“Waiting for God” by Simone Weil (translated by Emma Craufurd)

This book contains some of Weil’s thoughts on the nature of God, on the established Church, and on the City of God versus the City of Man. Often, she writes about the proper synthesis and separation between the material and spiritual realms. The book is organized as a collection of letters, followed by a few of her essays, which, in total, detail her conceptualization of the idea of God and how she relates her earthly being to this transcendent spirit. Her writing is deeply moving, personal, and profound.

The first part of this book is a collection of letters that Weil wrote to a Catholic priest and friend, Father Perrin, as she prepared to flee Nazi-occupied France. In them, she explains her conception of her love of God, as well as explaining the reasons she decided not to get baptized into the Church. She writes, “The mere thought that, supposing I were baptized with any sentiments other than those that are fitting, I should ever come to have even a single instant or a single inward movement of regret, such a thought fills me with horror. Even if I were certain that baptism was the absolute condition of salvation, I would not run this risk, even to save my soul.” You can feel her sense of struggle, but also her certainty. Furthermore, her relationship with Christianity is certainly not orthodox. “If it cannot be given me to deserve one day to share the Cross of Christ, at least may I share that of the good thief. Of all beings other than Christ of whom the Gospel tells us, the good thief is by far the one I most envy. To have been at the side of Christ and in the same state during the crucifixion seems to me a far enviable privilege than to be at the right hand of glory.”

Weil also explains her conception of truth to her friend, Father Perrin. “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.” Weil describes her struggle with the established Church, because of her love and commitments to the variety of earthly things. “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…. Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be. But it is not merely legitimate. So long as God does not give me the certainty that he is ordering me to do anything else, I think it is my duty.”

Weil also feels the presence of God here on earth. For her, there is no reason to hope for an afterlife. “Even if there were nothing more for us than life on earth, even if the instant of death were to bring us nothing new, the infinite super-abundance of the divine mercy is already secretly present here below in its entirety.” She compares the love of Christianity with that of Stoicism. “At any rate if I really have the right to be called a Christian, I know from experience that the virtue of the Stoics and that of the Christians are one and the same virtue. I mean true Stoical virtue of course, which is before anything else love…. When a soul has attained a love filling the whole universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within but from without.” In one of her essays she continues, “Christianity will not be incarnated so long as there is not joined to it the Stoic’s idea of filial piety for the city of the world, for the country of here below which is the universe…. The only true beauty, the only beauty that is the real presence of God, is the beauty of the universe. Nothing less than the universe is beautiful…. The universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of the wisdom of the Stoics. We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”

In another essay, Weil describes her idea of worldly justice. There is love contained in just punishment, as there can be justice in forgiveness. Both have their proper place and utility. “Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being and not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in him the faculty of free consent.” Sometimes we need punishment and sometimes we need mercy. She continues, “Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may sink as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away.”

Weil also describes the subjective experience of human reality as self-centered, but imaginary. “We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence…. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world…. Such consent is love.” Later, when discussing the Lord’s Prayer, she concludes, “We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made of desire; but the desire that nails us down to what is imaginary, temporal, selfish, can, if we make it pass wholly into the petition, become a lever to tear us from the imaginary into the real and from time into eternity, to lift us right out of the prison of self.”

“If Not Critical” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of ten of Griffiths’ lectures on literature, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Griffiths’ lectures were famous for their erudition and wit. Before a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak, Cambridge students, most of whom were not even enrolled his class, would flock to his lectures for the pure entertainment of hearing him speak. Griffiths spoke often about the power of analogies and he, himself, used them freely. In one lecture, he spoke of Shakespeare’s penchant for coining new words, dressed in the style of ancient language, “Shakespeare engaged in this fabrication of the antique, this production of ‘distressed pine’ or ‘stone-washed jeans’…. So in A Lover’s Complaint and Troilus and Cressida we find new words produced by affixation, particularly with prefixes such as ‘en-’ or ‘em-’…. These affixes all have in common a strongly latinate, and especially frenchified, timbre, and they produce when they appear en masse an air of faded courtliness, a sense of outdated refinement; they have an ‘indexicality’ rather like that which attaches to certain linguistic usages in old families, or families which like to pretend to antiquity, in the Southern United States.” Griffiths manages to poke fun at the seriousness of Shakespeare and get in a dig in at the pomposity of American southern gentility, all while expounding on Shakespeare’s lexical innovations. In another lecture dealing with the reign of Louis XIV, Griffiths offers the caution, “with analogies as with kings, it is important to know how far it is safe to go.” Perhaps he does not always take his own advice (or rather he considers himself at safe temporal distance), “The king and the official imagery which surrounded him are better understood as the seventeenth-century French equivalent of Eric Cartman’s repeated cry ‘RESPECT MY AUTHORITY’, which is not something that someone who unshakeably has authority needs to cry.”

Another of Griffiths’ lectures dissects Shakespeare’s Hamlet in great detail. Griffiths speaks of the distinction between history and poetry- “the boundary between the realm of history, contingent on facts, and that of poetry, of general rules. History tells us what in fact happened, poetry lays out the pattern according to which we could have seen the event coming…. This distinction between history which ‘merely’ records what happened in all its particularity and poetry, which gives, as it were, a template for how in general things happen, the pattern or rule of events, has counted in various ways for a lot in literary history.” Griffiths takes to task much of the modern literary criticism of Shakespeare. “A principal weakness of much comment on Shakespeare’s plays is that the commentators pay little attention to what a figure in the play is doing by uttering these words at this point; commentators are often preoccupied rather with such things as imagery, or with what they take to be the philosophical suggestiveness of what is said, as if it were a secondary consideration who says what when and where to whom, whereas it is not secondary, not at all, but rather the drama itself. Some commentators are so concerned with putting across how deep the plays are that they have no energy to spare to describe how they are deep, but they are deep because of, through, their surfaces.” For Griffiths, the whole mode of much modern criticism entirely misses the point. And the point is that Shakespeare wrote plays for the stage to be spoken by actors out loud. “It is as if the words had been said by nobody to nobody in an atmosphere which exercises no pressure on what is said, or as if they had been whispered by Shakespeare himself directly into our collective ear…. So many essays about Shakespeare’s plays make him sound as if he had been occupied in writing essays rather than plays. My claim is that Shakespeare’s material as an artist is interaction, interaction of two kinds—between the figures on the stage, and between the figures on stage and the audience. These interactions are what he composes, and to neglect them is to neglect an essential of his art.”

Griffiths often speaks of appreciating the technique involved in writing exquisite literature, while impressing on his audience, in a light tone, what the purpose of literature is actually for. In a lecture on Kafka he says, “Our fictions concern individuals…. Most of our fictions concern spatiotemporally unique beings who have proper names…. [However,] in our fictions, as Proust writes, ‘the individual is bathed in something more general than himself’. That is, our fictional personages, events, objects, are not sheerly irreducible particulars, but intimations of what Marx called species-being, sketches of an as yet unrealized humanity, representatives.” Griffiths makes the case that the study of literature is every bit as much a study of humanity as the social sciences. “Realistic fiction, such as Flaubert’s or Kafka’s, is a form of human natural history, and human natural history in the Wittgensteinian sense is something distinct from social or psychological science. The realism of such writing consists in attention to overlooked general facts of human nature—to such things as our experience of time, our capacity to draw rules from instances as also to know when instances do not suggest rules, our abilities to aspire and to concede, our thwartedness…. To observe the connective tissues of realistic story, its ‘he said’s and ‘then’s, ‘at just the moment when’s, is to pay attention to elemental constituents of the fictional worlds and the world outside fiction…. These speech-markers are structural conventions of storytelling, but just because they are conventions it does not follow that they are ‘mere conventions’. On the contrary, again. To the real artist no convention is ‘mere’; convention is rather just where artistry is likely to be most challenged, most at work.”

The final lecture of Griffiths for this collection is on the theme of “Godforsakenness”. He speaks of the Passion of Christ, his last words on the Cross, and of the duality of Christ, as both man and God. Griffiths’ lecture meanders into wondering upon possible ends for this world and on the omnipotence of God. He then ties this all back to the theme of tragedy as a literary form. “In the long run, either God becomes all in all or all becomes nothing, dust and ashes as this earth falls into the sun. Tragedy is quite indifferent to either of these conclusions, not being an art of the ‘long run’ but rather of the ‘from time to time’ realities of human experience and what we believe we can find through or within that experience…. God is essential to tragedy because He is its supreme audience, and it is a fundamental process of tragic art to enable its human audience for a time and from time to time to guess what it might be like to be such a God.”

Griffiths, in speaking of the joys of experiencing literature, supposes, “this is one source of the pleasure we take in works of art, whether comic or tragic: they offer us worlds we cannot change, before which we are without recourse, as we are at times helpless in our own world, but now our incapacities have become a spectacle for us rather than a dilemma or a source of the despair.” Sometimes it is best if we can laugh or cry at our impotence, whether real or imagined.