2
Christology and religious pluralism
“Let us do evil that good may come?” Their condemnation is deserved!
ROMANS 3:8
Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You.
MARTIN BUBER1
In 1942 while living with her family in exile in New York, at the urging of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, Weil wrote a letter to the Dominican priest Marie-Alain Couturier (1897–1954). This letter contains her most explicit and complete set of philosophical-theological questions, systematically presented for his consideration in 35 discrete sections. She opens the letter by saying,
When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of the mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine or, to be more precise, would be mine without the distance placed between it and me by my imperfection. This results in a painful spiritual state. I would like to make it, not less painful, only clearer. Any pain whatsoever is acceptable where there is clarity.2
Thus, she continues by requesting from him unequivocal answers to her concerns:
I am going to enumerate for you a certain number of thoughts which have dwelt in me for years (some of them at least) and which form a barrier between me and the Church. I do not ask you to discuss their basis. I should be happy for there to be such a discussion, but later on, in the second place.
I ask for you to give me a definite answer—leaving out such expressions as ‘I think that,’ etc.—regarding the compatibility or incompatibility of each of these opinions with membership of the Church. If there is incompatibility, I should like you to say straight out: I would refuse baptism (or absolution) to anybody claiming to hold the opinions expressed under such headings numbered so-and-so. I do not ask for a quick answer. There is no hurry. All I ask for is a categorical answer.3
We have already dealt with the question of Weil’s internal struggle over baptism, and although it is on this very pretense that she wrote this letter to Father Couturier, what is of significance in this letter for our purposes is that it contains many of Weil’s near final thoughts about theological issues before her untimely death. In particular, the questions she poses to the Dominican friar express her ideas about the centrality of Christ (especially the incarnation and his crucifixion) as well as the issue that has come to be known as religious pluralism.
Weil’s Christology and her religious pluralism will be analyzed at length in this chapter. An honest engagement with these subjects, however, also necessitates addressing Weil’s estranged relationship with her family’s ethnic Jewish identity, and, more importantly, her controversial statements condemning the Jewish faith. Many have praised Weil’s inclusive stance with respect to non-Christian religious traditions while excluding (or, at least minimizing) the evidence of her animosity toward Judaism (and additionally Islam, as we shall see). Just as many critics, it must be admitted, have cited her vitriolic critique of Judaism as sufficient justification for dismissing her entire oeuvre and all of her contributions to religious philosophy and social activism without even considering the arguments underpinning her denouncements. We aim to avoid both of these errors in this chapter and instead take this occasion to discuss directly and extensively the complex and controversial theological-philosophical-ethical questions raised by Weil’s treatment of these subject matters—many of which are still of central importance in contemporary theological, political, and ethical debates.
Weil’s philosophy is unapologetically a Christian philosophy. This means, of course, that her entire worldview is shaped by her understanding of the figure of Jesus, who she most commonly refers to as Christ, and emphasizes his role as a mediator between the divine and the human. But unlike some other Christologies, Weil’s analysis of Jesus’ words and deeds does not single out his resurrection as proof of his divinity and establishment of the Christian mission. Instead, Weil argues that it is Christ’s suffering on the cross that is exemplary. As we will explain, Weil’s Christology—and therefore her metaphysics and ethics—stands in contrast to other interpretations of Jesus that spread the good news of his triumphant holiness as witnessed through the resurrection and advise Christians, in Panglossian fashion, to rest assured.
In her letter to Father Couturier Weil writes, “And if the Gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me.”4 Theologies focusing on the event of the resurrection, to her mind, miss the mark. At the very least, they privilege a certain temporal hierarchy; that is, these theologies tend to be forward looking—eschatological—instead of attentive to the present. Consequently, the present (what is) is framed entirely by an imagined future (what may/will come). But the “future,” she exclaims, “is a filler of void places. . . . [T]he future hinder[s] the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field for imaginary elevation.”5 To put it differently, all futural orientations are the products of and only serve to affirm the imagination and pertain little, if at all, to objective reality.
Weil insisted that truth is bound with necessity. Psychologically and intellectually, and thereby ethically, dwelling upon the (unlimited) future is detrimental to the present in all of its particularities, which are necessarily limited. In situations that present themselves as painful because there is a sense of disequilibrium, injustice, or resistance to our selfish desires, rather than facing the facts, the imagination turns toward the indefinite and pliable future. This maneuver frees the imagination from necessity in order that it might construct a sense of equilibrium. Because the lever can be extended to whatever length the imagination desires, it can “balance” out even the most horrific and anguishing present conditions. For example, faced with terminal illness, one can readily imagine a “purpose” or providential reason for having been afflicted thusly, or a happy ending in some eternal paradise, thereby relieving oneself from the burden of carrying the full weight of the reality of the situation. The indefinite future diminishes and, therefore, distorts our perception of the present reality. Furthermore, theological beliefs and practices framed thusly have the additional effect of reducing the present (including persons) to mere means serving an ulterior, later end. Therefore, Weil contends, the futural gaze of the unbound imagination always misrepresents reality and poses grave ethical consequences.
Freely imagining in this way amounts to placing oneself on par with God. Rather than acknowledging and accepting the truth of creation as it is/has been given, one imaginatively “creates” (i.e., fictionalizes) the world in a manner she prefers it to be/have been given. “It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the creator,” writes Weil, “than in the place of Christ crucified.”6 Hence, humans are naturally inclined to construct theologies that express how the world would be if the author(s) were God rather than theologies that are disinterested accounts of reality. (As we explained in the previous chapter, the Christ of popular theology is an ersatz divinity—a creation of humankind rather than a response to the present reality of creation itself.) Returning to a familiar motif, Weil likens imaginative and therefore futural thinking to projecting and predicting shadows on the wall of Plato’s allegorical cave. She then concludes, “To come out of the cave, to be detached, means to cease to make the future our objective.”7 By remaining fully present, or “innocent” in her words, we relinquish all expectations or claims to equilibrium. “To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.”8
For Weil, the event of the crucifixion awakens us to the present. The literal suffering and eventual death of Christ ought to evoke compassion (a suffering with Christ on the cross), and in no way should it be diluted, falsified, misrepresented, or erased by the imagination. The crucifixion stands as an impregnable testament to the reality of an order that is not man-made but is the result of God’s withdrawal from the world and Jesus’ perfect response to the necessarily asymmetrical relation between the creator and the created.9 The crucifix represents the tension within creation.
Truth is laid bare on the cross. “The Passion is the existence of perfect justice without any admixture of appearance.”10 A Christology inferred from the resurrection as proof of Christ’s divinity would logically stress hope in the ultimate victory of goodness over injustice in the same miraculous manner in which Christ defeated death. The result of Weil’s Christology, however, is her designation of Christianity as the religion of slaves, not of victors and therefore masters. She stands the theological paradigm intuited in popular imagination on its head.
Christ healing the sick, raising the dead, etc.—that is the humble, human, almost low part of the mission. The supernatural part is the sweat of blood, the unsatisfied longing for human consolation, the supplication that he might be spared, the sense of being abandoned by God.11
For Weil, then, to be Christian is not to believe in the God of miracles, is no guarantee that all prayers will be answered, and it is not to be on the winning team, especially one that is rigged so that the outcome always falls in the Christian’s favor. The supernatural truth of Christ is evident in his affliction—the paradoxical intersection between the two furthest points: horizontally oriented humankind on one hand, and God’s verticality on the other. Christ’s suffering and humiliation on the cross is not merely the reconciliation between God and humanity redeeming original sin, according to Weil; rather, it is Christ’s loving consent to the distance between God and his creation.
The cross, therefore, serves as the ultimate theological (and ethical) symbol in that it provides the true measure of the disequilibrium between God and humanity. “The cross is infinitely more than martyrdom. It is the most purely bitter suffering—penal suffering. This is the guarantee of its authenticity.”12 Jesus’ anguish was real and therefore should not be curtailed theologically by interpreting it as having been predestined or as a means for a greater, more purposeful end. To the contrary, its reality renders all human expectations and claims to anything more than what has been given illegitimate, hubristic, and idolatrous. God abandoned Jesus on the cross. Hence, Christ’s plea, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” is understood by Weil to be “the real proof that Christianity is something divine.”13 That Jesus was not granted reprieve on the cross and remained there suffering unto death is, unexpectedly, proof of God’s love, to Weil. “The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!”14 During this event neither God nor Jesus filled the void.
Intellectual honesty and fidelity to the cross, then, prohibits the construction of compensatory theologies.15 In his teachings, Jesus emphasized his Father’s love and compassion. He described it as unconditional love—the greatest form of love. “So that the love may be as great as possible,” writes Weil, “the distance is as great as possible.”16 God created this abyss through his withdrawal in creation, and this gulf is inscribed in the event of the crucifixion, symbolizing God’s refusal to command everywhere he has the power to do so.
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 the 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.17
The possibility of expressing infinite love requires there to exist an infinite gulf between the lover and the beloved. God’s act of unconditional love is evident in his refusal to intervene and console his son crying out in agony, thereby sustaining the very possibility of Jesus’ willing consent. (We will also see, in the next chapter, how God’s love also manifests as creation itself.) Christ, for his part, loved his Father despite his incarnation and the wretched conditions of his death.
Weil’s argument follows that the love Jesus exhibited—in both word and deed, but especially on the cross—was infinite and unconditional like his Father’s. As such, he is the Mediator, and therefore, exemplary. Weil takes this point quite literally. In her religious philosophy, Christ is not an inimitable deity, but a model for human religious/ethical behavior. She is highly critical of theologies that give lip service to Christ, but never genuinely advise being Christ-like. “In order that the imitation of God should not be a mere matter of words, it is necessary that there should be a just man to imitate . . .”18 Christ crucified, in other words, amounts to an ethical imperative. Jesus mirrored God’s love; Christians are commanded to love just as Jesus loved in the void. “I have to be like God, but like God crucified. Like God almighty in so far as he is bound by necessity,” she writes.19
In Christ on the cross, Weil sees the incarnation of the perfect love—loving in God’s absence/abandonment and with acceptance of necessity—in proportion to the love received from God.20 Christ is mediator and therefore calls to our attention humanity’s true relation with God. This is why she writes, “The function of mediation in itself implies a tearing asunder.”21 In other words, the crucifixion serves to tear us from our attachments to selfish thinking and self-oriented action. The natural attitude is devoid of, or at least forgetful of, vertical relationality. Weil finds evidence of theological perversions of this essential point even in translations of sacred scriptures:
The very fact that Logos has been translated by verbum shows that something has been lost, for λόγος means above all relation, and is a synonym for άριθμός, number, with Plato and the Pythagoreans. Relation, that is to say proportion. Proportion, that is to say harmony. Harmony, that is to say mediation. I would translate as follows: In the beginning was Mediation.22
Errant proportions distort the proper relationship between humankind and God. Whereas Jesus embodied the zero-point—egolessness resulting from emptying the void through love—such that God literally became flesh (incarnation), in Weil’s understanding, humanity continues to tilt the scales toward individual and collective desires, seeking to be omnipotent and ever-expansive. For Weil, however, Christ’s death on the cross is a calling for all humanity to respond in kind. Looking at the symbol of the crucifix ought to recall the one time in Christian history where there was actual equilibrium and recognize fully what it entailed.
Intimations of religious pluralism
As the title of this section suggests, we will be arguing that the religious pluralism often favorably attributed to Weil is, properly speaking, at best a qualified one. Whereas she does demonstrate a great deal of openness to and even reverence for other religious traditions—going so far as to suggest that Christianity does not hold the sole claim to truth and, in fact, has much wisdom to learn from non-Christian religions—there are two principal concerns that significantly diminish, if not outrightly disqualify any claims of religious inclusiveness in her philosophy: first, Weil ultimately interprets and values non-Christian religious traditions in purely Christian terms (especially incarnationism), and, second, Weil’s religious pluralism is contested by her categorical exclusion of Judaism and Islam.
A recurrent concern throughout her letter to Father Couturier is the Church’s position on and relationship with non-Christian religious traditions. In particular, Weil finds a great deal of value in her studies of other religious traditions and sacred literatures, and she is concerned that showing any sympathy toward these traditions would be grounds for exclusion from the Church. (Recall her criticisms of anathema sit outlined in the previous chapter.) Repeatedly, she insists that Father Couturier answer directly whether or not someone who found truth in these other religions would be admitted into the Church and be able to partake in the holy sacraments.
Weil has many good reasons to be suspicious of the Church’s position with respect to non-Christian religions. The most obvious reason of all was the fact that Christian missionaries had been and continued to be the handmaidens of empire, if not its principal architects.23 Colonial expansion was aided and abetted by Christians desiring to convert native populations, and thus, it was often the case that missionaries were the first to arrive in the so-called new territories. As Weil makes clear, however, “Missionary zeal has not Christianized Africa, Asia and Oceania,” rather it “has brought these territories under the cold, cruel and destructive domination of the white race, which has trodden down everything.” She continues,
It would be strange, indeed, that the word of Christ should have produced such results if it had been properly understood.
Christ said: “Go ye, and teach all nations and baptize those who believe,” that is to say, those who believe in Him. He never said: “Compel them to renounce all that their ancestors have looked upon as sacred, and to adopt as a holy book the history of a small nation unknown to them.”24
As we discussed in the previous chapter, in Weil’s analysis political-theology is the contradictory admixture of the collective will (the Great Beast) and Christ’s exemplarity, which always results in significantly contorting the latter (the religious) for the sake of the former (the social-political). It is predicated on a mistaken interpretation of Jesus’ mission; that is, he did not exhibit or mandate to his followers an imperialist imperative to homogenize—by coercion and domination—all humanity under a single theological order. Ultimately, Weil thinks that Jesus “commanded his apostles to bring glad tidings, not a theology . . . But the command was misunderstood.”25 He commanded, in her view, that Christians accept their neighbors and enemies without expectations or reducing them to the same. In fact, in most cases, as we will explain in further detail below, she thinks that changing religions is harmful.
The Church perverts Christ’s teachings when it condones, is complicit with, and actively participates in deception, exploitation, and the brutal use of force in colonialist expansion. These historical facts were a grave source of consternation for Weil, both as a French citizen and as someone who earnestly tried to model her behavior on Christ’s exemplarity.
But . . . as to whether a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, or one of those termed pagan has not in his own tradition a path toward that spirituality which the Christian churches offer him, in any case Christ never said that warships should accompany, even at a distance, those who bring the good news. Their presence changes the nature of the message. It is difficult to retain the supernatural virtues attributed to the blood of the martyrs when it is avenged by force of arms. You are asking for more trumps in your hand than is allowed when you want at one and the same time Caesar and the Cross.26
Human violence belongs to the social and political domains. And this violence cannot be reconciled with Christianity because it corrupts the image of Christ in the same way as the Great Beast disavows true religiosity. Even when Weil reluctantly gave up being a pacifist in order to maintain logical consistency, she admitted that to take up arms is to acknowledge the justice of all harm that might come to all willing participants, including herself, as a result. In no uncertain terms, Weil affirms that all forms of violence are blatant contradictions of Jesus’ example, and therefore, those who rationalize the implementation of physical threat or force, are decidedly not acting in a Christ-like manner. “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.”27 To be Christian is to bear the cross.
Weil’s position against Christian missionaries is far more than a political condemnation of violence and colonialism, however. She constructed philosophical-religious arguments against this practice. She witnessed the damaging effects of what she calls “uprootedness”—when people are forced (i.e., they do not freely give their consent) to abandon their land, their language, their cultural traditions and literatures, and especially their religion.28 This type of being “torn asunder” is not the same as the one she positively described with respect to the cross. The former consists in the deprivation of others’ ability to renounce their egos and consent to the void; the latter is the effect of experiencing God’s love and consenting to loving him in return. They produce opposite results. Uprootedness strips life of any sense of meaning and order. This is why she writes in her letter to Father Couturier, “I think that for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.”29 By definition, conversion to a different faith under duress is not consensual and, thus, not born out of love. There lingers a reasonable doubt regarding the authenticity of the act. Moreover, conversion is not merely a question of changing systems of belief. Missionaries’ pretensions to the possibility of humans convincing other humans that their present religious tradition is inferior to Christianity, and thus should be relinquished in favor of “accepting Jesus Christ as lord and savior,” is grossly arrogant in her view. It is hubristic in the same way as is the use of political force and potentially equally damaging to its intended targets. Religious truth is not arrived at in winning a theological disputation or through appeals to emotion, fear, pride, et cetera. Hence, Weil emphatically condemns all missionary practices: “It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.”30
The basis for her defense of other religious traditions goes well beyond her critique of Christian missionaries’ role in colonialism or its own internal theological and ethical contradictions, however. Weil was very learned about other religions and cultures. She expended a significant amount of time and effort learning languages, such as ancient Greek and Sanskrit, in order to study other traditions’ sacred literature. During the course of her studies, she found a great deal of inspiration and truth in their teachings and practices. She went so far as to affirm the truth claims made by other religious traditions.
Every time a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Krishna, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light—and in the best of cases the fullness of light—in the heart of that same religious tradition.31
From this passage it is clear that Weil does not view non-Christian religions as competing with Christianity in the marketplace of ideas, where the religion or denomination with the highest numbers wins, or where one tradition will be declared the sole victor on the epistemic battlefield. Theologians that think in such combative terms tend to focus on the differences between their orthodox set of beliefs, doctrines, and rites and those of other religious traditions. This is especially true of Christians with an evangelical mission. The process leading up to the Christians’ inevitable self-declared victory includes not only a systematic theological account of their own tradition, but also by extension translating other religious traditions into Christian theological terms so as to demonstrate on what bases Christian belief is incompatible and, ultimately, they presuppose, superior to those non-Christian religions. This is why, for example, it has become quite natural for uneducated and unsympathetic Western commentators to desire a (Protestant type) reformation in Islam (with the hopes of finding the Muslim “Martin Luther”32), as if Islam is simply on a parallel trajectory, only lagging hundreds of years behind Christianity and littered with mistaken premises. At the same time, these commentaries betray the arrogant assumption that Christianity (or the so-called West) in its present form is obviously superior to Islam in its traditional and present forms. Or take as another illustration of this point, the professor teaching a course on World Religions, World Humanities, or other non-Christian based worldviews who must frequently contend with students’ questions or comments situating whatever concept or practice being discussed vis-à-vis Christianity: “X is like/unlike Christianity in the following way(s) . . .” As well intentioned as the students’ efforts may be, they nevertheless skew the subject matter by forcing everything into Christian theological terms.
Although, as we will see shortly, Weil, too, errs on the side of assimilationism, at this stage we want to demonstrate her ecumenical leanings. Rather than compatibility/incompatibility being the basis of critical analysis in order to determine once and for all which, if any, of these traditions has legitimate claims to truth, Weil takes the stance that most religious traditions are equally true. She writes,
The story of the creation and of original sin in Genesis is true. But other stories about the creation and original sin in other traditions are also true and also contain incomparably precious truths. They are different reflections of a unique truth untranslatable into human words. One can divine this truth through one of these reflections. One can divine it still better through several of them.33
If we recall that Weil maintains that the intellect is limited and, therefore, no single (i.e., limited) vantage can fully grasp and articulate the divine, then her stance on non-Christian religions is consistent. Hence, she advises that Christians can learn a great deal of truth and obtain wisdom from intense study of all religious traditions (with a few exceptions). However, she also understands that the “comparison of religions is only possible, in some measure, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy.”34 Clearly, antagonistic theological outlooks—that is, those looking for and emphasizing differences between religious traditions for the sake of self-assurance—preclude the possibility of such sympathy. But Weil approaches the encounter between faith traditions very seriously and, at least initially, she does so openly and offers important insights relevant to contemporary ecumenical dialogues and comparative approaches to the study of religion. We quote her at length:
We can know men to a certain extent if at the same time as we observe them from outside we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying. Here, moreover, this word faith is used in its strongest sense.
This scarcely ever happens, for some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, whereas, on the contrary, we must have given all our attention, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it. In the same way, only those who are capable of friendship can take a real heartfelt interest in the fate of an utter stranger.35
Defensive postures are just as prohibitive to learning as aggressive ones in comparative religious studies. Being guarded renders the encounter disingenuous in a very real sense, according to Weil and probably prevents the encounter altogether. Take for example an actress. A good actress becomes the character she is portraying on stage. Her dialect, bodily gestures, facial expressions, et cetera must be—not just appear—natural. To the degree that she accomplishes this transformation through an essential vulnerability to the narrative she brings the performance to life. If the audience can perceive that she is “acting,” it is because she is perceptibly someone other than the character she is portraying. The most common source of the inability of the actress to step outside of herself and into character is that she is too self-conscious. Stage fright is the result of being hyper self-aware and neurotic. Failed actors, in other words, are those who are always consciously not the characters they portray. In the same way, all approaches to other religions fail when the participants remain self-consciously and guardedly at a distance. Catholics, Weil reminds Father Couturier, admit as much while defending or promulgating their faith.
The Catholic religion contains explicitly truths which other religions contain implicitly. But, conversely, other religions contain explicitly truths which are only implicit in Christianity. The most well-informed Christian can still learn a great deal concerning divine matters from other religious traditions; although inward spiritual light can also cause him to apprehend everything through the medium of his own tradition. All the same, were these other traditions to disappear from the face of the earth, it would be an irreparable loss. The missionaries have already made far too many of them disappear as it is.
St. John of the Cross compares faith to reflections of silver, truth being gold. The various authentic religious traditions are different reflections of the same truth, and perhaps equally precious. But we do not realize this, because each of us lives only one of these traditions and sees the others from outside. But as Catholics are for ever repeating—and rightly—to unbelievers, a religion can only be known from the inside.36
What Weil thinks is necessary for the study of other religions is actual sympathy, and this is only possible when the possibility exists for genuine friendship. (In the next section we will examine the complications created by the dictum “Love thy enemies” in Christian theology with respect to Judaism and Islam and how it manifests itself in Weil’s most controversial writings.) Friendship, however, is equally rare as it entails openness, vulnerability, and the “consent to preserve an autonomy within ourselves and in others.”37 In other words, there ought to be no ulterior motives in the study of other religions; that is, there can be no desire to transform or to convert them, even, or especially, for the sake of self-preservation or self-enlargement.
The list of religious and ancient cultural traditions Weil admires is as long as it is diverse: Hinduism,38 the ancient Greeks39 and Egyptians,40 Taoism, Buddhism, European mythology and folklore,41 among others. And, we must not forget, she even holds atheism in high regard. The consequence of her openness to other ways of (religious) thinking hints to a sort of flattening out of distinctions, however. One can only imagine, for instance, Father Couturier’s initial reaction when he read Weil’s account of the parallelism between Christian theism and atheism: “So likewise an atheist or an ‘infidel,’ capable of pure compassion, are as close to God as is a Christian, and consequently know Him equally well, although their knowledge is expressed in other words, or remains unspoken.”42
Comparative approaches to religion and philosophy, even with the best intentions, are prone to conflating all traditions to a single universal truth. The argument goes that each tradition remains distinct in its outward (exoteric) manifestations (i.e., orthodox sets of beliefs, sacred literatures, and rites), but also, at the same time, each expresses the same transcendent truth (i.e., the Divine).43 Inspiration for this type of thinking is most commonly found among the mystics (esotericism). Weil, in fact, evinces a similar conclusion when she writes,
In practice, mystics belonging to nearly all the religious traditions coincide to the extent that they can hardly be distinguished. They represent the truth of each of these traditions.
The contemplation practiced in India, Greece, China, etc., is just as supernatural as that of the Christian mystics. More particularly, there exists a very close affinity between Plato and, for example, St. John of the Cross. Also between Hindu Upanishads and St. John of the Cross. Taoism too is very close to Christian mysticism.
The Orphic and Pythagorean mysteries were authentic mystical traditions. Likewise the Eleusinian.44
But if we look carefully at the wording of this otherwise innocuous passage, we see signs of assimilationism. Granted, this passage appears in the context of a letter written to a Catholic friar for the purpose of posing to him Weil’s specifically Christian theological questions, but in each comparative citation, the benchmark is a Christian mystic. She does not demonstrate her point by offering a comparison between Taoism and the Hindu Upanishads, for instance. This tendency to simultaneously uphold the legitimacy of non-Christian religions by their relation to Christianity occurs repeatedly in her letter (and other writings). As another case in point, she writes, “There have perhaps been among various peoples (India, Egypt, China, Greece) sacred Scriptures revealed in the same manner as the Jewish-Christian Scriptures.”45
Up until this point we have seen that Weil insists that we “consent to preserve an autonomy . . . in others.” Yet, in the instances cited above and in many others as well, she departs from this position and adopts a more typical attempt to value non-Christian religions on the basis of their intimations of Christianity.46 In particular, she finds (rather hypocritically we must add) these other religious traditions agreeable insofar as she can detect in them acceptance of incarnationism, actual incarnations, or even a foreshadowing of the incarnation in the body of Christ. Hence, in the passage quoted earlier, she identifies the Holy Spirit as that which bestowed light on the prophets of the non-Christian religions included in her assemblage.47 In some of these traditions, such as the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, the Holy Spirit manifested itself in the sacred rites, which, according to Weil, “were real sacraments, possessing the same virtue as baptism or the eucharist.” This is true, however, only insofar as they presage “Christ’s Passion” which was “then to come. Today it is past. Past and future are symmetrical,”48 she informs Father Couturier. With respect to some religions, Weil takes the radical position—especially for a Christian—that some of those prophets may have been, not merely human messengers of God, but actual divine incarnations. “At all events,” Weil writes to the Dominican priest, “we do not know for certain that there have not been incarnations previous to that of Jesus, and that Osiris in Egypt, Krishna in India were not of that number.”49
The takeaway from all of this is that Weil’s Christian conviction, in the end, does color her perception of other religions. Although she views many religions in a favorable light—because after all, according to her, they all reflect the light of the Holy Spirit sent by the Son of God—there are others, as we will see in the next section, that are distinguished and excluded from her positive assessment. In fact, she is outright antagonistic toward them primarily on the basis of their denial of the Christian theological doctrine of the incarnation.
Love’s implicit enemies—The Jew, the Muslim
Relatively little of what Weil wrote was ever published during her lifetime. The majority of her writings, from which scholars have since pieced together her philosophical-religious views, were published posthumously and mainly consist of letters and her reflections recorded in her cahiers (notebooks). Weil never intended, of course, for her personal correspondences and scattered notes to be made public. She left her notebooks with her friend and confidante Gustave Thibon for safekeeping before she left for America with her family in 1942.50 She died the next year.
In 1947 Thibon published a collection of passages from her notebooks under the title, La pésanteur et la grâce (translated into English as Gravity and Grace).51 The publication of this collection nearly coincided with the Zionist formation of the state of Israel in 1948, and as Thomas Nevin has observed, “More than any other volume bearing her name, with the possible exception of Attente de Dieu [Waiting for God], published three years later, La pésanteur et la grâce shaped Weil’s image and reputation for her first generation of readers.”52 This work is especially important for the impact it made and continues to make upon Weil’s English language audience, including the present authors. Anticipating a negative backlash to the selections Thibon collated under the heading “Israel,” especially in the aftermath of World War II, the editors of the first translation into English published by Routledge in 1952 omitted this section. The omission has just recently been rectified when, according to Lawrence Schmidt, “Under pressure from [Palle] Yourgrau, Routledge had the chapter translated by Mario von der Ruhr and finally included in the ‘First Complete English language edition’ published in 2002.”53 What exactly did Weil write in these passages that the editors feared would prove detrimental to her reception in the English-speaking world?
Before we answer that question, it does bear noting that their suspicions have been justified, even if their decision to censor the material has not. Few commentators have resisted taking Weil—and her admirers—to task for “her narrow, willful, and ignorant reading of Judaism.”54 The list of prominent scholars and public intellectuals who criticize her for “rejecting” or even “hating her Jewish identity” includes: George Steiner, Robert Coles, Anna Freud, Alfred Kazin, Rachel Brenner, Witold Rabi, and Jeffrey Mehlman.55 Emmanuel Levinas—perhaps her most eminent critic (and admirer)—goes so far as to declare that, “Simone Weil hates the Bible [i.e., the Old Testament, or Torah].”56 Perhaps Levinas’ curt summation of Weil’s position on Judaism is correct. But given Weil’s otherwise consistent appeal to reason and compassion, it bears examining how she arrived at what others perceive as obviously mistaken and prejudicial positions, ones that run contrary to the entirety of her religious philosophy.
Despite countless analyses and cautions about the dangers inherent in the union of theology and politics (see Weil’s own warnings as discussed above and in Chapter 1), religious intellectuals continue to construct apologia while denouncing what they deem fundamental misunderstandings and misappropriations of religious ethical-social-political values. In fact, it is often argued that it is precisely within religious discourse that the kernels of universal justice (and human rights) are to be found. Weil is one of those figures frequently cited and praised as a fecund source of religio-political inspiration—as someone who embodies and articulates a true Christian ethos, rooted in the unconditional love of God, and who advocates universal justice against the tyrannies of relativism, capitalism, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism.
That being said, in the section on Israel (Judaism) published in Gravity and Grace, in addition to other comments found throughout her cahiers and personal correspondences, one finds severe and unforgiving criticisms of Judaism—and Islam—that lack the intellectual sensitivity with which she otherwise has come to be associated. Take for example the following passage, in which she writes,
Evil is to be purified—or life is not possible. God alone can do that. This is the idea of the Gita. It is also the idea of Moses, of Mahomet, of Hitlerism . . . But Jehovah, Allah, Hitler are earthly Gods. The purification they bring about is imaginary.57
Jehovah (the God of the Jews), Allah (the God of the Muslims), and Hitler (the God of the Nazis) are grouped together in her purview, and stand diametrically opposed to the nonimaginary purifications she contends are offered by the God of the Christian and the Hindu, and intimated by the ancient Greeks, among others. This supposition demands serious investigation if thinking about Weil’s religious philosophy is to remain relevant and responsible.
The first sign of the estrangement of Judaism and Islam in Weil’s philosophy is their conspicuous absence from the catalog of religions that she held in high regard.58 When either of the religions that share the Abrahamic heritage with Christianity is mentioned in the same passage as the non-Christian traditions she favored, it is usually for the purpose of serving as the foil in her argument. As Levinas observes about Weil’s treatment of Judaism in his jeremiad, “Only Greek, Chaldean, Egyptian and Hindu writings contain an unsullied generosity. Jews possess only a God for armies—how horrible!”59
The basis of her caustic criticisms of Judaism and Islam is twofold: both religions, she claims, are motivated by a will to power, and they both reject the incarnation. As we have seen, these are not unrelated issues in Weil’s philosophy.
Building her case for the former accusation, she writes, “The veritable idolatry is covetousness . . . and the Jewish nation, in its thirst for carnal good, was guilty of this in the very moments even when it was worshipping its God. The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the ‘chosen people.’”60 To put this slightly differently, according to Weil’s reading of the Old Testament,61 instead of truly renouncing idolatry as was commanded—“You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath . . .” (Exodus 20:4)—and worshipping the invisible and self-renouncing God, the Hebrews desired other nations’ earthly wealth and power. To acquire it, Weil contends that they constructed a theology—one with a remarkably complicit God—that hypocritically denounces idol worship while simultaneously erecting itself as the new idol—the nation of Israel.
Following this line of reasoning, Weil concludes that Judaism is in essence an “[e]xclusively collective religion.”62 As such, its aspirations are purely temporal and of this world, and the means it employs to attain those ambitions are of the same kind.63 The God of the Jews not only committed violent acts, as recorded in the Old Testament, but He also commanded—thereby providing a supposedly divine justification for—Jews to commit mass atrocities in order to achieve their own self-serving ends with a great cost for their neighbors. Weil finds this ethically reproachable, and logically inconsistent with the God she knows via Christ.
The language she uses in her critical retellings should sound quite familiar, as it is the very language she employs against idolatrous ersatz religions formed and perpetuated by the Great Beast (see Chapter 1):
The Hebrews call their own collective soul God; they pretended, and convinced themselves, that it was the creator and ruler of heaven and earth. This was not always easy to believe . . . Nevertheless, it seems that it must have given them an extra strength. As for the neighboring peoples, they had to be conquered before they could be convinced of it. Their neighbors were unwilling to associate with them except on terms which obliged them to practice idolatry, because their claim to possess God as a national fetish and to possess him exclusively implied a terrifyingly imperialist outlook. With a people which was still weak and very unmilitary, and which had been broken by slavery, such an attitude could hardly succeed.64
She adds, “With the Moslems it [i.e., theologically motivated conquest] succeeded much better.”65 For, according to Weil, Muslims, too, “aspired to temporal domination in the name of religion,”66 and, she writes elsewhere in her cahiers, “They made converts, not without a certain amount of violence.”67 Drawing a direct connection between Judaism and what she has previously called the Great Beast, she declares, “What we call idolatry is to a large extent an invention of Jewish fanaticism.” And then she goes on to speculate in her letter to Father Couturier, “If some Hebrews of classical Jewry were to return to life and were to be provided with arms, they would exterminate the lot of us—men, women and children, for the crime of idolatry. They would reproach us for worshipping Baal and Astarte, taking Christ for Baal and the Virgin for Astarte.”68 In summation, Weil concludes that both Judaism and Islam are essentially idolatrous, fundamentally violent, and purely politically minded ersatz religions.
In addition, theologically they exclude the possibility of the one pure means to resolve the problem of the will to power. The real crux of the matter, or at least the most deep-seated basis of her anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic point of view, rests on the centrality of the incarnation in her thought. As we demonstrated in the previous section, Weil’s positive assessment of some non-Christian traditions comes at the expense of those religions in and of themselves, on their own terms, as she values them only insofar as they corroborate the Christian belief in the incarnation. The same cannot be said of Judaism and Islam. “In reality the process by which Simone Weil establishes this perfidy of the Jews is at the very least original,” writes Levinas, who then adds, “It consists first of all in crediting every nation on earth, with the exception of Israel, with a prefiguration of the Passion.”69 In her own words, Weil posits as irrevocable truth:
There can be no personal contact between man and God except through the person of the Mediator. Without the latter, God can only be present to man collectively, nationally. Israel chose the national God and simultaneously rejected the Mediator; it may, at one time or another, have moved towards true monotheism, but it always fell back on, and was unable not to fall back on, the God of the tribe.70
The theologies of both Judaism and Islam deny this theological claim. “The prophet,” according to the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “is a person. . . . The prophet’s task is to convey a divine view, yet as a person he is a point of view.”71 The prophet does not lose his particularity (personhood) and is not, in other words, identifiable as being God incarnate; he always maintains a certain distance from God. Theologically, Judaism and Islam have more in common than either independently has with Christianity on this very basis. But Christian political theology has succeeded in dividing them from one another (the habitual refrain “Judeo-Christian” has the effect of theologically disavowing Islam from its Abrahamic heritage), perhaps for the purposes of conquering both.
In his book, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Gil Anidjar has convincingly argued that the Jew and the Arab (i.e., Muslim) are prefigured as the implicit enemies of Christianity (and by extension, of Europe and the West).72 As it says in the Gospel of Matthew, “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”73 Upon a certain reading, then, Christianity’s foes, in other words, are its Abrahamic companion religions, Judaism and Islam.
First, they are made identical with one another: non-Christian. But, the commandment is to “love thy enemies” thereby necessitating there to be not a single enemy but numerous enemies within the “household.” Second, Judaism and Islam must be separated from one another to account for this plurality. Following the generation of Augustine’s and Aquinas’ just war theories, Anidjar explains how Christianity’s enemies came to be distinguished from one another, first by spatial metaphor, “near” (Judaism) and “far” (Islam), and subsequently, on theological and political grounds:
Aquinas [in Summa contra Gentiles] distinguishes and separates the Jew from the Arab, the Jew from the Muslim, by affirming that a theological struggle, a religious disputation, is possible only on the basis of a prior agreement, a consensus and common ground, a common text. Such theological common ground is available only with the Jews, not the Muslims. [Aquinas writes,] “The Mohammedans and the pagans do not agree with us in accepting authority of any scripture. . . . Thus, against the Jews we are able to argue by means of the Old Testament, while against heretics we are able to argue by means of the New Testament. But the Mohammedans and the pagans accept neither the one nor the other.”74
Judaism is cast, therefore, as the internal theological enemy of Christianity. Despite there being theological differences, in part there remains a shared scriptural tradition. Perceiving no theological common ground with Islam, then, Aquinas locates Islam on the other end of the spectrum and reduces it to being the external political enemy of Christianity. Anidjar goes on to enumerate a litany of casualties of this line of thinking.
Because the pinnacle of Weil’s religious philosophy is incarnationism—a theological contention—she does not maintain the distinction between Judaism and Islam as explained above; they are both theological and political enemies. Precisely due to their theological denial of the incarnation, they are deemed by her to be motivated by political desires. It is only through the incarnation that a (non-imaginary) just balance can be established. Christ (or Krishna, etc.) is the lynchpin. As she says to Father Couturier, “[T]here is no purity without participating in the divine incarnation . . .”75 What remains is an either/or decision on the incarnation. All religions, therefore, that refuse or even refute the incarnation, are impure (i.e., have made the wrong decision and, therefore, willfully perpetuate an unjust balance) in her view.
“It is Platonic clarity which haunts Simone Weil,”76 writes Emmanuel Levinas. Ironically, her exacting analyses of the crises facing humanity, and her equally precise and tightly woven solutions to those crises, arrive at a single absolute principle from which she cannot waver, no matter what the consequences. As we have already discussed, Weil “found unacceptable and repugnant the Church’s refusal to disavow or to be contrite over past actions that had destroyed vulnerable human lives.”77 In fact, as E. Jane Doering has noted, Weil intended to write an essay summarizing “her thoughts on the need to redirect the course of Christianity, purge it of influences that glorified force, power, and prestige, and eliminate the idea of exclusivity.”78 But because of her utter reliance on the incarnation to solve perennial philosophical, religious, and, by extension, social and political dilemmas, she ultimately sides with religion as being in sole possession of political authority. So-called religions that do not at the very least intimate Christianity, such as Islam and Judaism, “the Great Beast[s] of religion,” are “not likable,” for, as she says, “[t]he Great Beast is always repulsive.”79 As Doering explains further, “Weil had come to the firm conviction that the Christian spirituality of love, charity, and faith had to permeate any civilization that wished to counter the force of gravity in human nature that pulled human beings toward the exploitation of their fellow beings.”80 This point is made abundantly clear when Weil concludes, “There can be no legitimacy without religion,”81 which she has narrowly defined to the exclusion of the Jew and the Muslim. The practical implications of this line of thinking are frightfully clear.
Weil ends up where she began, but, unfortunately, this time on the other side of the proverbial coin. What at first was the subject of her philosophical-religious critique, Weil now forcefully advocates during what amounts to the construction of her own political-theology. She reminds us that Christ did not “prescribe the abolition of penal justice.”82 Then, she adds, the “legal character of a punishment has no true significance if it does not give it some kind of religious meaning . . . and therefore all penal offices, from that of the judge to that of the executioner and the prison guard, should in some sort share in the priestly office.”83 The interlocking of the political apparatus and the supernatural sounds suspiciously familiar to the unholy union she identified at the root of the Church’s abuses, and, which, she originally sought to expose and challenge.
Then, in a move so flagrantly contradictory to her prior criticisms of the Church to be almost unthinkable, at one point Weil condones anathema sit. In the fourteenth question that she poses to Father Couturier, she says,
To keep in line with St. John, [the Church] should never have excommunicated any except the Docetae, those who deny the Incarnation. The definition of faith according to the catechism of the Council of Trent (firm belief in everything taught by the Church) is very far removed from that of St. John, for whom faith was purely and simply belief in the Incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus. . . . According to St. John, the Church has never had the right to excommunicate any one who truly believed Christ to be the Son of God come down to earth in the flesh.84
We might concede that this makes sense internally to Christianity; that is, only those who accept the incarnation are properly “Christian.” But Weil has already made clear that identity in a collective is in itself problematic for the universalist message revealed in Christ—hence, her own resistance to baptism. As if the contrariety of her position is not confounding enough, in the very next question to the friar—numbered fifteen—she returns to her usual habit of admonishing the Church for, among other things, not having “learned from [the] parable [of the Good Samaritan] never to excommunicate any who practices love of his neighbor.”85
Weil would have been aware of the original Greek usage of the term anathema, especially in the biblical context, where it denotes “the object of a curse.”86 All who do not accept the truth of incarnation, or intimate it, are cursed and are rightfully banished according to Weil who cites St. John as precedent, else the host society risk contagion. They are enemies.
Consequently, Weil’s critique of Judaism turns into blame.87 First, because Judaism is an earthly religion, in her account, and Jesus’ message inverts that perspective in favor of the truly transcendent because loving God,88 she holds the Jews (in connection with the Romans) responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion, saying that they are, “[a] people chosen for blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.”89 Accusing Jews of the persecution and eventual murder of Jesus is certainly not original, and historically it has accompanied sinister intentions resulting in abhorrent and bloody consequences.
This brings to mind the second and most sweeping and bewildering charge she levels against Judaism. Namely, Weil blames Judaism for corrupting Christendom.
. . . To speak of an ‘educational God’ in connection with this people [Jews] is a cruel joke. It is not astonishing that there should be so much evil in a civilization—ours [i.e., Christian European]—contaminated to the core, in its very inspiration, by this terrible lie. The curse of Israel rests on Christendom. Israel meant atrocities, the Inquisition, the extermination of heretics and infidels. Israel meant (and to a certain extent still does . . .) capitalism. Israel means totalitarianism, especially with regard to its worst enemies.90
What is astonishing to us, alongside countless other critics, is that, given her own sensitivity to the rise of Nazism, she intimates their anti-Semitic rhetoric. After all, Nazi propaganda, likewise, framed European Jewry as a contagion. And this language, as it was designed to do, incited violence and genocidal behavior.
But as Weil sees it, Judaism is a spiritual saboteur of Christianity and European civilization. “The Jews, that handful of uprooted people, have caused the uprootedness of the whole terrestrial globe,” she writes, continuing,
Their involvement in Christianity has made of Christendom, in regard to its own past, something uprooted. The orientation of the Enlightenment, 1789, secularism, etc. have infinitely increased this uprooting, through the lie of progress. And uprooted Europe has uprooted the rest of the world, by colonial conquest. Capitalism, totalitarianism, have a share in this progressive uprootedness . . .91
Her claim, as absurd and obscene as it sounds, is that Judaism set off a domino effect resulting in every major crisis in the classical and modern worlds, including and especially the spiritual crisis in Christianity and all the sins it has perpetrated falsely in the name of Christ.92
These remarks must be read in conjunction with an important biographical note, lest they result in the mistaken impression that Weil was (self-)hateful of the Jewish race. In August 1940 Weil applied for a teaching post, hoping to be assigned to one of the French colonies as a means to get out of France. After not having received a reply, she inferred that she had been denied an appointment due to the racist policies of the Vichy government as outlined in the statute concerning Jews that was issued on October 3, 1940. According to her friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, who ascertained the following based on documents she obtained while compiling research for her book, Weil had actually been “appointed a professor at the girls’ lycée in Constantine on October 1, 1940,” but, “for some reason the information never reached her.”93 Unaware of her appointment, in November Weil composed a sardonic reply to the Minister of Education.
Similar to the letter she sent to Father Couturier, in this letter Weil poses a series of questions to the unsuspecting Minister of Education. This letter, unlike the one written in earnest to the Dominican priest, however, is dripping with sarcasm and is intended to lay bare the racist ideology at the heart of Nazism and their Vichy collaborators. She opens the letter stating her intentions. “I want to know to whom this Statute applies, so that I may be enlightened as to my own standing. I do not know the definition of the word ‘Jew’; that subject was not included in my education.”94 Citing the statute’s exact wording, which stated that a “Jew” is “a person who has three or more Jewish grandparents,”95 Weil proceeds by constantly referring to herself as the case in point, forcing the Minister, should he respond, to provide her with a clear definition of the term as well as to explain how his office determined that she fit the definition.
Does the term “Jew” denote someone of the Jewish faith, or does it denote someone of the Jewish race, she queries? If it designates the former, she informs him that she has “never been in a synagogue, and [has] never witnessed a Jewish religious ceremony.”96 Then, in a mordacious tone, she writes, “On the other hand, I know definitely that both my maternal grandparents were free-thinkers.”97 “But perhaps,” she continues, “the word designates a race?” To which Weil explains that, according to the historian Josephus, Titus succeeded in exterminating this race, and so “it seems highly unlikely that they left many descendents.”98 So, how exactly did the Vichy government verify that she was of the Jewish race, she asks, to which, in the same manner that Socrates answered his own questions in the Apology, Weil surmises that it would “be quite difficult to get reliable information on this point.”99 Weil closes the letter asking once again, “But I should like to be officially enlightened on this point, since I myself have no criterion by which I may resolve the question.”100 Not surprisingly, Weil “never received a reply.”101
Pétrement soberly summarizes the gist of this letter as follows:
Obviously this letter did not mean that Simone was not in solidarity with other Jews. The arguments she raises in regard to race were valuable for all Jews. On the contrary, she was mocking the “Statutory Regulations on Jews” and the confused ideas on which all anti-Semitic racism rests.102
Although for some the temptation to claim otherwise has proven too much to resist, in this light it is clear that Weil was not racist. Even if she did not use such derogatory language in the exact same manner employed by the Nazis, however, it is inexcusable for a thinker with such intellectual acuity, and one so morally minded, to be as callous and unjust in her treatment of Judaism and, we would add, Islam. “Simone Weil’s anti-biblical passion,” Levinas cautioned, “could wound and trouble Jews.”103 Her remarks about Judaism and Islam cannot be passed over or uncritically accepted as being benign. What are we, then, to make of them?
To begin, we follow Levinas and other critics who have exposed Weil’s ignorance of Judaism. Weil never took the time to study Hebrew, or Arabic for that matter, not to forget her nonchalant condemnations of Islam. She admits as much throughout her writings when she confidently corrects translations of ancient Greek, without any reference to their Hebrew equivalents when it would be appropriate. Her demand for accuracy in representing religious symbols and religious language seems not to matter so much to her with respect to the Jewish and Islamic traditions.
One could go so far as to say that her approach to Jewish and Islamic literature is dilettantish. As a result, her readings of each are reductive and, at times, childishly naïve. As Levinas writes in his rejoinder to Weil’s interpretation of Judaism,
We cannot reproach Simone Weil’s culture for being ignorant of the fact that notions like goodness are not simple, and that they can call up and encapsulate notions which seem opposed to them. And while the dialectic of Christian experience excites her, she is content to remain on the level of immediate notions whenever it involves referring to the Old Testament. Here she casually repeats Voltaire’s argument that “Abraham began by prostituting his wife.”104
Furthermore, her biased reading of the Old Testament—and near nonexistent reading of the Qu’ran or other Islamic literature—lacks nuance and sophistication. It also lacks humility. It is difficult to fathom that the author of these commentaries on the Old Testament is the same astute reader of ancient Greek texts, such as Iliad or Antigone, or the Bhagavad Gita. But, as Levinas rightly notes, Weil misses a fundamental yet obvious point about the stories in the Old Testament.
Israel is not a model people, but a free people. It is of course, like any people, filled with lust and tempted by carnal delights. The Bible tells us of this lust in order to denounce it, but also knows that it is not enough to deny. It seeks to elevate matters by introducing the notion of justice.105
Weil interprets most of the stories in the Old Testament as mythical affirmations of the collective desire of the Jewish people. Somehow she managed to gloss over much of the inherent complexity that exists within Judaism and Islam and their sacred literatures. But Weil presumes that a true religious text must provide people with an exact model of goodness, one that uniformly solves all dilemmas in the same manner as the Passion of Christ in the New Testament. In the end, we are justified in being suspicious of the conclusions she draws.
To carry forward a metaphor we previously used, in her treatment of Judaism and Islam, we can see plainly that she is acting. She never succeeds in having true sympathy with them. Recall that she said to be in a position to claim knowledge of another religion is to “transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever [religion] we are studying.” What is required, in other words, is to “have given all our attention, all our faith, all our love . . . that is proper to it.”106 By her own standards, Weil’s readings of Judaism and Islam are clearly done in bad faith. Like a failed actress, she never loses herself in the role of being a Jew or a Muslim; she remains self-conscious—that is, consciously Christian—and, therefore, at a critical distance from these religions. Her own personality intrudes upon the scene. Thus, she never consents to their autonomy which is necessary—again according to her own philosophy—for friendship. In this way she affirms our suspicion that Judaism and Islam are the implicit, if not explicit, enemies of Weil’s Christian love.
In retrospect, Weil’s treatment of Judaism and Islam backs her into a corner, and the best possible explanation is that she is guilty of not practicing her own philosophy. On one hand, she champions the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the outcasts, the afflicted, and, generally speaking, the most vulnerable among us. Weil questions the social, political, and religious boundaries created by self-interested will to power. She challenges the Church and its complicity with values and practices contrary to Christ’s exemplarity. She even seeks wisdom within a plurality of religious and cultural traditions and denounces Christian missionaries and the colonization of indigenous peoples. On the other hand, because she staunchly opposes relativism, and following the Platonic model, thinks justice can only be had through a universalizable truth, her system hinges on an abiding belief in an absolute, unchanging, transcendent ideal—God. As Levinas observes of her philosophy, “Good [is turned] into an absolutely pure idea [by Weil], excluding all contamination or violence.”107 This ideal, this goodness, was most clearly embodied in Christ. As consequence, other religions are valued insofar as they either have within them possible events of incarnationism or admit of the possibility of the incarnation of God in Christ. Otherwise, her system does not hold together—to the detriment of Jews and Muslims above all.
Another way of framing the tensions in Weil’s thought about Judaism in particular, especially given her letter to the Minister of Education, is to place her within the long line of Jewish intellectuals who struggle with the question of what it means to be Jewish. And it is here that Weil’s criticisms can at least serve as an occasion to consider some important religious, ethical, and political concerns specifically pertaining to Judaism, and where, unpredictably, her philosophy parallels other Jewish thinkers in some fascinating and potentially incisive ways.
On October 22, 2009, New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the Social Science Research Council, and Stony Brook University convened four of the most prominent living philosophers—Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West—for a colloquy on religion in the public sphere.108 Butler’s presentation was titled, “Is Judaism Zionism?”109 As promised by the title, in her lecture she dared ask the question that Weil posed to the Minister of Education: “What is a Jew?” It goes without saying that the answer to this question has taken on special importance since the rise of anti-Semitism, Nazism, and the Holocaust. But now it is also recast in light of the formation of the state of Israel on the basis of a Zionist philosophy. For many Jews and non-Jews, Zionism has come to be synonymous with Judaism. But for many others, again both Jewish and non-Jewish alike, Zionism and Judaism are not identical. There is a sense of urgency surrounding this question due to the ongoing occupations of the West Bank and Gaza, and the human rights abuses suffered by Palestinians, and even non-Jewish immigrants in Israel.110
Butler’s essay summons Weil’s contemporary Hannah Arendt, another Jewish philosopher who “made clear in her early writings, Jewishness is not always the same as Judaism. And, as she made clear in her evolving political position on the state of Israel, neither Judaism nor Jewishness necessarily leads to the embrace of Zionism.”111 Unsurprisingly, her position on Zionism led to harsh criticisms and even ad hominem attacks from her fellow Jewish community members; as Butler notes, Gershom Scholem went so far as to question Arendt’s Jewishness.112 Ironically, it is this very gesture—taking it upon oneself to choose who is and is not to count or live among us—that Arendt observed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and toward which she directed her philosophical critiques. “According to Arendt,” Butler writes, “Eichmann thought that he and his superiors might choose with whom to cohabit the earth and failed to realize that the heterogeneity of the earth’s population is an irreversible condition of social and political life itself.”113 The Nazis decided that Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and others did not fit within their idealized society and eugenic aspirations and, hence, set out to exclude (anathema sit) them once and for all. Judaism, Butler argues, provides a direct yet paradoxical response to such exclusivist enterprises, including, she adds, Zionism.
Judaic ethics require the suspension of the principle of identity, according to Butler. As she explains, “[W]ithin several ethical frameworks, Jewishness is itself an anti-identitarian project insofar as we might even say that being a Jew implies taking up an ethical relation to the non-Jew.”114 The ethical imperative is cohabitation. To face the other is to give full consent to the other’s alterity. An equivalent to this ethical imperative is found in Weil’s understanding of friendship. Or, as Levinas writes, “To love one’s neighbor can mean already to glimpse his mastery over us, and the dignity he has as someone who is associated with God and has rights over us.”115 Accepting the other as other displaces self-privilege, or egoistic desire. As Butler writes,
. . . we must actively preserve the nonchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation: we not only live with those we never chose, and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part. . . . To cohabit the earth is prior to any possible community or nation or neighborhood. We might choose where to live, and who to live by, but we cannot choose with whom to cohabit the earth.116
No person or group warrants special preference over and above others, yet alone at the expense of others.
The paradox of the principle of Jewish identity being anti-identitarian as expounded by Butler coincides with Weil’s ethics. As such, we propose that Butler’s paradox is a corrective to the internal contradictions within Weil’s oeuvre, as evidenced by her selective advocacy of anathema sit, as well as her outright caustic remarks about Judaism and Islam. It functions as such by evoking and then emphasizing the most prescient ideas in Weil’s thought—albeit Butler arrives at the problems from a different direction—to a degree that prohibits the transgression of the paradox itself.
To begin, Weil likewise acknowledges necessity (or, our external limits), whereas in Butler’s terms as stated above, it is “to realize that the heterogeneity of the earth’s population is an irreversible condition of social and political life itself.” On these very grounds, Weil rebuked the Church and European colonialism for attempting to and at times succeeding in eradicating non-Christian, non-European cultures.
Weil, as we will describe in the next chapter, singles out selfish desire and the imagination as the root of evil. Self-identity and by extension collective-identity reify our imagined selves, motivating a will to power. Rather than recognizing our inherent vulnerability, we tend to superimpose our imagined selves over and against the world and others—the euphemistic collateral damage of our selfish desires. In her mystical philosophy, Weil argues that we ought to be porous. As we explained in the first chapter, both philosophy and mysticism are the preparations for death (of ego). The preparation means refraining from exercising our will to power. This, in turn, ultimately entails remaining detached, and renouncing our individual and collective identities. In short, Weil’s ethics are anti-identitarian.
We think it fitting to set ourselves and Weil aside and leave the last words on this topic to Butler:
We are outside ourselves, before ourselves, and only in such a mode is there a chance of being for another. We are, to be sure, already in the hands of the other before we make any decision about with whom we choose to live. This way of being bound to one another is precisely not a social bond that is entered into through volition and deliberation; it precedes contract, is mired in dependency, and is often effaced by those forms of social contract that depend on an ontology of volitional individuality. Thus it is, even from the start, to the stranger that we are bound, the one, or the ones, we never knew and never chose. If we accept this sort of ontological condition, then to destroy the other is to destroy my life, that sense of my life that is invariably social life.117