albert camus, simone weil and the absurd

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Irish Theological Quarterly

DOI: 10.1177/0021140005070004032005; 70; 343Irish Theological Quarterly

Rik Van NieuwenhoveAlbert Camus, Simone Weil and the Absurd

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Albert Camus, Simone Weil andtheAbsurd1

Rik Van Nieuwenhove

According to Camus it is only in the face of the absurd - and through our unremittingrevolt against it - that meaning can be generated. Espousing the Christian faith abnegatesthe absurd, and with it the only possible source of meaning for modem man. This critiquecan be addressed by engaging with Simone Weil. She develops an original dialectic ofdivine absence (in the laws of indifferent necessity and affliction) and presence, whichreflects the intra-Trinitarian unity and distance of the divine Persons, and which finds

ultimate expression on the Cross of Christ. For her this dialectic does not induce revoltbut a sophisticated kind of reconciliation that involves a selfless openness to, and engage-ment with, this world.

AlbertCamus was deeply fascinated by Christianity and by the work

of Simone Weil in particular. In this paper I will re-examine thework of the early Camus and contrast it with that of Simone Weil. More

specifically I will focus on the notion of the absurd and the implicationsit has for questions of meaning, the way we relate to God and the world.

According to Camus it is only in the face of the absurd - and through ourunremitting revolt against it - that meaning can be generated. In hisview, espousing the Christian faith - the infamous leap of faith- does

away with the absurd, and with it the only possible source of meaning formodern man. This critique, although powerful, can be addressed byengaging with Simone Weils thought.Although there are historical linksbetween Camus and the work ofSimoneWell as Director of Gallimards

Espoir Series, he guided some of her work towards publication after herdeath - I do not claim that there has been a direct influence of Weil on

Camus perception and presentation of Christianity. I merely hope toshow that in the writings of Weil we find a viable and profound alterria-tive to the critique raised by Camus. Indeed, Simone Weil develops anoriginal dialectic of divine absence and presence, which reflects the intra-Trinitarian unity and distance of the divine Persons, and which finds ulti-mate expression on the Cross of Christ. For her this dialectic does notinduce revolt but a sophisticated kind of reconciliation that involves aselfless openness to, and engagement with, this world.

1. Part of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Irish TheoLogicalAssociationin Drumcondra, 2005. I am grateful to those present for criticism raised, and to theResearch Office at Mary Immaculate College for their generous financial assistance inpreparing this paper.

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I. Camus and the absurd as the only possible source of meaning

(a) The Plague: suffering, and reconciliation or revolt.Camus preoccupation with Christianity found a literary expression

his novel The Plague, published in 1947. The book describes the eventsthat took place in theAlgerian town of Oran. It is struck by the plague.Dr Bernard Rieux, the main protagonist, who is sick and tired of theworld he lived in - although he had much liking for his fellowman hasonly one certitude: his daily round and his futile attempts to fight the

rampant plague. The plague represents evil and senseless suffering (theabsurd) - evil that is larger than life and out of place in a modem world

in which people are in control of things - or so they would like tobelieve.2 Each citizen has to learn to live only for the present, aloneunder the vast indifference of the sky.3At the heart of the book we findthe religious question and the problem of theodicy. The issue is crystal-lized in two sermons by Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest who will be deeplytransformed by his encounter with the plague. In a sermon he preachesthat this calamity has been inflicted by God as a chastisement from Godwho, nevertheless, continues to stretch out his hand towards the sinners,calling them to change their ways: now the hour has struck to bend yourthoughts to first and last things.4

This sermon then leads to one of the central dialogues in the book,between Dr Rieux and Tarrou, one of the locals who volunteers to start

up sanitary squads to do the heavy work (i.e., remove corpses and assistin the quarantining of people who contracted the plague). When askedabout his views on God, Rieux answers that he has seen too much suffer-

ing to relish any idea of collective punishment. He believes we mustrelieve human suffering before pointing out its excellence and makes the

point that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curingthe sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a Godof that sort; no not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in sucha God.And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himselfon Providence completely.&dquo; Rieux argues that we should prefer to

2.As the narrator puts it in a revealing comment: our townsfolk were like everybody else,wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists; they disbelieved in pesti-lences.A pestilence isnt a thing made to mans measure; therefore we tell ourselves thatpestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesnt passalways away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the human-ists first of all because they havent taken their precautions. Our townsfolk were not moreto blame than others, they forgot to be modest - that was all - and thought that everythingstill was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. Trans. byS. Gilbert fromAlbert Camus. The Plague (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960) 34.3. Ibid. 63.

4. Ibid. 80-84.5. Ibid. 106-107. This remark by Rieux probably represents one of the most persistent mis-understandings of the Christian notion of Providence by Camus himself - as if human anddivine causality and operation are somehow in competition with one another.



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struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyestowards heaven where he sits in silence.6

Father Paneloux then joins one of the sanitary squads, which shows

that he is better than his sermon, as Rieux remarks.&dquo; In this role hewatches a child (who had been given an experimental serum) die after aprotracted and painful agony. This brings the issue of absurd suffering andthe God-question to a climax: That child, Rieux exclaims, was innocent- and you know it as well as I do.8 To this Paneloux replies: That sort of

thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhapswe should love what we cannot understand.Against this Rieux asserts:until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which chil-dren are put to torture.9

Paneloux then gives a second sermon. He now talks in an inclusivesense. He states that while what he had said in the first sermon still held,it had lacked somewhat in charity. The suffering of an innocent child

puts our backs to the wall. In the shadow of this wall we must face a deci-sion : We must believe everything or deny everything.And who, I ask,amongst you would dare to deny everything?&dquo;All we can say is: Since itwas Gods will, we, too, must will it.l~ We must go straight to the heartof that which is unacceptable, precisely because it is thus that we are con-strained to make our choice. The sufferings of children were our bread of

affliction, but without this bread our souls would die of spiritual hunger.&dquo;Only total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality can reconcileus to the suffering and the deaths of children.3

In the second sermon by Paneloux, Camus has captured an authenticexpression of one kind of Christian sainthood. 14 This is, of course, not to

say that Camus had much sympathy for this kind of spirituality: for himit represents a leap into irrational fideism that leads to dangerous resig-nation. In order to understand Camus reservations I would now like to

examine his earlier treatise TheMyth of Sisyphus.

This willbring

us to the

heart of the present contribution: does Christianity necessarily imply

6. The Plague, 108.7. Ibid. 126.8. Ibid. 177.9. Ibid. 178.10. Ibid. 183.11.Again this seems to be a view that we find echoed in Simone Weils work.

Commenting on the speech of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, she writes: No reasonwhatever which anyone could produce to compensate for a childs tear would make meconsent to that tear.Absolutely

none which the mind can conceive. There is just one,however, but it is intelligible only to supernatural love: "God willed it."And for that rea-son I would consent to a world which was nothing but evil as readily as to a childs tear.(Gravity and Grace [London: Routledge, 1992] 68).12. Ibid. 185.13. Ibid. 186.

14. For Camus, the question then becomes: is it possible to attain sainthood in a worldwithout God? This issue is explicitly raised by Tarrou and is one of the major themes of thebook (see p. 208).



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resignation, denial of the absurd and, with it, foreclosure on the onlypossible source of meaning?

(b) The Myth of SisyphusCamus published his essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. The story of

Sisyphus is well known: the gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselesslyrolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall backof its own weight. Faithful to the earth, in contempt of the gods who pun-ished him with this absurd labour, Sisyphus represents modern man in aworld devoid of illusions: Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity thatnegates the gods and raised rocks. [...] The struggle itself towards the

heightsis

enoughto fill a mans heart.15 The

openingsentence of the

essay sets the tone for what follows: There is but one truly serious philo-sophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is notworth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philoso-phy.16 Camus tries to answer this question by referring to the absurd: Ithappens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the officeor factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday,Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, according to thesame rhythm - this path is easily followed most of the time. But one daythe &dquo;why&dquo; arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged withamazement.1A strangeness creeps in, and we make the disconcertingdiscovery that at the heart of all beauty there lies something inhuman,and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this

very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them,henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. [...] The world evades usbecause it becomes itself again.18 Men too secrete the inhuman, and this

applies to ourselves too: The stranger who at certain seconds comes tomeet us in a

mirror,the familiar and

yet alarmingbrother we encounter

in our own photographs is also the absurd.&dquo;9 The laws and theories of sci-ence too fail to capture the world - they ultimately dissolve into poetry.20The absurd finds its origin in the clash between our irrational and wild

longing for clarity, on the one hand, and the world on the other hand.These two are bound together as only hatred can weld two creaturestogether.21 The absurd is therefore born of a confrontation, a discrepancy

15. A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975) 111.16. Ibid. 11.17. Ibid. 19.18. Ibid. 20.19. Ibid. 21.

20. Ibid. 25: you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitatearound a nucleus. You explain the world to me with an image. I realize then that you havebeen reduced to poetry: I shall never know. [...]So that science that was to teach me every-thing ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty isresolved in a work of art.21. Ibid. 26.



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between our expectations and an unyielding world. This observation,namely that the absurd lives on a discrepancy and unceasing confronta-tion or struggle has important implications. In order to solve the prob-

lem of the absurd,we

must retain this tension: If I attempt to solve aproblem, at least I must not by that very solution conjure away one of theterms of the problem.22 For Camus, the absurd can only be a source ofmeaning if it is not agreed to, if it is not being done away with.23 This, inturn, implies a total absence of hope, a continual rejection and a contin-uous dissatisfaction. This brings us to the heart of his critique of

Christianity: as meaning can only originate when we confront the absurdface to face, Christianity (which is a form of escapism) must be rejected.The problem with Christianity and some of the thinkers Camus consid-ers representative of it (Chestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers) is that it affirmsthe absurd - only to do away with it in a leap of faith: The moment thenotion [of the absurd] transforms itself into eternitys springboard, itceases to be linked to human lucidity. The absurd is no longer that evi-dence that man ascertains without consenting to it. The struggle iseluded. Man integrates the absurd and in that condition causes to disap-pear its essential character which is opposition, laceration, and divorce.This leap is an escape.24 For Camus, the approach that Kierkegaard andother religious thinkers pursue is a kind of philosophical suicide. We

should, rather, be able to remain on that dizzying crest - that is integrityand the rest is subterfuge.&dquo; Living is keeping the absurd alive. Morespecifically we should adopt a position of revolt. Only revolt, whichCamus describes as a constant confrontation between man and his own

obscurity, 116 gives life its value. It is therefore essential to be defiant: theabsurd man is the opposite of the reconciled man. We must live without

hope, without consolations, without illusions. 27Given his critique of Christianity throughout The Myth of Sisyphus and

in otherwritings,

it is somewhatsurprising

to find Camusstating,

when

discussing Dostoievskys hero Kirilov from The Possessed, that what con-tradicts the absurd in that work is not its Christian character but rather

its announcing a future life. It is possible to be Christian and absurd.There are examples of Christians who do not believe in a future life.&dquo;

This is an intriguing remark. It is difficult to think of a Christian authorwho explicitly rejects belief in the afterlife; but it is certainly possible tothink of Christian authors who argue that we should live as if there is noafterlife. One of the authors that comes to mind is, of course, Simone

22. Ibid. 34.23. Ibid. 35.24. Ibid. 38.25. Ibid. 50.

26. Ibid. 53.

27. Ibid. 54-62.28. Ibid. 102.



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Weil, in whose work Camus was to take a profound interest.9At any rate,this casual remark towards the end of The Myth of Sisyphus suggests that

Christianity does not necessarily imply the failure to acknowledge and

retain the absurd. By engaging with the work of Simone Weil I hope toexamine this suggestion in some more detail.

II. Simone Weil, and the absence and presence of God

Before we go any further, lets summarize the main points of Camus

critique:(1) The absurd originates from the clash (or discrepancy) between our

expectations and our desire to find meaning on the one hand, and an

unyielding worldon

the other.(2) The only lucid response to this absurdity is to revolt against it.(3) Christianity, by making an irrational leap of faith, does away with

the absurd: one of the poles on which the absurd lives, is being denied.The first point seems hermeneutically naive: Camus does not seem to be

aware that it is not the case that there is a world out there which is absurd

and which atheists and Christian then subsequently interpret in different

ways. Rather, the very way different people interpret their worlds willdepend on the presuppositions with which they approach their worlds inthe first place. Leaving this critical remark aside, I still think there is sometruth in Camus approach - even the Christian encounters an unyielding,absurd world at times - and I will now argue that in the work of Simone

Weil ( 1909-1943 ) we encounter an author who is very much aware of theabsurd and refractory character of our world, and who is not only willingto acknowledge this but puts it at the heart ofher spirituality. For Weil toosuffering and absurdity can yield meaning (which does not imply that theyare intrinsically meaningful) - although not by revolting against it.

In Weils workwe

find a dialectic (both traditional and profound) ofdivine transcendence (the mysteriousness and otherness of the ChristianGod) on the one hand, and an equally emphatic emphasis upon divineimmanence or even solidarity (through the Incarnation of the Son of God)on the other. She appropriates this traditional dialectic in terms of theabsence ofGod in a world governed by the laws of necessity and gravity,and presence of God. This dialectic evokes a particular response - one ofdetachment. This detachment is not to be understood as indifference but

as a dying to self-centredness and possessiveness, enabling us to engagewith the world in a non-idolatrous, selfless manner, as I hope to show inthe remainder of this article.&dquo;

29. See Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1992) 13: We must leaveon one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immor-

tality. ( ... ) The belief in the providential ordering of events in short the consolationswhich are ordinarily sought in religion.30. I have dealt with the theme of detachment and involvement in The Religious and theAestheticAttitude in Literature and Theology 18/2 (2004) 160-172, especially 167-70, andTechnology and Mystical Theology in M. Breen, E. Conway and B. McMillan eds.,Technology and Transcendence (Dublin: Columba Press, 2003) 186-94, especially 188-92.



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One way of cultivating this detachment is through affliction (malheur)and suffering in a world governed by the indifferent laws of necessity. Thisis a major theme in the writings of Simone Weil: she can certainly not beaccused of

beingblind to what I have called the

refractoryor

unyieldingnature of our world - or what Camus calls the absurd.As she puts it, onewould have to be blind, deaf or without pity to fail to see it.Nevertheless, the Christian is aware that there is divine mercy behindthe curtain of this world:

Those who have the privilege of mystical contemplation, havingexperienced the mercy of God, suppose that, God being mercy, thecreated world is a work of mercy. But as for obtaining evidence of

this mercy directly from nature, it would be necessary to becomeblind, deaf and without pity in order to believe such a thing possible.[...] That is why mysticism is the only source of virtue for humanity.Because when men do not believe that there is infinite mercybehind the curtain of the world, or when they think that this mercyis in front of the curtain, they become cruel. 31

In other words, those who altogether deny Gods mercifulness are mis-taken ; those who claim to find it in a self evident fashion are either blind

or pitiless (i.e., they do not see the suffering, or they do not take it seri-ously). The right way is to acknowledge suffering and yet to affirm beliefin a merciful God. But how can we affirm the mercifulness of God

behind the curtain of this world?

Weil enumerates four evidences of divine mercy: the favours of God

bestowed on beings capable of contemplation; the radiance of these beingsand their compassion (which is really the divine compassion at work inthem); the beauty of the world; and, paradoxically, the complete absenceof mercy here below.32 This, then, begs the question: how can the absenceof the mercy of God in this world be a manifestation of his mercy?

I will attempt to answer this by examining Weils notion of necessityand the dialectic of presence and absence in the light of the Cross ofChrist - itself, in turn, to be understood in the light of the unity and dis-tance within the heart of the Trinity. These two aspects are therefore

intrinsically linked: the indifference of the Father who sends afflictionwithout distinction to the wicked and the good, reveals something of theweakness of God which finds its ultimate expression in the Cross ofChrist.33

For Simone Weil, the Creator is a hidden, transcendent God who sur-

passes all our concepts. In order to create the world, God had to withdraw- perhaps an echo of the Jewish notion of zimzum: God could only create

31. Gravity, 100.32. Ibid. 100-101.33. Ibid. 101.



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by hiding himself. Otherwise there could be nothing but himself.34 Oneaspect of this withdrawal is the space God gives to the indifferent anddeterministic laws of nature (including the blind arbitrariness with which

good and bad fortune are handed out to us). Weil calls this necessity. Thefree play that necessity enjoys in this world is a kind of divine analogy tothe human virtue of obedience.&dquo; Creation is thus a kind of divine renun-

ciation. God renounces being everything: Necessity is the screen setbetween God and us so that we can be.36 If we were exposed to the directradiance of Gods love, without the protection of space, time, and of mat-

ter, we would evaporate like water in the sun: there would not be enough&dquo;I&dquo; in us to make it possible to surrender the &dquo;I&dquo; for loves sake. This is whyGod can only be present in creation under the form of absence.37

However, what Weil calls necessity is, from a different perspective(from the other side of the curtain) obedience.

If, however, we transport our hearts beyond ourselves, beyond the uni-verse, beyond space and time to where our Father dwells, and if fromthere we behold this mechanism, it appears quite different. Whatseemed to be necessity becomes obedience. [...] In the beauty of theworld rude necessity becomes an obj ect of love. What is more beauti-

ful than the action of weighton

the fugitive waves of the sea as theyfall in ever-moving folds, or the almost eternal folds of the mountains?The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that some-

times ships are wrecked. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty.38

As creatures we cannot escape from obedience to God. Our onlychoice is to desire obedience or not to desire it.39 Welts approach mayseem to come close to the Stoic notion of amor fati. However, it is differ-ent - perhaps more different than she herself realized.40 For what she pro-poses is more than a mere acceptance of the refractory necessity that rulesour world; it becomes a personal obedience to the merciful God behindthe curtain of this world. It becomes surrender to a personal God whorevealed and bestowed himself in Christ rather than a mere acceptance of

that which we cannot change. Whereas the Stoic ideal of apatheia hasbeen unmasked by some as a technique of preserving oneself from sor-row, Weil actually proposes a total gift of oneself to a personal God of

34. Ibid. 33.Earlier

(p. 11)in

thesame book

she hadwritten:

Theworld must

be regardedas containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposesevil.

35. Ibid. 94.36. Ibid. 28.

37. Gravity, 99.38. Waiting on God, 70.39. Ibid. 71.40. In a Letter addressed to Father Perrin (from: Waiting on God 45) Simone Weil wrote:"I know from experience that the virtues of the Stoics and that of the Christians are oneand the same virtue." We could raise critical questions about this view.



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love who dwells behind this refractory world.41 Surrendering ourselves inobedience to the mechanism of necessity operative in this world - itself

only a veil of God - allows us to become open to the radiant beauty ofthis world. To see the world in this way

requirestime and effort, like an

apprenticeship. In this kind of apprenticeship our bodiliness, our corpo-reality (and its inevitable openness to suffering), plays a major role: onthe plane of physical sensibility, suffering alone gives us contact with thatnecessity which constitutes the order of the world.42 Weils spirituality is

deeply enfleshed, incarnated.We must thus mirror Gods renunciation by renouncing ourselves, or as

she puts it: we respond to, and participate in, the creation of the world byde-creating ourselves.43 De-creation means making something created

pass into the uncreated. We only possess whatwe

renounce; whatwe

donot renounce escapes from us.44

This de-creation is described in terms of self-effacement and detach-

ment. It makes us perfect instruments of Gods love, free from possessive-ness and self-centredness: Pure love of creatures is not love in God, butlove which has passed through God as through fire. Love which detachesitself completely from creatures to ascend to God and comes down againassociated with the creative love of God.45 Thus we attain a state of inac-

tive action.46 We leam to love creatures in an utterly selfless manner,

allowing the divine love to pass through us: The soul does not love likea creature with created love. The love within it is divine, uncreated; forit is the love of God for God which is passing through it. We can onlyconsent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soulfor this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. 141The self is only a shadow that sin and error cast by stopping the light

of God .4 God can love in us only our consent to withdraw in order tomake way for him, just as he himself withdrew when creating the worldin order that we might come into being.49 One way of effecting this self-effacement or renunciation is by carrying out the ordinary human duty.SoThe renunciation that Weil propounds does not lead to a world-hostilespirituality.41. H.U. von Balthasar makes this point about Meister Eckhart in The Glory of the Lord.Vol. V. The Realm of Metaphysics in the ModemAge (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991)37-38.

42. Waiting on God, 72.43. Gravity, 29.44. Ibid. 29. See also p. 30: He emptied himself of his divinity. We should empty ourselvesof the false divinity with which we were bom. Once we have understood that we are noth-

ing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing. It is for this that we suffer with res-ignation, it is for this that we act, it is for this that we pray. May God grant me to becomenothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me.45. Ibid. 57.46. Ibid. 39.47. Waiting on God, 74.48. Gravity, 35.49. Ibid. 35.50. Ibid. 36.



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The theme of imitating the renunciation of God brings us to a second,closely associated theme: we encounter God in the very absence of God.In Gravity and Grace, she provides us with a memorable analogy to clar-

ify this point: Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with eachother by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separatesthem but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us

and God. Every separation is a &dquo;link ...... This dialectic of presence inabsence operates in a number of fields. First, as suggested earlier, it can bediscemed in the created world where the divine mercy operates behind

the curtain of the world - behind the indifferent laws of necessity that

govem this world. This dialectic explains that the necessity that charac-terizes our world is both impersonal and personal: just like a work of arthas an author (who puts his individual stamp on it) and yet, when it is

perfect, it has something essentially anonymous about it. In the same waythe necessity of the laws of nature manifest a God who is both personaland impersonal at the same times

This dialectic of presence and absence operates also on a more exis-

tential level, and more specifically when we suffer affliction. In a bold and

strikingly innovative move, well ahead of its time, Weil links this dialec-tic with a profound theology of the Trinity. Indeed, in The Love of God

andAffliction -one

of hermost

searching essays in the collectionWaiting on God - Weil describes the indifferent, unyielding necessity ofthis world in terms of the distance between the Father and the Son within

the heart of the Trinity - a distance that manifested itself utmost on theCross: This universe where we are living, and of which we form a tinyparticle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are apoint in this distance. Space, time and the mechanism that govems mat-ter are the distance. Everything that we call evil is only this mechanism.&dquo;

But this separation from God (or his absence in a world of indifferent

laws of nature, and of suffering) can only be understood in the light of amore profound unity that grounds it: it is a separation of unity (in thesame sense that friends, although absent from one another, are neverthe-less united in their friendship, and this qualifies the nature of their sepa-ration).Again, ZXleil develops this from a Trinitarian perspective:

Before all things God loves himself. This love, this friendship ofGod, is the Trinity. Between the terms united by this relation ofdivine love there is more neamess; there is infinite nearness or iden-

tity. But, resulting from the creation, the Incarnation and thePassion, there is also infinite distance. The totality of space and the

totality of time, interposing their immensity, put an infinite distancebetween God and God. 54

51. Ibid. 132.52. Ibid. 136.53. Waiting on God, 69.54. Ibid. 68.



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Just like two friends are united, even when far apart, so too the absenceof God implies a presence - which, in turn, mirrors the infinite nearnessand distance between the divine Persons at the heart of the Trinity.

Our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege of sharing in thedistance placed between the Son and the Father. This distance or separa-tion, although painful, is good, because it is love.55 Developing a deeplytraditional theme of sharing in the Passion of Christ, Weil asserts thatthere can be no greater good for us than to share in the distress of theabandoned Christ: For those who love, separation, although painful, is agood, because it is love. Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is agood. There can never be a greater good for us on earth than to share init. God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our

flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction.This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why theCross is our only hope. 116

In the Cross, the point of intersection of creation and its Creator, theTrinitarian dialectic of absence and presence, distance and nearness,reaches its climax.&dquo; This explains why the abandonment the dying Christsuffers reveals an abyss of love on both sides.s8 It is through the Crossthat we too enter into the presence of God.At the moment when we feel

most abandoned - at that very moment - we are nearest to God. Extreme

affliction is like a nail that pierces the soul, but it is this affliction that can

bring us into the presence of God:

In a dimension which does not belong to space, which is not time,which is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail has pierced ahole through all creation, through the thickness of the screen whichseparates the soul from God. In this marvellous dimension, the soul,without leaving the place and the instant where the body to whichit is united is

situated,can cross the

totalityof

spaceand time and

come into the very presence of God. It is at the intersection of cre-

ation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of inter-

section of the branches of the Cross.9

None of this should be taken as a legitimation of suffering. Nor shouldit be seen as an instance of unhealthy self-indulgent dolorousness. It isnot an explanation of suffering, for to explain suffering is to console it;therefore it must not be explained.6 Moreover, we must eliminate afflic-

tion as much as we can from social life for affliction only serves the

55. Ibid. 69.

56. Ibid. 69.

57. Ibid. 76.

58. Gravity, 79.59. Waiting on God, 76.60. Gravity, 102.



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354

purposes of grace and society is not a society of the elect. There will

always be enough affliction for the elect.&dquo;

III. Concluding observations

Meaningless suffering and the absurdity it entails are as central to Weilas they are to Camus. Unlike Camus, however, Weil does not revolt inthe face of affliction. Rather, she proposes a complex kind of reconcilia-tion, a reconciliation on a higher plane. She calls it the pulsation of sorrow-

joy:62 Suffering is violence, joy is gentleness, but joy is the stronger. Truesaintliness consists of simultaneous existence of incompatible things inthe souls bearing; balance which leans both ways at once.63 I suspectwhat she has in mind is a strange mixture of sorrow and bliss, a smiling

through the tears: Felicity is beyond the realm of consolation and pain.64This disposition then reflects the Christian hope that there is mercybehind the curtain of this world.

Thus, Simone Weil is well aware of the refractory or absurd character ofthis world. For her embracing the Christian faith does not result in abne-gating the absurd or denying its existence. However, it does not lead torevolt either but to obedience and renunciation of self - a renunciation that

should not be mistaken for political apathy or passivity. It is an obediencethat culminates in a

strange joyin the middle of

suffering:reconciliation.

Therefore, a case can be made against Camus and others (followingNietzsche) who claim that Christianity renounces the world for the Beyondin an irrational leap of faith. On the contrary, the fact that God is both rad-

ically transcendent and yet freely identifies himself with this world throughthe Incarnation of his Son allows the Christian to engage with the world

without losing herself in it; it allows her to challenge it without renounc-

ing it. In the writings of Simone Weil, this dialectic at the heart of

Christianity was reformulated in terms of absence ofGod (in a determinis-

tic, mechanistic world) and presence of God - a dialectic that mirrors theTrinitarian unity and distance between the divine Persons, and which findsits ultimate expression on the Cross of Christ. It is in the midst ofour afflic-

tion, when God seems most absent, that we are drawn into his presence. Inthe light of this dialectic the Christian will adopt an attitude or dispositionof obedience and detachment - but this detachment should not be inter-

preted as escapism, denial or world-alienation. Rather, it implies aninvolvement with this world, an attachment to all without possessiveness.61. Ibid. 143. Similarly, she makes it clear that we should search out suffering: We mustnot seek the void, for it would be tempting God ifwe counted on supernatural bread to fillit. We must not run away from it either. Weil is very much aware that there is afflictionthat can destroy us. It is in this context that she speaks of affliction that destroys the Ifrom outside - and there is nothing worse than that. It leads to annihilation according tothe atheistic or materialistic conception (Gravity, 23). We should, rather, attempt todestroy the I from within - that is through detachment.62. Gravity, 9263. Ibid. 92.

64. Ibid. 22.


albert camus, simone weil and the absurd

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