, whether they had come to fight or just to look around – the latter kind most often colourless and inoffensive intellectuals – I never saw anyone express, even in private, repulsion, disgust, or even disapproval with regard to the blood shed pointlessly. You speak of fear. Yes, fear had a share in these slaughters, but where I was, I didn’t see the share that you attribute to it. Seemingly courageous men – there is at least one whose courage I witnessed with my own eyes – would, in the middle of a meal full of camaraderie, relate, with a nice brotherly smile, how many they had killed in the way of priests or “fascists” (a very broad term). I acquired the feeling that, whenever the temporal and spiritual authorities have placed a category of human beings outside of those whose life has a value, there is nothing more natural to a man than to kill. When one knows it is possible to kill without risking either punishment or blame, one kills; or at least one surrounds those who kill with encouraging smiles. If perchance one feels a little disgust, one keeps quiet about it, and before long one extinguishes it, for fear of seeming to lack manliness. One is swept up; it is an intoxication impossible to resist without a strength of soul I am obliged to consider exceptional, since I have never encountered it anywhere. In contrast, I have encountered peaceable French persons, whom I did not despise up to this point, who would not have had themselves the idea of killing, but who bathed in this atmosphere soaking in blood with visible pleasure. For the latter I can never have any esteem in the future.

Such an atmosphere immediately wipes out the very goal of the struggle. For one can formulate the goal only by relating it to the public good, to the good of human beings – and human beings are of no worth. In a country in which the poor are, in a very great majority, peasants, the improved condition of the peasants must be an essential goal of any association of the extreme left; and this war was perhaps, above all, a war for and against the apportionment of lands. Well now, these wretched and magnificent peasants of Aragon, who had remained so proud beneath their humiliations, were for the militiamen not even an object of curiosity. Without acts of insolence, without insults, without brutality – at least I saw nothing like that, and I know that theft and rape, in the anarchist columns, were subject to the death penalty – an abyss separated the armed men from the unarmed population, an abyss completely similar to the one that separates the poor and the rich. That could be sensed in the attitude of the one group, a bit humble, submissive, fearful, and in the ease, the nonchalance, the condescension of the other.

You go off as a volunteer, with ideas of sacrifice, and you end up in a war of mercenaries, with many additional cruelties and even less idea of the regards due to the enemy.

I could continue such reflections indefinitely, but one has to limit oneself. Ever since I was in Spain, and since I have been hearing and reading all kinds of considerations about Spain, I can mention no one, other than you alone, who, to my knowledge, has bathed in the atmosphere of the Spanish war and has resisted it. You are a royalist, a disciple of Drumont – what do I care? You are nearer to me, incomparably, than my fellow militiamen of Aragon – those comrades I nonetheless loved.

What you say of nationalism, of war, of French foreign policy after the war also went straight to my heart. I was ten years old at the time of the Treaty of Versailles. Up until then I had been a patriot with all the exaltation of children in time of war. The desire to humiliate the conquered enemy that spilled out so repugnantly everywhere at that moment (and in the years that followed) cured me once and for all of this naive patriotism. The humiliations inflicted by my country are more painful to me than those it may suffer.

P.S. I included my address without thinking. For, first of all, I think you must have better things to do than answer letters. And then, I am going to spend one or two months in Italy, where a letter from you would not perhaps follow me without being stopped on the way.

Mlle Simone Weil
3, rue Auguste-Comte
Paris (VIe)

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But what if the people are stupid?

Posted on March 4, 2025 | Comments Off on But what if the people are stupid?

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Posted in Adam Curtis

Home

Posted on January 9, 2025 | Comments Off on Home

How can I feel I have arrived home in something that is in many ways so ­foreign to me? And yet beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas, the dark silhouettes of two nuns chant the antiphon. There is incense in the air. The icons glow in the half light. This could be a thousand years in the past or the future, for in here, there is no time. Home is beyond time, I think now. I can’t explain any of it, and it is best that I do not try.

— Paul Kingsnorth

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Emma Craufurd/Crawford

Posted on December 11, 2024 | Comments Off on Emma Craufurd/Crawford

Slight traces can be half-guessed, half-gathered to compile a crude biography. Weil was initially published in the United Kingdom, so we can guess that her translator may well have been British. Craufurd was active as a translator from about 1951 to 1964, working mainly on religiously inflected texts from the French. From these facts—her likely nationality, her profession, her unusually spelled last name—we can narrow down the search through online archives to identify a woman I am nearly certain she is: Emma Katherine Craufurd. She was the youngest daughter of a family associated with a minor Scottish baronetcy (her father was not a baronet, her brother was). Her terse biography in Burke’s Peerage, the British authority on aristocratic genealogy, reads: “Emma Katherine; b 23 October 1891; d unm 3 April 1967 after a motor accident.” “Unm” here, of course, stands for unmarried. 

I have not found a way to link this Emma Katherine Craufurd with the Emma Craufurd named in a thousand footnotes, no way to link the life lived with the mind at work, so my writing about her inhabits the shadow-space of translation, riddled with my own assumptions and desires.

[…]

In 1952, the same year Craufurd’s Gravity and Grace was published, another edition was released by a different publisher, this one translated by Arthur Wills, favored by Weil’s mother as the English-language translator for her daughter’s work. When I compared my recent copies of the two editions, they were word-for-word identical. Even with the most straightforward text in the world, even for sentences that as Thibon said “had no padding interposed between the life and the word,” this should not have been possible. So which was it? Was Craufurd’s work overwritten by Wills’s or did Wills get credit for a translation that was not his own? Were my own copies somehow misprinted? Did I misunderstand? It’s almost funny that the translator of Weil’s singular phrase and motive, “decreation,” would have been so thoroughly decreated herself that even her translations are only dubiously hers.

[…]

The 1950s, when Craufurd’s translations were published, were a time when Weil’s family and collaborators were working hard to publish her works, to share her startling mind with the world. They were organizing her notebooks into publishable writings, pulling letters and essays from drawers and ironing them out. They almost certainly had to have established contact with Emma Craufurd, perhaps through a recommendation of an unlikely translator or an impassioned plea from Emma herself, who could have encountered Weil’s work and gotten that hunger I know so well: the fire to be the one who does this text justice, the certainty that she was the only one who possibly could. Waiting for God was Craufurd’s first translation, after all. 

— Alejandra Oliva

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Posted in Emma Craufurd, Simone Weil

Simone Weil: 1988 Interview with Simone Deitz

Posted on November 26, 2024 | Comments Off on Simone Weil: 1988 Interview with Simone Deitz

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Posted in Writing

From the Letters of Mother Teresa

Posted on November 18, 2024 | Comments Off on From the Letters of Mother Teresa

July 1959

Matter of confession

In the darkness…

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love—and now become as the most hated one—the one You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on Whom I can cling—no, No One.—Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone.—Unwanted, forsaken.—The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable.—Where is my faith?—even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness.—My God—how painful is this unknown pain. It pains without ceasing.—I have no faith.—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me—I am afraid to uncover them—because of the blasphemy—If there be God,—please forgive me.—Trust that all will end in Heaven with Jesus.—When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven—there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.—Love—the word—it brings nothing.—I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Before the work started—there was so much union—love—faith—trust—prayer—sacrifice.—Did I make the mistake in surrendering blindly to the call of the Sacred Heart? The work is not a doubt—because I am convinced that it is His not mine.—I don’t feel—not even a single simple thought or temptation enters my heart to claim anything in the work.

The whole time smiling—Sisters & people pass such remarks.—They think my faith, trust & love are filling my very being & that the intimacy with God and union to His will must be absorbing my heart.—Could they but know—and how my cheerfulness is the cloak by which I cover the emptiness & misery.

In spite of all—this darkness & emptiness is not as painful as the longing for God.—The contradiction I fear will unbalance me.—What are You doing My God to one so small? When You asked to imprint Your Passion on my heart—is this the answer?

If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this—if souls are brought to You—if my suffering satiates Your Thirst—here I am Lord, with joy I accept all to the end of life—& I will smile at Your Hidden Face—always.

April 1961

In Loreto, Father I was very happy.—I think the happiest nun.—Then the call came.—Our Lord asked directly—the voice was clear & full of conviction.—Again & again He asked in 1946.—I knew it was He. Fear & terrible feelings—fear lest I was deceived.—But as I have always lived in obedience—I put the whole thing before my spiritual father—hoping the whole time that he will say—it was all devil’s deception but no—like the voice—he said—It is Jesus who is asking you.—& then you know how it all worked out.—My Superiors sent me to Asansol [in] 1947—and there as if Our Lord just gave Himself to me—to the full. The sweetness & consolation & union of those 6 months—passed but too soon.

And then the work started—in Dec. 1948.—By 1950 as the number of the Sisters grew—the work grew.—

Now Father—since 49 or 50 this terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God—which gives me that pain deep down in my heart.—Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.—When the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God—and then it is that I feel—He does not want me—He is not there.—Heaven—souls—why these are just words—which mean nothing to me.—My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls—to go where?—Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does not want me.—Sometimes—I just hear my own heart cry out—“My God” and nothing else comes.—The torture and pain I can’t explain.—From my childhood I have had a most tender love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament—but this too has gone.—I feel nothing before Jesus—and yet I would not miss Holy Com. [Communion] for anything.

You see, Father, the contradiction in my life. I long for God—I want to love Him—to love Him much—to live only for Love of Him—to love only—and yet there is but pain—longing and no love.—Years back—about 17 years now—I wanted to give God something very beautiful.—I bound myself under pain of Mortal Sin not to refuse Him anything.—Since then I have kept this promise—and when sometimes the darkness is very dark—& I am on the verge of saying “No to God” the thought of that promise pulls me up.

I want only God in my life—“The work” is really and solely His.—He asked—He told me what to do—He guided every step—directs every movement I take—puts the words in my mouth makes me teach the Sisters the way.—All that & everything in me is He.—This is why when the world praises me—it really does not touch—not even the surface—of my soul. About the Work I am convinced it is all He.

Before I could spend hours before Our Lord—loving Him—talking to Him—and now—not even meditation goes properly—nothing but “My God”—even that sometimes does not come.—Yet deep down somewhere in my heart that longing for God keeps breaking through the darkness. When outside—in the work—or meeting people—there is a presence—of somebody living very close—in very me.—I don’t know what this is—but very often even every day—that love in me for God grows more real.—I find myself telling Jesus unconsciously most strange tokens of love.—

Father, I have opened my heart to you.—Teach me to love God—teach me to love Him much. I am not learned—I don’t know many things about the things of God.—I want to love God as and what He is to me, “My Father.”

Very often I long to make use of the food I give my Sisters—but I can never do it—the same for spiritual books.

All these things were so natural to me before—until Our Lord came fully in my life—I loved God with all the powers of a child’s Heart. He was the centre of everything I did & said.—Now Father—it [is] so dark, so different and yet my everything is His—in spite of Him not wanting me, not caring as if for me.

When the work started—I knew what it will all mean.—

But with my whole heart I accepted then everything.—Only one prayer I made—to give me grace to give saints to the Church.

My Sisters, Father, are the gift of God to me, they are sacred to me—each one of them. That is why I love them—more than I love myself.—They are a very great part of my life.

My heart & soul & body belongs only to God—that He has thrown away as unwanted the child of His Love.—And to this

Father I have made that resolution in this retreat—

To be at His disposal.

Let Him do with me whatever He wants as He wants for as long as He wants. If my darkness is light to some soul—even if it be nothing to nobody—I am perfectly happy—to be God’s flower of the field.

October 1961

… As for myself, Father—I have nothing to say—for the darkness is so dark, the pain is so painful. Sometimes the grip of pain is so great—that I can hear my own voice call out—My God, help me. When I help my Sisters draw very close to Jesus—when I teach them to love Him with a deep—devoted—personal love—I long to be able to do the same.—The Sisters in front of my very eyes I see them love God—come so close to Him—grow daily so much like Him—and I, Father—am just “alone”—empty—excluded—just not wanted. And yet in all the sincerity of my heart—I am happy to see Him loved—to see the Sisters grow like Him. I am happy to love Him through them.—Rev. Fr. Van Exem was here for 8 days giving the Superiors retreat—not a word came from me.—It hurt me—because I have never kept anything from him.—But now I really have nothing to say …

February 1962

… Nothing goes in. I have realised something these days. Since God wants me to abstain from the joy of the riches of spiritual life—I am giving my whole heart and soul to helping my Sisters to make full use of it. I see them grow day by day in holiness—see them grow in the love of God—and the seeing makes me happy. As for myself, I just have the joy of having nothing—not even the reality of the Presence of God.—No prayer, no love, no faith—nothing but continual pain of longing for God …

May 1962

… How cold—how empty—how painful is my heart.—Holy Communion—Holy Mass—all the holy things of spiritual life—of the life of Christ in me—are all so empty—so cold—so unwanted …

September 1962

Often I wonder what does really God get from me in this state—no faith, no love—not even in feelings. The other day I can’t tell you how bad I felt.—There was a moment when I nearly refused to accept.—Deliberately I took the Rosary and very slowly without even meditating or thinking—I said it slowly and calmly. The moment passed—but the darkness is so dark, and the pain is so painful.—But I accept whatever He gives and I give whatever He takes. People say they are drawn closer to God—seeing my strong faith.—Is this not deceiving people? Every time I have wanted to tell the truth—“that I have no faith”—the words just do not come—my mouth remains closed.—And yet I still keep on smiling at God and all … I am sorry I missed you each time—for I would have loved to have the chance to go to Confession. Nearly every other week I have a different priest for Confession—and I never can speak—and also I have nothing to say.—How long the Good God will act this way, I don’t know—and I am happy that He knows. This is the only thing I do at present—to “Let His hand free.” He can do what He likes and as He likes.—Pray for me …

August 1964

… In my soul—I can’t tell you—how dark it is, how painful, how terrible.—My feelings are so treacherous.—I feel like “refusing God” and yet, the biggest and the hardest to bear—is this terrible longing for God.—Pray for me, that I may not turn a Judas to Jesus in this painful darkness. I was looking forward to speaking to you.—I just long to speak—and this too He seems to have taken the power from me.—I will not complain.—I accept His Holy Will just as it comes to me. If you have the time please write & do not mind my inability to speak to you—for I wanted to speak—but I could not …

May 1964

… Pray for me—for the life within me is harder to live. To be in love & yet not to love, to live by faith and yet not to believe. To spend myself and yet be in total darkness.—Pray for me.

January 1965

… As for me—what will I tell you? I have nothing—since I have not got Him—whom my heart & Soul longs to possess. Aloneness is so great.—From within and from without I find no one to turn to.—He has taken not only spiritual—but even the human help. I can speak to no one & even if I do—nothing enters my soul.—I was longing to speak to you in Bombay—yet I did not even try to make it possible.—If there is hell—this must be one. How terrible it is to be without God—no prayer—no faith—no love …

July 1967

Forgive me for asking you to come & then telling you nothing.—This shows you how terribly empty my soul is—but I am not afraid.—He has done marvels for me—Holy is His name.—Pray for me that in this darkness I do not light my own light—nor fill this emptiness with my self.—I want with my whole will only Jesus.—

Father, I wanted to tell you—how my soul longs for God—for Him alone, how painful it is to be without Him—how my thoughts are only the Sisters & the Poor.—Is this distraction [or] are these thoughts the cause of my praying?—They are my prayer they are my very life.—I love them as I love Jesus—& now as I do not love Jesus—I do not love them either. I know this is only feelings—for my will is steadfast bound to Jesus & so to the Sisters & the Poor …

Notes from a retreat, March-April 1959

EXAMINATION

Do I value the salvation of my soul? I don’t believe I have a soul. There is nothing in me. Am I working in earnest for the salvation of the souls of others? There was a burning zeal in my soul for souls from childhood until I said “yes” to God & then all is gone. Now I don’t believe.

What use am I making of creatures? I have no attachment.

Am I truly indifferent to my work, the companions with whom I work, my health, my success, my failure? Yes.

Am I indifferent to the love and affection of my companions and of the people for whom I work? Yes …

…  Manifestation of Conscience.

Am I perfectly sincere to my Superior? I find it more and more difficult to speak—It is just closed …

EXAMINATION

How do I perform my daily exercises of piety? Very badly.

Do I keep to the prescribed time? Yes.

Do I have internal and external reverence? Yes.

Do I really consider Holy Mass to be the greatest action of my day? I want but it is not like that.

Do I receive Holy Communion with faith and love? No.

When visiting the Blessed Sacrament, do I really visit Jesus as my Friend, telling Him everything? He has always been the One to share, know everything in details—but now, it is not like that.

Do I say my Rosary with fervour? I want to love [Our Lady], but no love enters my heart.

— Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light

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An astonishing life

Posted on November 10, 2024 | Comments Off on An astonishing life

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Posted in Simone Weil

The Velvet Queen

Posted on October 29, 2024 | Comments Off on The Velvet Queen

Encountering an animal is a rejuvenation. The eye captures a glimmer. The animal is a key. It opens a door. On the other side… The incommunicable.

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Posted in Sylvain Tesson

Some of Simone Weil’s metaphors

Posted on October 13, 2024 | Comments Off on Some of Simone Weil’s metaphors

We must rediscover the idea of the metaphor which is real.

— First and Last Notebooks

Gravity and Grace (tr. Crawford):

– Any attempt to gain this deliverance by means of my own energy would be like the efforts of a cow which pulls at its hobble and so falls onto its knees.

– The source of man’s moral energy is outside him, like that of his physical energy (food, air etc.). He generally finds it, and that is why he has the illusion—as on the physical plane—that his being carries the principle of its preservation within itself. Privation alone makes him feel his need. And, in the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible. There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light. Not to judge. All faults are the same. There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible. ‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.’

– Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.

– Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls.

– Like a gas, the soul tends to fill the entire space which is given it. A gas which contracted leaves a vacuum—this would be contrary to the law of entropy.

– A rock in our path. To hurl ourselves upon this rock as though after a certain intensity of desire had been reached it could not exist any more. Or else to retreat as though we ourselves did not exist. Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails (once its energy has been used up) the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.

– The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give. But if, doing violence to this necessity, we leave a vacuum, as it were a suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if we receive other wages: it is this vacuum which makes it come.

– To come out of the cave, to be detached, means to cease to make the future our goal.

– Let the whole universe be for me, in relation to my body, what the stick of a blind man is in relation to his hand. His sensibility is really no longer in his hand but at the end of the stick.

– In affliction the vital instinct survives all the attachments which have been torn away, and blindly fastens itself to everything that can provide it with support, like a plant fastens its tendrils.

– Affliction, from this point of view, is hideous as life in its nakedness always is, like an amputated stump, like the swarming of insects.

– This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

– The bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them but we do not know how to use them. We thought they were intended to have houses built upon them. We have erected skyscrapers on them to which we ceaselessly add storeys. We no longer know that they are bridges, things made so that we may pass along them, and that by passing along them we go towards God.

– Power (and money, power’s master key) is means at its purest. For that very reason, it is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.

This world, the realm of necessity, offers us absolutely nothing except means. Our will is for ever set from one means to another like a billiard ball.

– The existence of opposite virtues in the souls of the saints: the metaphor of climbing corresponds to this. If I am walking on the side of a mountain I can see first a lake, then, after a few steps, a forest. I have to choose either the lake or the forest. If I want to see both lake and forest at once, I have to climb higher. Only the mountain does not exist. It is made of air. One cannot go up: it is necessary to be drawn. An experimental ontological proof. I have not the principle of rising in me. I cannot climb to heaven through the air. It is only by directing my thoughts towards something better than myself that I am drawn upwards by this something. If I am really raised up, this something is real. No imaginary perfection can draw me upwards even by the fraction of an inch. For an imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.

– Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the handle or the point. For him who loves, its metallic coldness will not destroy love, but will give the impression of being abandoned by God. Supernatural love has no contact with force, but at the same time it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection from the coldness of steel. Armour, like the sword, is made of metal. Murder freezes the soul of the man who loves only with a pure love, whether he be the author or the victim, so likewise does everything which, without going so far as actual death, constitutes violence. If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God. Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.

– The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken on the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is no more at least than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

– The cross. The tree of sin was a real tree, the tree of life was a wooden beam. Something which does not give fruit, but only vertical movement. ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up and he will draw all men unto himself.’ We can kill the vital energy in ourselves while keeping only the vertical movement. Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise.

– God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightning flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.

– The cross as a balance, as a lever. A going down, the condition of a rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift. In the same way ‘he who humbleth himself shall be exalted’.

– The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to catch hold of God.

– Evil is the shadow of good. All real good, possessing solidity and thickness, projects evil. Only imaginary good does not project it.

– Necessity is God’s veil.

– The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. We do not, however, see what is transparent. We see that which is opaque through the transparent – the opaque which was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. We see either the dust on the window or the view beyond the window, but never the window itself. Cleaning off the dust only serves to make the view visible. Reason should be employed only to bring us to the true mysteries, the true undemonstrables, which are reality. The uncomprehended hides the incomprehensible and should on this account be eliminated.

– Others. To see each human being (an image of oneself) as a prison in which a prisoner dwells, surrounded by the whole universe.

– The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands. But except for souls which are fairly near to saintliness, the victims are defiled by force just as their tormentors are. The evil which is in the handle of the sword is transmitted to its point. So the victims thus put in power and intoxicated by the change do as much harm or more, and soon sink back again to where they were before.

– Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity — the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious.

– The spirituality of work. Work makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work. If we regard one of the two as an end, or the one and the other taken separately, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth. A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere — extreme misery and extreme grandeur.

when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

Waiting for God (tr. Craufurd [translator’s name spelled differently in this publication])

– The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.

(‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’)

– When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time. Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center. The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. 

(‘The Love of God and Affliction’)

First and Last Notebooks (tr. Rees)

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. We are experiencing this. The root which, mixed with faith, has produced this fruit, ought to be torn up.

Man is like a castaway, clinging to a spar and tossed by the waves. He has no control over the movement imposed on him by the water. From the highest heaven God throws a rope. The man either grasps it or not. If he does, he is still subject to the pressures imposed by the sea, but these pressures are combined with the new mechanical factor of the rope, so that the mechanical relations between the man and the sea have changed. His hands bleed from the pressure of the rope, and he is sometimes so buffeted by the sea that he lets go, and then catches it again.

But if he voluntarily pushes it away, God withdraws it.

Seventy Letters (tr. Rees)

— To Joë Bousquet, 1943

The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love – the Love which is God himself, and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.

The spirit, leaving the miserable body in some corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, which has no perspective, but from which this world is seen as it is – unconfused by perspective. Compared to what it is inside the egg, space has become an infinity to the second or rather the third power.

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence – not an absence of sound, but a positive object of sensation. It is the secret word, the word of Love, who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

You, once you have emerged from the shell, will know the reality of war – which is the most precious reality to know, because war is unreality itself. To know the reality of war is the Pythagorean harmony, the unity of opposites; it is the plenitude of knowledge of the real.

That is why you are infinitely privileged, because you have war permanently lodged in your body, waiting for years in patient fidelity until you are ripe to know it. Those who fell beside you did not have time to collect their thought from its frivolous wandering and focus it upon their destiny. And those who came back unwounded have all killed their past by oblivion – even if they have seemed to remember it – because war is affliction, and it is as easy to direct one’s thought voluntarily towards affliction as it would be to persuade an untrained dog to walk into a fire and let itself be burnt.

To think affliction, it is necessary to bear it in one’s flesh, driven very far in like a nail, and for a long time, so that thought may have time to grow strong enough to regard it – to regard it from outside, having succeeded in leaving the body and even, in a sense, the soul as well.

Body and soul remain not only pierced through but nailed down at a fixed point. Whether or not affliction imposes literal immobility, there is always enforced immobility – in the sense that a part of the soul is always steeped, monotonously, incessantly, and inextricably, in pain.

Thanks to this immobility, the infinitesimal seed of divine love placed in the soul can slowly grow and bear fruit in patience – the divinely beautiful Gospel expression. Translators say in patientia, but hypomonē is quite another thing. It means to remain where one is, motionless, in expectation, unshaken and unmoved by any external shock.

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