The Absent God Author(s): Susan Anima Taubes Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan.

, 1955), pp. 6-16 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1201142 Accessed: 14/11/2008 07:37
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

THE ABSENT GOD

SUSAN ANIMA TAUBES*

w rTHFEN Neitzsche announced that

seed for a new kind of atheism which has become a major theme of European thinkers in our century and which found its most uncompromising formulation in the posthumously published notes of the French philosophermystic-saint, Simone Weil. Atheism, which used to be a chargeleveled against skeptics, unbelievers, or simply the indifferent, has come to mean a religious experienceof the death of God. The godlessness of the world in all its strata and categoriesbecomes,paradoxicallyand by a dialectic of negation, the signature of God and yields a mystical atheism, a theology of divine absence and nonbeing,of divine impotence, divine nonintervention, and divine indifference. Religious atheism is distinct from secular atheism from the start, in that it invests the natural world, from which divine presence and providence have been totally excluded, with theological significance.He who, seeking God, does not find him in the world, he who suffers
v V
* Susan Anima Taubes is Josiah Royce Fellow at Radcliffe College, preparing her doctoral dissertation on the theological elements in Heidegger's philosophy. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1951 in philosophy and in that year was awarded the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship, which enabled her to study in Paris and Jerusalem. Her previous publications include "A Critical Discussion of Camus' L'Homme revolte," in Yiun, Philosophical Journal of the Hebrew University (1952); "The Nature of Tragedy," Review of Metaphysics (1953); and "The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger's Nihilism," Journal of Religion (July, 1954).

Xf

God is dead, he planted the

the utter silence and nothingnessof God, still lives in a religious universe: a universe whose essential meaning is God, though that meaning be torn in contradiction and the most agonizing paradoxes. He lives in a universe that is absurd, but whose absurdity is significant, and its significance is God. God, however negatively conceived, explains the world, explains the nothingness of God in the world. The thesis of religious atheism has been most boldly formulated by Simone Weil: the existence of God may be denied without denying God's reality. God's absence is not a temporary ill brought about by the sinfulnessof a generation, as when the prophet Isaiah laments that God has turned away from his people and hid his face fromman, believing that there was a time when God was present and that there will be a time when he will show his face again. Simone Weil has universalizedthe historical experienceof the death of God into a theological principle. The unworldliness of God, his silence, and nothingness are his most essential features. God can be present to us only in the form of his absence. The situation that Nietzsche represented by the image of the death of God grew out of several revolutions in consciousness,each of which voiced its particular challenge to Christianity. These movements range from the critical investigation of sacredChristianhistory to the final shattering of faith in divine providence in the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century. They encompass

THE ABSENT GOD

the scientific technological transformation of a hierarchicallycreated universe into a blind mechanicalprocess; the empirical investigation of the religions of the world leading to the relativizationof Christian dogma and institutions; the progressive undermining of faith, first, by Marxiantheory, that exposedreligion as politicalideology, and then by psychological and psychoanalyticaltheory, that reduced"religiousexperience"to behavioristic and subjective categories. The scientific conception of the universe and the critical inquiry into the nature of man and society have relegatedreligious "symbols" to the level of useful or useless, dangerous or therapeutic, fictions. The march of optimistic humanism was, however, almost from the start acwhich, uncompaniedby apprehensions, der the impact of the political and economic events of the last decades,ripened into an acute anxiety and despair,manifest in the general hunger for religion in our day. Simone Weil was neither an apologist for the traditionalfaith, trying to defend it against materialistic attacks, nor a fugitive from the emptiness and confusion of the secularworldto the fortressof an orthodox religiousframe of reference. Jewish by birth, she refused baptism, choosingto identify herselfwith the "immense and unfortunate mass of unbelievers." She tried to meet the modern challenge to the authenticity of religious life not by taking issue with the claimsof empiricalsciencebut by accepting them. The mortification of God in the world becomesthe theologicalstartingpoint for the life of the spirit in God. She discovered the reality of God in the phenomena that seemed to testify most forcibly against it: in the meaninglesssufferingof the concentrationcamps, in the futility of manuallabor,in the coercivenecessity

of matter, in the mechanisticbehaviorism of the human psyche. And she succeeded in coininga religiousvocabularyfromthe profoundestexperienceof the absence of God. The theology that emerges from the notes of Simone Weil is conditioned by the contemporaryexperienceof atheism. But while she has illuminatedthe depths of contemporary affliction and inhumanity with unfailing purity of insight, she has divorcedthem from their historical causes and formalizedthe impotence of the age into a theological category. Thus the uprootedness, the nakedness, and the hopelessnessof man today reveal him in his ultimate essence. Affliction does not create human misery, it merely reveals it. It is preciselyin the enslavementand degradationof man in our times that she discovers the Christianimage of man. Describing her experience at the Renault factory, where she worked for a year in order to share the lot of the workers,SimoneWeil writes: "There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the brandingof the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave." It was through the experience of industrial labor, where the atomization of the individualand the dehumanization of man to a mere thing reaches one of its peaks, that SimoneWeil for the first time envisaged Christianity as an answer to human suffering. "There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianityis pre-eminentlythe religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others." In the ordeal of twentieth-centuryfascism and atheism, the Christian symbols regain their significance.Strippedof his humanity, man once more envisages himself in

THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

the image of a slave. SimoneWeil speaks from the very heart of the Christianexperience when she discovers, in the last nudity and wretchedness of man, his genuine spirituality. She saw the greatness of Christianity in that it does not seek for a supernatural remedyfor sufferingbut for a supernatural use of suffering. Her Christianity, however, goes only as far as the Cross, the image of the crucified and humiliated God. And in her Letter to a Priest,

where she discusses the obstacles to her conversionto the Catholic faith, she repudiates, point by point, the major dogmas of the church regarding resurrection, providence, immortality, miracles, and eschatology. II SimoneWeil'smeditationscenterin the problemof evil and the effect of affliction on the soul. Affliction,in distinctionfrom simple suffering, represents a total uprootingof life in all its parts-social, psychological, as well as physical. Affliction "takes possession of the soul and marks it through and throughwith its own particular mark, the mark of slavery." It stamps man with the scorn, the disgust, and self-hatred,the sense of guilt and defilement, which crime ought to produce but actually does not. There is a pitiless realism in Simone Weil's analysis of the effect of affliction on the human soul, which seems to defy any attempt to glorify it. We like to believe that affliction ennoblesman, but actually the contrary is true, for the afflictedpersondoes not contemplatehis affliction,"hehas his soul filled with no matter what paltry comfort he may have set his heart on." Afflictiondegradeswhomever it touches and can evoke only the revulsionof those who behold it. The model of the slave, not the model

of the hero or the model of the martyr, determinesSimoneWeil'sinsight into affliction. Afflictionproceeds from chance and blind mechanism; "affliction is anonymousbefore all things, it deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things." The slave emerges as the model of affliction in a technologicalsociety whose blindmechanism makes both heroism and martyrdom meaningless as human possibilities and which findsits image in the impotent victim, in the industrialworker,or in the prisoner in a concentration camp, who suffersnot as a man in the hands of men but as a thing battered around by impersonal forces. It is a world in which man as such, man as an autonomousperson and source of action, has no being; personality and organism crumble in a calculusof forces;and it remainsmerely to distinguish between two orders of necessity: gravity and grace. Gravity,whereby Simone Weil understands the strictest Cartesiandeterminism, governs all naturalphenomena,and man's soul as well as his body is caught in the mechanismof the world.Man'ssocial behavior, his imagination,his emotions, desires, and beliefs-in short, all the natural movements of the soul-obey quantitative laws as rigid as those that rule physical phenomena. By a law of compensation, suffering is necessarily converted into either violence or hatred. Any blow we suffer,whether in the form of a pain or an insult, is automatically communicatedto some person or object outside us in a sense as material as the transferof force in the action and reaction of atoms. Afflictioncuts one of our innumerable threads of attachment to the world. A vacuum is createdin the soul, of which it tries to rid itself either by transferring it to another creatureby inflictinga wrong

THE ABSENT GOD

or by "filling"it through the action of a compensatory imagination. The psyche vacui. is essentially governed by a horror It cannot tolerate any emptiness, and its basic activity consists in filling up the void that is continuallycommunicatedto it by other psyches likewise determined to get rid of the void created in them. Under the law of gravity both forgiveness and compassionare impossible.The realm of human relationspresents a field of force where there is a perpetual transmission of evil from man to man. Unless we supposethe action of a force radically differentfrom that of gravity, it would be utterly beyond man's power to arrest evil. It is through the contemplation of "humanmechanics"that SimoneWeil is led to conceive of the necessity of grace. The possibility of a power which can withstand the forceof gravity and endure the void created in the soul through affliction implies the intervention of a force of a differentorder, the supernatural action of grace. Grace alone can give the soul the strength to sufferthe void, to "go on loving in the emptiness." We do not love God because he exists; our love is the proof and the very substanceof his reality. "Godis absent from the world except through the existence of those in this world in whom his love lives." Thus to affirm and at the same time to deny God's existence is a "case of contradictories which are true. God exists. God does not. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word." Simone Weil's notion of "atheism as a

purification" goes even further. Since God can be present in the world only in the form of absence, "we have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist." It is precisely to the extent that we have dissociatedfromourlove of God the least sense of consolation (includingthe consolation that God exists) that our love is real. The subjectiveand pragmatic motives that modern psychology and sociology have discoveredin all forms of religiosity do not necessarily lead to an attitude of cynicism but, on the contrary, serve to purify our notion of the supernatural. SimoneWeil criticizesthe basic Christian doctrines of the immortality of the divineprovidence,and soul, resurrection, eschatologicalhope as forms of consolation that are obstaclesto faith. While belief in God as a consolationactually insulates the soul from contact with the true God, atheism that enduresthe emptiness of God'sabsenceis a purification.Doubt is not incompatiblewith faith, for faith is not identical with belief;it is "loving in the emptiness"; it is "fidelity to the void." Simone Weil's mysticism of atheistic purification bears some resemblanceto the "darknight of the soul" of St. John of the Cross, to whom she frequentlyrefers in her notes. But while the Spanish mystic is describing an ecstatic experience of the soul's death prior to its rebirth in God, for Simone Weil the dark night of God's absenceis itself the soul's contact with God. Whenshe speaksof an "ineffableconsolation"that fills the soul after it has renounced everything, renounced even the desire for grace, she does not mean that supernaturallove is something distinct from the acceptance of the void. To endurethe void, to suffer evil, is our contact with God. The path of

10

THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

Simone Weil's thought "from human misery to God" has the sense of a "correlation"and not a compensation.Affliction containsthe seed of divine love. "By redemptive suffering, God is present in extremeevil. For the absenceof Godis the mode of divine presence which corresponds to evil-absence which is felt." III The psychologicalanalysis of affliction brought into light the existence of two irreducibly contrary forces-grace and gravity. On the level of the theologicalinterpretationof evil, however, grace and gravity are shown to be two aspectsof the same divine reality. The soul that goes on loving in the emptiness and consents to afflictionknows that "this world,in so far as it is completely empty of God, is God himself" and that "necessity, in so far as it is absolutely other than the good, is the good itself." But how can God, who is the sourceof the good, wear the mask of evil? Why has God hidden himself behind the "screen"of creation, so that we can love him only in the form of the "inconsolable bitterness" of his absence? This is perhaps the most desperate formulationof the question that has haunted theology ever since the Creator of the world was envisaged as one supremeand infinitely good God. If God is the supremeCreator,then he is responsiblefor all evil, including the crimes committed by men; if God is not responsiblefor the evil in the world, then we must supposethat there exists a being whose power is equal to God's. The efforts of orthodox theology have been directed toward maintaining the omnipotence of God without making God responsible for evil. Simone Weil argues that God can be supremeand innocentat the same time because he is impotent. The Son of God was crucified;his Father

allowedhim to be crucified;these are the two aspects, Simone Weil writes, of God's impotence. God suffers and consents to evil. But whence does the evil spring originally? Evil arises out of the fact that there is something other than God, namely, the world and all its creatures.Simone Weil does not shrink from saying that, as the creatorof the world, God is the authorof evil and likewise the author of sin. But creation does not mean the exercise of divine power,it is the abdicationof God, the sacrifice of God. Through creation, God renouncedbeing everything. Creation and sin are the same thing viewed from differentperspectives."The great crime of God against us is that he createdus; that we exist. Ourgreat crime against God is our existence. When we forgive God our existence, our existence is forgivenby God." Why God abdicated his powerin favor of cosmic necessity, by creating an autonomous universe, remains an incomprehensiblemystery for Simone Weil. We must consent to the world, consent to necessity and to the suffering of the innocent, because God has consented. Finally, it is by consenting to God'swill that we can expiate the crime of our existence and become nothing. Man's consent to be nothing is essentially the same as the acceptance of the void and involves the action of grace. Conversely, God's consent not to be everything, God's impotence, manifests itself as the mechanism of gravity. Decreation is a process of uprooting one's self, of acceptingand loving the affliction that tears the soul from its social and vital attachments. Indeed, sufferingimplies the superiority of man over God, and "the incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous."

THE ABSENT GOD

11

The paradoxof consenting to evil and sufferingit to the limit as a way of attaining the good leads to the verge of nihilism. For if affliction is the proof of God's supremelove, why should we not deliberatelyuproot,degrade,and destroy both ourselves and others? If we were createdin orderthat we should de-create ourselves,why should we not choose suicide, or why should we try to avert or to assuage the suffering of others? If the death of the self is desirable,if existence as such is evil, why should murder and destructionbe condemned? To consent to affliction, Simone Weil claims, is to consent to the will of God. Affliction,therefore,must be inflictedby God and "throughhis own instruments." The afflictionswhichwe trace to "human mechanism"-social injustice, political oppression,and economic exploitationare as much an instrument of God, a supernaturaldevice for revealingto man the wretchednessof naturalattachments, as are flood, earthquake, and disease. "Human crime, which is the cause of most affliction,is a part of blind necessity." And since extreme afflictionalways involves social degradation,it is, finally, the "social animal" that gives affliction its specific and absolute stamp. Whenever we pray "Thy will be done," we should think of "all possible misfortunes added together," because only at the point where suffering becomes intolerable,will the cords that attach us to the world break. But at the same time she counselsus not to seek affliction deliberately. "We must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God if we counted on supernatural bread to fill it." To inflict violence on one's self or on others is therefore contrary to grace. Does it follow that we ought to do good, to prevent evil, or to help those who are

afflicted?For Simone Weil the question as such is baseless, for man cannot do good. All action is subject to the law of gravity, and "only suffering, useless in appearanceand perfectly patient," can arrest evil. The condemnation of crime and suicide springs only from the fact that they are actions;the nature of the good, however, is passive, for it reflects the impotenceof God. We cannotimitate God throughcreativity-this necessarily leadsto evil-but only throughobedience. Simone Weil speaks of acts of charity as supernatural; moreover, at a certain stage of spiritual perfection it is as impossible for a man not to help a creature in need as it is for a stone to defy gravity. Nevertheless, charity remains inexplicable on the plane either of grace or of gravity, and the mystery of charity is analogous to the mystery of creation itself: "Whyhas God createdus? But why do we feed those who are hungry?" We can no more comprehend the value of charity than the goodness of creation. The soul's movement toward God in Simone Weil's mysticism is conceived in terms of an intellectual skepsis rather than ecstatic experience. She makes no claim to voices or visions and is suspicious of states of spiritual intoxication. Voices and visions, she writes, result from an illegitimate admixtureof imagination in supernatural love; and the lives of the saints would have been still more wonderfulwithout them. To imagine that one is in paradiseis a "horrible possibility," for every paradise is artificialand the mystical experienceof eternal blessedness is simply a glorified projectionof earthly happiness.The true union with God is not beatific but crucifying, for we become one with God in void and slavery, one with the crucified God.

12

THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

IV

The Gnostic traits of Simone Weil's mysticism are strikingat first sight. And her notebooks contain ample evidence of her familiarity with Gnostic, Manichaean, and Catharist sources. Her intellectualism in matters of faith, the obsession with purity, the notion of transcendental immanence, and the pathos of the nonexistent God place her in the line of Gnosticheretics. SimoneWeil adopts the basicmotifs of of matter. ... It is a chain over a chain, the gnosis, the absent God, the divine a chain of steel over a chain of brass." The power and the glory and the void, the worldorderas an all-embracing predatory mechanism wherein man is Kingdom are images of this world. imprisoned,the pneumaor divine part of SimoneWeil accuses the early Christians the soul that is opposedto both the body and the Gnosticsof making God "more," and the psyche, and the dialecticalunity and thereby less, than supernatural.The of the supernaturalself and the super- gospel of Resurrection is still tainted natural God, but eliminatesthe eschato- with the attachment to life. The proof of logical drama and the mythological God is not Resurrectionbut the Cross. frame.She reinterpretsthe gnosis by rob- "Hitler could die and return to life again bing or "purifying"it of its aura of posi- fifty times," Simone Weil writes; "I tive transcendence,of its visions of the should still not look upon him as the Son splendorof the utterly strangeand utter- of God. And if the gospel omitted all ly new God, its sense of genuine libera- mention of Christ's resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by ittion from the bonds of necessity. The God of the Gnostics, however self is enough." The figureof the crucifiedJesus, abanstrange, absent, and unknown, is yet a doned by God and dying without hope of God of dazzling splendor, of light and does not, however,yield the joy, a God of life. The Gnostics, like the resurrection, image of man's tragic complaint against early Christians,referto the divine spark in man as the life. Life liberatedfrom the a deaf sky-an image not without some chains of the flesh and death, freedom,a human grandeur,for it implies that man kind of folly and fever, a sense of quick- in his conscious moral anguish is superior to an amoral universe. The contempoening and ecstasy, and, above all, hope in rary situation does not lend itself to a in redemptionand resurrection God charits is not the tragic acterize the quality of spirit. Wherethe hero interpretation; image fighting against great odds and degnosis is inconsistent, confusing the ex- feated in the end but the masses of helpperience of the nothingness of God with less victims subjected to meaningless visions of apocalypseand the triumphof waste and torture,defeatedfrom the bethe good, Simone Weil is logical to the ginning. Its image is not the sinnerwho bitter end. Supernaturallove is not a wilfully transgressesGod's law, but the quickening of the soul; it is a kind of oppressors and the oppressed alike as death. Once we understandthat truth is mere victims of a mechanism of drives

on the side of death, we have no right to project even the most sublime image of life on the plane of the supernaturalor the hereafter. Freedom and the sense of spiritual exaltation are the illusions of life; they are inextricablybound up with the world we must renounce.Therefore, it is futile to seek throughthe supernatural "a slackeningof the chains of necessity. The supernaturalis more precise, more rigorousthan the crudemechanism

THE ABSENT GOD

13

and compensations.Its image is not even that of the martyr, for martyrdom, like heroism,can be chosen; but "one cannot choose the Cross .... The Cross is infinitely more than martyrdom. It is the most purely bitter suffering, penal sufering."
V

It was surely a profoundexperienceof the pits of unredeemedhuman suffering in the contemporary world, combined with a pitiless realism regardingthe effects of afflictionon men's souls, that led Simone Weil to realize that any attempt to resurrectthe dead God is doomed to remain romantic rhetoric. Her insight into the fact that God dies in the souls of men subjected to the extremesof torture and humiliationdrove her to devise a religion of a dead God: a God who is not so much unmanifest because he is the primordial and inexhaustible source of all that can become manifest, a God who is not so much transcendental becausehe is limitationsof time, space,and beyond the necessity, but a God who does not exist, who emptiedhimselfinto the world,transformed his substance in the blind mechanismof the world,a God who dies in the inconsolable pits of human affliction. This God is, finally, more alien to the living person and to the visionary life of the spirit than the blind mechanism of nature, for while nature may constrain and imperil life, this God asks man to renounce his attachment to life altogether. By way of a negative theodicy, Simone Weil interprets the complete absence of justice, mercy, and the good in the world as the sign of divine justice and goodness. Thereby she defends divine justice, but not without destroying the possibility of man's justice. The negative theodicy attains its most powerfulformulationin the

image of the crucifiedGod. For it is God himself who suffersin the flesh and soul of every afflicted creature. "God is at once a sacrificialvictim and an all-powerful ruler." The theological solution, which represents the murdererand his victim united in the selfsame person of God, merely obscures the fact that, in reality, the murderersare two, standing over against each other, divided by a gulf that separates the living from the dead and that magnifiesa human dilemma to cosmic dimensions. There is no answer to the sufferingof the helpless, to the tortures of the concentration camps, to the slow death of manual labor. "To explain suffering," Simone Weil writes, "is to console it; therefore,it must not be explained."And yet, by findingtheologicaluses for suffering, she has, in whatsoever unjust and absurd a manner, striven to justify and to rationalizeit. To say that the cries of the afflictedpraise God, that supernatural grace fills the voids of the crippled and the humiliated,is finally as grave an insult to the hells of human sufferingas to say that the sufferingof the innocent is rewarded in heaven or serves God's final purpose.There is no meddlingwith human suffering,and Simone Weil knew this. The sufferingshe had in mind was the ultimate hell that reduces men to a mass of shriekingflesh and then to inert matter, that robs them of their capacity to feel and to act as men. Simone Weil understoodthat for this sufferingthere is no answer.Her deepest insights are those which reveal that extreme affliction plunges the soul beyond the pale of redemption and which show that, in fact, suffering,and not sin, brings damnation. But even while she realizedthat the soul dies in the hideous pits of affliction, she refused to accept it-the thirst for redemptionwas sufficientprooffor its reali-

14

THE JOURNALOF RELIGION

ty-and thus she tried througha seriesof spiritual experiments to find a way to strengthen, train, and prepare a part of the soul for the worst affliction. What is at stake for Simone Weil in the question of the reality of God is the survival of man's soul, his capacity for love, compassion,gratitude, forgiveness, and his joy in reality, even underslavery, degradation,impotence, exile, and pain, even under the most terrible tortures. Life itself and all attachments to this world seemed worth sacrificingif only a spark of love could be made to enter the petrified soul of the afflicted in the concentrationcamps. She started by asking, How can this cross be borne?She ended by exalting the Cross into the sole union with God and the end of all spiritual
striving.

But the hells of the afflictedare unredeemable.This is what Ivan Karamazov meant when he said that it is beyond God's power to make good a single tear from a single child. Simone Weil writes: "We have to say, like Ivan Karamazov, that nothing can make up for a single tear from a single child, and yet to accept all tears and the namelesshorrorswhich
are beyond tears .... We have to accept

the fact that they exist simply because they do exist." But acceptance is as irrelevant as revolt before the irreparable, before that which simply is. Revolt at least transcendsman's impotence in the face of the particularunredeemable fact, by stating that such a fact should not be possibleand by demandingthat it should not be permitted to exist. What is meant is not the permissionof God but of men. The Cross, as Simone Weil knew, is more than martyrdom.The sufferingsof the destitute, the persecuted,and the oppressed are not a ritual but a reality. Was it her continual failure, despite many efforts, to take this reality upon

herself that drove her to construe suffering as a spiritualexercise?For she left the Renault factory after a year's "experience" to return to her academic circle and did not lose herselfin the anonymity of the masses. After an accident in the Spanishcivil war she accepted the rescuing hand of well-to-do parents, while others died and rotted away in camps. Hitler came, and she followed her parents, if unwillingly, to Portugal, North Africa, the United States, and England. One cannot help suspecting that, by a strangetwist of honesty, she felt impelled to confrontafflictionin spuriousways, on the level of "spiritual experience," because she did not succeed in meeting it in reality. It is a romantic illusion that one can go to the people and share their lot as long as one retains the possibility of returning to one's former life of security whenever one chooses. The people have no other resources.If one wouldsharethe conditionof the poor, one must go among them as one enters a cloister, leaving one's securities and resources behind. Otherwise,one remainsa spectator. For the gravity of their lot consists just in its hopeless finality. The attempt to introduce contemplation in physical sufferingresultsin a kind of aestheticism. Affliction,Simone Weil claims, revealsman's essential wretchedness and thus his spirituality.But is this not to confuse man's capacity for moral anguish with the facts of physical pain and social degradation?It would seem that there is a distinctionbetweenman's metaphysical reflection on his human condition and the kind of violent physical tormentand social dislocationSimone Weil means by affliction.The distinction is rather crucial, for while man's consciousnessof his own frailty may indeed reveal his greatness, the tortures of the

THE ABSENT GOD

15

concentrationcampsand the ruthlessuprooting of human beings reveal, if anything, the abyss of human bestiality. Simone Weil shows with unfailing insight how man's social dependence, his need for "moral food," reveals his vulnerability; and she uses man's vulnerability as the pivotal point on which man's spirituality turns, by way of detachment from the social as well as the vegetative realm. But the spirituality of human sufferingis rooted, if at all, in the spirituality of human existence, the specifically human relations whose destruction can mutilate and even kill man's spirit. The religions that teach the "supernatural value" of suffering exploit man's image of an ideal human community and his longing to realize it, while they bid him to renounceattaining it and to acquiescein his condition. It is the specificmarkof human suffering that it points beyond the sheer immediacy of pain to an ideal norm which appliesto man as such within a historical reality. The chain of the oppressedof all ages burdensman not merelyby its physical weight but as a wrong.It has been the crime of religion against humanity to teach men that slavery under whatever form is not a wrongbut a fate. It reaches its most scandalous expression in the view that the sufferingof the innocent is a specialsign of the love of Gcd. Thereby religion not only sanctions the present sufferings of the injured but paralyzes the nerves of a historicalhuman community based on a mutual responsibilitybetween the generations. The purity of Simone Weil's experience of the Cross and her genuine desire for identification with the injured and the oppressedrenderher religion of suffering all the more tragic. For her mystical atheism offersa religionto the afflicted only at the price of blindfoldingone's

self to the fact of those who profit from their afflictionand consequently serving their ends. VI SimoneWeil assimilatedboth the psychologicaland the sociologicalcritiqueof religion. Her analysis of the psychological motivations and social horizonof the early Christiandoes not fall short of the descriptionsof either Marx or Nietzsche and is as devastating. At the same time she answeredNietzsche's contemptuous and Marx'sindignantcharacterization of as a religion for slaves, by Christianity embracing the identity of slavery and religionwithout apology or reservations. She was fully aware of the role of compensationin traditionalreligionand tried to develop a theology which could in no way be reduced to a compensatory-escapist mechanism, since it rested on a total renunciationof desire and extinction of hope, on the one hand, and a total surrender to brute actuality, on the other. She envisageda God whose reality was beyond doubt because he revealed himself only at the point where the mechanismof compensationwas arrested and attention was fixed on the point of suffering. What SimoneWeil failed to realizewas that the social implicationsof her negative theology were not essentially different from those of positive theology, so that the sociologicalcritique of religious mystification applied to the Gcd of impotence as well as to the Godof power.It would seem, then, that in the end she did not meet the challenge of enlightened humanism to Christianity, for her attempt to purify Christian theological symbols from the element of power remains trapped in the social dialectic of domination. The alternative to domination is not impotencebut the elimination

16

THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

of domination. Impotence is only one side of the power relation and presupposes the relation of man's domination over man. Simone Weil's negative theodicy of divine impotencepresupposesa powerful God who voluntarily abdicates his power.Behind the void of divine absence looms the figure of an all-powerfulGod who, by an act of withdrawal, sets the grim mechanism of necessity in motion and lets evil take its course.Thus, in the end, the human implications of serving the "dead God" and of being in the hands of the living God are equally ambiguous. Simone Weil attacks the living God, representedby the God of Israel, as a form of social idolatry. The religionof power may have been guilty of idolizing the aspirationsof a particularcommunity; but is not Simone Weil in her way also guilty of projecting the impotence

and the hopelessnessof a particularhuman society into the divine being? Regarded from the point of view of man, theodicy is an offense against human justice; from the point of view of God, it is blasphemy against the divine being. The book of Job presentsthe most poignant formulationof the problem of theodicy and at the same time its most powerful refutation. Job believed to the end that the sufferingof a just man is unjust and did not speculate on the supernatural uses of suffering.He questioned the justice of God, and the Almighty answeredhim out of the whirlwindthat the Creator of heaven and earth cannot be called to account by his creatures.Otherwise, we must hold with Lucretius that the gods are so remotefrom the affairsof men that, for all intents and purposes, men must carryon their pursuit as if the gods did not exist.