Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa had come to America in January 1940. Like Auden, who had arrived a year earlier, they found lodgings in New York—though while Auden had to make do with rather Bohemian digs in Brooklyn Heights, where he shared a house with other expatriate artists and a famous “exotic dancer” named Gypsy Rose Lee, the Maritains were installed on Fifth Avenue.
According to Jacques’s biographer Ralph McInerny, in The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, they settled at 30 Fifth Avenue. Another great French exile, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, lived just around the corner at 51 West 11th Street, in the same apartment building as Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory, who worked for Bell Labs. (Shannon’s theory of information bears a curious affinity to the structural anthropology that Levi-Strauss, under the influence of his fellow exile, the structural linguist Roman Jakobson, developed during the war.) Even by Manhattan standards, that is a remarkable accumulation of intellectual firepower in one small area. Since I learned about this synchronicity, I have longed for Tom Stoppard to write a play about Maritain, Levi-Strauss, and Shannon—along the lines of what he did with Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara in Travesties.
Maritain had crossed the Atlantic only in order to give some lectures at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto and then in New York; it was the fall of France later in 1940 that forced him to remain in the States. Though a leading French Catholic thinker since the period of World War I, he had in his adolescence been an atheist, like Raïssa Oumançoff, a Russian-Jewish immigrant he met at the Sorbonne in 1901, when they were both still teenagers. They fell in love, and the tightness of their bond—which would last until Raïssa’s death in 1960—was intensified by their shared longing for something absolute, something transcendent, which in their student days neither of them could then grasp. They certainly did not receive anything sustaining from their professors at the Sorbonne: many years later, Raïssa would write that their only teacher “inspired with ardent faith” was Emile Durkheim, and his faith was in sociology.
One day, walking after class through the Jardin des Plantes on the Left Bank, they said to each other—as Raïssa recalled in 1940, writing from their apartment in New York—“that if our nature was so unhappy as to possess only a pseudo-intelligence capable of everything but the truth, if, sitting in judgment on itself, it had to debase itself to such a point, then we could neither think nor act with any dignity. In that case everything became absurd.”1
“I wanted no part in such a comedy,” Raïssa recollected. “I would have accepted a sad life, but not one that was absurd.” She and Jacques agreed that for a certain period they would continue the “experiment” of living, to see if “the meaning of life would reveal itself.”
But if the experiment should not be successful, the solution would be suicide; suicide before the years had accumulated their dust, before our youthful strength was spent. We wanted to die by a free act if it were impossible to live according to the truth.
In the end the experiment was successful. “It was then,” Raïssa writes at the beginning of her memoir’s next chapter, “that God’s pity caused us to find Henri Bergson.” Bergson, a Jew whose beliefs were unorthodox by any standard, was not seeking to win people to religious faith; but he was working at the time on the ideas that would lead to his most famous book, L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which posited an élan vital saturating the whole of life and drawing it ever onward toward perfection. Jacques and Raïssa’s encounter with those ideas, in 1901, was enough to save them from suicide, even though they would not long hold to Bergson’s general point of view: five years after they first attended his lectures, and two years after their marriage, they were received into the Roman Catholic Church.
Jacques’s first book would be a critique of Bergson and Bergsonisme. Much later in life he came to feel that he had been ungenerous, and should have expressed more gratitude for what Bergson did to bring him out of the slough of despond. And indeed his work as a theologian would always be marked by that early spiritual crisis. Long before Camus wrote that the one truly serious philosophical problem is whether to commit suicide—indeed, a dozen years before Camus was even born—the Maritains had faced this decision and come out on the other side as Catholics, and he as a theologian. But he had not pursued the priesthood, indeed as a married man could not have, and this meant that his theological orientation was always that of a layperson, a Catholic in the pew, not presiding at the altar. It was the task of every person, he thought, to follow and to practice what in the 1930s, as we have seen, he came to call “integral humanism”—an account of the human being that, unlike the truncated humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, took into full account our proper relationship to God. The last book he published before leaving the Continent, The Twilight of Civilization, lamented the failure of France and Europe more generally to achieve such a humanism and their consequent descent into spiritual torpor—a torpor that made the whole continent vulnerable to the utopian visions of Communism and Fascism alike.
It is noteworthy that Raïssa began her memoir, to which she gave the title We Have Been Friends Together, after their exile to New York, at a time when they were separated from their native land and from those friends, when Jacques was still trying to find a role with the Free French and she had no public role at all. In March 1940, she wrote in her journal, “For me this exile is a terrible trial”—and she even contemplated suicide, for the first time since those dark days in the Jardin des Plantes.2 The writing of her memoir, then, was an exercise in what St. Augustine called memoria: not memory in any passive sense, but the willed realization, through the study of one’s past, of the pattern of one’s life. It was a reminder to herself, and perhaps to Jacques, that the “experiment” had after all been successful, that genuine meaning had been found, and that even in unpropitious times there was still useful work to do.
When she was in the midst of telling their story to herself, she learned, in January 1941, that Bergson had died. “Great pain for us. I think of all that we owe him, and that many others do as well. We heard in a letter from France that he had been baptized and did not want to declare it publicly out of consideration for the Jews subject to persecution in recent years. Our master, lost and found.”3 In fact, Bergson’s biographers doubt whether he ever converted. According to his widow, he said late in life that he might have converted were it not for the rise of European anti-Semitism, which made it a moral necessity for him to remain in full solidarity with France’s Jews. But in any case he did not wish to be baptized.4
But for the Maritains, Bergson remained always their “master,” because he had been the one to suggest to them that the world just might be ruled by something other than blind force.
* * *
Around the time that the Maritains arrived in New York and Raïssa began work on her memoir—almost immediately after the fall of France to the German armies—Simone Weil wrote an essay about the Iliad. It remains her most famous piece of writing. Here is how it begins:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.5
The word “loveliest” arrests the reader: but for Weil anything that reveals the truth to us is lovely. And it is supremely true that “the subjection of the human spirit to force . . . is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is.”6
It is perhaps for this reason that when human beings gain power over other human beings, they are unable to use it moderately. “The moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness.” The human being does not settle on the employment of extreme force after careful deliberation, but rather “dashes . . . to it as to an irresistible temptation.”7
We must, then, ask: What may profitably be opposed to force? What, if anything, could be stronger than it? We can only answer, Weil thinks, after sustained contemplation of ourselves in this “purest and loveliest of mirrors.” The Western world has not yet found the Iliad’s counterepic: Perhaps the people of Europe “will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate.” But, she adds, in the final words of her essay, “How soon this will happen is another question.”8 In the three remaining years of her life, Weil would devote much of her intellectual energy to the attempt to ask what might prompt and ground an authentic and adequate answer to Homer’s “poem of force,” an epic of another power, another ethos.
A year or so after writing about the Iliad, while living in Marseille and writing for Les Cahiers du Sud, Weil sought to find that alternative power in what she called the “Romanesque Renaissance.” Her essay is a strange and subtle one that creates curious variations on an all-too-familiar theme: the idealization by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christians, especially Catholic ones, of medieval Christendom.
The opening sentences of the essay could flow directly from the conclusion of her thoughts on the Iliad: “Why dwell upon the past, instead of directing one’s thoughts to the future? If people are turning, for the first time in hundreds of years, to contemplate the past is this because we are weary and close to despair? Indeed we are so.” And reflection on a poem that teaches us the ultimate and inescapable power of force over us all might, if unaccompanied by other reflections, bring on that despair. “But there are better grounds for contemplating the past.” Those grounds arise from recognition of this fact: “We cannot be made better except by the influence upon us of what is better than we are.” Now, it may be that in the future there will be societies better than ours, but we do not have access to them—nor will it do any good to exhort us to imagine them, for that just presents us with the intractable problem that we are the ones doing the imagining: “the future is empty and is filled by our imagination . . . it is just as imperfect as we are.” Therefore we must turn to the past, not because it is necessarily better than our own world, but because it is different.9
Weil here offers a version of an argument that C. S. Lewis made in his 1939 sermon on “Learning in War-Time.” He would return to the point, and expand it, in an introduction to a new English translation of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation of the Word of God. There he argues, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” All writers of a given period—“even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it”—“share to some extent the contemporary outlook.” We therefore “need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” Like Weil, Lewis does not believe that there was “any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.” And he adds, again like Weil, “To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”10
Weil’s argument in “The Romanesque Renaissance” certainly rhymes with Lewis’s, but it is in certain respects more subtle. “The past offers us a partially completed discrimination,” she writes. “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.” For Weil, the great task of thought is just this, to discern the eternal, that which is always and everywhere true but also always and everywhere obscured by the “attachments and passions” of a given person or a given culture. What has survived from the past is the discrimination of the eternal achieved by that time and place, a discrimination that is never complete and never directly mappable onto our own moment but that nevertheless remains of inestimable value. What the past saw clearly is a pearl of great price for us.
However, it is not always easy for us to read with clarity the past’s achievements. Those same attachments and passions that blind us to the eternal blind us also, and for the same reasons, to the wisdom of our ancestors. This is why for Weil the power of the past to offer us the needful discriminations “is true above all for the past which is temporarily so dead that it offers no food for our passions.”11 No stage of the past is permanently dead; any moment of it can rise up again into full and dramatic life, as the Iliad did in the opening months of the war. But the “temporarily dead”—the past that has lost its relevance for us, that seems to bear no analogies to our current situation—we may have the power to read discerningly. Its voice we may just be able to hear.
In this essay, Weil is, I believe, setting her thoughts subtly but firmly apart from those of Maritain. She knew well his 1920 book Art and Scholasticism, in which, as we have seen, he celebrated the high Gothic as the pinnacle of Christian art and lamented the cultural fall into the naturalistic humanism of the so-called Renaissance and so-called Enlightenment. Weil does not wholly disagree with this narrative. She speaks, for instance, of “the false Renaissance, which is called by that name today.”12 Like Maritain, she traces a kind of decline. Yet her story takes a very different course, and again, as we saw with the comparison to Lewis on “old books,” her account offers subtleties and surprises that the more standard narratives, especially narratives of secularization, lack.
Weil contends that the Romanesque civilization of the tenth and eleventh centuries “was the true Renaissance. The Greek spirit was reborn in the Christian form which is its truth.” And for her, one of the key marks of its truth was the ease with which it lived in the midst of, and peacefully tolerated, profanity and error. The center of the Romanesque Renaissance, in Weil’s reading, was Languedoc; and Languedoc was also the center of Cathar Christianity, or, from another point of view, the Albigensian heresy. The Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century, which resulted not only in the suppression of the Cathars but the absorption of Languedoc into France, amounted to the “murder” of a country, the “decisive crime” that not only ended the Cathars but also ended the true Renaissance. It was this destruction of a vibrant if chaotic culture that ushered in the Gothic era; and for Weil the whole of the Gothic world should be seen as shadowed by the massive crime that brought it into being. “The Gothic Middle Ages,” so praised and celebrated by major European artists and intellectuals from Ruskin to Maritain, were, in Weil’s deliberately shocking phrase, “an essay in totalitarian spirituality.”13
Interestingly, a very similar argument had been made a few years earlier by Charles Williams, in a book that had a major effect on Auden’s return to Christianity: in Descent of the Dove (subtitled A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church), he writes of the desire to create “a dominant culture, an achieved society” via “the method of the imposition of belief.” These impulses produce “totalitarian minds.”14 It was this temptation to impose belief that, in Weil’s view, the Romanesque era resisted. In pre-Gothic Languedoc, “leaving the profane intact, the supernatural thereby retained its purity.” But within the new Gothic regime, “the profane as such had no rights any more.” This was a disaster not only for the Cathars and other representatives of the profane, but for Christendom itself: “spirituality is necessarily degraded by becoming totalitarian. This is not what Christian civilization is.”15
Weil knows that her view of that period has massive implications for any account of a subsequent history, and she embraces those implications without flinching. It is true that at the time of what is usually called the Renaissance, “humanism” was produced, and as we have seen, Weil believed that humanism was “poisonous”—and a distinctively Christian kind of poison, or, perhaps it is better to say, one to which Christianity is distinctively prone. Humanism “consists in treating the bridges bequeathed to us by the Greeks as if they were permanent habitations.” To be sure, “Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value”; but it was tragically wrong “in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”16 What is usually called humanism, in what is usually called the Renaissance, lost sight of the possibility of a truly Christian culture toward which the insights of Greek paganism pointed, and “from then onwards, the spiritual life of Europe has diminished until it has almost shrunk to nothing.” But this diminishment was the unwitting creation of the “spiritual totalitarianism” of the Gothic era: it was against this tyranny that the early modern spirit revolted, and in so doing it was bound to fall into error. In Weil’s view, we should not fail to see how the early modern era ushered in a great spiritual decline; but we should assign the causes more accurately, and see that nonreligious, or antireligious, humanism was a genuine attempt, however misguided and doomed to failure, to seek spiritual freedom from the oppression imposed by the “imposition of belief” of the Gothic era. “Today, in the grip of affliction, we feel a loathing for the process which has led to the present situation. We vilify and would reject that humanism which was developed by the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and the Revolution. But by doing that, so far from raising ourselves, we are throwing away the last faint, confused image that remained to us of man’s supernatural vocation.”17 For Weil, l’humanisme athée decried by de Lubac, Maritain, and Gilson was an error, but it was an understandable error, and an authentic attempt to reclaim freedom that had been taken away by the “spiritual totalitarianism” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Church of that time had unwittingly created its own nemesis.
Weil states the conclusion of her brief history flatly and boldly: “It may be that in those early years of the thirteenth century Christianity was faced with a choice. She made an evil choice. She chose evil, and the evil bore fruit and now we are suffering evil.”18 In other words, we find ourselves subject to force. Indeed, the totalitarianism of the Gothic era was a kind of contract with force, and effected the transformation of the Church into “the social beast” that “alone possesses force.”19 In a very strong sense, the Iliad, the “poem of force,” is “the purest and loveliest of mirrors” for twentieth-century Europe because thirteenth-century French kings united in a single course of action a passion for eliminating heresy and an equally strong passion for expanding the reach of their empire. Weil lays her finger on that moment in European history and calls for repentance; and “repentance means going back to the moment which preceded the wrong choice.” It means going back beyond the celebrated High Gothic era to the relatively neglected Romanesque era, when leaders of Christendom found they could live in peace with error; when force was at their command but they chose not to employ it. In reading this history, modern Europeans may escape despair by discerning the eternal. In reading it, they may “learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate.”20
* * *
In the misery of France’s fall, in May and June 1940, the one bright spot was the successful evacuation of nearly 350,000 soldiers from Dunkirk, on the English Channel. Perhaps it should be called merely a less dark spot: as Churchill—appointed as Prime Minister just a few weeks earlier—commented in the House of Commons, “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”
Dunkirk gripped the imagination of Britons in a peculiar but powerful way. The soldiers themselves tended toward anger and resentment at having been effectively abandoned on the beach, but the English people were amazed that they had been rescued at all, and especially by the role that ordinary citizens had played in the rescue. In a BBC radio broadcast, the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley said of the Gracie Fields, a ferryboat from the Isle of Wight that was sunk in the Channel, that “this little steamer . . . is immortal. She’ll go sailing proudly down the years in the epic of Dunkirk.” And a headline in the Daily Mirror read simply, “BLOODY MARVELLOUS.”21
A less enthusiastic observer of the scene was T. S. Eliot, who from his flat in Kensington wrote a melancholy meditation on the events. E. McKnight Kauffer, of the Ministry of Information, had come up with the idea of an exhibition of photographs of the British war effort, to be displayed in New York with the evident hope of generating American sympathy. Eliot was asked to provide a kind of commentary, and he called it “Defence of the Islands.” He would later say that he had Dunkirk on his mind as he wrote. Echoing Thomas Gray’s famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”—“The paths of glory lead but to the grave”—he wrote of those “for whom the paths of glory are the lanes and the streets of Britain,” and also those who “fight the power of darkness in air and fire.” In a foreshadowing of the great poem he would write two years later, “Little Gidding,” he invokes the traditional four elements and discerns those elements as the stage on which history is enacted. What the photographs of the exhibition “say, to the past and the future generations of our kin and of our speech,” is merely this: “we took up our positions, in obedience to instructions.”22
We took up our positions. Eliot by this point had identified himself completely with Englishness, and wished to take up whatever position might be assigned to him—though he knew that at his age his options were limited. In February 1940, he had said of himself and his fellow writers, “We can have very little hope of contributing to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole world at once . . . . We must keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation.”23
What those proper “aspirations” might be is a question partly answered by Eliot’s ongoing participation in Oldham’s Moot, which was making its own “modest and local beginnings” of an inquiry into the restoration of Christian intellectual leadership in Britain. But Eliot was also thinking of the “modest and local beginnings” of his own ancestors in the Somerset village of East Coker, which he had visited in 1937 and about which he had been thinking ever since. He was composing the poem bearing the name of that village as he wrote of the hopes he and his fellow writers should and should not have; and the poem was published just two months before Dunkirk.
In her Composition of Four Quartets, Helen Gardner commented that at that dark hour the poem had an extraordinary consoling and encouraging effect on the British reading public: it was reprinted several times in 1940, and in its first year in print sold twelve thousand copies.24 Seen as a poetic self-assessment, the poem is discouraging: “That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory,” he writes in immediate response to one of the poem’s lyrical movements; and then, later, more summarily,
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
This makes “each venture . . . a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating” and “under conditions / That seem unpropitious.” And yet he continues to work: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
The ethic undergirding this beautiful and elegant poem is something rather homely: the English self-conception at the time of Dunkirk, the mustn’t-grumble stoicism that allows the people of a besieged nation to to their duty in “conditions / That seem unpropitious”—a suitably English litotes for being subjected to ceaseless aerial bombardment.
That stoicism is generally thought to have had its best expression in the rhetoric of the new Prime Minister. In his most famous speech—just before he expresses his hope that future generations will say of that moment in British history that “[t]his was their finest hour”—he presents the moment not as an opportunity for triumph but rather of effective resistance:
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.25
The language of “perverted science” indicates the general belief that the Nazis were masters of new and unprecedentedly dangerous technologies; this belief is accompanied, as it usually was, by the conviction that the only forces capable of offering meaningful resistance to such technologies were moral, were forces of character.
“East Coker” is, more than anything else, a reinterpretation of the events of the war as spiritual trial and discipline. Section 4 in particular counsels acceptance of suffering as necessary to restoration: if the poem’s speaker is “to be warmed,” then he must first “freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.” Such harsh measures are “the sharp compassion of the healer’s art.”26 It is possible to read the poem without regarding the “unpropitious” moment of its composition—indeed, most of its readers surely have—and Eliot would surely have agreed with Lewis, in his sermon on “Learning in War-Time,” that “the war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”27 But at the time of its first publication, so general a reading would have been effectively impossible. “East Coker” was an expression in specifically Christian terms of a stoic fortitude that almost everyone in Britain aspired to achieve, and it was an attempt to be simultaneously universal and topical. The last line of part 4 concludes, “in spite of that, we call this Friday good”—and the poem was published on Maundy Thursday 1940: the day before that year’s Good Friday.
A similar doubleness of vision characterizes the next poem in the sequence, “The Dry Salvages,” which appeared eleven months later. It would not be wrong to say that the metaphorical environment of the poem is determined by its being the Quartet of Water (“Burnt Norton” being of Air, “East Coker” of Earth, “Little Gidding” of Fire); but it is also a poem written in an island nation, surrounded by the sea, traditionally dependent on its Navy rather than its Army—simultaneously protected and endangered by its maritime character (thus the earlier “Defence of the Islands”). So when Eliot addresses
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who come to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgment of the sea
—or pleads, “Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory, / Pray for all those who are in ships”28—we should remember the wartime efforts of the British Navy; we should remember Dunkirk; we should remember that an entire section of the Book of Common Prayer is devoted to “Forms of Prayer to Be Used at Sea.” The poem is simultaneously elemental, Christian, British, and highly topical.
* * *
Just after Eliot had published “East Coker,” and only a few days before delivering the celebrated “Their Finest Hour” speech of June 18, 1940, Churchill had uttered what would prove to be his most lastingly famous words: he said that he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The following March, when “The Dry Salvages” was newly in print and he was preparing a speech for the BBC to be called “Towards a Christian Britain,” Eliot remembered Churchill’s phrase. Writing to Philip Mairet, he commented, “I was, and am, wanting to give them blood and sweat, and not promise them a Christian happy land as the reward for the Churchill blood and sweat.”29
“Towards a Christian Britain” might be seen as the first of several prose sequels to his 1939 book The Idea of a Christian Society, which had been, even for Eliot, a masterpiece of vagueness and evasion. One of the book’s most persistent and curious tics involves its disavowals: “this book does not make any plea for a ‘religious revival’ in a sense with which we are already familiar”; “what I am concerned with here is not spiritual institutions in their separated aspect”; “I am not at this moment concerned with the means for bringing a Christian Society into existence; I am not even primarily concerned with making it appear desirable”; “[w]ith religious Liberalism, however, I am no more specifically concerned than with political Liberalism . . . . Nor am I concerned with the politics of a revolutionary party”; “I am not concerned with the problem of Christians as a persecuted minority”; “I am not here concerned with the problem of how radically [the parish system of the Church of England] must be modified to suit a future state of things”; “I am not here concerned with the means by which a Christian society could be brought about”; “[w]ith the reform of the Establishment I am not here concerned”; “I am not here concerned with what must occupy the mind of anyone approaching the subject of Education directly, that is the question of what should be done now.”30
Even when Eliot confesses a “concern,” he may then immediately disavow it:
I am not concerned with rationalistic pacifism, or with humanitarian pacifism, but with Christian pacifism—that which asserts that all warfare is categorically forbidden to followers of Our Lord. This absolute Christian pacifism should be distinguished again from another: that which would assert that only a Christian society is worth fighting for, and that a particular society may fall so far short, or may be so positively anti-Christian, that no Christian will be justified or excused for fighting for it. With this relative Christian pacifism I cannot be concerned, because my hypothesis is that of a Christian Society.31
To this point in his career, Eliot had been a poet and literary critic, with only occasional forays into larger matters of public concern; and he cannot have failed to be aware of the ambiguities of his status as, though a subject of the King, a metoikos, a resident alien—“the American gentleman” (see note 23 in this chapter). And yet he has allied himself with those who “take up our positions, in obedience to instructions.” So he oscillates between speech and the withdrawal of speech; this is understandable enough, but a rather maddening dance for the reader to attempt to track.
With considerable relief, then, this reader turns from these oscillations and evasions to “Towards a Christian Britain.” It is a short talk, but serves as an effective bridge between the obliquities of The Idea of a Christian Society and the more highly developed critique Eliot would articulate in 1942 and 1943, in a series of essays that eventually lead to Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). The British people had been schooled, since 1939, in the need for sacrifice, and indeed “a Christian Britain demands sacrifice from all,” he writes, but this sacrifice is “beyond our power as human beings.” However, “this knowledge should bring not discouragement but a greater hope,” at least for Christians who understand that human influence is not the only influence at work in the world. But we need “prophets” to help us grasp this hope, prophets “who have lived through the mind of this dark age, and got beyond it.”32
Eliot cites as an example of such a prophet Charles de Foucauld, a French priest who lived for years with the Tuareg in southern Algeria and was killed by bandits in 1916. “I think that is it through such men as Foucauld that the reborn Christian consciousness comes; and I think that from the point of view which we should take, there is no higher glory of a Christian empire than that which was here brought into being by a death in the desert”—a direct reference to Robert Browning’s poem of that name, and perhaps particularly to these words: “For I say, this is death and the sole death, / When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain.”
It is rather curious, to say the least, that in a talk on “Christian Britain” Eliot would hold up as an exemplary figure a French Catholic priest who died in a foreign land. Yet Charles Foucauld, like Eliot’s listeners, was no soldier but rather an ordinary citizen, endangered in time of war through no choice of his own, shot dead as he was merely pursuing his calling—something that could happen to any of those listeners, as it happened to Wormwood’s “patient” in The Screwtape Letters, struck down in his youth and health by a German bomb in the streets of London. Eliot seems to be suggesting that “Christian Britain” will only become possible if his listeners become seriously and primarily Christian—if their national identity, even in time of war, plays a secondary role. To orient oneself to the Christian life is to realize that “the reward for the Churchill blood and sweat” may not be “a Christian happy land” but rather a martyr’s death. To refuse such martyrdom is, as Browning puts it, “death and the sole death.”
In “The Dry Salvages,” published, again, just a few weeks before Eliot gave this address, he wrote,
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.33
Surely Charles Foucauld is one of the saints he thought of as he wrote those lines. The ordinary person will not experience the full grace within which the saint lives, however painfully, but will have “only hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses”; anything more will come only through “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” Eliot often said that the three Quartets that he wrote during the war—“East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”—“are primarily patriotic poems,” and this is, as we have seen, true; but it leaves unspoken the degree to which they revise and decenter the typical impulses of patriotism.34
* * *
Throughout the war, Eliot led an unsettled life. He had no home: he left the flat in Kensington he had lived in for several years and lived chiefly as a paid lodger in the village of Shamley Green, in Surrey near Guildford, with the writer Hope Mirrlees and her extended family, commuting by train to his job at Faber in London. When commuting was impractical, he stayed with Geoffrey Faber and family in Hampstead, or, later in the war, in a tiny flat at the office. Meanwhile he kept up an extraordinary range of social and intellectual commitments: he continued to participate in the Moot as well as a similar gathering, focusing more on economic and sociological issues, called the Chandos Group; he wrote for the Oldham-associated periodical called the Christian News Letter; he gave lectures to all sorts of groups throughout England, made a lecture tour to Sweden in 1942, served on Church of England committees—an astonishing whirl of activity for someone who often, in his letters, complains about illness and exhaustion. Ezra Pound even wanted him to collaborate with George Santayana on a project envisioning “the ideal University,” though nothing came of that.35 But when he began to work seriously on the poems that became the Four Quartets, he stayed away from London as much as possible. While he had in some odd sense enjoyed serving as an air raid warden in Kensington—an experience that, as we shall see, made its way into “Little Gidding”—the chaos and the crush of daily London life had been at best enormously challenging for him. Once he wrote to the Greek poet George Seferis that he hated having to take shelter in an underground station during an air raid: “I would feel the need to get out as quickly as possible, to escape all those faces gathered there, to escape all that humanity.”36
Retreating to Shamley Green, he could focus on those things that were, rather than fleeting and unpredictable, permanent or repetitive. As Lyndall Gordon has rightly noted, “Repetition is the very message of Four Quartets: to try again and yet again for the perfect life, and not to look for the fruits of action, an end to the pilgrimage.”37 It was necessary for him to connect himself to the long past—to the Somerset village of East Coker where his ancestors had lived for centuries, to the New England coast where they had come in the seventeenth century—and deep in that past find a wellspring of meaningful action, or stability, in the present moment.
All this begins with waiting.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.38
In the long slow martyrdom of waiting and listening, one stands a chance of hearing the word of consolation, or the word of authority. “We took up our positions, in obedience to instructions.” It is in this frame of mind that one may possibly perceive a spiritual world that transcends the rule of force that governs everyday wartime life.
* * *
From the spring of 1942 until her death in August 1943, Simone Weil’s travels took her on a great arc from Marseilles to Casablanca to New York to London. Once she saw to it that her parents were safe in New York, she would have returned, had she had her way, to France; but this proved impossible, and her circuit remained incomplete. In her mental life, this period traced not a parabola but an expanding circle, as her attempt to understand her own spiritual autobiography led her outward toward questions of the largest social and political consequence. It may seem strange that an internal debate on whether to undergo baptism would lead to something like a fully articulated political philosophy, but in Weil’s mind this is precisely what happened.
In May 1942, Weil wrote a series of letters to her unofficial confessor, Father Perrin, in which she tried to explain to him, though perhaps more to herself, why she had not asked for the sacrament of Holy Baptism and why she might not in the future. The letters oscillate between a confessional and a lecturing tone, and were it not for Weil’s terrifyingly intense earnestness, there would be something comical about her desire to instruct the priest in a range of theological topics. “I have been wondering lately about the will of God, what it means, and how we can reach the point of conforming ourselves to it completely—I will tell you what I think about this.” “I have also been thinking about the nature of the sacraments, and I will tell you what I think about this subject as well.” It is hard to imagine that she would have asked Father Perrin for his or his Church’s views on these matters; indeed, at the end of her first letter, she seems to warn the priest away from any attempt to correct her: “It may well be that some of the thoughts I have just confided to you are illusory and defective. In a sense this matters little to me; I do not want to go on examining any more.”39
Sacraments are traditionally understood to be “means of grace,” and while Weil acknowledges that she is in need of God’s grace and is willing to ask for it, she effectively dissociates that need from her thoughts about whether to be baptized. “I think that only those who are above a certain level of spirituality can participate in the sacraments as such.” She understands herself not to have reached the requisite level and on those grounds declines baptism. And she further believes that this shortcoming is her fault and must be amended by the full exercise of her own powers: “God rewards the soul that thinks of him with attention and love, and he rewards it by exercising a compulsion upon it strict and mathematically proportionate to this attention and this love.”40 The idea that God might freely and graciously reveal himself to someone who has not fully earned that revelation is simply alien to Weil’s strenuous theology.
This articulation of a spiritual algebra comprised of cold and inflexible equations may call to mind Weil’s complex (though always affectionate) relationship with her mathematician brother, André. “The exceptional gifts of my brother,” she writes in a later letter, “who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.”41 The particular pain she felt at her inferiority “was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides.” She says, and I think without exaggeration, that she would prefer to die than to live so excluded from those truths accessible only to the great. But she did not die; and her strategy for living seems to have involved as a central component the redescription of her “exclusion” as an opportunity and even a vocation:
I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment. He thus becomes a genius too, even though for lack of talent his genius cannot be visible from the outside.42
She acquired this “everlasting conviction” when she was fifteen, and it clearly stayed with her: it provides the foundation for the talk she gave, at about the same time as her letters to Father Perrin, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” where she speaks of the ways that even academic failures, if the student is fully attentive and works diligently, can bear fruit in other dimensions of life, such as prayer.43 But she clearly believed this idea to be of special importance for her, an insight into her distinctive religious vocation. Just as she was called to be one who without genius longed to enter the kingdom of truth, so too, and in much the same way, was she called to remain always outside the household of the Church while nevertheless seeking with all her heart and soul what is to be found only there. “I cannot help still wondering whether . . . God does not want there to be some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ and who yet remain outside the church.” And then, in the next letter, she writes no longer speculatively but conclusively: “I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception.”44
She is at pains to insist, to Father Perrin, that she does not stay outside because she is “of a very individualistic temperament”—on the contrary: “I am aware of very strong gregarious tendencies in myself. My natural disposition is to be very easily influenced, too much influenced, and above all by anything collective. I know that if at this moment I had before me a group of twenty young Germans singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of my soul would instantly become Nazi.” And this confession leads her to another dimension of her resistance to the Church: “I am afraid of the Church patriotism existing in Catholic circles . . . . I am afraid of it because I fear to catch it.”45 The danger of this infection, she believes, may be seen in the tendency of even great saints to approve of such manifest injustices as the Crusades or the Inquisition—acts of, to recall her phrase about the edifice of Christendom in the high Gothic era, “spiritual totalitarianism.” It is partly, perhaps chiefly, in order to bear witness against such patriotic perversity—and such a rule of force in the one place from which force should be exiled—that she is called to a love of the Church expressed only outside it.
Here we might recall her treatment of the Cathars in “The Romanesque Renaissance,” where she suggests that in suppressing them Christendom suppressed some uncomfortable truths: the Cathars’ “horror of force was carried to the point of practicing non-violence and to the doctrine which sees everything associated with the domain of force as originating in evil: namely, everything carnal and everything social. That was going far,” she concedes, “but not further than the gospel.”46 Weil makes it clear, in the “Spiritual Autobiography” that she wrote for Father Perrin, that in her own outsider status she identifies with the Cathars, in both the truths that they perceived and the heresies for which they were condemned: “In my eyes Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves . . . all the traditions banned as heretical, those of the Manicheans and Alibgenses [another name for the Cathars] for instance; all those things resulting from the Renaissance”—that despised “humanist” Renaissance—“too often degraded but not quite without value.”47
For Weil, the Church’s “right” to determine within and without—the power it claims from Christ’s promise to his apostles, “what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven”—generates a logic of exclusion that Weil, in her relentless identification with the excluded, cannot endorse except as one of those the church excludes. In New York, a few months after composing her spiritual autobiography, she wrote a letter to a priest in which she listed her own heresies: the total came to thirty-five. One suspects that she would have made it a thousand if she could have.48
Weil’s reasoning on these matters leads her to extreme conclusions, but as usual she embraces the extremity. She grounds her position in a reading of Jesus’s temptation by Satan in the wilderness (Luke 4). For her, the fact that Satan offers Jesus dominion over “all the kingdoms of the world”—that he has the power to make such an offer—demonstrates that “the social is irremediably the domain of the devil.”49 Thus her most common designation throughout her work of the social order: the Social Beast, the Beast. Not just her view of the Church but also the entire political philosophy she elaborates in the final year of her life emerges from this single decisive point. She acknowledges that “the Church must inevitably be a social structure”; nevertheless, “in so far as it is a social structure, it belongs to the Prince of this World.” It is just because she discerns this truth that it is “necessary and ordained” that she should be “a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception.” From the outside of the Church, she can remind the Church of what it must (but dare not) know about itself. And she does this for love of the Church; indeed, she is so constituted that it is only in such critique that she can manifest that love.
And yet despite this fear and loathing of the social Beast, this suspicion of all the kingdoms, ecclesial and political, that belong to the Prince of this World who is also therefore the Prince of force, Weil loved France and, when driven away from it, longed to return. In the few months that she lived in New York—her brother André had arranged for their parents to be resettled there for the duration of the war, and Simone had accompanied them—she sought desperately to get back to France by any means possible. But her ideal, her great goal, was to establish what seemed to others a bizarre institution, a kind of sacred company of front-line nurses: women who would treat wounded soldiers on the battlefield, not in a hospital safely behind the lines. Almost as soon as she arrived in New York she wrote to Jacques Maritain, seeking his help: she seems to have wanted him to arrange for her to meet with President Roosevelt. (She also told him a bit about her own peculiar spiritual situation, and he put her in touch with the priest to whom she made her list of heresies.)
Needless to say, Weil did not meet with the president. (Eventually her plan for a front-line nursing corps was put before General de Gaulle, who simply declared her insane.) She spent all her time in New York seeking for ways to get back to France, consoling herself only with weekly attendance at a Baptist church in Harlem—and once, a visit to a synagogue of Ethiopian Jews: the only time in her life she ever entered a synagogue. To an English soldier she had heard on the radio, she wrote a typically passionate letter: “Now I find myself among comfort and security, far from the danger and the hunger, and I feel a deserter. I cannot bear that . . . . I would welcome any degree of danger if only I could do something really useful. My life is of no value to me so long as Paris, my native city, is subject to German domination. Nor do I wish the town to be freed only with the blood of others.”50
* * *
Weil’s self-accusing confession of her susceptibility to “anything collective”—“I know that if at this moment I had before me a group of twenty young Germans singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of my soul would instantly become Nazi”—is a reminder both of the enormous power of collectivist ideologies and of a general sense, among the intelligentsia of the Western democracies, that such power had to be resisted. And yet the war could not be fought if some analogue to the power of collectivism were not found. Auden experienced some of the complexities of this situation in early 1939, soon after his arrival in the United States. He gave a speech at a dinner in New York convened to raise money for refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and, as he later reported to an English friend, “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring. So exciting but so absolutely degrading. I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.”51 From then on, he gave no political speeches, a decision that left him open to charges of indifference to the great cause of the war—charges intensified when he declined to return to England after war broke out. In 1940, a Member of Parliament proposed that Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood be forcibly returned to England and conscripted into the military, or, if that proved impossible, be deprived of their citizenship. Auden simply ignored these and other provocations. He wrote to his brother John, “All that we can do, we who are spared the horrors, is to be happy and not pretend out of a sense of guilt that we are not, to study as hard as we can, and keep our feeble little lamps burning in the big wind.”52 And this he surely believed. But he also knew the temptations his quiet study was protecting him from.
A comical version of Weil’s anxiety about her vulnerability to the pressures of the collective may be found in a letter C. S. Lewis wrote to his brother Warnie in July 1940. He reports that their friend Humphrey Havard paid him a visit and “we listened to Hitler’s speech together. I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people: but it’s a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly.”53 In this case, and crucially, what was being articulated so unflinchingly was a vision of a chaotic world brought to order by a shared obedience to a single Leader. And while Lewis was just as convinced as Weil that opponents of totalitarianism had to be attentive to the danger of replacing Hitler’s authoritarian collectivism with one of their own—we may recall his discomfort at the war’s outset with prayers in church that God prosper “our righteous cause”—his response to that danger was quite dramatically different than hers. He remained within—within the familiar English social order, within the walls of an ancient college in an ancient university, within the Established Church of his adopted homeland—a homeland for which he had fought in the previous war, though as a native of Ireland he had not been required or even expected to. And from within he served as faithfully as he knew how. But such a road was not for Weil.
In a wonderful book on reading and interpretation, The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode writes eloquently about one of the most peculiar and troubling cruxes in the text of the Gospels. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus, after explaining one of his parables to his disciples, refers to the great crowds that gather to listen to him: “The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand’ ” (13:13; the quotation there is from the prophet Isaiah). But in Mark’s Gospel, he says that “to those outside, everything comes in parables, in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven’ ” (4:12; emphasis added). In the first text, people exclude themselves by their indifference; in the second, they are forcibly excluded from the beginning. The dedication of Kermode’s book reads, simply and without explanation: To Those Outside. To “those outside,” Simone Weil dedicated not a book but her whole life.