I’ve been posting alot about Simone Weil recently. A selection that deals with “affliction” in her thought ( I found this very powerful) :
"Why she thought differently, though, can be understood if we consider what the discovery of affliction revealed to her. Affliction was not simply a problem with a system, although the factory system of her time (where she first confronted affliction) and many of the systems of the century are particularly effective at producing affliction.
It was a universal possibility for the human soul. The human soul is fragile and can be destroyed. Oppression — the stifling of empowerment –and unfairness can leave us intact and noble; the problem in those cases is, a Weil thought in her earlier work, a matter of reforming the system.
But affliction can seize the soul and undo it. How? As she makes clear in “
The Love of God and Affliction” affliction, while including physical suffering, is chiefly a matter of social humiliation, a ceasing to count in anyone’s eyes, including one’s own. At that point, giving power to the powerless is not possible; there is nobody left inside to wield effective human power in the human world.
Power simply burns itself into the soul, making the soul more and more an object of other people’s actions, no longer the subject of one’s own. **Our self is a self that acts among others and requires that they respect our actions; for the afflicted, they no longer direct their own actions. **There is nothing to them that can focus human power into a coherent project. They do not affect us any longer.
And since affliction has also an essential accidental quality to it (*malheur *is literally “bad fortune”) one who is afflicted can find no reason for this being so. The mind cannot understand and thus cannot find any way to accept this condition. The world then seems chaotic, purposeless and poisonous.
Hope disappears and the afflicted inevitably begin to hate themselves. Thus even well meaning “empowerment” simply makes matters worse. The afflicted become tools of our pity and our own self image, our exercises of our own moral empowerment, and they recognize it.
The possibility of affliction and the impossibility of “empowerment” as a way of saving the soul from destruction thus signaled for Weil not only a practical problem with modern understandings of the person and of justice, they also signaled that the sense of well being and goodness we derive from empowerment is conceptually other than that of perfect goodness. It is an ersatz kingdom.
In her notebooks, she claims that if it were not for affliction, we might believe ourselves in paradise. That she thought was a horrid possibility, for it was the possibility that we would continue to live for a goodness that was no more than the projection of the relief of our anxieties. But where is the alternative? Where is perfect love and justice?
The Afflicted Christ
It is God’s own love in the Cross of Christ. In “The Love of God and Affliction” Weil insists that we see the crucified Christ not as a martyr for truth, or even the king of glory executed out of jealous resentment. For her, Christ is purely and simply afflicted. But Christ does not let his condition change his love for the Father and the world he has created, even though it contains affliction. Even though abandoned, he accepts this as the Father’s will and loves even when there seems nothing to love. He is not filled with resentment. And in that, Weil suggests, is ultimately established a bond of perfect love between the abandoned Christ and the Father in heaven, between emptiness and fullness.
In Christ’s love, God’s love is present in the world. That at least means that affliction is not an ultimate evil.
But Christ is not simply an example of how we might get through suffering. By accepting emptiness he redeems affliction; by accepting the nothingness of our condition he gives life to a world. His self emptying is for life, not his own, but others. When love triumphs over power, and selflessness over autonomy, it is Christ’s love in us that is our soul."
Jesus describes the overcoming of this addiction with the evocative word “blessed,” malcarios in Greek. Luke’s Jesus continues: “Happy are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man” (Luke 6:22). What could be stranger than this seemingly masochistic dictum? Again, some light might be shed if we translate it in terms of our hermeneutic of detachment: “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to the approval of others.” Status, attention, fame are among the most powerful and insinuating of the false gods who lure us …
Fr. Robert Barron has written on the Sermon on the Mount: “Jesus told his disciples: “Woe to you when all speak well of you” (Luke 6:26), and Winston Churchill said, “Never trust a man who has no enemies.” The one whom everyone loves is in spiritual distress, since the good-will of the crowd has undoubtedly become that person’s idol. As so many of the saints — and Jesus himself– witness, the path of spiritual freedom brings one almost inevitably into conflict with those who are still in chains. Those who have placed themselves in the Christ-center rest secure even as the approval of the fickle crowd waxes and wanes.” This is the roots of the “Blessed are the persecuted”
But since reading Weil I have come around to thinking that we are blessed to have understood what affliction means and can use its transformative powers to grow closer to Jesus.
Complete Weil post here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/06/10/reading-selections-from-an-introduction-to-the-life-and-thought-of-simone-weil-by-eric-o-springsted/
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